A Woman Worth Loving

by Jackie Braun

  “I know. Even if Ali and the other people I’ve managed to hurt eventually forgive me, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forgive myself.”

  The quietly issued statement touched a chord deep within Seth. He didn’t like it.

  Audra smiled awkwardly as the silence stretched. “Aren’t you glad you invited me to dinner?”

  “Homecomings can be hard,” he replied on a shrug, tamping down his emotions.

  Still, her expression was so full of gratitude that it made Seth uneasy when she added, “Yes, but you’re making mine easier. Thank you.”

  Three hours later, they had eaten their meal, polished off a little more than half the bottle of wine and sat in the small living room discussing anything and everything. Seth wanted Audra gone and yet he didn’t want to let her go. That puzzling dichotomy troubled him.

  He didn’t like to admit it, but at times during the evening he’d actually enjoyed himself, and not just because he’d filed away plenty of useful nuggets of information about Audra’s past to give to Welling. She seemed very different from the woman whose antics he’d watched through the viewfinder of his camera for the past couple of years.

  She was funny, for one. Not stand-up comedian funny, but she had him laughing out loud more than a few times while recounting some of the silly things she and her siblings had done as kids. From the stories she told, her early childhood seemed remarkably normal and even somewhat similar to his, especially before his father had died. She spoke fondly of her parents and grandparents and an assortment of cousins who lived over on the mainland. Every now and then, though, he detected…something, an elusive dark shadow that loomed over all of those otherwise happy times.

  It was also clear to him that as much as she loved her twin, they had definitely been in competition, not necessarily by choice, either. Reading between the lines as Audra spoke he gathered that everyone had considered Ali to be the “good” one, the “smart” one, and they had held her up as the model for Audra. One look at the two women and Seth had known with certainty there was no way to force either into the other’s mold. They were simply too different.

  Different, he thought, bemused as he listened to Audra now. In addition to her self-deprecating wit, she was intelligent. It had shocked him to find she had a bachelor’s degree, earned quietly through correspondence courses from a respected university. And she was a surprisingly interesting conversationalist. She was more plugged in to politics than he ever would have guessed her to be, despite her close friendship with Tempest Herriman, the hotel chain heiress whose husband was now a United States senator. And even though she had claimed earlier in the evening to find the news “too depressing” to read, it was clear she picked up a paper on a regular basis. Being educated and well-read weren’t things that could be faked.

  Had he misjudged her? The thought niggled, no matter how ruthlessly Seth shoved it aside. It burrowed deeper, as beguiling as the scent of her perfume.

  When the evening ended, Seth insisted on walking her home.

  “I think I can manage thirty yards in the dark,” she said dryly when he followed her down the three wooden steps that led from the front porch.

  “Call me old-fashioned.”

  Odd, but she seemed almost old-fashioned, too. As they walked in silence down the road, she stuffed her fists into the pockets of her jean jacket as if she was worried he’d try to hold her hand.

  When they reached her porch, she climbed one step before stopping abruptly and turning around to face him. She took both of her hands out of her pockets to hold the handrails on either side of her. The movement was casual and yet it also effectively blocked his way.

  “Well, here we are.”

  She exhaled sharply after saying it, and the chilly night air wreathed white around her head, mocking her nonchalant pose. She was a good six inches taller than Seth wearing those dangerous heels and standing on that step. He told himself that it was only in the interest of using the advantage of his height that he slid one of his feet between hers and then raised himself slowly until he had joined her on the stair.

  “Here we are,” he repeated.

  Now she was the one who was forced to look up. Their bodies brushed from thigh to chest before she bowed away from him, holding on to the railing to keep her balance.

  “Th-thanks again for dinner,” she stammered. “It was really…delicious.”

  She forced the last word out on what might have been a sigh.

  How was it possible, he wondered, that a woman who had been married to three men and all but lived with another could suddenly act all nervous and uncertain?

