Three Grooms and a Wedding

by JoAnn Ross

  “Alexandra never cared for fame. Indeed, she often said it was the unfortunate price she was forced to pay for her beauty. She did possess an almost obsessive need for wealth,” Natasha conceded. “But only because to her, money represented security. By the time Patrick met her, she had more money than she could have spent in several lifetimes. But, more importantly, he represented a security Alexandra had never known.

  “I’m convinced, that had her life not been cut so tragically short, she would have left Hollywood with no regrets. And never looked back.”

  A heavy silence came over the room, settling over the trio like a wet, suffocating cloak. They were each immersed in their private thoughts of Alexandra when the door to the cabin burst open.

  “Why is everyone so sad in the face?” Kyriako Papakosta asked in a big, booming voice. He entered the cabin on a long, strong stride, the energy of his personality sweeping away the gloom created by Natasha’s tragic tale. “The sun is shining, it is a beautiful day.” His teeth, beneath the shaggy white mustache flashed. “Much too nice to be down in the mouth.

  “Besides,” he complained to Natasha, “frowning will give you wrinkles.” He brushed a huge beefy finger across her forehead.

  “At my age, I’m no longer concerned about wrinkles,” Natasha lied. “And Blythe is too young to worry.”

  “A few lines only give a stunning woman’s face character.” Kyriako quickly changed gears as he turned to Blythe with another flash of strong teeth.

  “Of course I am familiar with your work,” he said after Natasha introduced them. He took Blythe’s outstretched hand and lifted it to his smiling lips. “And I’ve always found you as talented as you are lovely. But—” his smiling eyes turned suddenly serious “—I do not think your talent has been properly presented.”

  Romantic chivalry combined with honesty made an unusual and devastating combination. Blythe immediately understood why Natasha Kuryan had jumped ship to remain behind in Greece.

  “I’m working on that,” she said with an answering smile.

  “Ah, yes.” His hearty face, tanned to a deep hazelnut by eight decades of Mediterranean sun, took on a momentarily grave expression. “Natasha told me about your Alexandra Romanov problem. It’s a very sad story. I remember being quite distraught when she died. She was so lovely. And so young.”

  He turned and shook Gage’s hand. “And you are the man who intends to solve the murder. After all these years.”

  “So you don’t think Patrick killed Alexandra, either?” Blythe asked.

  The older man snorted. “Of course not. I know of no one who believed that cock-and-bull story the prosecution presented. It was obvious that Alexandra’s novelist husband was, how do you Americans put it, railroaded?”

  “That’s the word, all right,” Gage agreed with a frown that revealed he wasn’t fond of thinking that the system of justice he’d spent the major part of his adult life defending could be so badly misused. “And unfortunately, I’m beginning to agree with you.”

  “Of course you are,” Kyriako said. “Everyone always agrees with Papakosta, because he is always right. Isn’t that correct, my golden one?” he asked Natasha.

  “Of course,” she answered on cue, drawing a laugh all around.

  “You must let me give you the grand tour,” Kyriako proclaimed. “Then we will have breakfast.”

  Not a single person in the room felt inclined to argue.

  8

  AFTER A TOUR of the luxurious yacht, followed by breakfast and lively conversation with the ebullient Greek author, Blythe and Gage returned to the hotel where they spent a long, indulgent time making slow, dreamy love.

  Later that afternoon, desire temporarily sated, they were sitting side by side on the balcony outside her bedroom, looking out over the cerulean sea. Gage had his arm around Blythe’s shoulders; her head was resting on his.

  “Do you think it’s possible?” Blythe asked. Hours after meeting the elderly Russian makeup artist, her mind was still spinning with the possibilities. “Do you believe Walter Stern really could have been the murderer?”

  “Someone kept Natasha from testifying,” Gage said carefully. As a cop, he’d always believed that jumping to conclusions led to dangerous—and often embarrassing—landings. “Someone with power and connections.”

