by Patti Berg
“Ever swim naked in the ocean?”
“Of course not.”
“Will you do it with me?”
“No.”
Trevor sipped his Coke, watching the pretty lady over the top of the plastic lid. She didn’t know it yet, but Adriana Howard was going to go into the Pacific naked as a baby, and she was going to do it with Trevor Montgomery. It might take a day or two, maybe a week, but she was definitely going to give it a try.
“Where are we going now?” she asked, when he took her hand and led her out into the courtyard.
“Ice cream.”
Adriana pulled back. “I don’t want ice cream.”
“I do. If you don’t want to indulge, you can watch while I do.”
They went into the ice cream shop and Trevor stared at a room full of flavors. He’d thought about strawberry or chocolate, but suddenly he was faced with dozens of choices and he wanted to try them all.
“Which one?” he asked Adriana. He needed her advice, but she just leaned against the counter and smiled at him. She probably didn’t even know she was smiling, and he was sure she didn’t know how good it looked on her.
“You’re like a little boy,” she said, pulling napkins from a chrome container.
He couldn’t help but reach out and gently palm her cheek. ‘It’s all so new. I want to try everything.”
She pulled his fingers away, but he felt her absentmindedly stroke his knuckles with her thumb. “You’ll have plenty of time,” she told him.
“What if I don’t?”
She looked down at the black-and-white-tiled floor. “I don’t want to think about that.”
She cared. She was trying not to show it—but she did.
He settled on a sugar cone with a scoop of chocolate macadamia nut and one of black walnut and headed back out into the fragrant courtyard and down a walkway. Finding a small, grassy lawn, he pulled Adriana down beside him and leaned against a palm.
“Have you ever stomped grapes with your bare feet?” he asked her, delighted by her sudden laugh.
“Of course I haven’t. Why would I want to do that?”
“It feels good. So do a whole lot of other things.” He slowly licked the ice cream cone, watching the way her eyes studied his tongue, his lips. “What makes you feel good, Adriana?”
She slipped her shoes off and wiggled her toes as the sun hit them. “Finding a rare piece of memorabilia, getting it for a good price, and selling it much higher.”
“Making money’s good, but I was thinking of something more along the lines of going to parties with friends, playing croquet on a Sunday afternoon, dancing on a Saturday night.”
She shook her head slowly. “I don’t dance... much.”
He took one last bite of the cone and tossed the remains in the trash can not more than ten feet away, then stretched out on the grass, folding his arms under his head like a pillow. “Y’know, Adriana, I can’t imagine going more than a few days without dancing. Sometimes I used to hit two or three clubs in a week—the Trocadero, the Cocoanut Grove, the Palomar. One night we’d go to hear Benny Goodman, another Phil Harris or Jimmy Dorsey.”
“None of those places are around any longer. We don’t have big bands,” she said. “Hollywood’s different now, and all those nightclubs are just a part of history.”
“Memories don’t die, Adriana. For me, they just happened yesterday. I know the feel of Ginger Rogers’ waist and I remember Betty Grable’s legs. I remember Jackie Cooper sitting in with one of the bands and playing the drums. I remember sharing drinks with Cary Grant, trying to beat Fred Astaire in a dance contest, and getting drunk with Errol Flynn.” He opened his eyes. “Those were the good times.”
“Were there any that were bad?”
Too many bad times. Being locked away in his bedroom for weeks at a time just because he’d been caught going to see a movie. The switch his tutor took to his backside when he spoke of Valentino, Mary Pickford, or Douglas Fairbanks, rather than reciting Latin or key phrases from his father’s legal texts. His mother pushing him away when he’d wanted a hug. But Adriana didn’t need to know those things.
“Life was always good,” he told her instead. “What’s been good for you—besides making money?”
“Walks on the beach, reading.”
“What about friends? People you go out with?”
“Stewart and his wife, Maggie. I have business acquaintances over for cocktails, Stewart and Maggie come for dinner occasionally. That’s all.”
“Boyfriends? Ever been married?”
Adriana shook her head. “I like being alone.”
“You don’t like men?”
“No one’s ever interested me.”
“Do I interest you?”
“You’ve always interested me.”
“What about the me who’s here right now? The real Trevor Montgomery—not the one on the screen.”
She hesitated, and when she turned away, he sat up and tilted her face toward him. “What about me, Adriana?”
“Yes, you interest me.”
His fingers lingered a moment on her cheek, then he drew his hand away. Take it slow and easy, he told himself. Don’t frighten her.
There were so many things he wanted to teach her, so many interesting things he wanted to experience with her.
Someday.
oOo
Across the table sat the most beautiful woman Trevor had ever seen, but Adriana didn’t appear to have any idea how her blue eyes radiated or how her lips curved into a sweet smile even when she tried to look detached.
She picked at leaves of green lettuce while he devoured steak and lobster and a baked potato loaded with butter, sour cream, and chives. She’d wanted to go home and work, but he’d insisted the evening was too young to call it a night. Besides, there was so much to see and do in this new world he’d been thrown into, and he wanted to share every exciting thing with her.
He wanted to know everything about her, too.
