Eight Classic Nora Roberts Romantic Suspense Novels

by Nora Roberts

  They’d been good together, she remembered as she felt herself go damp. They would be good together again.

  Bringing herself back, she picked up the brush and smoothed her hair. She had spent the last of the grocery money at the hairdresser’s getting her shoulder-length straight hair colored to match Emma’s. Turning her head, she watched it sway from side to side. After today, she wouldn’t have to worry about money ever again.

  Her lips were carefully painted a pale, pale pink—the same shade she had seen on supermodel Jane Asher’s recent Vogue cover. Nervous, she picked up her black liner and added more definition near the corner of each eye.

  Fascinated, Emma watched her mother. Today she smelled of Tigress cologne instead of gin. Tentatively, Emma reached out for the lipstick tube. Her hand was slapped away.

  “Keep your hands off my things.” She gave Emma’s finger an extra slap. “Haven’t I told you never to touch my things?”

  Emma nodded. Her eyes had already filmed over.

  “And don’t start that bawling. I don’t want him seeing you for the first time with your eyes all red and your face puffy. He should have been here already.” There was an edge to Jane’s voice now, one that had Emma moving cautiously out of range. “If he doesn’t come soon …” She trailed off, going over her options as she studied herself in the glass.

  She had always been a big girl, but had never run to fat. True, the dress was a little snug, but she strained against it in interesting places. Skinny might be in fashion, but she knew men preferred round, curvy women when the lights went out. She’d been making her living off her body long enough to be sure of it.

  Her confidence built as she looked herself over and she fancied she resembled the pale, sulky-faced models who were the rage in London. She wasn’t wise enough to note that the new color job was unflattering or that the arrow-straight hair made the angles of her face boxy and harsh. She wanted to be in tune. She always had.

  “He probably didn’t believe me. Didn’t want to. Men never want their children.” She shrugged. Her father had never wanted her—not until her breasts had begun to develop. “You remember that, Emma girl.” She cast a considering eye over Emma. “Men don’t want babies. They only want a woman for one thing, and you’ll find out what that is soon enough. When they’re done, they’re done, and you’re left with a big stomach and a broken heart.”

  She picked up a cigarette and began to smoke it in quick, jerky puffs as she paced. She wished it was grass, sweet, calming grass, but she’d spent her drug money on Emma’s new dress. The sacrifices a mother made.

  “Well, he may not want you, but after one look he won’t be able to deny you’re his.” Eyes narrowed against the smoke, she studied her daughter. There was another tug, almost maternal. The little tyke was certainly pretty as a picture when she was cleaned up. “You’re the goddamn image of him, Emma luv. The papers say he’s going to marry that Wilson slut—old money and fancy manners—but we’ll see, we’ll just see about that. He’ll come back to me. I always knew he’d come back.” She stubbed the cigarette in a chipped ashtray and left it smoldering. She needed a drink—just one taste of gin to calm her nerves. “You sit on the bed,” she ordered. “Sit right there and keep quiet. Mess with any of my stuff, and you’ll be sorry.”

  She had two drinks before she heard the knock on the door. Her heart began to pound. Like most drunks, she felt more attractive, more in control, once she’d had the liquor. She smoothed down her hair, fixed what she thought was a sultry smile on her face, and opened the door.

  He was beautiful. For a moment in the streaming summer sunlight, she saw only him, tall and slender, his wavy blond hair and full, serious mouth giving him the look of a poet or an apostle. As nearly as she was able, she loved.

  “Brian. So nice of you to drop by.” Her smile faded immediately when she saw the two men behind him. “Traveling in a pack these days, Bri?”

  He wasn’t in the mood. He was carrying around a simmering rage at being trapped into seeing Jane again and put the bulk of the blame on his manager and his fiancée. Now that he was here, he intended to get out again as quickly as possible.

  “You remember, Johnno.” Brian stepped inside. The smell, gin, sweat, and grease from yesterday’s dinner, reminded him uncomfortably of his own childhood.

  “Sure.” Jane nodded briefly to the tall, gangly bass player. He was wearing a diamond on his pinky and sported a dark, fluffy beard. “Come up in the world, haven’t we, Johnno?”