  “Someone like the head of a major motion picture studio.” Blythe shook her head. “I can’t believe he’d take such a risk. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Gage ran his hand down her hair. Pressed his lips against her temple. “Crimes of passion seldom do.” Because it had been too long since he’d kissed her—at least ten minutes—he cupped her chin between his thumb and finger and lifted her lips to his. “Speaking of passion...”

  It was happening again. Despite the fact that they’d spent most of the afternoon in her bed, Blythe found herself wanting Gage all over again. When he slipped his tongue between her parted lips to seduce hers, Blythe felt herself melting, like a wax candle left out too long in the unrelenting Mediterranean sun.

  “Oh, yes,” she said on a long, blissful sigh as he carried her through the French doors, into the adjoining bedroom. It was the last thing she would say for a very long time.

  * * *

  IT WAS NEARLY midnight. A white moon rose in a star-spangled sky, creating a silvery path on the darkened waters of the ocean below. The unceasing sound of the incoming tide lapped softly against the glistening sand; the sea breeze rustled in the tops of the palm trees. Smoke from the smudge pots that nearby orange growers burned during these winter nights to warm their groves, wafted on the salt air. With the exception of that faint odor of smoke—and the sight of a woman, stumbling across the beach—it could have been another perfect night in Lotus Land.

  “Dammit!” Alexandra cursed as her silver high heels bogged down in the thick dry sand, causing her to twist her ankle. She would have fallen, had it not been for the strong hand reaching from the darkness to grab her arm.

  “Let go of me,” she shouted, shaking free of the possessive masculine touch. “I don’t want you to touch me. Ever again.”

  “You don’t mean that.” His voice was deep and rich and, dammit, as exciting as ever.

  “Yes, I do!”

  She was wearing her thick sable hair loose and flowing, her trademark mermaid waves attractively ruffled by the sea breeze. When some of those strands blew across her face, he brushed them away with fingers far gentler than she would have expected, given the circumstance.

  “You’re a horrid man.” Her accent thickened when she was emotional and tonight Alexandra was more upset than she could ever remember being. His fingers were still on her cheek; when she batted them away, her wedding ring glittered in the moonlight. “You’re a liar. And a cheat.”

  She lifted the champagne glass she was carrying and with a dramatic flair, downed the remainder of the sparkling wine. “I wish I’d never met you.”

  Patrick looked inclined to touch her again, but instead slipped his hands into the pockets of his dress slacks. “You’re talking to the man you love,” he reminded her.

  “That’s not even an original line,” she shot back. “Clark Gable said it to Norma Shearer in A Free Soul.”

  Patrick shrugged, drawing her unwilling attention to the way his broad shoulders strained the seams of his custom-tailored white dinner jacket. “A good writer knows enough to steal a great line when he hears one.”

  Her temper reaching the boiling point, Alexandra categorically refused to let her husband defuse her anger. Not after having caught him in that clinch with Mae Chandler, the actress Walter was touting for an Oscar for her supporting role as the long-suffering wife in Alexandra’s latest film, Lady Reckless. Typecast as usual, Alexandra had, of course, played the man’s backstreet mistress.

  “Not that you’d know anything about good writing,” she spat out, her words meant to wound.

  Anger flashed in his eyes. “It’s not how it looked,” he said mildly.

 
; She tossed her head. “That must be one of your own lines. Since it’s trite and overused.”

  A muscle clenched in his jaw, revealing that she’d just gone too far. “Speaking of being overused,” he said in a low voice that she recognized as being more dangerous than a shout, “since you seem to be all worked up about my alleged infidelity, how would you like to discuss your own recent dalliances?”

  She drew in a deep, painful breath. That was a lie. There’d never been anyone else for her since she’d first laid eyes on Patrick Reardon.

  Refusing to dignify the accusation—which he had obviously only thrown out to muddy the waters after being caught kissing some opportunistic slut—Alexandra said, “I have nothing to discuss with you.”

  Patrick was towering over his wife, looking huge and threatening. He lowered his head until his face was close to hers.

  “That’s too damn bad. Because I have a great deal to talk about with you. Beginning with your stint as one of Havana’s premiere whores.”

