Three Grooms and a Wedding

by JoAnn Ross

  Gage stared down at her, transfixed. Before his eyes, she’d literally become Alexandra Romanov. It was more than a mere physical resemblance. More than a mimicking of her voice and body language. What he was witnessing was Alexandra’s spirit. Her soul.

  “When Walter Stern came to me in Havana, and asked me if I had ever acted on the stage, I had to laugh. I was, of course, already, in my own fashion, a premiere aktrisa.”

  She tossed her dark head; defiance blazed in her ebony eyes. “Of course, my stage was not in a theater, but in a luxuriously appointed suite in the city’s finest tourist hotel. And my rapt and appreciative audience was only one man at a time.”

  Her gaze fixed on Gage. “You dare to accuse me of betraying you, but you do not attempt to appreciate what it was like for me, for so many of us, after the revolution. We have a saying in my country—’A sated man cannot understand a starving one.’” Her furious eyes raked over him.

  “You have said you love me. But I believe you only fell in love with the glamorous woman on that large silver screen. Not the very human woman who carries your child.”

  A chill crept into Gage, going deep into the bone. “Blythe.” He took hold of her shoulders and shook her. Lightly, at first. Then, when he received no response, harder. His fingers tightened. Gage knew there’d be bruises, but at this moment, he honestly didn’t care. “Dammit, Blythe, it’s me, sweetheart. Gage.”

  It was his tone, more than his words, that filtered through the fog clouding her mind. He sounded frightened. More than frightened, she realized with amazement. Terrified.

  The painful memory faded from her eyes before she closed them on a soft, ragged moan.

  She struggled against the almost overwhelming desire to remain where she was. But her need for Gage, her love for him, pulled her back.

  “Gage?” She blinked against the blinding light of the sun that was rising from the sea outside the window. Her eyes felt dry and scratchy, their lids leaden. Her tongue was thick.

  “Got it on the first try.” Not even attempting to hide his relief, he lowered his forehead to hers. “Lord, lady, you had me terrified half out of my wits for a while there.”

  His relief flowed out of him and into her, metamorphosing to a soothing warmth that made Blythe realize exactly how lucky she was to have this man in her life.

  Vowing that she’d never let anything—or anyone—come between them, she lifted her lips to his. Their mouths met in a desperate, mutual pleasure as Blythe allowed the glory of his kiss to dull the last lingering vestiges of pain.

  The fever rose, as it always did. As she knew it always would. Wanting to show him how much she loved him, how much she’d always love him, Blythe wrapped her arms around him and pushed him back down to the mattress.

  Strong, willful, her hands skimmed over his naked body, drawing husky, hungry groans as they never lingered on any one spot for very long. The room was cast in a golden morning glow. The air swirling hotly around them was rich and redolent with the perfume of the jasmine outside the window, the scent of desire emanating from love-warmed flesh.

  The power built inside her. Blythe’s need for Gage was as urgent as breath. And every bit as vital. As they rolled over the bed, tangling the sheets, her mouth streaked over him, following the heated path her hands had blazed, greedily tasting, savoring, loving.

  Hot hammers of need pounded inside him. The control he’d always counted on had deserted him, stripped away by the fever of her mouth, the tempest of her hands. For the first time in his thirty-one years Gage felt utterly helpless.

  Half-mad, his breath burning in his lungs, his loins, he grasped hold of her waist with unsteady hands as she straddled his hips. “Now,” he said, lifting her above him.

  Her eyes were dark with passion, but a flame burned in their midnight depths. “Now.” Their eyes met, exchanging unspoken promises as she lowered herself onto him, taking him inside her, steel into warm satin.

  Her body contracted as he filled her, her muscles clenching, throbbing. He watched the naked thrill rise in her eyes.

  “I love you, Blythe.” The words came hoarsely from his throat.