  He recalled the kiss they’d shared on Dane’s porch. Well, Seth didn’t plan to kiss her again. Of course, he hadn’t planned to do it the first time. But right here, right now, as he stood crowding her space, he vowed that despite his rapid pulse and his body’s awkward betrayal, he would not lower his head and nip at that very inviting lower lip of hers.

  No. He would not. Lower. His head.

  The vow fragmented as his chin dipped down, pulled by a need that was more powerful than any magnet. He was in the process of closing his eyes like some lovesick fool when Audra scooted up the second step and then the third. But it wasn’t until she stood at the top, eyes wide open and somehow shining luminescent in the moonlight, that he realized what he’d almost done. A second time. In one day.

  “Good night, Seth.” She tilted her head in seeming apology. “See you tomorrow?”

  He forced a smile. “Count on it.”

  That night, as Jay Leno was delivering his monologue on The Tonight Show, Seth dialed Deke Welling’s number on his cell phone and settled onto the couch with the remainder of the wine. He’d been putting off this call, but after his evening with Audra he needed to remember why he was here.

  “You’ve been gone a week without a word, Smithfield,” the other man groused as soon as he came on the line. “My agent says the publisher wants to see some of the artwork you’re going to provide before they’ll budge on the size of the advance they’re offering. What do you have for me and when will it get here?”

  This news should have had Seth pumping his fist in the air in triumph, but he didn’t feel triumphant. Oddly enough he felt conflicted, which was ridiculous.

  “I’ve got some good shots,” he hedged. “And better than that, unprecedented access. I’ll send you the whole package when it’s ready. I prefer not to do this piecemeal.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you prefer!” the other man shouted. “I need something now. At least e-mail me your archived stuff so I can send it to my agent.”

  “Give me a month.”

  “A month! Are you nuts?”

  “The entire package will be worth it,” he promised.

  He hung up on Deke’s sputtering curses.

  What was he waiting for? He had some good pictures already, and he was the only photographer who knew where Audra was. He could have what he needed by the end of the week, easily.

  Still, something told him there was more to Audra than what he had documented so far. More secrets to unearth.

  Pictures tell the story.

  He glanced across the room at his camera. During the next few weeks he planned to let them.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AUDRA rolled onto her back on the sagging mattress and stretched lazily. The room was still cast in shadows but sunlight speared through a gap between the heavy drapes covering the window. Glancing at the clock on the stand next to the wrought-iron bed she blinked twice, sure it had to be wrong. It was only quarter to seven.

  Only rarely did she wake before what she considered the civilized hour of ten o’clock, and yet instead of rolling back over and ducking her head beneath the pillow, she found herself tossing off the covers and getting up. Besides, how could she stay in bed when for the first time in too many years to count she could hear birds singing outside her window?

  Amazingly, she felt well-rested and alert despite the fact that she’d
had a difficult time falling to sleep after leaving Seth outside on her porch the night before. She still couldn’t believe that she had all but run into the cottage like some trembling virgin after his big, warm body had bumped solidly into her own.

  What was it about that man that had her so keyed up and questioning her every move? Sure, he was handsome as sin, but so were dozens of other men she’d met in and around Hollywood over the past decade. Surely it went beyond looks. Maybe it was the way he watched her, as if he could somehow see beyond the surface polish to the woman underneath.

  In the bathroom, she studied her unmade face in the mirror over the sink. She saw her mother’s high cheekbones and her father’s cornflower-blue eyes—and for the first time in years she forced herself to recall all of the ways in which she had disappointed them. And yet, just like Dane, in every letter, every card and every phone call they had told her they loved her and they had asked her to come home.

  It was time to make them proud.

