by Jenna Ryan
Rain and wind didn’t bother her. Navigating treacherous canyon roads in a sporty little car that was only functioning on two-thirds of its cylinders did.
“I’d better get going,” she said, removing her keys from her leather bag. She faced him with no apparent glitch in her composure. “I’m sure we’ll bump into each other from time to time, Aidan.”
He took the hand she extended, holding it for a beat longer than was necessary. In that beat, his gaze caught and held hers. “John’s a good friend of mine,” he said quietly yet with an underlying warning that made the hair on the back of her neck prickle. He paused, then added a deliberately ambiguous, “Take care, Sam.”
She pulled her hand free as swiftly as possible without appearing spooked. Sharp-tongued Margaret Truesdale had nothing on this man. She couldn’t believe that even Mary Lamont would be more daunting. If soft-spoken threats were a specialty, they’d surely be his.
“Goodbye, Aidan,” she returned with an arch of her delicate brow that was a complete pose. She needed to get away from him. No more chance meetings. None. He was too sexy and far too shrewd to suit her. She’d need to be on her guard with him constantly.
A low peal of thunder rolled threateningly across the sky. She raised her head. Angry black clouds bunched together like sullen allies.
Out of range of Aidan Brodie’s powerful aura, Sam’s nerves at once began to settle. She felt his gaze on her back, but didn’t concern herself with it. Distance, that’s what she needed to cope with him.
Tossing her bag onto the passenger seat, she slid into her five-month-old Mazda Miata. The engine started with a touch, paused, hiccuped and promptly died. “New car bugs, no problem,” Andy, whose brother worked at the dealership, had assured her. Every vehicle, new or old, had them.
Five unsuccessful attempts later, Sam swore fluently and gave the steering wheel an irritable bang. Trust Andy’s flashy brother to pick out the only lemon on the lot and sell it to her. Trust her to trust him enough to buy it. Guido was right. She had to get over the belief that people were basically good and should, for the most part, be given the benefit of the doubt.
The first big drops of rain splashed against the windshield. Sighing, Sam hunted out her seldom-used cellular phone. Not surprisingly, the batteries were dead.
“Problem?” Aidan called from his car parked directly ahead of hers on the drive.
“Yes,” she yelled, then swiftly retracted the admission. “No.”
He might not have seen her slap her cell phone onto the passenger seat. He couldn’t have missed the sick engine. Flipping up the collar of his dark green jacket—it looked good with faded jeans and well-worn work boots—he jogged to the window.
“What’s wrong?”
Frank to a fault, Sam eyed him doubtfully. “Are you mechanical?”
“Garden variety. I’m better with old cars. It doesn’t sound like the battery.”
“It isn’t”
Again that cryptic near-smile. “Do you need a lift?”
Did she want to bother John Christian? Because she’d have to if she rejected Aidan’s offer. Of course rejecting it would be the smart thing to do.
“Yes, please,” she replied. “As long as you don’t try to pump information out of me about the source of my interest in Mary Lamont.”
Now he did smile, right up to his eyes. “I was raised a gentleman, Sam, by a strong Irish mother and proper Scottish father. I don’t pump.”
Right, and pigs flew. Only an idiot fool would buy that bit of blarney. On the other hand, she felt decidedly out of her depth with this case. If John’s sense of the woman had any merit—and no doubt it did—Mary Lamont was an obsessive, unpredictable shrew, an almost-great actress with murder on her severely unbalanced mind. An exchange of information might not go amiss at that.
They ran to Aidan’s vintage Caddy, wrestled the doors open and started off a mere ten seconds before the skies opened up.
Sam buckled in and peered at lowering storm clouds. “God must be on a rampage,” she murmured.
“I beg your pardon?”
She bit lightly on her tongue. “Nothing. When we had big storms, my brother used to tell me that God was angry.”
“And His anger caused the thunder?”
“No, moving His furniture made thunder. Anger came out as lightning and rain.” She raked damp tendrils of hair from her cheeks and forehead. “You don’t have brothers and sisters, do you?”
