One Night in Newport
Villars, Elizabeth
There never was and never will be anything like Newport in 1912. Women squandered millions in fierce competition for social ascendancy, men made fortunes and lost them over a glass of brandy, and love was as cheap as a servant's wages.

Or so Amelia Leighton had learned a decade ago when she had to marry against her will an English nobleman. It was a fair exchange, the Four Hundred agreed  --  Amelia's dowry for the duke's title. But the duke had turned out to be anything but fair, and in Newport, divorce could be as expensive as marriage.

But then everything in Newport was expensive. Samuel Van Nest's services, for example, would cost thirty-five million. That was the price he had given J. P. Morgan for winning over -- or breaking  --  five of the most powerful men in American finance.

As the fabulously rich play their games on the exclusive beaches and lavish yachts, in the gilded ballrooms and gold tooled libraries of the opulent mansions, Sam Van Nest maneuvers his way around five of the richest men in the world, and Amelia Leighton and her two sisters strive to work out their own destinies free of their mother's ambitions and Newport's overwhelming sense of propriety.

Set in a world that was once enchanted, rigid, and racing headlong and heedless toward its end, ONE NIGHT IN NEWPORT is a novel of ambition and passion, money and love, and the value that Newport put on each.