  Smiling, she hastily washed her face and pulled her hair into a no-fuss ponytail reminiscent of the kind Ali preferred. She rummaged through the dresser drawers for the comfortable yoga clothes she’d unpacked the day before. Over them, she pulled a bulky, high-necked sweater in deference to the chilly spring morning and her marked neck. She would go for a walk. Not on a treadmill or in circles around some indoor track. She wanted to be out in the crisp morning air, inhaling the mingling scents of damp earth and newly budding wildflowers.

  From his window, Seth watched Audra jog down the three steps of her porch with a smile on her face. Somebody slept well, he thought, his mood just this side of foul since it hadn’t been him. He’d lain awake until nearly two trying to figure out what her game was and why he was nearly falling for it. Then, after a few hours of fitful dozing, he’d decided to get up and make coffee. He’d just poured his third cup when he saw her. He grabbed his Nikon from the dresser in his bedroom, inserted the memory card and rushed out the door with his shoelaces untied and his T-shirt untucked.

  Where was she going? She seemed to have a destination in mind, striding purposefully along the gravel roadway as Seth hung back and out of her line of vision should she glance over her shoulder. Then she cut into the woods, leaving him with no choice but to follow if he hoped to record whatever it was that had her out of bed so early.

  Was she meeting someone? A man? Anger bubbled to the surface, white hot and roiling. It surprised him as he made his way through the woods.

  They were on a trail of some sort, he realized. It was overgrown and probably would be all but impassible in the summer when the ferns and other underbrush sprouted thick and thorny, but she seemed to know where she was going, picking her way along in the rubber soles of her Nikes as surely as he’d seen her click the high heels of her expensive Jimmy Choos along the sidewalks of Rodeo Drive.

  Thirty yards ahead of him she stopped abruptly. Seth crouched low on the balls of his feet. As a photographer he spent a lot of time in this position and so his balance was steady when he raised the camera and used its magnified eye to take a closer look. The slow smile curving Audra’s lips had his mouth going dry.

  Click!

  He depressed his finger and recorded the moment, not realizing until he displayed the image on the back of the camera what it was that had brought on that look of pure joy.

  Wildflowers? They rioted white around her feet. Trillium, he knew, noting their three pointy petals. It seemed as if every shop on the island displayed the image of one of those blooms on its business sign. He frowned. She was out at this early hour to look at wildflowers? Then he heard her traipsing on and scrambled to follow.

  The path opened onto a secluded sweep of beach that barely measured twenty yards wide. Beyond it the vast lake stretched out as smooth and beautiful as blue glass in the pastel-drenched glow of morning. The water lapped gently at the shore in a soothing rhythm as Audra stood quietly, head tilted sideways for the sun’s gentle kiss. Seth raised his camera, mesmerized. He could just catch a glimpse of her profile from his hiding spot at the edge of the woods, but her eyes appeared to be closed and something shimmered on her cheeks. Tears?

  He lowered his camera. Oddly enough, Seth found himself hesitating to take a photo of Audra, wondering whether he had the right to intrude on what for some insane reason seemed like a private moment, when even the interlude he’d mistakenly expected between her and her stepson had not. In the end he squelched the flicker of misplaced conscience and raised the Nikon back to his eye. Click went the shutter, and the image was frozen in time.

  Half a dozen frames later, Audra turned. He knew the exact moment when she spied him. Even with the space of thirty-five feet serving as a buffer, he caught the sudden wariness that tightened her otherwise relaxed pose.

  “Good morning!” he called out on a wave, and smiled. His mind scrambled for plausible excuses for his paparazzo-like pose as he covered the distance to where she stood.

  She discreetly wiped the tears from her cheeks. Her face was rosy from the brisk air. It was clear to him now that she hadn’t come to meet a man. No, even though the daylight had streaked in a couple hours ago and the sunrise wouldn’t have been quite as spectacular from this part of the island anyway, Audra had come to this secluded spot to greet the morning.

