Eight Classic Nora Roberts Romantic Suspense Novels

by Nora Roberts

  It was the last thing he saw before passion dragged him under.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  It infuriated Emma that she kept looking over her shoulder. Almost a week had passed since she’d settled back into the house on the beach—since Michael and Conroy had unofficially settled in with her. A rehearsal, she sometimes thought, for the future she was beginning to believe in. Living with Michael, sharing her bed and her time with him, didn’t make her feel trapped. It made her feel, at long last, normal … and happy.

  Yet no matter how content she was, Emma couldn’t shake the sensation of being watched. Most of the time she ignored it, or tried to, telling herself it was just another reporter looking for a new angle. Another photographer with a long lens looking for an exclusive picture.

  They couldn’t touch her, or what she was building with Michael.

  But she kept the doors locked and Conroy close whenever she was alone.

  No matter how often she told herself there was no one there but her own ghosts, she kept watching, waiting. Even walking down Rodeo Drive in bright sunshine she felt the tension in the back of her neck.

  She was more embarrassed than afraid, and wished she had called a limo rather than driving herself.

  She’d thought she would enjoy looking for just the right outfit, trying on both the outrageous and the classic, being pampered and cooed over by the clerks. But it was only a relief to have it over, to tuck the dress box into her car and drive off.

  It was pitiful, she told herself, this persecution complex. Emma thought Katherine would lift her psychiatrist’s brow and make interested noises if she told her. Poor Emma’s gone off the bend again. Thinks she’s being followed. Wonders if someone’s been in the house when she goes out. What about those odd noises on the phone? Must be tapped.

  Christ. She rubbed a finger against her temple and tried to laugh. The next thing she’d start doing was checking under the bed at night. Then she’d be in therapy for life.

  Well, she’d chosen L.A., hadn’t she? Before long she’d have a personal trainer as well as a therapist. She’d be worried about her polarity or she’d start channeling for a three-hundred-year-old Buddist monk.

  And then she did laugh.

  After she stopped at the auditorium, she picked up her camera. Buddhist monks would have to hold off, at least until she’d dealt with the business at hand. Acts and presenters for the awards show would already be inside. It would be like the old days, she mused. Watching rehearsals, taking pictures.

  It was a satisfying feeling to know that her past and her future had found a way to meld.

  When she stepped from the car, Blackpool stood blocking her path.

  “Well, well. Hello again, Emmy luv.”

  It infuriated her that he could still make her cringe. Without speaking, she started to skirt around him. He simply shifted, trapping her against the car as easily as he had once trapped her in her darkroom.

  Smiling, he stroked a fingertip down the back of her neck “Is this any way to treat an old friend?”

  “Get out of my way.”

  “We’ll have to work on those manners.” He gripped her braid and tugged hard enough to make her gasp. “Little girls who grow up with money always end up spoiled. I’d have thought your husband would have taught you better—before you killed him.”

  It wasn’t fear, she realized as she began to shake. It was fury. Hot, glittering fury. “You bastard. Let go of me.”

  “I thought we might have a chat, just the two of us. Let’s take a ride.” He kept his hand on her hair, pulling her along.

  She swung back, bringing her camera case hard into his midsection.

  When he doubled over, she stepped back, and into someone else. Without thinking, she whirled and nearly caught Stevie in the face.

  “Hang on.” He threw up a hand before her fist could connect with his nose. “Don’t hit me. I’m just a poor recovering addict who’s come to play guitar.” He put a hand on her shoulder, gave it a quick squeeze. “Is there a problem here?”

  Almost carelessly, Emma glanced back at Blackpool. He’d recovered his wind, and was standing, fists clenched. Emma felt a quick surge of pleasure. She had taken care of herself, and very well. “No, there’s no problem.” Turning, she walked toward the theater with Stevie.

  “What was all that about?”

  There was still a smile on her face. Pure satisfaction. “He’s just a bully.”

  “And you’re a regular Amazon. Here I was loping across the lot, trying to play white knight. You stole my thunder.”

  She laughed and kissed his cheek. “You’d have flattened him.”

