by JC Grey
‘I agree,’ Blaze interjected. ‘And this time, no image-makers, no publicity agents. I’m not replacing Monica.’
‘Babe —’
‘I mean it, Jax. If, and I mean if, because I haven’t decided yet, but if I come back to work, it’s going to be on my terms. I want to get roles because I’m the best person for the job, not because some marketing analyst says males aged fifteen to forty-four think I’m hot.’
As the words left her mouth, Blaze was filled with a confidence that this was the right thing to do. She hadn’t consciously thought about it, but it felt good. As a teenager she had rebelled against her parents’ plans for her. Now she had to make an even more difficult stand – against the Hollywood machine – if she wanted people to like or dislike her work on its own merits and not because of some image manufactured because it would win attention or fill a gap in the market.
Over the next few days as she worked side by side with Rowdy – doing the simple tasks he allotted her – she came to the conclusion that not everyone was in thrall to celebrity. Rowdy, reserved as he still was with her, didn’t balk at telling her if something she did wasn’t up to scratch. Even the people at the out-of-town bathroom and kitchen centre were more impressed by her enthusiastic debate about the merits of marble over tiles than they were by her star aura, and Stella just enjoyed a good girly gossip with her.
Then there was Macauley Black. Bastard though he was, he had made no attempt to pander to her. After their row the other night, she’d expected that a spectacular flower arrangement and a grovelling apology would quickly follow. She should have known better. His silence spoke volumes: the next move comes from you.
Well, Macauley Black was about to discover she wasn’t some lovesick girl to go chasing him, as no doubt he was used to. He might have the most incredible body – and know how to use it – but his attitude sucked. Anyway, she was too busy helping Rowdy and young Trent, who proved as open and engaging as his half-sister.
In addition to light manual labour, Blaze also had the task of keeping the paperwork straight, which wasn’t her greatest strength. Just a couple of days ago, a quote from the kitchen appliance supplier had gone missing, but fortunately they’d been able to email a copy to her. Rowdy had even tentatively teased her about being an un-blonde bimbo over sandwiches that lunchtime, making her laugh. He’d looked so pleased at her reaction that she dared a gentle question about the family she assumed had been a casualty of his drinking.
‘Do you ever hear from your wife?’
He looked at her in shock, which faded to a familiar look of regret and guilt as he shook his head. ‘She didn’t leave me, not like that. She’s dead.’
Blaze was aghast. ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t realise. I just thought, well . . .’ She shrugged helplessly.
Rowdy just stared at his half-eaten sandwich for so long that Blaze was starting to search around for an alternative topic when he spoke.
‘It’s all right. It was six years ago now. My wife, Helen, and our daughter, Kelly, were killed outright in a head-on smash out on the coast road, coming back from a camping trip. Truckie had fallen asleep at the wheel.’
Blaze felt tears burn her eyes and throat. She couldn’t think of anything to say, so she reached out and covered Rowdy’s hand with hers.
‘Kelly was only ten. She’d be sixteen now. Bright little thing. Full of chatter like her mum. House just sort of went quiet after they died, like all the life had been sucked out of it, you know?’
‘I can only imagine,’ Blaze said. She’d lost her family, too, but they’d been far from the centre of her world.
‘And I couldn’t, well . . .’ He looked away for a moment. ‘I couldn’t seem to get over it. And the only thing that helped was the bottle. Stupid.’
‘No, not stupid,’ Blaze said quietly. ‘We all do what we have to do to get through.’
They sat there a few minutes more until Rowdy gave a shaky smile and let her hand go. He stood up. ‘Well, time’s money,’ he said. ‘Best get back to it.’
No more was said about the tragedy, but their relationship seemed to turn a corner that day, and if Rowdy still drank Blaze saw no sign of it.
Mac reached into the fridge and pulled out a cold one. When he tilted the bottle to his mouth, he saw his fingers were dusted in the powder the fingerprint guys had used. The stuff was still all over the kitchen, but that would change tomorrow.
Thank God he had a new cook. Emily Williams might be a little young and nervous but she could throw together a not-bad lasagne and she was available immediately. The hands were satisfied at least, and if her reference checked out, it was good enough for Mac.
