VALERIE WAS A LIONESS! Tall, sandy-haired, with golden feline eyes. What better model could her eccentric aunt find for the heroine of her latest anonymous romance novel? But the plot of life proved far richer than fiction. For when Valerie arrived at her aunt's country estate, she suddenly found herself in the midst of high society seances and chicanery ... where secret passages hid stolen jewels, where money changed hands as fast as Val changed gowns. And where distant French cousins and dashingly attractive, if poor, scholars, turned out to be as intangible as ghosts, as flimsy as certain "famous" fortunes, and as illusive and longed for as love....