  He could have hurt her no less if he’d reached out one of those strong dark fists and hit her in the solar plexus. Alexandra’s creamy complexion turned as white as the moonlight streaming down around them.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she hedged, frantically wondering who’d told him about her less than pristine life in Cuba.

  Certainly not Walter? Alexandra knew that the studio head was furious about her marriage, claiming it diminished her sex appeal, which in turn, hurt box office receipts. But a year after eloping with Patrick, there was still not another star who equaled her drawing power—not Garbo or Dietrich, or even that lacquered blond bombshell, Jean Harlow.

  Vindictive as Walter admittedly could be, possessive as he’d always been, Alexandra couldn’t believe he’d risk the story getting out that Xanadu’s most popular star was a former prostitute.

  “For an actress, you’re a rotten liar, sweetheart,” Patrick shot back. “But, now that I think about it, I suppose it’s not all that different, selling your body for pesos above some Havana casino, or trading it for starring roles in Tinseltown.”

  On a roll, he ignored her furious gasp. “The problem is, it makes a guy kind of wonder—” his gaze was iced fury as it raked its way over her still flat stomach “—exactly whose bun you’ve got in your oven.”

  Alexandra had not had an easy life. Until coming to America, her entire existence had been a seemingly continuous pattern of deprivation, pain and loss. She’d been five years old when World War I broke out, eight when a revolution ended czarist rule and led to civil war. She’d lost her father during a peasant uprising, one brother was killed in the Red Army, another was imprisoned and later died after a sailors’ revolt at the naval base near Petrograd.

  She and her mother had been driven off their land, but not before her mother had first been brutally raped by the soldiers sent to claim the farm for the Bolsheviks. Held back by arms far stronger than hers, Alexandra had been forced to watch. Two weeks later her mother died, more, Alexandra believed, from a broken heart than from the pain the soldiers had inflicted on her body.

  She spent the next five years laboring eighteen hours a day on collective farms. The work was hard, she received no pay and the scant bit of food she was allowed barely kept her from starving. Prone to daydreaming, she was also beaten with depressing regularity.

  When her ugly duckling stick-thin frame blossomed into a swan’s voluptuous curves, Alexandra realized that her body, and her face, were her fortune. And her means of survival.

  By her sixteenth birthday, she’d become mistress to a high-ranking politburo member. Two years later, she bribed the captain of a merchant vessel with sex—and money stolen from her lover—to take her out of the country. He’d willingly agreed, then kept her captive the entire voyage to Cuba, doing excruciating, hateful things to her body and her spirit.

  Oh, Alexandra had known pain, all right. But never could she have imagined that mere words could hurt more than the pain so many men in her past had already inflicted on her. She’d come to view the baby she and Patrick had made together as a miracle—a reward for surviving all the past sins committed against her. For Patrick to even dare question that it was his child was unthinkable!

  “You bastard!” She slapped him. Hard. The sound reverberated like a gunshot in the perfumed night air.

  Patrick raised his own dark hand and for a long, suspended moment, although he’d only ever touched her in passion, or with heartbreaking tenderness, Alexandra actually believed he would strike her back.

  Their eyes met. And held. Then Patrick muttered a low, vicious curse and slowly lowered his hand to his side. Without another word, he turned abruptly on his heel and went marching back toward the house.

  “Patrick!” They couldn’t leave it like this. “Please! Come back!”

  Her words were whipped away by the wind. Confused and hurt and upset, she hurled the champagne glass at his rigid, departing back.

  Then she dropped to her knees and buried her face in her hands.

  Blythe woke with a start, the sob of some long distant pain caught in her throat. Lying beside her, Gage was instantly jerked from a sound sleep.

  * * *

  “BLYTHE?” He reached out and touched her wet face. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” he soothed. “It was only a bad dream.”

  “Oh, Gage!” She flung herself into his arms and pressed her cheek against the reassuring strength of his chest. “It seemed so real.”

  The tears were streaming down her face. He could feel them, hot and wet against his naked flesh. He smoothed his palm down her sleep-tousled hair. “You were dreaming about Alexandra.” It was not a question.