  “And I love you.” He was hers. Body, mind, heart. The unquestioning knowledge sent a new warmth surging through her—an emotional joy that increased the physical pleasure. “Only you.” Her lips were full and parted. Her damp flesh glistened in the gilt morning light. She gripped his wrists, lifting his willing hands to her breasts. “Always.”

  Her hair curtained both their faces as she lowered her mouth to his. The sun was warm on her back as they rose together, the ancient rhythm instinctive, perfect.

  * * *

  MUCH, MUCH LATER, they were back in the horse-drawn carriage, on the way to the waterfront. Although neither was anxious to leave the romantic island, both reluctantly agreed that the clock was ticking. Even if Connor would be willing to change the shooting schedule on Expose, which was a possibility, it was still imperative Blythe return to work on the project.

  As for Gage, Blythe knew she was not his only client. And even with Lily having recently become his partner, she understood his need to return to the states.

  Even knowing all that, as she watched their cliff-side hotel growing smaller and smaller in the distance, Blythe found herself wishing that one of them wasn’t so damn responsible.

  “I’ve made a decision,” Gage said abruptly.

  His gruff tone unnerved her, just a little. “Oh?”

  “I’m still willing to let you get used to the idea of marriage. But I want us to live together.”

  She immediately relaxed. “I’m already packed.”

  “Are you saying you’re willing to move in with me? Just like that?” As comfortable as Bachelor Arms was, it was still a long way from Blythe’s Beverly Hills mansion.

  “For the time being,” she agreed. “At least until my house is restored. Then perhaps, if you’re comfortable with the idea,we can move in there and keep your apartment as your office.”

  “Whatever you want.” Having expected her to put up an argument, Gage was pleased and admittedly relieved at her immediate acquiescence. He didn’t care where the hell they lived so long as they were together. Hopefully, once they were living under the same roof, she’d realize that marriage was the only logical next step.

  “Until then, as nice as the Chateau Marmont is, since I’m a little tired of living in a hotel, I love the idea of moving into Bachelor Arms with you.”

  He threaded his hands through her hair and grinned down into her face. That breathtakingly lovely face that had been haunting his sleep for months. “Are you saying you just want me for my apartment?”

  Laughing merrily, she lifted her smiling lips to his. “Believe me, darling,” she murmured against his mouth, “of all the reasons I want you, your apartment, as charming as it admittedly is, is very far down on my list.”

  They’d reached the dock. At the driver jumped down from the front seat and began unloading their luggage from the back of the carriage, Blythe reluctantly broke off the kiss.

  “You’ve made a list?” Gage asked, knowing Blythe’s penchant for details. He climbed out of the carriage.

  “Of course,” she said as he lifted her down to the ground,

  They were standing there, beside the clear blue water, bathed in the warmth of the morning sun, his hands on her waist, hers on his shoulders. Blythe found herself wishing she could stop time, like a movie freeze-frame.

  “Don’t you think I should see this alleged list? So I can have an idea what’s expected of me?”

  “As soon as we get home, we can begin working our way through it,” she promised. Laughter and what he knew to be love danced in her eyes. “One night at a time.”

  “Hey, you’re the boss,” he agreed.

  9

  “THIS IS GOOD STUFF,” Sloan Wyndham told Blythe the morning after her return from Los Angeles. Although she’d had less than five hours’ sleep, she’d been eager to share the information she’d
gleaned during her trip to Greece.

  They were sitting in his office, which took up several hundred square feet of his Pacific Palisades home. The wall of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the sparkling expanse of ocean. Each time she visited, Blythe wondered how anyone could get any work done when faced with such a dazzling view. The fact that Sloan had actually progressed so well on the Alexandra screenplay said as much about his power of concentration as it did his talent.

  Since a rewarding string of successes had put the maverick screenwriter in the upper echelons of hot properties in Hollywood—making him one of a few “bankable” writer-directors in the business—scarcely a day went by that Blythe didn’t consider herself fortunate that he’d agreed to sign on to her project.

  “Personally, I thought it was horribly sad,” she contradicted him quietly.

