by Nora Roberts
“It was perhaps four A.M. when we had our drink,” Rory said slowly. “Yet he looked … well, like a banker taking a relaxed business lunch. I found him very articulate. He was indeed a fan, not just of mine, but of film. We spent nearly three hours discussing movies and the making of them. He told me he was interested in financing an independent production company, and would be in Los Angeles the following month.”
He paused to sip and to think. “I ran into him again at a party Eve and I attended together. We were both unattached, Eve and I, and often escorted each other, one might say. In fact, Paul was living with Eve while he attended some classes in California.”
“I was a sophomore at U.C.L.A.,” Paul elaborated. With a small shrug he pulled out a cigar. “My father has yet to forgive me for turning down Oxford.”
“You were determined to break family tradition.”
“And you became an advocate of tradition only when I did.”
“You broke your grandfather’s heart.”
Paul grinned around the cigar. “He never had one.”
Rory straightened in his chair, ready to do battle. Just as suddenly, he fell back again with a laugh. “You’re absolutely right. And God knows you were better off with Eve than with either your mother or me. If you’d buckled under and gone to Oxford, the old man would have done his best to make your life as bloody miserable as he tried to make mine.”
Paul merely sipped his brandy. “I think Julia’s more interested in Eve than in our family history.”
With a smile, Rory shook his head. “I’d say the interest runs about neck-and-neck. But we’ll concentrate on Eve for the moment. She was looking particularly stunning that night.”
“Darling,” Lily purred, “how rude of you to say so in front of your current wife.”
“Honesty.” He picked up Lily’s hand and kissed her fingers. “Julia insists on it. I believe Eve had just returned from a spa of some sort. She was looking refreshed, regenerated. We’d been divorced several years by then and were back to being chums. We were both quite delighted by the fact that the press would make a great deal of our being seen together. In short, we enjoyed ourselves. We might have—forgive me, darling,” he murmured to his wife. “We might have spent the night reminiscing, but I introduced her to Delrickio. The attraction was instant, the old cliché about lightning bolts, at least on his side. On hers, I’d say that Eve was intrigued. Suffice it to say that it was Delrickio who escorted her home. After that, I can only speculate.”
“You haven’t really answered the question.” Julia set her empty cup aside. “Why was he frightening?”
Rory let out a little sigh. “I told you he’d said he was interested in a certain production company. It seemed the company wasn’t interested in him, initially. Within three months of my introducing Delrickio to Eve, he—his organization—owned the company outright. There had been some financial setbacks, some equipment lost, some accidents. I learned through associates of associates that Delrickio had strong ties with … what does one call it these days?”
“He’s Mafia,” Paul said impatiently. “There’s no need to skip around it.”
“One hopes to be subtle,” Rory murmured. “In any case, it was suspected—only suspected—that he had links with organized crime. He’s never been indicted. I do know that Eve saw him discreetly for a few months, then she married that tennis player quite suddenly.”
“Damien Priest,” Julia supplied. “Eve mentioned that it was Michael Delrickio who introduced them.”
“It’s certainly possible. Delrickio knows a great many people. I can’t tell you much about that particular relationship. The marriage was a short one. Eve never discussed the reasons for its abrupt ending.” He sent a long look toward his son. “At least not with me.”
“I don’t want to discuss Delrickio.” The moment they entered the suite, Paul stripped off his jacket. “You’ve spent most of the evening interviewing. Give it a rest.”
“You can give me an angle your father can’t.” Julia stepped out of her shoes. “I want your insight, your opinion.” She could see the anger growing in him in the way he tugged off his tie—quick, tensed fingers dragging away the knot.
“I detest him. Isn’t that enough?”
“No. I already know how you feel about him. I want to know how you came to feel that way.”
“You could say I have an intolerance for crime lords.” Paul toed off his shoes. “I’m funny that way.”
Dissatisfied, Julia frowned as she drew the pins from her hair. “That answer would work if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve seen you with him and know it’s a personal intolerance rather than a general one.” The pins jabbed into her palm. As she opened her hand and looked down at them, she realized that this kind of intimacy had become easy between them. The kicking-off-your-shoes taking-down-your-hair comfort between lovers. Another intimacy, that of the heart, was more elusive. The knowledge brought a dull edge of pain that was both anger and hurt.
Watching him, she tossed the pins on the table beside her. “I thought we’d come to the point where we trusted each other.”
“It’s not a matter of trust.”
“It’s always a matter of trust.”
He sat, his face as stormy as hers was calm. “You’re not going to let this go.”
“It’s my job,” she reminded him. She walked to the windows to draw the drapes with one quick snap of her wrist and close out the storm. And to close them inside, so they were faced with only each other in the slant of gold from the lamp. “If you want to put this on a professional basis, fine. Eve can tell me anything I need to know about Michael Delrickio. I’d hoped to hear your point of view.”
“Fine, my point of view is that he’s slime oozing around in an Italian suit. The worst kind of slime because he enjoys being exactly what he is.” His eyes glittered. “He profits from the miseries of the world, Julia. And when he steals, blackmails, maims, or kills, he lists it all under the tidy heading of business. It means no more and no less to him.”
