by Nora Roberts
Paul punched in the number for the main house. “Then pour me one—and leave the bottle out for Eve.”
However much she might resent the order, it was something to do. Julia was replacing the stopper in the decanter when Paul strode into the living room.
“She’s on her way. Have you checked your personal things?”
“My jewelry. A few pieces I have from my mother.” She handed him the snifter. “It’s all there.”
He swirled the brandy, watching her as he sipped. “It’s absurd for you to feel responsible.”
She was pacing, couldn’t stop. “You don’t know how I feel.”
“Julia, I can all but see the thoughts in your head. I’m responsible, she’s thinking. I should have prevented it.” He sipped again. “Don’t these lovely shoulders of yours get tired carrying the problems of the world around?”
“Back off.”
“Ah, I keep forgetting. Julia handles the wrath of the world alone.”
She turned on her heel and marched into the kitchen. He heard her murmur to Brandon, then the slam of the screen door. Sent the child out to play, he presumed. However rattled she might be, she would protect her son first. When Paul walked into the kitchen, she was standing with her hands braced on the sink, staring through the window.
“If you’re concerned about the value of the missing pieces, I can promise you they’re insured.”
“That’s not really the point, is it?”
“No, it’s not.” After setting the brandy aside, he moved behind her to massage her rigid shoulders. “The point is your space has been invaded. This is, after all, your space while you’re here.”
“I don’t like knowing someone could walk in here, look through my work, select a few expensive trinkets, and stroll out again.” She pushed away from the sink. “Here comes Eve.”
Eve rushed in with Nina one step behind. “What the hell is all this?” she demanded.
Braced, Julia told her as quickly and clearly as possible what she had discovered.
“Son of a bitch” was Eve’s only comment as she moved from the kitchen into the living room. Her gaze sharpened as it swept the room, noting the spaces where items were missing. “I was damn fond of that clock.”
“Eve, I’m so sorry—”
With an impatient wave of her hand, she cut off Julia’s apology. “Nina, check the rest of the place against your inventory list. Paul, for Christ’s sake, pour me a brandy.”
Since he was already doing so, he only lifted a brow. She took the glass and drank deep.
“Where’s the boy?”
“I sent him outside to play.”
“Good.” She drank again. “Where have you set up your office?”
“In the den, through here.”
Eve had already swept in to yank open drawers before Julia could speak again. “So, you claim someone’s gone through the tapes.”
“That’s not what I claim,” Julia said evenly. “That’s what I say.”
The faintest hint of amusement touched Eve’s lips. “Don’t get up on your high horse, girl.” After brushing a finger over the tops of the tapes, she let out a quick laugh. “Well, well. Busy little beaver, aren’t you? Kinsky, Drake, Greenburg, Marilyn Day. Good Christ, you’ve even gotten to Charlotte Miller.”
“Isn’t that what you hired me for?”
“It certainly is. Old friends, old enemies,” she murmured. “All tidily filed. I’m sure dear Charlotte gave you an earful.”
“She respects you almost as much as she dislikes you.”
Eve glanced up sharply, then let out a full-throated laugh as she dropped into the chair. “You’re a cool-handed bitch, Julia. By God, I like you.”
“I’ll return both compliments, Eve. But more to the point, what do we do now?”
“Hmm. You haven’t got any cigarettes around here, do you? I left without mine.”
“Sorry.”
“Never mind. Where the hell’s my brandy? Ah, Paul.” She smiled and patted his cheek, and he crossed over to hand it to her. “How convenient that you were here in our moment of crisis.”
He let the sly inference pass. “Julia is naturally upset at having the house broken into, her work pawed over. And, perhaps not so naturally, feels responsible for the loss of your property.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Eve dismissed it all with a negligent wave, then sat back, eyes closed, to think. “We’ll check with the guard at the gate. There may have been some deliveries, some repairmen—”
“The police,” Julia interrupted. “They should have been called.”
“No, no.” Already planning, Eve swirled her brandy. “I think we can handle this incident with more delicacy than the police.”
“Eve?” Nina stepped into the doorway, a clipboard in her hand. “I think I’ve got the bulk of it.” “Estimate?”
“Thirty, maybe forty thousand. The amethyst butterfly.” Her eyes filled with concern. “I’m sorry. I know you were fond of it.”
“Yes, I was. Victor gave it to me nearly twenty years ago. Well, I think the wise thing to do is take inventory at the main house. I’d like to know if we’ve had any sticky fingers there as well.” After finishing off the brandy, she rose. “I’m very sorry, Julia. Paul was perfectly right to use that censoring tone to inform me you’re upset by all this. You can be sure I’ll speak with security personally. I dislike having my guests disturbed.”
“May I speak to you a moment privately?”