“Why do you live in my old house?” he asked, taking a sip of the wine she hadn’t wanted him to buy. “Why do you have so many of my belongings?”
She wiped her mouth with the linen napkin, folded it neatly in fourths, and laid it beside her plate. He thought he’d been neat in his lifetime, but she had him beat. Slowly her gaze flickered from his eyes down to the glass of ice water which she took in her hands, holding it in front of her mouth as if it were a shield. Lord, he hoped one of these days she would relax in his presence and not feel the need to hide.
“I inherited everything,” she finally answered, looking terribly uncomfortable when she spoke.
Trevor frowned at her words. “I didn’t leave a will. I had no family that I knew of.”
“After you disappeared, when it looked like you’d never return, the state wanted to confiscate everything.”
That didn’t make sense. Not at all. “But I had money in the bank. I had a business manager. Surely he looked after things.”
Adriana shook her head, and suddenly the full depth of what had happened sank in. He had nothing any longer.
“Your business manager hired detectives to look for you, or so I was told, then he disappeared, along with your money. Apparently he didn’t want to bother getting rid of the house and your cars.”
‘That was generous.” Trevor downed the remains of his wine, ignoring Adriana’s frown. “Remind me to fire him if I ever get back to 1938.”
“Do you want to go back?”
“To a murder charge? No. To the life I was leading the day before Carole died? I’m not sure.”
He saw the look of nagging fear cross her pretty face. She lifted the dessert menu from the table and attempted to hide by looking for something sweet, which he knew she didn’t want to eat.
Putting an index finger on top of the menu, he pushed it down slightly so he could see her eyes. “I’d like something chocolate, and I’d like you to tell me how you inherited all my things.”
A moment lat
er the waiter took the order for chocolate Grand Marnier, and Adriana rested her arms on the table, leaning closer to Trevor as if she didn’t want anyone else to hear.
“Harrison Stafford gave it to me.”
“Harry?”
She nodded. “His attorneys found a way to claim every tangible item that belonged to you at the time of your disappearance. He couldn’t recover the money, but he did get the cars, the house, your furniture. He was sure you’d come back someday, so he kept everything just as it was.”
“Good old Harry. The two of us go way back. Is he still living at Sparta?”
Adriana shook her head. “No.”
Trevor saw the sadness in her eyes and suddenly he knew. He’d been gone sixty years—things were bound to have changed.
He looked away, not wanting Adriana to see the grief that was making his lips tremble. “Is he dead?” he asked, although he was sure of the answer.
“Eight years ago.”
Death. It was something he hadn’t considered. How many of his other friends were gone? He hated to think about it.
“Mind if we go home?” He was no longer interested in the food or atmosphere of the restaurant, no longer wanted to enjoy the night. He wanted to be alone, to think.
In less than half an hour he climbed from the Mercedes and headed toward the stairs leading to the beach, not giving any thought at all to Adriana until he sensed her standing at the kitchen door watching him. He turned around, saw her face in the moonlight, and he held out his hand.
Slowly she came to him. She didn’t take his hand, but she slipped off her shoes and left them at the top of the stairs before she walked at his side down to the beach.
He sat in the sand with her beside him, and together they watched the gentle waves rolling back and forth.
“Was Harry your father?” he asked finally, trying to understand her connection with a man who, he imagined, would have been a hundred years old if he were still alive.
“My legal guardian,” Adriana said softly. “My father was curator at Sparta, and when he died, Harrison took care of me.”
‘That wife of his must have loved that,” Trevor said sarcastically.
“Not exactly. She fought it every step of the way. She even tried to have the courts declare him incompetent.”
“Harry incompetent? Never! But I can understand that wife of his trying to prove it. She refused to live anywhere but New York. Refused to let him see his own children. The only mistake Harry ever made in his life was marrying that woman. What about her? Is she still around?”
Adriana nodded. “Bitterness seems to keep her alive. She had one goal, and that was to have everything that ever belonged to Harrison. She figured if she outlived him, she’d have it all. Of course, Harrison’s attorneys put together an ironclad will, and he managed to stay alive until I was legally old enough to inherit it all.”
“Everything?”
“Almost. He left a sizable fortune to each of his children, even to his wife, but he left Sparta to me, along with all the property, the businesses, most of the money, your house, your cars.”
“All of that, yet you choose to live here instead of Sparta.”
“Sparta doesn’t belong to me any longer. Not all of it anyway.”
Suddenly she rose from the sand. “It’s getting late.”
‘It’s early—and I want to hear more.”
“It’s not something I like talking about.”
Reaching out, Trevor took hold of her fingers and kept her from walking away. ‘Tell me, Adriana. Please.”
She sat beside him again, wrapping her arms around her knees, and stared out at the ocean.
“You told Stewart today that you’d been a coward, that you didn’t want to face the press. Well, that’s the same reason I no longer own Sparta.”
She was silent a moment, reflective.
“Harrison became my legal guardian when I was sixteen. What should have been a simple proceeding got dragged through the press because his wife accused him of having more than a fatherly interest in me.”
“That’s impossible. Not Harry.”
