Every Step She Takes

by Armstrong, Kelley

  Did I think Karla—fifty-something Karla, who probably doesn’t even have time for spin classes—was going to confront a twenty-three-year-old action-movie star without a weapon?

  I did not foresee this because I didn’t want to foresee it. I wanted to believe Karla cared enough for these kids that she only came to talk to Jamison, to persuade him.

  I’d planned to step from this closet and confront her myself. Now, seeing that gun, I realize my terrible mistake. I take a deep breath and ease back into the closet. I need to warn Marco and stay here—

  Molly hears Karla, then. I’d put her into the bedroom with a chew toy, and she’d been quiet, but now there is clearly someone else in the building, and she wants out. Between puppy yips, Karla’s shoes squeak as she halts.

  She knows something is wrong, and if there was any doubt, it evaporates when Molly begins flinging herself against the door, yowling. Being locked in a room is foreign enough, but to have someone inside the house ignoring her? That is a mistake, and the puppy yowls her confusion and concern, telling Karla, beyond any doubt, that no one is in the front room watching TV.

  I need to get out of here. Now.

  I ease open the closet door and tiptoe to the back one. I twist the knob just as Karla’s shoes squeak again. She’s coming back my way.

  I throw open the back door and run. I tear through the small yard, my gaze fixed on the woods twenty feet away—

  “Stop, Lucy.”

  In the movie version, I’d lunge for the forest and somehow reach it despite it being at least ten feet away. Or I’d dodge and weave until I was safely in the trees. In reality, I know that if I even try that, she’ll shoot me in the back.

  So I turn, hands raised. Karla stands there, and I hope—I still hope—that I won’t see a gun in her hand. Maybe it really was her cell phone, or maybe she’s hiding the gun, hoping not to need to resort to that.

  The gun is there. Right there. Pointing straight at me.

  Karla came to kill me.

  The thought barely settles, ice cold in my gut, before it’s steamrolled by the truth, one even worse.

  Karla didn’t know I was here. She couldn’t have come for me.

  Karla came to kill Jamison.

  “Suicide?” I say, and my voice is eerily calm.

  Her brows shoot up. “You think I’m going to kill myself, Lucy?”

  “Of course not. You came to shoot Jamison. You were just going to make it look like suicide. He has a history of it, after all. You’d shoot him and tell the police you came to talk to him because you knew he’d killed Isabella. You were coming to help Jamie turn himself in, and you arrived to discover he’d found another solution to his problem.”

  She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to. I see by the flicker of consternation that I’m right—or close enough to it.

  “Where is he?” she says.

  Now I’m the one lifting my brows. “You really think I’d tell you?”

  “Yes, because you have a choice to make, Lucy. Two solutions to this problem. One, I can shoot you and frame him. You came to beg for his help, and—being Isabella’s actual killer—he shot you. Two, I finish this, and we say Jamie took his own life. He would eventually, anyway, especially with Isabella gone. This only speeds up the inevitable.”

  Especially with Isabella gone.

  Those words thunder in my ears. She says them offhandedly, stating a simple fact. As if Jamison’s mother died of some tragic accident or natural cause.

  “You murdered Isabella,” I say, barely able to force the words out. “She trusted you and—”

  “Isabella never trusted me. She tolerated me, for Colt’s sake. I spent my life working for that man, and who did he turn to? Who did he rely on? A woman too wrapped up in herself and her career to take proper care of him. That summer, he was having a midlife crisis, and she barely noticed. All she cared about was her silly show.”

  The hairs on my neck rise. “Is Colt actually correct? That someone set him up that summer? With me?” I step toward her. “You hired me. You didn’t stop the scandal because you didn’t want to. You wanted Colt’s name in the papers again, and you wanted Isabella gone, and you thought that would do it.”

  “Long-suffering Isabella,” Karla says. “That’s the only decent role she ever played. But she couldn’t even stick with that one. Hooks up with a musician half her age and intends to divorce Colt to marry him. That was bad enough. Then she brings you to New York and plans to drag Colt down by reopening the past.”