  He glanced around the dingy flat. “Some of us.”

  “This is Pete Page, our manager.”

  “Miss Palmer.” Smooth, thirtyish, Pete offered a white-toothed smile and a manicured hand.

  “I’ve heard all about you.” She laid her hand in his, back up, an invitation to lift it to his lips. He released it. “You made our boys stars.”

  “I opened a few doors.”

  “Performing for the queen, playing on the telly. Got a new album on the charts and a big American tour coming up.” She looked back at Brian. His hair fell nearly to his shoulders. His face was thin and pale and sensitive. Reproductions of it were gracing teenagers’ walls on both sides of the Atlantic as his second album, Complete Devastation, bulleted up the charts. “Got everything you wanted.”

  Damned if he’d let her make him feel guilty because he’d made something of himself. “That’s right.”

  “Some of us get more than they want.” She tossed her long hair back. The paint on the swingy gold balls she wore at her ears was chipped and peeling. She smiled again, posing a moment. At twenty-four she was a year older than Brian, and considered herself much more savvy. “I’d offer tea, but I wasn’t expecting a party.”

  “We didn’t come for tea.” Brian stuck his hands in the wide pockets of his low-riding jeans. The sulky look he’d worn throughout the drive over had hardened. True, he was young, but he’d grown up tough. He had no intention of letting this old, gin-soaked loner make trouble for him. “I didn’t call the law this time, Jane. That’s for old time’s sake. If you keep ringing, keep writing with all your threats and blackmail, believe me I will.”

  Her heavily lined eyes narrowed. “You want to put the bobbies on me, you go right ahead, my lad. We’ll see how all your little fans and their stick-in-the-mud parents like reading about how you got me pregnant. About how you deserted me and your poor little baby girl while you’re rolling in money and living high. How would that go over, Mr. Page? Think you could get Bri and the boys another royal command performance?”

  “Miss Palmer.” Pete’s voice was smooth and calm. He’d already spent hours considering the ins and outs of the situation. One glance told him he’d wasted his time. The answer here would be money. “I’m sure you don’t want to air your personal business in the press. Nor do I think you should imply desertion when there was none.”

  “Ooh. Is he your manager, Brian, or your blinking solicitor?”

  “You weren’t pregnant when I left you.”

  “Didn’t know I was pregnant!” she shouted and gripped Brian’s black leather vest. “It was two months later when I found out for sure. You were gone by then. I didn’t know where to find you. I could have gotten rid of it.” She clung harder when Brian started to pry her hands off. “I knew people who could have fixed it for me, but I was scared, more scared of that than of having it.”

  “So she had a kid.” Johnno sat on the arm of a chair and pulled out a Gauloise which he lit with a heavy gold lighter. In the past two years he’d gotten very comfortable with expensive habits. “That don’t mean it was yours, Bri.”

  “It’s his, you freaking fag.”

  “My, my.” Unperturbed, Johnno drew on the cigarette, then blew the smoke lightly but directly into her face. “Quite the lady, aren’t we?”

  “Back off, Johnno.” Pete’s voice remained low and calm. “Miss Palmer, we’re here to settle this whole matter quietly.”

  And that, she thought, was her ace in the hole. “
I’ll just bet you’d like to keep it quiet. You know I wasn’t with anybody else back then, Brian.” She leaned into him, letting her breasts press and flatten against his chest. “You remember that Christmas, the last Christmas we were together. We got high and a little crazy. We never used anything. Emma, she’ll be three next September.”

  He remembered, though he wished he didn’t. He’d been nineteen and full of music and rage. Someone had brought cocaine and after he’d snorted for the first time he’d felt like a thoroughbred stud. Quivering to fuck.

  “So you had a baby and you think she’s mine. Why did you wait until now to tell me about her?”

  “I told you I couldn’t find you at first.” Jane moistened her lips and wished she’d had just one more drink. She didn’t think it would be wise to tell him she’d enjoyed playing the martyr for a while, the poor, unwed mother, all alone. And there’d been a man or two along the way to ease the road.