  She wore no makeup, not so much as a hint of eyeliner, and she had forgone jewelry with the exception of a pair of small gold hoops at her ears. The simple hairdo and casual clothing made her appear closer to twenty than the thirty he knew her to be. Maybe that explained why he had this sudden urge to believe she needed protection rather than that she deserved humiliation.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  A variation on the truth seemed his most reasonable defense, so Seth said, “A little nature photography. Great morning for it. I thought I saw you in the woods so I followed you. Hope I didn’t startle you just now.”

  “No.” But her wary gaze remained on the camera. “Did you take my picture?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “A beautiful woman glancing out at a beautiful lake on a beautiful morning?” He shrugged casually. “It seemed like a good idea.”

  “That’s a fancy camera you own,” she remarked.

  “And expensive,” he agreed, again deciding that a variation of the truth would be best. “I majored in photojournalism in college. I wanted to work for Sports Illustrated when I graduated. For the sports, you understand, not the swimsuit models.”

  He smiled. That was true enough, although he’d snagged an internship at the Los Angeles Times just out of college and had wound up on staff there a year later, shooting everything from house fires and traffic accidents in the field to mug shots in the studio. Over the next several years, though, he’d made a name for himself for his features that stood alone with only a caption’s worth of identifying information. The rest of the story, of course, was plain in the photograph.

  Pictures tell the story.

  “And do you work at Sports Illustrated now?”

  “No.”

  “But you are a photographer. It’s more than the hobby you claimed it to be the yesterday.” Her posture was rigid when she asked, “Do you work for a newspaper?”

  “Not anymore. I tried it for a while. Working for other people—bending to their vision—it really wasn’t for me. I guess I need a little more artistic freedom.”

  Again, not quite a lie. He had found the constraints on his craft too limiting, especially under one editor who’d seemed to take delight in cropping Seth’s work into two-column images that rarely complemented the subject matter of either the photograph or any accompanying article.

  Would he have quit the Times eventually if the accident hadn’t forced his hand? He wondered now. He certainly wouldn’t have tried nature photography, and yet he’d almost enjoyed the work he’d done as cover yesterday on his way to Dane’s.

  “So, what do you do?”

  He took a deep breath. I
t could have been the moment of truth. For one crazy second he wanted it to be. But he answered with an evasion.

  “A little of this and that. Last night you mentioned you’d had a life-altering experience. I guess you could say I had one of those myself a couple years ago, and right now I’m sort of at a crossroads. I’m not sure what I’ll eventually do with my life. Makes me seem kind of aimless, but I do have some goals,” he said.

  One of them was standing in front of him. He fiddled with the F-stop, waiting. Would she put it all together? Would she ask more questions that would force him to lie outright? For some reason that thought bothered him.

  Audra’s expression was rueful when she replied, “I guess I’m at a crossroads, too.”

  “Maybe we can pick a direction and travel together for a while, at least until we figure out where it is that we’re heading,” he suggested lightly.

  “Maybe.”

  When she said nothing else, Seth noted, “This is a pretty place. You obviously knew where you were going.”

  “I used to come here a lot in high school.”

  “To think?”

  “Sometimes.” Then she smiled, looking much more like the tempting woman he was used to photographing. “And with boys. I thought it was a pretty romantic spot. Bring a blanket, light a campfire, and after the last of daylight was gone we would gaze at the stars on a warm summer’s night.”

  “That all?” he asked quietly.

  “No, but that’s all I’m going to admit to.” She smiled again, this time with humor.

  “You must have driven the boys—hell, the men—crazy around here,” he murmured.

  The humor he’d seen evaporated and she rubbed her arms through the bulky sweater.

  “Cold?”

  “A little. I forgot how much chillier it can be out by the open water.”

  “Here.” He handed her the camera that was responsible for his livelihood and shrugged out of his jacket, which he then draped around her shoulders. “Is that better?”

  “Yes.”

  She glanced up at him, her gaze as incisive as a laser’s beam, and awareness shot through Seth like a shower of sparks—not quite painful, but dangerous all the same.