  “Going public with me,” I murmur. “You didn’t plan to kill Isabella, but when Jamie called you after the accident, you saw an opportunity. Kill her. Put Jamie in your debt. Frame me to reignite that old scandal and remind the world just how irresistible Colt Gordon is. Fourteen years later, I’m still so obsessed with him that I murder my so-called rival. Except you knew, even with the planted evidence, it was hardly an airtight case. So you hired a guy to stalk me.” I meet her gaze. “You hired him to kill me.”

  Her lips stretch in a humorless smile. “You have quite the imagination there. Perhaps you could have been a screenwriter after all. If someone was following you, Lucy, might I suggest it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the fact that you are a wanted fugitive.”

  “Possibly. That would certainly explain why you think you can get away with killing me or framing Jamie, as if there’s no one else here but the three of us.”

  She hesitates. It’s only a flicker behind her eyes, but I catch it.

  “I didn’t come alone,” I say. “You should know that, though, if you hired the man who held a gun to me yesterday. I mean, he’d have told you, right? Told you that his attempted abduction was foiled by my private eye, who also took his gun.”

  I purse my lips. “Unless he failed to disclose that the last time you spoke. Kind of embarrassing, I guess. My hired guy disarming your hired guy in broad daylight. Tricking him with a fake tourist routine. If he is your guy, you deserve a refund.”

  Her expression answers for her. It is completely impassive, ice-cold with rage. Then her hand moves. I see it out of the corner of my eye, just the slightest move.

  My brain doesn’t even have time to tell me to dive. It screams a warning, and I twist so fast, I stumble, and the gun fires. I don’t know if it’s the twist or the stumble, but one of them saves my life. The bullet whizzes past, and I’m doing another awkward move, half-scrambling, half-diving for the forest. The whoosh of another silenced shot just as I hit the ground.

  “Gen!”

  Marco’s shout comes from somewhere in the forest, and Karla wheels, gun raised. I scream a warning, my heart hammering as I lunge in Marco’s direction.

  A streak of motion flies from the other side of the house. Karla is looking the other way, scanning the forest. At the last second, she hears the sound behind her, and my mouth opens to call another warning, but Jamison is already in flight, knocking her flying. He pins her gun hand, his other hand at her throat.

  “You murdering bitch,” he snarls.

  A strangled gurgling from Karla, cut short by Jamison.

  “Is this what you did to her, Karla? Is this what you did to my mother?”

  I race over to them. Jamison has shoved the gun aside, and he has his knee on Karla’s chest, his hands around her throat as she writhes and wheezes.

  “Did you think I was too stupid to figure it out?” he asks. “Or too weak to do anything about it? Too sensitive.”

  He leans his weight onto her. “Am I stronger than you expected? You’re the one who insisted I do that movie with Dad. Maybe you’re regretting that now. Maybe you’re regretting a lot of things now.”

  “Jamie,” I say.

  He startles. Guilt and shame flood his face just like when he was a boy and I caught him destroying that script in his room.

  That look vanishes in a second, replaced by hard anger and determination, his jaw setting. He does ease up on her throat, though, and Karla sputters and gasps for
air.

  “I called her,” he says. “Called her for help. That’s what we’re supposed to do when we run into trouble. I used to joke I should have her phone number tattooed on my arm. Call in case of emergency. Or blackout. Or overdose.” He looks down at Karla. “Or in case my mother falls, and hits her head and isn’t breathing.”

  I glance over as Marco walks from the forest. He’s moving quietly, careful not to interrupt.

  I turn back to Jamison. “You thought your mother was dead. So you called Karla.”

  He nods, his eyes brimming with tears. “She said I had to get out of there before anyone knew I was at Mom’s hotel that night. I’m an addict and an alcoholic, and if the police didn’t blame me, the press would. She said that for Tiana and Dad’s sake, I had to leave. She’d tidy up and slip back to her room downstairs. When the hotel staff found Mom, it’d look like an accident.”

  He swipes away tears as he stands. “I shouldn’t have left. I just . . . I was in shock, and I kept thinking that if I left, maybe I’d wake up in an alley and realize I’d stopped to get a fix and hallucinated the whole thing.”