  “I went on this program, they have them for girls who get in trouble. I thought maybe I’d give her away, you know, for adoption. After I had her, I couldn’t, because she looked just like you. I thought if I gave her up, you’d find out about it and get mad at me. I was afraid you wouldn’t give me another chance.”

  She started to cry, big fat tears that smeared her heavy makeup. They were uglier, and more disturbing, because they were sincere. “I always knew you’d come back, Brian. I started hearing your songs on the radio, seeing posters of you in the record store. You were on your way. I always knew you’d make it, but, Jesus, I never knew you’d be so big. I started thinking—”

  “I’ll bet you did,” Johnno murmured.

  “I started thinking,” she said between her teeth. “That you’d want to know about the kid. I went back to your old place, but you’d moved and nobody would tell me where. But I thought about you every day. Look.”

  Taking his arm she pointed to the pictures she’d crowded on the walls of the flat. “I cut out everything I could find about you and saved it.”

  He looked at himself reproduced a dozen times. His stomach turned. “Jesus.”

  “I called your record company, and I even went there, but they treated me like I was nobody. I told them I was the mother of Brian McAvoy’s baby daughter, and they had me tossed out.” She didn’t add that she’d been drunk and had attacked the receptionist. “I started reading about you and Beverly Wilson, and I got desperate. I knew she couldn’t mean anything to you, not after what we had. But I had to talk to you somehow.”

  “Calling Bev’s flat and raving like a maniac wasn’t the best way to go about it.”

  “I had to talk to you, to make you listen. You don’t know what it’s like, Bri, worrying about how to pay the rent, whether you’ve got enough for food. I can’t buy pretty dresses anymore or go out at night.”

  “Is money what you want?”

  She hesitated just an instant too long. “I want you, Bri, I always have.”

  Johnno tapped out his cigarette in the base of a plastic plant. “You know, Bri, there’s been a lot of talk about this kid, but I don’t see any sign of her.” He rose, and in a habitual gesture, shook back his gleaming mop of dark hair. “Ready to split?”

  Jane sent him a vicious look. “Emma’s in the bedroom. And I’m not having all of your troop in there. This is between Brian and me.”

  Johnno grinned at her. “You always did your best work in the bedroom, didn’t you, luv?” Their eyes held for a moment, the disgust they had always felt for each other clear. “Bri, she was a first-rate whore once upon a time, but she’s second-rate now. Can we get on?”

  “You bloody queer.” Jane leaped at him before Brian caught her around the waist. “You wouldn’t know what to do with a real woman if she bit you on the dick.”

  He continued to grin, but his eyes frosted over. “Care to give it a shot, dearie?”

  “Always could count on you to keep things running smoothly, Johnno,” Brian muttered as he twisted Jane around in his arms. “You said this business was with me, then keep it with me. I’ll have a look at the girl.”

  “Not them two.” She snarled at Johnno as he shrugged and pulled out another cigarette. “Just you. I want to keep it private.”

  “Fine. Wait here.” He kept his hand on Jane’s arm as she walked to the bedroom. It was empty. “I’m tired of the game, Jane.”

  “She’s hiding. All these people put her off, that’s all. Emma! Come here to your mam right now.” Jane dropped to her knees beside the bed, then scrambled up to search through the narrow closet. “She’s probably in the loo.” Rushing out, she pulled open a door off the hallway.

  “Brian.” Johnno signaled from the kitchen doorway. “Something here you might want to see.” He held up a glass, toasting Jane. “You don’t mind if I have a drink, do you, luv? The bottle was open.” He jerked the thumb of his free hand toward the cabinet under the sink.

  The stale scent was stronger there, old liquor, ripening garbage, molding rags. Brian’s shoes stuck to the linoleum as he crossed to the cupboard, then crouched. He pulled open the door and peered inside.

  He couldn’t see the girl clearly, only that she was hunched back in the corner, her blond hair in her eyes and something black hugged in her arms. He felt his stomach turn over, but tried to smile.

  “Hello there.”

  Emma buried her face in the furry black bundle she held.

  “Nasty little brat. I’ll teach you to hide from me.” Jane started to make a grab, but a look from Brian stopped her. He held out a hand and smiled again.