Her first job would be to clean the muck from the kitchen now that the police had finished with it. Despite crawling all over it, they hadn’t found a bloody thing. No DNA, no hairs, nothing that matched with any known offenders, apart from good old Pete, of course. Even then, his fingerprints had only been on the fridge and bench, not on the skillet.
Ryan had thrown up the possibility that Mac’s former station hand might have gloved up for the attack, but Mac couldn’t see it – he simply wasn’t smart enough – and now it turned out that the bastard had a watertight alibi. The night of the attack on Peggy, he’d been in the lock-up fifty kilometres away on a drunk-and-disorderly charge.
When that piece of news had come through, Ryan had even backtracked and begun to reconsider whether Peggy had been attacked at all. Perhaps it had been a bizarre accident, and she’d accidentally cracked her own head on the skillet. Stranger things had happened.
The docs had brought her out of the induced coma yesterday, although she was heavily medicated so an interview wouldn’t be possible for at least another few days. They seemed to think her progress was good, although to Mac she still seemed alarmingly fragile. She wouldn’t like the idea of an interloper in her kitchen, though, so Mac was going to hold back on mentioning the new cook for a while longer.
The boys were fractious, too, with Pete’s departure and Peggy’s injury. Everyone was jumping at shadows and tempers were on a trigger-wire. Just this afternoon he’d had to break up a fight between Lewis and Fred. Even Amos seemed spooked, muttering as he stomped around the stables. They were all working harder to make up for being a man down. Harry Blenheim’s kid, Beau, had agreed on a move to Rosmerta, but he had to work out his notice and couldn’t start until next week.
Not that Beau was a kid to anyone except Amos. He was only seven years younger than Mac, and had plenty of experience on his folks’ place and more recently at One Tree Station on the other side of Meriwether, so named because it was a relatively small spread. Rosmerta, at nearly four times the size, would be a feather in his cap for the ambitious new foreman. Mac thought he’d be lucky to get three or four years out of Beau before the guy scraped together the funds to buy his own place or took over his parents’ station. Still, for the time Beau was foreman at Rosmerta, Mac would delegate some of the responsibility for the day-to-day management, which would allow him to work on his plans to diversify into breeding stock horses.
He stood, letting the house settle around him. It seemed quiet, too quiet.
Rubbing his sore shoulders, he wandered up the stairs to his bedroom. Apart from it and the one Peggy sometimes used, three other bedrooms sat there collecting dust. When he’d rebuilt the house, he’d had vague thoughts – assumptions, really – that at some point he’d have a family, and that the spare rooms would be taken up with two or three kids. But the first few years had been so hard, he’d barely had time to scratch himself, let alone date seriously.
There had been fourteen-hour days running the station, sometimes more, and as many as four nights a week poring over the books, wondering how the hell he was going to make ends meet. Even later, somehow it had never happened.
Maybe if he’d met the right woman, he’d have made more of an effort. Once, briefly, four years ago, he’d thought he had. Physically, Leanne had been a good foil for him. Blonde, ath
letic, interesting. But he’d made the mistake of taking her to meet his father and step-mother after they’d dated for a few months.
Quite by accident he’d overheard Leanne and his step-mother, Barbara, speaking about tactics for prising him off the station and back to civilisation. Apparently there was even a senior stock agent’s job going in town, which both women thought would be perfect for him. That had been the end of that relationship, much to his step-mother’s disgust. He wasn’t leaving his land for any woman.
Grinning to himself as he got in the shower to wash off the day’s dust, he wondered what would happen if Barbara and Blaze were thrown together; the social-climber and the star. Barbara would most likely despise Blaze yet want to cultivate her at the same time, while Blaze, used to hangers-on, would ignore her. Deep down, they’d hate each other’s guts. It would almost be worth . . . nah! His smile broadened. Well, maybe something could be worked out. He was long overdue for a barbecue at Rosmerta.
As his closest neighbour, Blaze would be on the guest list, and his step-mother would never be able to resist attending if there was a genuine A-list celebrity as the guest of honour. Something to think about once Peggy was back on her feet. She’d know about caterers, or probably insist on doing the whole damn thing herself.