She sat, but she didn’t reach for her tape recorder. “Yet Eve was involved with him.”
“I think it would be accurate to say that she didn’t realize precisely who and what he was before their relationship developed. Obviously, she found him attractive. He can certainly be charming. He’s articulate, erudite. She enjoyed his company, and, I’d think, his power.”
“You were living with her,” Julia prompted.
“I was going to school in California and making my base with her. I didn’t know how she’d met Delrickio until tonight.” A small detail, he thought, that hardly mattered. He knew the rest, or enough of the rest. And now, due to her own tenacity, so would Julia. “He started coming around—for a swim, a game of tennis, dinner. She went to Vegas with him a couple of times, but for the most part, they saw each other at the house. He was always sending flowers, gifts. Once he brought in the chef from one of his restaurants and had him prepare an elaborate Italian dinner.”
“He owns restaurants?” Julia asked.
Paul barely glanced at her. “He owns,” he said flatly. “A couple of his men were around, always. He never drove himself or came unaccompanied.” She nodded, understanding perfectly. Like the gates of Eve’s estate. Power always exacted a price. “I didn’t like him—didn’t like the way he looked at Eve as though she were one of his fucking orchids.”
“Excuse me?”
Paul rose and walked to the window. Restless, he tugged the drapes open a crack. The sleet had stopped, but there was a bitterness to the weather he could sense even behind the glass. One didn’t always have to see ugliness to recognize it. “He grows orchids. He’s obsessive about them. He was obsessive about Eve, hovering around, insisting on knowing where she was, with whom. She enjoyed that, mainly because she refused to account to him, and that would drive him crazy.” He glanced back to see her smiling. “Amused?”
“I’m sorry, it’s only that I’m—well, envious, I suppose, of th
e way she skillfully handles the men in her life.”
“Not always so skillfully,” he murmured, and didn’t return the smile. “I walked in on an argument once when he was raging at her, threatening her. I ordered him out of the house, even tried to toss him out myself, but his bodyguards were on me like lice. Eve had to break it up.”
Now there was no amusement, but a trickle of alarm and memory. Hadn’t Delrickio said something about it being a pity Eve hadn’t let him teach Paul respect? “You’d have been, what, about twenty?”
“About. It was ugly, humiliating, and illuminating. Eve was angry with him, but she was every bit as angry with me. She thought I was jealous—and maybe I was. I got a bloody nose, a few sore ribs—”
“They hit you?” she interrupted in a voice sharp with appalled shock. He had to grin.
“Babe, you don’t train apes to play patty-cake. It could have been worse—a lot worse, as I was doing my best to get my hands around the bastard’s throat. You might not have heard I have a sporadic affection for violence.”
“No,” she said calmly enough, even while her stomach churned. “I hadn’t. Was this, ah, episode, the reason Eve broke it off with Delrickio?”
“No.” He was tired of talking, tired of thinking. “As far as she was concerned, her relationship with him had nothing to do with me. And she was right.” Slowly, as if he were stalking, he moved toward her. And, like all things hunted, she felt the quick tremor of alarm that kicked her heart rate from slow to racing. “Do you know how you look just now, sitting with you back straight in that chair, your hands neatly folded? And your eyes so solemn, so concerned?”
Because he made her feel foolish, she shifted. “I want to know—”
“That’s the problem,” he murmured, bending over to take her face in his hands. “You want to know when all you have to do is feel. What do you feel now when I tell you I can’t think of anything but peeling you out of that proper little dress, of seeing if that perfume I watched you spray on hours ago is still clinging to your skin—just there—under the curve of your jaw.”
As he ran his fingers along the line, she moved again. But rising was an error in judgment, only bringing her up hard against him. “You’re trying to distract me.”
“Damn right.” He tugged down her zipper, chuckling as she tried to wriggle aside. “Everything about you has been distracting me from the moment I met you.”
“I want to know,” she tried again, then gasped as he jerked the dress down to her waist. His mouth was on her, and his hands, not gently, not seductively, but with a possessive fervor that edged toward frenzy. “Paul, wait. I need to understand why she ended it.”
“It only took murder.” His eyes blazed as he dragged her head back. “Cold-blooded, calculated murder for profit. Delrickio’s money was on Damien Priest, so he eliminated the competition.”
Horror widened her eyes. “You mean he—”
“Stay away from him, Julia.” He dragged her against him. Through the thin silk she could feel the heat that poured from his flesh. “What I feel for you, what I might do for you, makes what I felt for Eve all those years ago nothing.” He caught her hair in tensed, fisted fingers. “Nothing.”
Even as she shuddered with excitement he pulled her to the floor and showed her.
Tucked into her robe, Julia sipped a brandy. Her body was heavy with fatigue and sex. She wondered if this was what it might feel like to find herself tossed up on a dry shore after a wild battle with a violent sea. Drained, exhilarated, dazed, because she had survived the violence and the uncanny beauty of something so primitive and so ageless.
As her pulse leveled and her mind cleared, the word Paul had spoken before dragging her into that turbulent sea echoed in her head.
The word was murder.