A canny brow went up. His eyebrows were as expressive as his eyes. “How do you figure that?”
“You don’t babble. You seem very—” she searched for the word “—private. You don’t get much privacy when you have three siblings especially when there are less than two years between oldest and youngest” Noting his sideways look, she said, “Adoption. Three of us were adopted, one was my parents’ child.”
He eased the car off the winding drive and onto the slippery canyon road. “Which one?”
Sam grinned. “One of my brothers. We don’t know which. My parents never told us and none of us were old enough to remember our mother being pregnant It could be Michael. He’s the eldest. It’s not Anna or me. We found our papers when we were young. Anyway, Anna’s too Scandinavian fair. My parents came from Italy. It might. be Danny. His eyes are blue, but that can happen with brown-eyed parents. How did we get on this subject anyway?”
Aidan shrugged. “Probably me. I was making conversation. You’re very beautiful. It’s a distraction.”
Sam accepted the compliment with equanimity. “Thanks, but I’d rather look like Anna. Do you remember Grace Kelly before she married Prince Rainier? That’s Anna to a tee.”
The door was open now; they both knew it Since she wasn’t the one attempting to navigate a slick canyon road, Sam braved it first
“John’s right, you know. Mary has it in her mind to kill Margaret Truesdale. They were rivals from the start, but apparently all hell broke loose during a movie they made together called The Three Fates.”
Aidan’s impassive gaze rose to the rearview mirror. “And just how do you know that, Sam Giancarlo?”
Sam considered for a moment She’d maintained her silence at Oakhaven, partly because she’d taken a strong dislike to Alistair Blue and partly because her instincts had advised cau-tion. Now uncertainty overrode caution. She wasn’t stupid by any means, but realistically she wouldn’t recognize a proper investigation from a hole in the ground. And while she fumbled around, what was to stop Mary from going for Margaret’s jugular?
The thought of blood spilled in the grisly fashion that a madwoman like Mary Lamont might envision brought a shudder to Sam’s skin and a calm admission of truth to her lips.
“Margaret Truesdale is my natural grandmother.”
The car swerved sharply and she had to clutch the dashboard to avoid being flung against his arm. “It isn’t that big a jolt,” she declared. “What are you doing?” This as the Caddy rocked to the right.
Eyes fixed on the wet road, Aidan demanded, “Is there anyone behind us?”
Sam looked. “No. Why?”
“Do you know this road?”
The next curve, taken on two wheels, threw her against the door. “It’s twisty,” she said, righting herself angrily. “Have you gone mad? There’s no one behind us, Aidan, so if you’re trying to outrun—”
The realization hit with the next bend and a glimpse of the speedometer, which read in excess of fifty miles per hour. Only a suicidal maniac would drive that fast in the rain. And Aidan Brodie was not suicidal.
Clawing the hair from her face, Sam stared through the windshield. On full, the wipers couldn’t begin to keep the glass clear.
“You don’t have brakes, do you?” she whispered in a terror-choked voice.
“Not unless they’re hiding,” Aidan replied, aggravatingly unruffled. “Unbuckle your seat belt, Sam, and get ready.”
“Ready for what?” she demanded, her eyes fastened on the blurred road. “Aidan, I’m not�
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“Yes, you are,” he said flatly. In a movement too swift for her to anticipate, he shot across the seat, grabbed her around the waist, and took her with him out the passenger door.
Chapter Three
They rolled and tumbled forever, over slippery rocks and flowers, through soggy bushes and along a mud embankment. Sam hit her head twice and her shoulder once, very hard. Aidan maintained his grip the entire time, which probably helped her but couldn’t have done him much good.
In the back of her mind she heard a sound like an agonized crunch of metal far below. Her fingers clawed for something solid to grab, a vine, a twig, even a firmly planted rock. She found several but nothing that she could catch for more than a split second.
Visions of North by Northwest, doubtless fueled by the tone of the past two days, flitted through her head. This might not be Mount Rushmore, but it sure as hell felt close from her vantage point
It took both of them to halt their fall; Aidan to dig in with his heels and Sam to grasp a sapling birch.