  The grin faded from his handsome face. “True. But it definitely fills in a lot of missing blanks.” He leaned back in his leather chair, linked his hands together behind his head and eyed her with admiration. “Obviously, Natasha proved as helpful as you and Gage had hoped.”

  “Yes.” Blythe didn’t tell him that her knowledge of the facts of the argument had not come entirely from the elderly makeup woman, but from some deep-seated source she could not explain.

  “The thing we have to decide now is whether we should fictionalize the story so we can suggest a killer, or keep it factual, go with what we’ve got, and leave the mystery unsolved.”

  As it had remained for so many years. Too many years.

  Blythe knew what she wanted to do. She also knew that coming out and implying Walter Stern may have murdered his studio’s biggest star could get her into legal hot water. Especially since having just lost the studio that had been in his family for three generations, Walter Stern III wouldn’t take kindly to another attack on his family. He was not a man to cross lightly.

  “Let me discuss it with legal,” she suggested.

  “Terrific.” Sloan’s scowl, as he dragged a hand through his shaggy chestnut hair, reminded Blythe of something he’d said when she’d first asked him to work on the project with her.

  “I recall you comparing the director’s role to that of a sculptor, chiseling away at the stone, ultimately setting the vision—and the truth—free,” she murmured. “You also said that you categorically refused to expend creative energy on a story only to let some guy with a chain saw loose on it.”

  His scowl turned to a grin. “I was pretty much of a self-important, egotistical bastard that day, wasn’t I?”

  Blythe shrugged. “I understood that you wanted to maintain control. To ensure that when the picture was finished, whatever was born from that beginning block of marble would be your vision.”

  “And yours,” he pointed out.

  “Yes.” She knew what he was getting at, understood he was warning her not to let fear of litigation dilute the strength of the story she’d wanted to tell for so long.

  During these recent months working closely together, Blythe had discovered that the stories of Sloan Wyndham’s impatience and fierce independence, which routinely landed him in hot water with studio executives, were not exaggerated. She knew he found her caution unreasonably frustrating.

  “Gage is trying to track down the detectives who’d been the first to arrive at the murder scene that morning,” she revealed. “Why don’t we give him a few more days?”

  “And if he doesn’t find them?”

  Blythe hated feeling so uncharacteristically hesitant. “He’ll find them.”

  He studied her, looking long, looking deep. “I remember thinking, the first time we met, that this project was very personal to you.”

  She thought of the dreams. The nightmares. “That’s become an understatement.”

  “So Cait has said.” Concern rose in his whiskey brown eyes as he studied the smudged purple shadows beneath her eyes. “I also asked you, that first day, if you were hiring me to write a screenplay, solve a murder, or right a sixty-year-old wrong. Do you remember what you answered?”

  How could she forget? It was a question she asked herself for weeks. For months.

  “At the time, I told you,” Blythe said slowly, “that I thought all three.”

  “And now?”

  She dragged her hand through her hair, feeling unreasonably nervous. “Although I don’t have a thread of hard evidence, or any concrete proof, I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that Patrick didn’t kill Alexandra.” Unwilling to meet his probing gaze, she looked out over the gleaming, sun-brightened water. “You probably think I’m crazy.”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “What?” Her head spun back toward him.

  “Anyone working in this business is crazy,” he explained with a quick, easy grin that Blythe suspected was part of the reason Cait had fallen for him. “You, me, hell, this entire town is nuts. If movies didn’t exist, we’d all probably have to be locked away in padded rooms.”

  Blythe laughed, as she was supposed to. The tense mood passed. She rose from her chair with a lithe grace, bent over and kissed him on the cheek. “Cait’s a lucky woman.”

  Another grin reached his dancing brown eyes. “I remind her of that every day. Right after I consider the irony of having fallen head over heels in love with a woman who’d held me at gunpoint the first time we met.”