Eve merely gestured her assent as she perched on the edge of the desk. Julia closed the door behind Paul and Nina. “I am sorry you’ve been upset, Julia,” Eve began. While she drummed the fingers of one hand on the desk, the others rubbed a small circle at her temple. “If I’ve appeared to make light of it, it’s because I’m infuriated that anyone would dare.”
“I think you should reconsider calling the police.”
“Public figures have very little privacy. Forty thousand dollars worth of knickknacks aren’t worth finding my face plastered all over supermarket tabloids. It’s much more interesting to find it there because I’ve had an affair with a thirty-year-old body builder.”
Julia opened the drawer and took out a tape. “On this are your recollections of your marriage with Anthony Kincade. Someone might have dubbed it, Eve. Someone surely might leak the information to him.”
“And?”
“He frightens me. And it frightens me to think of what he might do to prevent this story from becoming public.”
“Tony is my worry, Julia. There’s nothing he can do to hurt me, and nothing I would permit him to do to hurt you. Unconvinced?” She held up a finger, lifted her voice only slightly. “Nina, dear?”
The door opened in less than ten seconds. “Yes, Eve?”
“Take a letter, please. To Anthony Kincade—you’ll find his current address?”
“Yes.” Nina flipped over a page on the clipboard and began scribbling in shorthand.
“Dearest Tony.” She laced her fingers slowly, almost as if in prayer. The malice was back in her eyes. “I hope this finds you in the poorest of health. Just a quick, chatty note to let you know I’m progressing with the book by leaps and bounds. I know how interested you are in this project. You may be aware that several people are quite concerned about the content—so concerned that there have been hints and rumbles about trying to put a stop to it. Tony, you of all people should know how poorly I react to pressure. To save you any trouble, in case you’ve considered inducing some of your own, I’m writing to let you know that I’m seriously considering Oprah’s offer to come on her show and gossip my bio. If there’s any interference from your neighborhood, darling, I’ll snap up her offer, and titillate the audience with a couple of memoirs from our fascinating years together. I believe that little slice of prepromotion, on network television, might sell gobs of advance copies. As ever. Eve.” Smiling, Eve lifted a hand. “That should send the cocksucker into apoplexy.”
Unsure whether she wanted
to laugh or scream, Julia sat on the desk as well. “I admire your guts if not your strategy.”
“Only because you don’t fully understand my strategy.” She squeezed Julia’s hand. “You will eventually. Now, take a hot bubble bath, drink some wine, let Paul talk you into bed. Believe me, the combination will work wonders for you.”
Julia laughed, shook her head. “Maybe the first two.”
Eve surprised them both by putting an arm around Julia’s shoulder. It was a gesture of comfort and support, and, undeniably, of affection. “My dear Jules—isn’t that what he calls you?—any woman can have the first two. Come to the house, tomorrow, ten o’clock. We’ll talk.”
“Eve?” Nina interrupted. “You have your first wardrobe fitting for the miniseries tomorrow morning.”
“Right. Check with Nina,” Eve said as she started for the door. “She knows my life better than I.”
Nina waited until Eve glided out. “I know how upsetting this must be. You’ve only to say the word and we can move you and Brandon into the main house.”
“No, no, really. We’re fine here.”
Nina’s slim brows knit with doubt. “If you change your mind, it can be done quickly and without fuss. In the meantime, is there anything I can do for you?”
“No. I appreciate your offer, but to tell the truth, I feel better already.”
“You call the house.” Nina reached out to take Julia’s hand. “If you’re uneasy during the night. If you just want someone to talk to.”
“Thanks. I can’t feel uneasy knowing you’re there.”
“Two minutes away,” Nina added, giving Julia’s fingers a final squeeze.
Alone, Julia reorganized her tapes. It was a small gesture, and useless at that point, but it eased her mind. Picking up Eve’s empty brandy snifter, she started toward the kitchen. The aroma of cooking had her hesitating, sniffing the air, then continuing on. At the kitchen doorway she could only stare at the sight of Paul Winthrop slaving over a hot stove.
“What are you doing?”
“Making dinner. Rotini with tomato and basil.” “Why?”
“Because pasta’s good for the soul—and it’s impossible for you not to invite me for dinner when I’m cooking it.” He picked up a bottle of Burgundy he had breathing on the counter, poured some into a glass. “Here.”
She took it, holding it in both hands, but not drinking. “Are you any good?”
His grin flashed. Since her hands were occupied, he took advantage by wrapping his arms around her waist. “At what in particular?”
It felt wonderful, too wonderful, to be held at that particular moment. “At rotini with tomato and basil.”
“I’m terrific.” He bent closer, then sighed. “Don’t jerk, you’ll spill the wine.” Patient, he slid one hand up to cup her neck, which served the dual purpose of holding her still and making about a dozen nerve endings sizzle. “Relax, Jules. A kiss isn’t terminal.”
“It is the way you do it.”
His lips were curved when they met hers. “Better and better,” he murmured, nuzzling. “Tell me, do I set off the same kind of explosions in you as you do in me when I do this?” He scraped his teeth over her ear, then tugged on the lobe.