  I put my arms around him, and he falls against my shoulder. When Karla tries to rise, I slam my foot onto her throat.

  “Don’t give me an excuse,” I say. “I won’t let Jamie kill you, but I’m happy to do it myself.”

  Marco walks over, still quiet.

  “Got my 911 text, huh?” I say.

  He manages a tight smile, his gaze still on Karla, making sure she’s subdued.

  “Would you call the real 911 for us, please?” I ask.

  “Already have. They’re on their way.”

  I look at Jamison. “Is that okay? Are you ready for . . . ?”

  “Ready to confess?” He meets my gaze. “I’ve been ready since Sunday night, Lucy. I just want this to be over. For all of us.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  A week later, I’m out for lunch with Tiana. Real lunch, in public—or, at least, a private dining room in a very exclusive restaurant. It’s a relief not to be a fugitive, but that doesn’t mean I can walk around New York just yet. If anything, I’m a bigger story now.

  When Jamison and I were taken into custody, Tiana hired separate lawyers for us. Marco worked with mine, and I spent a day in lockup before they sorted everything and decided not to pursue charges. Yes, I’d tampered with the scene of Isabella’s murder, but everyone seemed to decide that, under the circumstances, the optics might be better if the DA’s office overlooked my panicked mistake.

  Jamison is also free. Like me, he didn’t do anything except make questionable choices. Looking back, though, I’m not sure either of us could have done anything different without a crystal ball to guide us.

  Jamison had thought his mother was dead, so he’d brought in the person he counted on to help. At that point, realizing Isabella was alive, Karla should have called 911. Instead, she’d committed an unbelievable act of betrayal. There will be a lifetime of “what-ifs” for Jamison, but the police and DA’s office were quick to see that he wasn’t a killer.

  Proving Karla’s guilt was trickier. She admitted she was in the hotel suite that night and confessed to framing me. As for the murder weapon, she’d taken the pillowcase and shoved the insert into a closet—she could hardly walk around the hotel with a pillow under her arm. A hair on the insert matched hers, but that trivial piece of evidence wouldn’t have stood up in court.

  That’s when the police found her accomplice. It was the private eye she’d originally set on my trail in Rome at Isabella’s behest. Then she used him to plant the evidence in my hotel room and later to stalk and threaten me. Yes, threaten me. That’d been her order. Not to kill me, but to scare the crap out of me so I’d flee. She knew the evidence wouldn’t hold up, but if the police were chasing me, they wouldn’t be looking for other suspects. Of course, she hadn’t admitted to the private eye that she’d killed Isabella herself. She pretended to be protecting Jamison. That was, after all, her job. Fixer to the stars.

  No, fixer to one particular star. The only one who counted. Colt. Marco says that the DA wants to paint Karla as an obsessed middle-aged woman who couldn’t get the man she loved. As much as I despise Karla, I’m almost insulted on her behalf. Just because she was a woman—and he was an attractive man—didn’t make this a case of sexual obsession. He was her client. Her golden goose. The center of her career universe, which was the only universe she had.

  Now her universe will be a prison cell, and I’m free, sitting across from Tiana. That’s all that matters to me.

  “Dad wants to see you before you leave New York,” Tiana says as she cuts into a steak.

  I laugh.

  “I take it that’s a no,” she murmurs.

  “I have neither the need nor the desire to see your father,” I say. “This isn’t his story. It never was.”

  She tilts her head, puzzled, before nodding. “True. Not for lack of trying on his part, though. Did you hear he’s now claiming Karla set up his scandal with you?”

  “I hate to give your dad any credit, but I’m not sure he’s wrong.”

  “Really?” Tiana says. “Huh. Well, he says she gave him the champagne you drank. She handed him the open bottle and told him you were with Justice, and she was worried because she heard Justice was a player. She suggested Dad should rescue you with a drink.”

  “That actually was his excuse for taking me from Justice, who’d done absolutely nothing untoward.”

  “Dad claims Karla drugged you both.”

  When I don’t answer, she says, “Dad didn’t drink the champagne, did he?”

