Eight Classic Nora Roberts Romantic Suspense Novels

by Nora Roberts

  “That a very high percentage of the people there cared as much about the charity as they did the publicity. That new Hollywood will never have quite the same class as old Hollywood. And that Anthony Kincade is an unpleasant and potentially dangerous man.”

  “I wondered if you’d be easily dazzled. Apparently not. How many more, you son of a bitch?”

  “Five.”

  Eve swore her way through them, panting like a woman in the last throes of childbirth. The more vicious her oaths, the wider Fritz’s grin. “Wait here,” she ordered Julia, then groaned to her feet and disappeared through a door.

  “She is a lovely woman,” Fritz commented. “Strong.”

  “Yes.” But when she tried to imagine herself pumping iron as she cruised toward seventy, Julia shuddered. She’d damn well take her flab and like it. “You don’t think all this might be too much, considering her age?”

  He lifted a brow as he glanced toward the door where Eve had gone. He knew if she had heard that, she would do a great deal more than swear. “For someone else, yes. Not for Eve. I am a personal trainer. This program is for her body, for her mind. For her spirit. All three are strong.” He moved toward one of the windows. Beside it was a massage table and a shelf cluttered with oils and lotions. “For you I design something different.”

  That was a subject she wanted to veer away from. And quickly. “How long have you been her personal trainer?”

  “Five years.” After choosing his oils, he used the remote to change the music. Now it was classical, soothing strings. “She has brought me many clients. But if I had only one, I would want Eve.”

  He said her name almost reverently. “She inspires loyalty.”

  “She is a great lady.” He passed a tiny bottle under his nose and reminded Julia of the bull, Ferdinand, smelling flowers. “You’re writing her book.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You be sure to say she is a great lady.”

  Eve came back in, wrapped in a short white robe, her hair damp, her face pink and glowing. Without a word she walked over to the table, stripped as carelessly as a child, and stretched out on her stomach. Fritz draped a sheet modestly over her hips and went to work.

  “After hell comes heaven.” Eve sighed. She propped her chin on her fists and her eyes glowed into Julia’s. “You may want to include that I put myself through this hideous business three times a week. And while I hate every minute of it, I know it’s kept my body looking good enough that Nina has to turn down an annual offer from Playboy, and my endurance up so that I can endure a ten- or twelve-hour shoot without collapsing. In fact, I’m stealing Fritz away when I go to Georgia on location. The man has the best hands on five continents.”

  He blushed like a boy at the compliment.

  While Fritz used those hands to knead and relax Eve’s muscles, Julia centered the conversation on health, exercise, and daily routine. She waited, patient, while Eve slipped back into her robe and exchanged a very warm, very intimate kiss with her trainer. Julia thought of the scene she’d witnessed in the garden and wondered how a woman so obviously in love with one man could flirt so blatantly with another.

  “Monday,” he said with a nod at Julia as he tugged on sweats. “I start your program.”

  “She’ll be here,” Eve promised before Julia could politely decline. She was grinning as Fritz hefted his gym bag and strode out the door. “Consider it part of your research,” Eve advised. “Well, what did you think of him?”

  “Was I drooling?”

  “Only a little.” Eve flexed her limbered muscles, then slipped a pack of cigarettes from her robe pocket. “Christ, I’m dying for one of these. I don’t have the heart—or maybe it’s the nerve—to smoke around Fritz. Fix us another drink, will you? Heavy on the champagne in mine.”

  While Julia rose to obey, Eve took a deep, hungry drag. “I can’t think of another man in the world I’d give these up for, even for a few hours.” She blew out another stream of smoke as Julia offered a glass. Her laugh was quick and rich, as if at a private joke. “The longer I know you, the easier you are to read, Julia. Right now you’re struggling not to be judgmental, wondering how I justify an affair with a man young enough to be my son.”

  “It’s not my job to be judgmental.”

  “No, it’s not, and you’re bound and determined to do your job. Just for the record, I wouldn’t attempt to justify it, but merely to enjoy it. As it happens, I’m not having an affair with that fabulous slice of beefcake, because he’s quite obstinately gay.” She laughed and sipped again. “Now you’re shocked and telling yourself not to be.”