She understood even though they sat close together on the sofa, the silence between them intimate, that this balance between them could be so easily skewed. However frenzied their mating, it was here, in the quiet after, while the air cooled and thinned again, where they needed to reach each other. Not just a hand linked with a hand, but again, that small, vital matter of trust for trust.
“As you were saying,” she began, and made him smile.
“You know, Jules, some might call you focused. Others might consider you just a nag.”
#x201C;I’m a focused nag.” She laid a hand on his knee. “Paul, I need to hear this from you. If Eve has any objections to what you tell me tonight, it stops there. That’s the agreement.”
“Integrity,” he murmured. “Isn’t that what Eve said she admired in you?”
He touched her hair. They sat like that for a moment before she spoke again, quietly.
Shaken, Julia rose to pour more brandy. She’d said nothing throughout Paul’s story of how Damien’s competitor had died, Eve’s suspicion it was murder—-murder ordered by Delrickio.
“We never spoke of it again,” Paul had ended. “Eve refused to. Priest went on to win the title, then retired. Their divorce caused some commotion for a while, but that died down. After a while I began to see why she had handled it that way. Nothing could have been proven. Delrickio would have had her killed if she’d tried.”
Now, before trying to speak, she sipped and let the hot punch of liquor steady her voice. “Is this why you were against the bio? Were you afraid Eve would tell this story and put her life in jeopardy.”
Paul looked up at her. “I know she will. The right time, the right place, the right method. She wouldn’t have forgotten; she wouldn’t have forgiven. If Delrickio believes she’s told you and you’re contemplating printing it, your life won’t be worth any more than hers is.”
She watched him as she took the seat beside him. She would have to go carefully here. All the years she had been on her own, making her own decisions, following her own code made it difficult to explain herself. “Paul, if you had believed, really believed that going to the police would have brought justice, would you have walked away from it?”
“That’s not the point—”
“Perhaps it’s too late for points. It comes down to instinct and emotion, and that infinite gray area between right and wrong. Eve believes in what she’s doing with this book. And so do I.”
He grabbed at a cigar, struck viciously at a match. “Putting your life on the line for someone who’s been dead for fifteen years doesn’t make sense.”
She studied his face, shadowed by the lamplight and smoke. “If I thought you believed that I wouldn’t be here with you. No,” she said before he could speak. “What’s between you and me isn’t just physical. I understand you, and I think I have right from the beginning. That’s why I was afraid to let anything happen. Once before I let my actions be swayed by my feelings. I was wrong, but since the result was Brandon, I can’t regret. This …” She laid a hand on his, slowly linking their fingers. “Is more, and less. More important, less superficial. I love you, Paul, and loving you means I have to trust my instincts, and respect my conscience—not only with you, but across the board.”
He stared at the glowing tip of his cigar, more humbled by her words than he would have thought possible. “You don’t leave me much room for arguments.”
“I don’t leave myself much room either. If I ask you to trust me, it means I have to trust you.” She lifted her gaze from their joined hands to meet his eyes. “You haven’t asked me about Brandon’s father.”
“No.” He sighed. He would have to back away from his objections for now. It was possible but unlikely that he would have better luck with Eve. That Julia would volunteer to talk about Brandon’s father meant they had scaled one more wall. “I didn’t ask because I hoped you’d do exactly what you’re about to do.” He grinned at her. “And I was arrogant enough to be sure you would.”
She laughed, a quiet, homey sound that made him relax. “I’m arrogant enough not to have told you if you had asked.”
“Yeah, I know that too.”
“It isn’t as important as it once
was to keep the circumstances private. It’s become a habit, I suppose, and I’ve thought, still think, it’s best for Brandon that it not be an issue. If he asks, and one day he will, I’ll tell him the truth. I loved his father, the way a girl of seventeen loves, idealistically, rashly, romantically. He was married, and I regret the fact that I let my emotions gloss over the reality of that. At the time we became involved, he was separated from his wife—or so he said. I was all too eager to believe it and to delude myself that he would marry me and, well, sweep me away.”
“He was older.”
“Fourteen years.”
“Someone should have tied his dick in a knot.”
For a moment she stared, then the crudity of the remark issued in that smooth elegantly accented voice sent her off into peals of laughter. “Oh, my father would have liked you. I’m sure he would have said very much the same thing if he’d known.” She kissed him, hard, then settled back as he continued to glare into the shadows. “I know it was more his responsibility than mine. But a girl of seventeen can be very persuasive.”
Quietly, thoroughly, she told him about Lincoln, about the heedless rush of feelings that had pushed her into an affair, her fear of the resulting pregnancy, her grief at Lincoln’s defection.
“I doubt I would change any of it. If I had it to do over again, I still wouldn’t tell my parents and risk layering another level of hurt on my father. He thought of Lincoln as a son. And I certainly wouldn’t have changed that awkward tumble on the couch, or there would be no Brandon.” When she smiled, the expression was serene, confident. “He’s given me the best ten years of my life.”
Paul wanted to understand but couldn’t get beyond the rage in his gut. She’d been a child, a child who had handled her responsibilities with more care and dignity than a man nearly twice her age.
“He doesn’t stay in touch with you, or with Brandon?”