  Having been present for that little episode, Blythe grinned as well. “Ah, the perils of falling for a cop.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Sloan assured her as he walked her to the front door. “While I’m still not wild about the Glock, I’ve discovered that handcuffs present a realm of intriguing possibilities.” His touch on her back was light and friendly. “You should ask Gage if he still has an old pair hanging around from his days on the force.”

  Blythe laughed, as he’d intended.

  But as she drove down the steep and winding road back toward Sunset, Blythe found herself almost considering adding Sloan’s outrageous—albeit admittedly erotic—suggestion to her list.

  “You just missed him,” Lily greeted Blythe when she arrived at Gage’s Bachelor Arms apartment. “He’s on his way to the airport.”

  “The airport? But we’ve only been back from Greece a few hours.”

  “I know. But we had a lead on one of the men he was looking for.”

  “You’ve found one of the detectives?” Blythe had been frustrated to learn that the two men had quit the force and left town two weeks after the murder. Unperturbed, Gage had assured her that Lily’s natural born talent for spelunking in the dark caverns of public records was nothing short of remarkable.

  “It looks like it. Unless it’s a different Michael Connelly. Which it could be,” Lily warned. “It’s not that uncommon a name, after all. But the man is a former county deputy. The fact that he was in law enforcement is a link.”

  “I wish Gage had waited for me,” Blythe complained. “I’d hoped to be along when he questioned him.”

  “He wasn’t trying to keep you out of things,” Lily assured her quickly. “It’s just that Connelly’s scheduled to leave on a fishing trip out of state first thing tomorrow morning. Gage wanted to wait for you, but he only had thirty minutes to catch his flight.”

  “What is it with elderly people these days?” Blythe muttered. “Don’t any of them stay home in their rocking chairs where they belong?”

  “Hey, don’t knock it,” Lily said with a laugh. “Every time I get behind one of those motor homes on the freeway, it gives me hope that I’ll still be having fun in my old age.”

  “If this investigation goes on much longer, I’m going to be old before my time.” Drawn to the oversize pewter-framed mirror, Blythe scowled at her reflection. “Look at this,” she complained. “I’ve actually got a gray hair.”

  “Where?” Lily came and stood beside her, looking into the mirror as well. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Right here.” Blythe plucked a hair from her temple. “See?”

  “Lord,” L
ily said, “you’re right. Well, you’d better not let Gage find out. He’ll dump you for sure.”

  Blythe laughed. “All right, maybe I am exaggerating. But the longer I’m on this project, the more frustrating it gets.” She gave up looking for additional gray hairs and returned their conversation back to its original track. “So where, exactly is Gage off to?”

  “Oregon. Connelly’s got a retirement cabin at Lake of the Woods, outside of Klamath Falls.”

  “How on earth did you find him there?”

  “It wasn’t that hard. I simply ran a check of former law enforcement pension recipients in neighboring states and found a Connelly who’d retired after thirty years working for the Klamath County sheriff’s department.”

  Believing that they were finally on the brink of solving the crime, Blythe hugged her long time friend. “Gage is right. You are a genius.”

  “Which is only one of the reasons I fell in love with her,” a familiar voice said from the front door. Engrossed in conversation, neither Lily nor Blythe had heard Connor enter. The baby he was holding was dressed in a ruffly pink dress and white socks. An elastic band with a polka-dot pink bow adorned a head covered with blond fuzz that looked as soft as duck down.

  “I hadn’t realized it had gotten so late,” Lily said, hurrying across the room to greet her fiancé. Their lips met over the baby’s head. As the kiss lingered, Blythe felt a twinge of envy. As much as she wanted to solve the mystery of Alexandra’s death, she’d also been looking forward to spending another night in Gage’s arms.

  “How did Katie like her first day at the studio?” Lily asked when the kiss ended,

  “She was a hit with one and all,” Connor said proudly. “In fact, she drew so much attention, I was tempted to sign her to a performing contract.” He grinned down at the baby, who was sucking on a pink fist. Gazing up at him with crossed blue eyes, she flashed a toothless smile in return.