“You know it, I know it, but the press had a field day. Every time I turned around there’d be a photographer shoving a camera in my face. If I picked up a paper, I’d see my picture on the front and some despicable headline. They called me a gold digger, a seducer of older men. Harrison laughed it off, but he was used to the press. Not me. The notoriety died down after a while, but it all started again when Harrison died. More pictures, more gossip. I rarely went out in public before he died, but after, well, I didn’t want to go anywhere. I just wanted it all to stop.”
“Did it?”
“No. It only got worse.”
“Let me guess. His wife contested the will.”
“She did more than that. Where she got them, I don’t know, but she had photos of me sitting on Harrison’s lap, of the two of us walking hand in hand on the beach, and she intended to give them to the tabloids.”
“They sound innocent enough to me.”
“Not when you put a different spin on the pictures, like Harrison Stafford and his child paramour.”
“Would she really have stooped that low?”
“I didn’t want to find out. I didn’t want anything bad to end up in the papers about me or about Harrison. He was like a father to me. I’d grown up at Sparta. I loved him, and he loved me. There was nothing more to it than that.”
“So, you made a deal with her.”
Adriana nodded. “Stewart didn’t want me to, but it was the only thing I could do.”
She told him about giving most of Sparta to the state, about ensuring that Harrison’s butler and cook were allowed to stay on. “Harrison’s wife didn’t care about his Hollywood memorabilia or your things in Santa Barbara. She didn’t even care if I kept Harrison’s suite of rooms at Sparta. All she wanted were his businesses and his money.”
“You gave all of that to her?”
“Stewart knew what I wouldn’t give up. The rest of the negotiation I left up to him. When he was through, I had what I wanted plus a sizable chunk of money in the bank and custody of all the pictures she had had taken of Harrison and me.”
“In other words, she got away with blackmail.”
“It doesn’t matter. Not anymore. Besides, I have wonderful memories; all she has is money and hate.”
“Share a good memory with me.”
Her smile made him feel warm inside.
“Watching old movies with Harrison, listening to his stories of the past. Watching him walk again after he had his first stroke. Sitting at his bedside and reading to him when he lost his sight.”
A tear slid down Adriana’s cheek, and Trevor caressed it away with his thumb.
“I have good memories of Harry, too. Would you like to hear one?”
She nodded as he stroked away another one of her tears.
“I was riding in an empty boxcar, taking my first cross-country trip from Chicago to Hollywood. I was sixteen. I was cold, broke, hungry, and I thought for sure I’d get kicked off the train when we stopped in Kansas City. I huddled in a dark corner, hoping the train would pull out before I got caught. This big, burly fellow swung up into the car just as the train jerked out of the station, and he just stood there, staring out the open door.
“I didn’t make a sound, afraid the man might be a guard. I was sure he hadn’t seen me, but then he took off his heavy coat and threw it toward me.
“‘Not such a bright idea to be riding the rails in wintertime,’ he said. ‘Especially without a coat. Suppose you don’t have any food, either.’ He pulled a loaf of bread from the bag he was carrying and tossed it to me along with a hunk of cheese. I didn’t expect kindness from a stranger. Took me totally by surprise.
“That was the best trip I ever took. Harry Stafford hunkered down beside me in that boxcar and talked all the way to California. He was twenty-two, he’d made big bucks in oil, and he planned to build a castle on the Pa
cific. But first, he wanted to see how guys like me saw the world. I told him it wasn’t a very pretty sight. All he did was laugh, and go on talking about his dreams.
“We parted company at the train station in Hollywood. I gave him back his coat and he gave me ten bucks and told me I could pay him back when I made my own first million. Took ten years for that to happen, but I paid him back.
“Guess I can honestly say there’s only one person I’ve ever loved in this world, and that was Harry Stafford.”
“He never told me that story,” Adriana said. “I thought I’d heard them all.”
“I could tell you hundreds more, if you feel like listening.”
“Harrison said that’s one of the things I did best.”
Her smile touched his heart, warming that spot that had been cold for so many years.
He captured a strand of breeze-tossed hair and curled it behind her ear. For the first time, he realized that she hadn’t flinched or moved away from his touch. He wanted to lean forward and kiss her, he wanted to tell her how happy she made him.
But she wasn’t quite ready.
Not yet.
Chapter 11
Trevor paced the living room while Adriana sat serenely at her desk with the phone pressed to her ear. For almost four hours she’d been in nearly the same position. “I have business to take care of,” she’d told him, and nothing turned her away from her task, not even the yellow roses he’d dipped in the garden or the plate of fruit he’d sliced and slid in front of the phone.
He could understand the obsessive desire to work hard at something you loved, but not at the expense of enjoying the other things in life, like dancing, stealing kisses in public, or making love. He had to wonder if Adriana had ever taken part in any of life’s special delights. If she hadn’t, he planned to introduce her to those things and many more.
“Of course I’m interested,” she told the person at the other end of the line, “but I need to have the signature authenticated before I can give you a bid.” She flipped through a leather-bound calendar. “Two-thirty tomorrow’s fine... At the airport.” She scribbled a name on the page. “I’m also interested in seeing the script you have from Magnificent Obsession, the one with Rock Hudson’s notes.”