They must have gone down miles, she thought grimly, afraid to move for fear of losing her grip. Her body ached and she had sharp pains in her shoulders and knees.
“Are you steady?” Aidan asked. He sounded winded and hurt but not seriously so.
“More or less.” She was panting, unable to catch her breath or still the trembling in her strained muscles. She recognized the signs. Shock wanted to settle in. She fought it, hauling herself upward with a determined grunt and every scrap of her remaining strength.
“There’s a plateau of sorts,” Aidan said from below. “Can you reach it?”
“I think so…Yes.”
Her fingers curled around the rocky ledge. Although slick with mud and weeds, it held fast as she dragged her bruised body onto it.
Once there, she collapsed on the far side and prayed for Aidan to join her.’
When she rolled over and scrambled back to the side, she spied his head. Relief swamped her. As he hoisted himself over the edge, she caught his sleeve, then winced and sat with a thump.
Aidan immediately frowned. “Are you all right?”
She touched her right ankle. “I think so.”
“You don’t sound convinced.” Kneeling, he took her foot gently in his hands, removed her shoe and probed the bone with his long fingers.
Part of her wanted to pull away. Another larger part was too absorbed to move. He had a velvet touch, better than an anesthetic, but nowhere near as safe. Banking a shiver, she said softly, “It’s fine, really, Aidan. I think…what?”
Aidan had glanced up. Sam brushed rain and hair from her eyes and followed his gaze to a point on the canyon floor. There sat his ‘62 Cadillac convertible, impossibly wedged between two oak trees. The entire driver’s side was crumpled inward.
“Maybe it’s not too bad,” she began, then decided not to bother. The thing might not be totaled, but it was a mess. Pointless platitudes didn’t strike her as something Aidan would welcome.
Her mind cleared as if washed clean by the driving rain. Thunder shook the ledge, or seemed to. A chill wind whipped through her soaked clothes and hair, but it wasn’t entirely responsible for the chill that enveloped her.
“Was it deliberate?” She slid her shoe back on. She had to shout to be heard above the noise of the worsening storm.
His expression told her nothing. The aura, or whatever it was that radiated from him like heat from a fire, was another matter. His anger was palpable, controlled, but simmering.
“Yes.” He answered calmly, his deep green eyes unwavering as they regarded the battered remains of his pride and joy. “The brakes were new. The line must have been cut.”
“Alistair Blue?” Sam surmised.
“Or Mary.”
“She wouldn’t be hanging around Oakhaven, Aidan.” A shiver borne entirely of the cold this time made her teeth chatter on his name. Without removing his gaze from the car, Aidan pulled off his jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. She did her best to conceal it, but he must have noticed her start of pain.
“You are hurt.” He sounded displeased. “Let’s get out of here first, and point fingers later.”
He would have stood except for Sam’s hand that suddenly clamped down on his forearm, restraining him. Her voice was sharp. “What if he’s up there, waiting for us?”
Climbing to his feet, Aidan eased her up. “In that case,” he said, frighteningly matter-of-fact, “he’ll have a few questions to answer—before he winds up a sorry neighbor to my car.”
RAIN PELTED the sides of the phone booth outside the small canyon store in…Alistair didn’t have a clue where he was. Some lost little community that Lucy and company had undoubtedly passed through en route to L.A.
Alistair loved Lucy, didn’t think much of Uncle Milty but thought Jack Benny was a hoot. Of the person on the other end of the phone, he was presently thinking daggers.
“I told you to warn him off, not to harm him, Alistair,” a crackling voice snapped. A pause, then, “Did he survive? Did you check to see?”
Alistair’s gaze swept the mist-topped hills. Pretty, but he preferred the desert. “He had enough time to bail. I’m sure he did. Brodie’s no amateur.”
“What about the woman?”
“You wanted her brakes fixed, too?”
“I didn’t want anybody’s brakes fixed, you idiot. They have no part in any of this. Margaret’s the key, not these tawdry secondary players. Do I make myself clear?”