Drying off, he went to the closet and pulled out clean underwear, T-shirt and jeans. Thinking about Blaze made him yearn for a repeat of that one hot night. It was only seven and still light. Plenty of time to drive over to Sweet Springs with a bottle of wine and try to sweet-talk his way back into her bed.
Her comment of the other night about not being seen with him still rankled, but maybe she’d unwittingly touched a nerve. Perhaps Barbara and Leanne’s disdain for station work had cut deeper than he’d thought and he’d overreacted. Once upon a time he’d been pissed off every time his step-mother looked down her slim nose at a working man; these days it took too much effort.
To give Blaze her due, star she might be, but she’d been applying plenty of elbow grease to scraping old paint off the window frame the last time he’d been over at Sweet Springs. Covered in dust, her hair in a lopsided knot, she hadn’t seemed to mind manual labour then. In fact, she’d looked far more the country girl than Leanne ever had.
In bare feet, he padded downstairs to the kitchen to see what the new cook had left in the fridge. Some sort of casserole. There were heating instructions so he shoved it in the microwave and leant on the bench to wait for the ping, realising he was grinning again foolishly at the picture Blaze had made, balanced precariously on that rickety old ladder.
Denim shorts on a woman were pretty good most times, but on someone with Blaze’s spectacular figure they were enough to make a man drool, and more besides. He glanced down at his crotch. Oh yeah. She might not be wife material, but no woman before – and certainly not Leanne – had got him hard just from thinking about her backside.
The microwave beeped, and he went to eat on the long deck off the living room. Yeah, he wasn’t giving up on Blaze Gillespie yet. Difficult, stubborn and high-maintenance she might be, but she’d always keep a guy on his toes, except when they were burning up the sheets.
Just thinking about the way she’d taken him deep inside – the slight hesitation when he first penetrated her, and then the long, slow gloving and the throaty cries she gave when he fucked her hard – got him hot and bothered all over again, almost enough to chuck the rest of the casserole in the bin and drive over there right now.
He went for his keys and then hesitated. Usually Mac opted for a strategy of being totally direct with a woman, but then usually he already knew the outcome. Blaze Gillespie was a different matter.
Rushing back in after she’d turned him down the other night would probably make him like all the other fools who panted after her. And once she had the upper hand with a man, she’d be hell on wheels. Smarter to wait; give her the chance to come to him. He just hoped the pay-off would be worth the sexual frustration.
Detective Sergeant Ryan gave a cursory knock on Inspector Jean Elsom’s open office door and walked straight in. His boss didn’t even look up from studying the report in her hands, but her usual pleasant countenance was marred by a frown.
‘What’s up, boss?’ Ryan asked as he sat down opposite. ‘Bad news?’
Elsom pursed her lips. ‘I’d say confusing news.’ She shoved the documents before him. ‘Updated investigation notes from the LAPD on the Mitch Redmond homicide.’
‘Since when does the LAPD go around sharing . . . Redmond?’ His mental cogs clicked into place. ‘Ah, the Hollywood filmmaker, right? Blaze Gillespie’s main squeeze.’
‘Well, apparently she denied it when the LA detectives interviewed her. Said they were just good friends.’
‘Right,’ Ryan’s drawl was thick with irony.
‘Mmm, seems she may have been telling the truth.’
Ryan gave her a ‘get real’ look. ‘Come on! The chick’s screwed everyone in la-la-land from what I hear. She was tight with this dude. Why not do him, too? Way I see it, to her he’s just a fuck buddy, but he’s more serious. Then some guy she did the dirty with on that movie set spills the beans on the group-sex deal. It’s all over the media, Gillespie and Redmond fight about it. Gets out of hand as these things do. He ends up filleted. Maybe not murder if there’s no premeditation, not sure on Californian law there. But Jesus! I read some of the reports. He had fourteen stab wounds. That’s no fucking accidental death.’
‘Yes, except according to this they didn’t have a thing going, casual or serious.’ Elsom shoved the papers at him. ‘Read it for yourself. Redmond was gay.’
Ryan stared at her, then at the LAPD report. He sat back in his chair so hard the breath whooshed out of him. ‘Bugger me . . . sorry, inappropriate in the context.’ He thought, sat forward again, intent. ‘And they know this how?’