  “He had a few sips and then put his glass aside. But I’m not reading anything into that. Yes, Karla wanted to get your mom out of your dad’s life. She also wanted to revitalize his career, and one way to do it was to give him a scandal. One that would get his name plastered everywhere as a guy who made a mistake that, quite frankly, a lot of his fans expect him to make. At worst, they’d forgive him for it, and at best, it’d be a show of action-star virility.”

  “Whether Karla set it up or not, though, she didn’t make him do it.”

  “No one made me do it, either,” I remind her.

  Tiana leans back, shaking her head. “I don’t know what I’ll do with him. Sometimes I almost hope he’ll screw up so badly that I can write him off completely. Cut him out of my life.”

  “But he doesn’t, and he is part of your life.”

  She makes a face. “A fifty-five-year-old toddler.”

  “Who needs to grow up,” I say softly.

  She nods. “I’ll still be there for him, but I’m not taking Mom’s place. I won’t be his crutch or his caregiver. Neither will Jamie. I’ll make sure of that. If anyone needs that care, it’s my brother, and he’s the one who’s going to get it.”

  I keep my voice as neutral as possible. “Does he need it?”

  She looks up.

  “Jamie seems to be doing pretty well,” I say. “At the risk of sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong, I think he could do with a little less care. I never had a sibling, but from what I understand, sometimes they get pigeonholed into their family roles. You’re the tough one. Jamie is the sensitive one. That doesn’t mean he needs quite so much care.” I meet her gaze. “Or that you don’t need any at all.”

  Tiana squirms at that. I change the subject—away from her family and onto her own life and plans, more comfortable territory for her. We talk through lunch and dessert and coffee. Then someone raps on the open doorway of the private room.

  Jamison ducks his head inside, puppy under his arm. “Sorry to interrupt, but Lucy isn’t answering her phone, and I believe we had an ice-cream date.”

  I curse and scramble to my feet as he waves off my apologies.

  “I could go for ice cream,” Tiana says.

  “Next time.” Jamison gives her a sidelong glance and says casually. “Maybe we could invite Justice along, before he leaves New York.”

&nb
sp; Tiana tenses, but Jamison lets the awkward silence drag until she nods and says, “Okay. Let’s do that.”

  “Good.” Jamison gives his sister a fierce hug. “I’ll catch up with you later, okay?”

  He steps outside and lets me say my goodbyes to Tiana before I join him.

  Jamison and I talk as we walk to the ice-cream parlor. We get some looks . . . and a surreptitiously snapped photo or two, but we ignore them. I don’t ask how he’s doing. I can see the answer is “not great, but coping,” which is all I can ask for. He’s extended his stay at the rehab center, knowing this is a dangerous time for him. He’s fired his agent, and he’s looking for one who wants Jamie Morales-Gordon, not “Colt Gordon’s son.”

  He’ll find his footing. I know he will.

  We sit out on the parlor patio to eat our ice creams. Molly has her own—a kiddie cone, of course.

  Eventually, conversation works around to me leaving the US.

  “I’m going to spend a month with my mom before I go back,” I say.

  “Is Marco staying, too?”

  “I haven’t talked to him about that yet.”

  Jamison’s look tells me to get on that—pronto.

  “I know,” I say. “I wanted to speak to you first and make sure you’re okay with me being in the US for a while.”

  “Nah, hate it. Go back to Italy, please.” Another look. “Are you seriously asking, Lucy? Or is it a roundabout way of asking whether it’s okay to stay in contact . . . because part of the reason you’re staying is to keep an eye on me.”

  “You don’t need that.”

  “Mmm, not so sure. I’m doing okay, but I could probably use my Mary Poppins around for a bit as long as she has another reason to stay.”

  “I do.”

  He swirls his ice cream, licking up the drips. “I’d like that. Tiana will, too, even if she won’t admit it. Mom wanted you two to go public with your story. That was her way of handling it. This is another way.”

  He nods at a young couple who are sneaking photos of us. “Not go public, but be seen in public. Be seen together. It says everything Mom wanted to say, if in a less dramatic fashion.”