  She burrowed deeper, like a kitten trying to escape a thunderstorm. “It was as if I were there. The night of the party. The night she was murdered.”

  She was trembling. His hands continued their caresses down her back, his touch meant to soothe, rather than arouse. “That’s not surprising,” he murmured against the top of her head. “Considering what Natasha told us today. Yesterday,” he amended as he viewed the stuttering pale light of a rosy new dawn slipping between the shutters.

  “You don’t understand.” Tilting her head back, she looked up at him, her eyes glistening with moisture. “I know what they were arguing about.”

  “Natasha said they were probably arguing about Alexandra’s time in Havana,” he reminded her gently. He brushed her hair away from her face and kissed her temple. The slanted line of her cheekbone. Her lips.

  His touch, his mouth, his reassuring tone, all conspired to calm her. But they could not make Blythe question the validity of what she knew. “She was right. Patrick did accuse her of being a whore.” She wrapped her arms around him and felt safe. “But then it got even worse.... Alexandra was pregnant.”

  “There was no mention of that in either the autopsy report or the trial.”

  “I don’t care what the official report says. I know it’s true.” Blythe began shivering again as she recalled, in vivid detail, Patrick’s frigid, unrelenting glare. “Patrick told her that he didn’t believe the child she was carrying was his.”

  The words rang a deep and distant chord. An icy fist clenched at his heart. Concerned with the way Blythe was trembling, like a frail leaf in a hurricane, Gage didn’t allow himself to dwell on it.

  “It was a nightmare,” he repeated soothingly. “Only a bad dream.”

  “No.” Blythe shook her head. “You don’t understand—”

  He didn’t want to hear it. “I understand you’ve been under a great deal of stress. I understand that you haven’t been getting enough sleep. Which,” he said as his lips brushed against hers again, lingering for a moment, “is mostly my fault, at least these past two nights.”

  As Blythe clung even tighter to him, her breasts flattened against his chest, her lips burrowed into the hollow of his throat, Gage began finding it difficult to keep his mind on this conversation. She felt so good. So warm. So right.r />
  “It’s not at all surprising that your subconscious would start filling in the blanks, sweetheart.”

  “That’s exactly what’s happening.” She lifted her eyes to his again, her gaze grave. “But it’s real, Gage. As if it’s happening to me. Not Alexandra.”

  “You were dreaming,” he insisted.

  The mists had cleared from her mind, leaving her with a clarity as bright as a new day. “Then tell me one thing.”

  “If I can.”

  “Did any of the information you uncovered reveal how Alexandra got to Cuba in the first place?”

  “No, but—”

  “She bribed a captain of a merchant ship to take her out of Russia. It was not an easy voyage. He abused her. Unmercifully.”

  Blythe’s gaze took on a distant, faraway look. “When the ship landed in Cuba to pick up sugar cane, I left the captain’s quarters for the first time since we’d set sail from Odessa.”

  Gage immediately caught the change in her words. “Blythe—”

  “For the first time in my life,” she said, ignoring his murmured interruption, “I was truly free.” She looked up at him. “You Americans have no idea what that word means. You take it for granted.”

  Impossible as it was, she’d begun speaking with a Russian accent. Even as he didn’t understand why he was witnessing this performance, Gage reminded himself that Blythe was a superb actress.

  “For the first time in my life, I was free from the grinding poverty and degradation that had been my life in Russia,” Blythe continued.

  “It felt marvelous.” Her full dark lips curved that sexy, trademark smile capable of bringing any red-blooded male to his knees. “Although the city was overrun with beautiful women, I immediately got a job modeling swim suits in the casinos for rich old men who stank of rum and cigar smoke. If, on occasion, I did more than model, if some small-minded persons might accuse me of being a prastitootka, I refuse to apologize.”

  She lifted her head with a haughty pride suggesting the former Czarina the studio publicity machine had made Alexandra out to be. Her eyes flashed jet sparks. “Survival is something only the rich take lightly.”