‘Apparently Redmond’s boyfriend has come forward. A set designer, Carlos Diaz. Hispanic and Catholic. Didn’t want his family knowing he likes guys. And Redmond was also in the closet – mostly – so they kept it discreet.’
Ryan frowned. ‘Okay, well maybe Redmond’s bi. You know, he does it with girls —’
‘I may be fifty-four but I know what bi means, thanks.’
‘Sorry. But Redmond swings both ways. Gillespie finds out he’s been fucking boys, too, confronts him, it gets out of hand. Or she invites herself over for a nice dinner with a plan to off him. Either way you can pretty much lock her up for the next ten to twenty.’
‘I put that one to them.’ Elsom gave him a cool look. ‘In more appropriate language, naturally. They were already checking it out, but they’ve reinterviewed friends and colleagues. Found a couple of old lovers of Redmond’s, both guys. Confirmed he was gay as the day is long and had never gone for girls; just preferred to keep it on the QT.’
Ryan rubbed his eyes. It was late and he wanted to get out of here, but he wanted to make this fly. ‘Well, if Gillespie was such good friends with Redmond, she must have known he was gay, so why not say something? Redmond’s dead and it takes a shitload of heat out of the motive without the sex angle.’
He thought for a moment. ‘Okay, well let’s turn this thing upside down. Gillespie’s a sex fiend, right? She’s gotta have it. Every man wants her except her best bud. She’s had a hard-on – or whatever women have – for Redmond, not knowing he bats for the other team. But he doesn’t have a clue how she feels, so she gets him drunk, has her way with him while he’s under the influence. He sobers up, reacts badly, they fight, et cetera et cetera.’
Elsom smiled and shook her head. ‘Why are you so convinced it’s her?’
‘Because.’ Ryan scratched his chin. ‘I guess she strikes me as the narcissistic type; the kind that doesn’t react well to rejection or set-backs because they so rarely experience it. People around here talk. Apparently the Gillespies doted on their kid. She had everything she ever wanted right from the get-go. Dance classes, acting lessons. They ferried her back and fo
rth from auditions and advertising shoots. Talent contests. You name it, she did it. And she loved to shove it in the faces of her classmates.’
‘Okay, she was a princess. She’s not the first.’
‘But when she’d sucked her folks dry, she was out of here. Moved on to Hollywood, established a new and adoring circle, and charmed her way into movies. Didn’t even bother to keep in contact with her folks after she started making a name for herself, apparently. How’s that for cold?’
Elsom stood and swung her bag over her shoulder. ‘Well, you may be right. However, I can’t see her for Mrs Fairchild. I mean, what’s the motive? She’d never even met the woman. But send whatever you’ve got to the LAPD in case something pops. But don’t, and I mean don’t, forget to explore all avenues. We focus on just Blaze Gillespie and we’re wrong, we’ll look like dickheads, Detective Sergeant.’
‘I’ll do my job, Inspector,’ Ryan told her as he stood and walked to the door. ‘But there’s something weird going on. And Blaze Gillespie’s involved. I just know it.’
Chapter Eight
Blaze thought even Hades couldn’t be this hot as she made the now-familiar drive towards Meriwether. It had to be close to forty-five degrees and the air conditioning in her car was struggling to make a dent in it. Sweat popped out on her forehead, her hands clung clammily to the wheel and her stomach roiled.
If it hadn’t been so important to make this meeting with the development-approval people at council, she would have postponed it to another day. But Rowdy wanted to get the plans for the top-floor extension okayed, and a personal approach could help their case. Perhaps she should have sent Rowdy, but that meant hours away from the job, and really she knew what she wanted better than anyone.
Before her was just heat haze, the bitumen blurring with the unnaturally white sky. She brought the car to a skidding stop on the soft gravel shoulder and took a long swig from the water bottle she’d only remembered to bring with her at the last minute. Almost instantly, she felt one hundred times better. Even the heat didn’t seem as penetrating. Thinking back, she realised that she’d been so busy she’d forgotten to drink anything since early this morning, which was stupid and potentially dangerous. In this kind of heat, dehydration could strike quickly and even fatally.