  “I don’t think I can fit in there with you. Would you mind coming out a minute?” He saw her peep up over her folded arms. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

  He had such a nice voice, Emma thought, soft and pretty like music. He was smiling at her. The light through the kitchen window was on his hair, making the deep, rich blond shine. Like an angel’s hair. She giggled, then crawled out.

  Her new dress was smeared and spotted. Her wispy baby hair was damp from a leak under the sink. She smiled, showing little white teeth with a crooked inciser. Brian ran his tongue over a similar one in his own mouth. When her lips curved, a dimple winked at the left corner of her mouth, a twin of his. Eyes as deep and blue as his own stared back at him.

  “I fixed her up real nice.” There was a whine in Jane’s voice now. The smell of the gin was making her mouth water, but she was afraid to pour a glass. “And I told her it was important to stay tidy. Didn’t I tell you to stay tidy, Emma? I’ll wash her up.” She grabbed Emma’s arm hard enough to make the girl jump.

  “Let her be.”

  “I was only going to—”

  “Let her be,” Brian repeated, his voice flat and dull and threatening. If he hadn’t been staring at her still, Emma might have dashed under the sink again. His child. For a moment he could only continue to stare at her, his head light and his stomach fisted. “Hello, Emma.” There was a sweetness in his tone now, one women fell in love with. “What have you got there?”

  “Charlie. My doggie.” She held the stuffed toy out for Brian to examine.

  “And a very nice one.” He had an urge to touch her, to brush his hand over her skin, but held back. “Do you know who I am?”

  “From the pictures.” Too young to resist impulses, she reached out to touch his face. “Pretty.”

  Johnno laughed and swallowed some gin. “Leave it to a female.”

  Ignoring him, Brian tugged on Emma’s damp curls. “You’re pretty, too.”

  He talked nonsense to her, watching her closely. His knees were like jelly, and his stomach tightened and loosened like fingers snapping to a beat. Her dimple deepened as she laughed. It was like watching himself. It would have been easier to deny it, and a great deal more convenient, but impossible. Whether he had meant to or not, he had made her. But guidance didn’t come along with acceptance.

  He rose and turned to Pete. “We’d better get to rehearsal.”

  “You’re leaving?” J
ane dashed forward to block his path. “Just like that? You only have to look at her to see.”

  “I know what I see.” He felt a pang of guilt as Emma inched back toward the cupboard. “I need time to think.”

  “No, no! You’ll walk out like before. You’re only thinking of yourself, like always. What’s best for Brian, what’s best for Brian’s career. I won’t be left back anymore.” He had nearly reached the door when she snatched up Emma and raced after him. “If you go, I’ll kill myself.”

  He paused long enough to look back. It was a familiar refrain. He could have set it to music. “That stopped working a long time ago.”

  “And her.” Desperate, she flung out the threat, then let it hang as they both considered it. The arm she had banded around Emma’s waist tightened until the girl began to scream.

  He felt a bubble of panic as the child’s, his child’s screams bounced off the walls. “Let her go, Jane. You’re hurting her.”

  “What do you care?” Jane was sobbing now, her voice rising higher and higher to drown out her daughter’s. “You’re walking out.

  “No I’m not. I need a little time to think this through.”

  “Time so your fancy manager can make up a story, you mean.” She was breathing fast, gripping the struggling Emma with both arms. “You’re going to do right by me, Brian.”

  His hands had balled into fists at his sides. “Put her down.”

  “I’ll kill her.” She said it more calmly this time, having centered on it. “I’ll slit her throat, I swear it, and then my own. Can you live with that, Brian?”

  “She’s bluffing,” Johnno muttered, but his palms were sweating.

  “I’ve got nothing to lose. Do you think I want to live like this? Raising a brat all on my own, having the neighbors gossip about me? Never being able to go out and have fun anymore. You think about it, Bri, think about what the papers will do when I call in the story. I’ll tell them everything right before I kill us both.”

  “Miss Palmer.” Peter held up a soothing hand. “I give you my word we’ll come to an arrangement that suits everyone.”