“I don’t know.” But she felt her legs dissolve from the knees down. “I’m out of practice as far as explosions go.”
His fingers tightened on the back of her neck before he forced them to relax. “That was exactly the right thing to say to make me suffer.” He leaned back to study her face. The gray of her irises had deepened, warmed to a rich smoke by whatever fires she fought down behind them. Was it his imagination, or had her scent intensified, heightened by the blood that rushed under her skin? It was a pity, Paul thought, a goddamn pity he had scruples. “You’ve got some color again. When you’re upset your skin goes as pale as glass. It makes a man determined to fix things for you.”
The backbone he’d melted so effectively stiffened again. “I don’t need anyone to fix things for me.”
“Which makes a certain kind of man all the more determined. Vulnerability and independence. I hadn’t realized what a devastating combination they could be.”
Struggling for a light tone, she brought the wine to her lips. “Well, in this case it’s getting me dinner.”
Still watching her, he took the glass from her and set it aside. “We could both have a lot more.”
“Maybe.” She stared into his eyes, dark and brilliantly blue. And very close. It was much too easy to see herself in them. Much too easy to wonder. “I’m not sure I can handle even a little more.”
Whether that was true or not, he could see she believed it. “Then it looks like we’ll have to progress by stages.”
Because it seemed safer than the meltdown she’d just experienced, she cautiously agreed. “I suppose.”
“The next stage would be for you to kiss me.”
“I thought I had.”
He shook his head. There was a challenge to the gesture, a not entirely friendly one. “I kissed you.”
Julia deliberated and told herself to act like a grown-up. An adult didn’t have to take up every dare tossed her way. Then she sighed.
Softly, she touched her lips to his. It took only an instant for her to realize this stage could be a tumultuous one. Still, she gave herself another moment, kept her lips warm against his, absorbing the thrill of risk.
“I need to call Brandon in,” she said as she stepped back. She wanted plenty of time to think before moving on to the next stage.
Michael Delrickio raised orchids in a fifteen-hundred-square-foot greenhouse attached to his Long Beach fortress by a wide breezeway. He took his hobby very seriously and belonged to the local garden club, contributing not only financially but often giving informative and amusing lectures on the family Orchidales. One of his greatest triumphs was his creation of a hybrid he’d named the Madonna.
It was an expensive hobby, but he was a very rich man. Many of his business enterprises were legal, and he paid taxes—more perhaps than many men in his particular bracket. Delrickio courted no trouble from the IRS, an institution he respected.
His business ranged from shipping, theatrical and restaurant supply, real estate, catering, prostitution, gambling, electronics, extortion to computers. He was owner of or partner in several liquor stores, clubs, boutiques—and he even had a piece of a heavyweight boxer. In the seventies, after resistance on his part brought on by personal distaste, Delrickio Enterprises dipped its toe into the drug trade. He considered it an unfortunate sign of the times that this area of his conglomerate was so profitable.
He was a loving husband who handled his extramarital affairs with taste and discretion, a doting father who had raised his brood of eight with a firm and fair hand, and an indulgent grandpapa who had difficulty refusing his grandchildren anything.
He wasn’t a man to make mistakes, and when he did, he admitted them. Eve Benedict had been one of his mistakes. He had loved her in a wild, fevered way that had made him both indiscreet and foolish. Even now, fifteen years after their affair, he remembered what it had been like to have her. Remembering could still arouse him.
Now, as he puttered around his orchids, babying them, cooing to them, he waited for Eve’s nephew. For all his faults, the boy was okay. Delrickio had even permitted Drake to date one of his daughters. Of course, Delrickio wouldn’t have allowed anything serious to come of it. A hybrid was fine, even desirable in horticulture—but not in grandchildren.
Michael Delrickio believed in like to like, which was one of the reasons he had never forgiven himself for becoming mesmerized by Eve. Or her, for doing the mesmerizing.
And because he saw the fault in himself, he was more patient with Eve’s worthless nephew than business dictated.
“Godfather.”
Delrickio straightened from his stance over a trio of spider orchids. Young Joseph was at the doorway. He was a handsome, solid brute who liked to lift weights and spar at the gym Delrickio had an
interest in. The son of one of his wife’s cousins, Joseph had been in the family business for nearly five years. Delrickio had had him trained by his own first lieutenant, knowing the boy was not too bright, but loyal and eager to please.
Muscle didn’t have to be intelligent, only tractable. “Yes, Joseph.” “Morrison is here.” “Good, good.”
Delrickio dusted off his hands on the white bib apron he wore when he was working with his flowers. His youngest daughter had made it for him, painting on the snowy material a clever caricature of her smiling papa with a garden spade in one hand and a curvy, sexy woman-size orchid with long, feminine legs draped around him.
“Bring him in here. Your cold sounds better.” He was a good, concerned employer.