  Uncomfortable, Julia shifted and sipped her own drink.

  “The purpose of this is for me to explore your feelings, not for you to explore mine.”

  “It works both ways.” Eve slipped off the table to curl like a cat into a deeply cushioned rattan chair. Every movement was sinuously feminine, seductive. It occurred to Julia that young Betty Berenski had chosen her name well. She was all woman—as ageless and mysterious as the first. “Before this book is finished, you and I will know each other as well as two people are able to. More intimately than lovers, more completely than parent and child. As we come to trust each other, you’ll understand the purpose.”

  To put things back on the level she preferred, Julia took out her recorder and pad. “What reason would I have not to trust you?”

  Eve smiled through a veil of smoke. Secrets, ripe as plums for picking, glistened in her eyes. “What reason indeed? Go ahead, Julia, ask the questions that are buzzing around in that head of yours. I’m in the mood to answer them.”

  “Anthony Kincade. Why don’t you tell me how you came to marry him, and how his second wife went from making B movies to working as your housekeeper?”

  Rather than answering, Eve smoked and considered. “You’ve been questioning CeeCee.”

  There was a trace of annoyance in the statement, enough to give Julia a tug of satisfaction. Maybe they would reach a level of trust and intimacy, but it would be on equal terms. “Talking to her, certainly. If there was something you didn’t want her to tell me, you neglected to mention it to her.” When Eve remained silent, Julia tapped her pencil on her pad. “She commented this morning that she’d often spent time here as a child, visiting her Aunt Dottie. Naturally, it came out who Aunt Dottie was.”

  “And you took it from there.”

  “It’s my job to follow up information,” Julia said mildly, not only registering the growing irritation, but relishing it. Petty perhaps, she reflected, but satisfying to know that she’d finally chipped under that glossy guard.

  “You had only to ask me.”

  “That’s precisely what I’m doing now.” Julia tilted her head, and the angle was as much a challenge as a pair of raised fists. “If you wanted to keep secrets, Eve, you chose the wrong biographer. I don’t work with blinders on.”

  “It’s my story.” Eve’s eyes sliced like twin green scythes. Julia felt the keen edge and refused to dodge.

  “Yes, it is. And by your own choice, it’s mine too.” She had her teeth into it now, her jaws snapped tight, like a wolf’s over a fleshy bone. Her will rose up to tangle with Eve’s, muscles flexed. Nerves smoldered like bright embers in her stomach. “If you want someone who’ll bow when you pull the strings, we’ll stop this now. I’ll go back to Connecticut and we’ll let our lawyers hash it out.” She started to rise.

  “Sit down.” Eve’s voice quivered with temper. “Sit down, dammit. You made your point.”

  With an acknowledging nod, Julia settled again. Surreptitiously she slipped a hand into her pocket and thumbed free a Tums from its roll. “I’d prefer to make yours, but that won’t be possible if you block me whenever I touch on something that discomfits you.”

  Eve was silent a moment, silent while temper faded into grudging respect. “I’ve lived a long time,” she said at length. “I’m used to doing things my own way. We’ll see, Julia, we’ll see if we can find a way t
o merge your way with mine.”

  “Fair enough.” She slipped the tablet onto her tongue, hoping that it and the small victory would soothe her jittery stomach.

  Eve lifted the glass to her lips, sipped, and prepared to open a long-locked and rusted door. “Tell me what you know.”

  “It was simple enough to check out the fact that Dorothy Travers was Kincade’s second wife, whom he divorced only months before marrying you. I couldn’t quite place her at first, but I’ve remembered she made a dozen or so Bs in the fifties. Gothics and horror films mostly, until she dropped out of sight. I can only assume now, to work for you.”

  “Nothing’s quite as straight-lined as that.” Though it continued to irritate that she hadn’t stated the connection first, Eve shrugged and expanded. “She came to work for me a few months after Tony and I finalized our divorce. That would be, Christ, over thirty years ago. You find that strange?”

  “That two women could have a lasting and close relationship for three decades after being in love with the same man?” Tension was crowded aside by interest. “I suppose I do.”