“As mud,” Alistair muttered.
“What did you say?”
“Must have been static. Do you want me to check it out?”
“If you wouldn’t mind. Remember what I said.”
“Yeah, I know. Eyes and ears open. Call if I see or hear anything remotely suspicious.”
“I’m not saying you won’t have to perform a few distasteful deeds,” the voice continued. “But I decide how and when. This is a game of revenge, Alistair. A deadly game.”
Some game, Alistair thought, batting at a wasp with his elbow. “Which one do you want me to tail?”
The protracted silence was punctuated by a loud burst of static and pelting rain. “The man for now, I think. Brodie, did you call him? I want to think about the young woman some more.”
Who didn’t? Alistair wiped the salivating corners of his mouth as he hung up. Put up or shut up, his grandfather had told him when he’d been a volatile teenager. He’d put up then and promptly been packed off to a juvenile camp for his efforts. For now he would shut up, stick his copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray in the VCR and think lewd thoughts of the delectable Sam Gian- Something. He’d think bloodier ones later of Aidan Brodie.
His lip curled in disdain. Who knew? Maybe he and Mary Lamont would turn out to have a common problem after all.
GUIDO’S ATTIC-STYLE office was hot and stuffy and cramped, overrun with filing cabinets, old boxes, a microfiche viewing screen, and somewhere on one of the cluttered shelves, a computer that was the dustiest thing in the room. He wore suspenders under an open black vest, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and bifocal glasses, the old-fashioned kind with only half a lens. The dead files were his domain and even Sam wouldn’t have dared to trespass without his permission.
“Here it is. You see?” Guido stabbed a calloused finger at a photo, presumably a publicity shot taken in the early fifties. “That’s Margaret in the middle. Mary’s on her right, Anthea her left. As you see, Anthea was a blonde, shorter and rounder than the other two. She got the nice-girl parts in every movie she made, except one. That exception was thanks to Margaret who put in a good word for her with the studio bigwigs.”
“It says here that Anthea and Margaret were cousins.” Sam, who’d been reading over his shoulder, indicated the appropriate line. “Did you know that?”
Guido’s wrinkled face screwed up in concentration. “Come to think of it, I did. Funny thing, that. Anthea disappeared at the same time as Margaret. Must be a connection.�
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“I’ll ask next time I see Margaret,” Sam promised.
Guido went back to packing his pipe. “You sure Margaret was telling the truth about you being her granddaughter?”
“She had the papers, Guido, and I checked with the hospital. It was a private one. The studio preferred that for their stars.”
“Discretion, Minx.”
“Margaret was admitted March 11, 1948, for an undetermined female indisposition.”
“They couldn’t say pregnancy on-screen in those days.”
“Apparently they had trouble saying it off-screen, as well. Anyway, the hospital should have the records on computer. I’ll look into them, but I’m sure they’ll bear out Margaret’s story. I also put out feelers on the name Helen Murdoch, but so far nothing.”
Guido puffed contemplatively, a frown deepening the ridge between his eyes. “I don’t like it, the brakes going like that It must have been deliberate.”
Sam disguised a shudder. “It was, Guido,” she said gently. “Remember, I told you Aidan Brodie called me last night. His car’s been pulled out. It’s in pretty bad shape but the mechanic said the line had definitely been cut. Either it wasn’t meant to look like an accident or the perpetrator was a rank amateur.”
Which she doubted Alistair Blue was—assuming of course that he had actually done the deed. Two days after the fact, Sam was torn. What if Aidan had damaged the brakes himself? It was possible that he wanted her off the case. More than possible, it was probable.
He’d still been there when she’d left the institute. That had surprised her a little, though not sufficiently for her to question his offer of a ride. But what if he’d “fixed” her already mal-functioning car? What if he’d tampered with his own vehicle? An extremist would go that far; a seasoned driver might take the risk. But did either of those descriptions fit Aidan Brodie? She sighed and wished she knew more about him.
Gnawing on the stem of his pipe, Guido asked, “This accident happened when? Sunday?”
Sam nodded.