  “Love?” Eve smiled as she stretched luxuriously. She always felt luxurious after a session with Fritz. Purged, pumped, and primed. “Oh, Travers may have loved him briefly. But Tony and I married for mutual lust and ambition. An entirely different thing. He was rather gorgeous in those days. A big, strapping man, and more than a little wicked. When he directed me in Separate Lives, his marriage was falling apart.”

  “He and Travers had a child who died.”

  Eve hesitated, then sipped her drink. Perhaps Julia had pushed her into a corner, but there was only one way to tell the story. Her way. “The loss of the child destroyed the foundation of their marriage. Travers couldn’t, wouldn’t forget. Tony was determined to. He’d always been completely self-absorbed. It was part of his charm. I didn’t know all the details when we began to see each other. It—our affair and resulting marriage—was a minor scandal at the time.”

  Julia had already made a note to look up back issues of Photoplay and the Hollywood Reporter.

  “Travers wasn’t a big enough star to warrant a lot of sympathy or outrage. You find that arrogant,” Eve observed. “It’s simply truthful. That small triangle took up some space in a few columns, then was forgotten. People took it much more personally when Taylor scooped Eddie Fisher up from under Debbie Reynolds.” Finding that amusing, she tapped out her cigarette. “Actually I may or may not have been the straw that broke the back of their marriage.”

  “I’ll ask Travers.”

  “I’m sure you will.” She made a fluid gesture with her hands, then settled again. “It’s unlikely she’ll speak to you, but go right ahead. For the moment, it might be helpful if I started at the beginning, my beginning with Tony. As I said, he was a very attractive man, dangerously so. I had a great deal of respect for him as a director.”

  “You met when you made Separate Lives?”

  “Oh, we’d run into each other before—as people do in this small ship of fools. But a movie set, Julia, is a tiny, intimate world, divorced from reality. No, immune to it.” She smiled to herself. “Fantasy, however difficult the work, is its own addiction. Which is why so many of us delude ourselves into believing we’ve fallen desperately in love with another character in that shiny bubble—for the length of time it takes to create a film.”

  “You didn’t fall for your costar,” Julia said. “But your director.”

  Her lashes lowered, hooding her eyes as she took herself back. “It was a difficult movie, very dark, very draining. The story of a doomed marriage, betrayal, adultery, and emotional breakdown. We’d spent all day on the scene where my character had finally acknowledged her husband’s infidelity and is contemplating suicide. I was to strip down to a black lace slip, carefully paint my lips, dab on perfume. Turn on the radio to dance, alone. Open a bottle of champagne and drink, in candlelight, while I swallow one sleeping pill after another.”

  “I remember the scene,” Julia murmured. In the brightly lit room smelling of sweat and perfumed oils, it played vividly through her mind. “It was terrifying, tragic.”

  “Tony wanted excitement, almost an exaltation along with despair. Take after take, he was never satisfied. It felt as though my emotions were being ripped out, raw and bleeding, then ground to dust. Hour after hour, that same scene. After I looked at the rushes, I saw that he’d gotten exactly what he’d wanted from me. The exhaustion, the rage, the misery, and that light that comes in the eyes from hatred.”

  She smiled then, in triumph. It had been, and was still, one of her finest moments onscreen. “When we wrapped, I went to my dressing room. My hands were shaking. Shit, my soul was shaking. He came in after me, locked the door. God, I remember how he looked, standing there, his eyes burning into mine. I screamed and wept, spewed out enough venom to kill ten men. When he grabbed me, I struck him. And I drew blood. He ripped my robe. I scratched and bit. He pulled me to the floor, tearing that black lace slip to shreds, still never, never saying a word. Good Jesus, we came together like a pair of wild dogs.”

  Julia had to swallow. “He raped you.”

  “No. It would be easier to lie and say he did, but by the time we landed on the floor of the dressing room I was more than willing. I was manic. If I hadn’t been willing, he would have raped me. There was something incredibly exciting in knowing that. Perverted,” she added as she lit another cigarette, “but damned arousing. Our relationship was twisted, right from the start. But for the first three years of our marriage, it was the best sex I’ve ever had. It was almost always violent, almost always on the edge of something unspeakable.”

  Laughing a little, she rose to fix herself another drink. “Well, after my five years of marriage to Tony, nothing, no one, will shock me again. I had considered myself quite knowledgeable.…” Lips pursed, Eve poured champagne to within a breath of the rim, then poured a glass of the same for Julia. “It’s lowering to admit I went into that marriage as innocent as a lamb. He was a connoisseur of the deviant, of things that weren’t even spoken of back then. Oral sex, anal sex, bondage, S and M, voyeurism. Tony had a closetful of wicked little toys. I found some of them amusing, some of them revolting, and some of them erotic. Then there were the drugs.”

  Eve sipped enough of the drink to keep the wine from lapping over the glass as she walked. Julia took the second glass when it was offered. Right here, right now, it didn’t seem so odd to drink champagne before lunch.

  “Tony was way ahead of his time on drugs. He enjoyed hallucinogenics. I dabbled in them myself, but they never held much appeal for me. But in all things Tony was a glutton, and he overused. Food, drink, drugs, sex. Wives.”

  This memory was ripping at her, Julia realized, and discovered she wanted to protect. They’d had their war of wills, but she disliked when victory caused pain. “Eve, we don’t have to go into all this now.”

  Making the effort, Eve shrugged off the tension, lowering herself into a chair as lithely as a cat curling on a rug. “How do you go into a pool of cold water, Julia? Inch by inch or all at once.”

  A smile fluttered over her lips, into her eyes. “Headfirst.”

  “Good.” Eve took another sip, wanting a clean taste in her throat before she dived. “The beginning of the end was the night he locked me to the bed. Velvet handcuffs. Nothing we hadn’t done before, enjoyed before. Shocked?”

  Julia couldn’t image what it would be like—to be that helpless, to put herself totally in the hands of another. Was bondage synonymous with trust? Nor could she imagine a woman like Eve willing to subjugate herself. Still, she shrugged. “I’m not a prude.”

  “Of course you are. That’s one of the things I like best about you. Under all that sophistication beats the heart of a puritan. Don’t be annoyed,” Eve said with a dismissive wave. “It’s refreshing.”

  “And I thought it was insulting.”

  “Not at all. Shall I warn you, young Julia, that when a woman tumbles to
a man sexually, really tumbles, she will do things that would make her tremble with shame in the light of day? Even as she pants to do them again.” She sat back regally, cupping the glass in both hands. “But enough womanly wisdom—you’ll find out for yourself. If you’re lucky.”

  If she was lucky, Julia thought, her life would go on just as it was. “You were telling me about Anthony Kincade.”

  “Yes, I was. He liked, ah, I suppose we’ll call them costumes. That night he wore a black leather loincloth and a silk mask. He was putting on weight by that time, so a bit of the effect was lost. He lit candles, black ones. And incense. Then rubbed oil over my body until it was glistening and throbbing. He did things to me, wonderful things, stopping just short of giving me release. And when I was half mad for him—Christ, for anyone—he got up and opened the door. He let in a young boy.”

  Eve paused to drink. When she spoke again, her voice was cold and flat. “He couldn’t have been more than sixteen, seventeen. I remember swearing at Tony, threatening, even pleading while he undressed that child. While he touched him with those wickedly clever hands. I discovered that even after nearly four years of being married to a man like Tony, I was still innocent in some things, still capable of being appalled. Because I couldn’t stand to watch what they were doing to each other, I closed my eyes. Then Tony brought the boy to me and told him to do what he wanted, while he watched. I realized that the boy was far less innocent than I. He used me in every possible way a woman can be used. While the boy was still in me, Tony knelt behind him, and …” Her hand wasn’t steady as she lifted her cigarette, but her voice was curt. “And we had a three-way fuck. It went on for hours, with them endlessly switching positions. I stopped swearing, pleading, crying, and started planning. After the boy left and Tony let me go, I waited until he fell asleep. I went downstairs and got the biggest carving knife I could find. When Tony woke up, I was holding his cock in one hand, the knife in the other. I told him if he ever touched me again, I would castrate him, that we were going to get a quick, quiet divorce and that he was going to agree to give me the house all its contents as well as the Rolls, the Jag, and the little hideaway we’d bought in the mountains. If he didn’t agree, I was going to whack him off right then and there like he’d never been whacked off before.” Remembering the way he’d looked, the way he’d babbled made her smile. Until she glanced over at Julia.