  “I don’t know. He’s a lot bigger than I am. Better all around that you punched him yourself. I’d hate to have gone on the telly with a black eye.”

  “You’d have looked dashing, and rakish.” She slipped an arm around his waist. “Let’s not say anything about this to Da.”

  “Bri’s very handy with his fists. I’d fancy seeing Blackpool with a shiner.”

  “I’d fancy it myself,” she murmured. “At least wait until after the awards.”

  “I never could resist a pretty face.”

  “No, you couldn’t. Have you convinced Katherine to marry you yet?”

  “She’s weakening.” They could hear one of the rehearsing acts playing before they entered the theater. Rough, unapologetic rock blasted through the walls. “She stayed in London. Said she had too many patients to take the time for this. But she also stayed behind to see if I could deal with this business on my own.”

  He stopped near the rear of the theater, just to listen.

  “And can you?”

  “It’s runny, all those years I took drugs because I wanted to feel good. There were some things I wanted to forget.” He thought of Sylvie, and sighed. “But mostly because I wanted to feel good. They never made me feel good, but I kept right on taking them. In the past couple of years, I’ve started to realize what life can be like when you face it straight.” He laughed, his shoulders moving restlessly. “I sound like a bloody public service announcement.”

  “No. You sound like someone who’s happy.”

  He grinned. It was true, he was happy. More, he’d begun to believe he deserved to be. “I’m still the best,” he told her as they walked toward the stage. “Only now I can enjoy it.”

  She saw her father being interviewed offstage. He was happy too, she thought. Johnno was stage right harassing P.M., who was trying to show off baby pictures to any technician he could collar.

  The group onstage had broken off rehearsing. They were young, Emma noted. Six smooth young faces, under masses of hair, who were up for Best New Group. She could feel the nerves from them, and she could see, with a sense of pride, the way they glanced toward her father from time to time.

  Would they last so long? she imagined them asking themselves. Would they make so deep a mark? Would another generation be touched, and moved by their music?

  “You’re right,” she said to Stevie. “You are the best. All of you.

  She didn’t think of Blackpool again. She didn’t look over her shoulder. For hours she indulged herself, taking pictures, talking music, laughing at old stories. It didn’t even bother her to make an entrance, and stand at the podium reciting her lines to a near-empty theater. She sat, sipping a lukewarm Coke, as some of the musicians jammed centerstage on old Chuck Berry tunes.

  Only P.M. left early, anxious to get back to his wife and baby.

  “He’s getting old,” Johnno decided, plopping down beside her to play some blues on a harmonica. He glanced back to study the seventeen-year-old vocalist who was already an established star. “Christ, we’re all getting old. Before long, you’ll commit the ultimate insult and make us grandfathers.”

  “We’ll just push your rocking chair up to a mike.” She tipped up the bottle.

  “You’re a nasty one, Emma.”

  “I learned from the best.” Chuckling, she draped an arm around his s
houlders. “Look at it this way, there hasn’t been anyone else onstage today who’s lived through two decades of rock-and-roll hell. You’re practically a monument.”

  “Truly nasty,” he decided and cupped the harmonica. “All this talk about lifetime achievement awards,” he muttered between chords. “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

  “They have their nerve, don’t they?” She laughed and hugged him. “Johnno, you’re not really worried about age.”

  He scowled and began to blow more blues. Behind him, someone picked up the rhythm on bass. “See how you like it when you’re cruising toward fucking fifty.”

  “Jagger’s older.”

  He shrugged. The drums had fallen in, a brush on the snare. “Not good enough,” he told her and continued to play.

  “You’re better looking.”

  He considered that. “True.”

  “And I’ve never had a crush on him.”

  He grinned. “Never got over me, did you?”

  “Never.” Then she spoiled the solemn look with a chuckle. She began to sing, improvising lyrics as she went. “I’ve got those rock-and-roll blues. Those old, old, rocking blues. When my hair is gray, and you ask me to play, I say don’t bug me, Momma, my bones they’re aching today. I got them rock-and-roll blues. Them old man rocking blues.”

  She grinned at him. “Did I pass the audition?”

  “Pretty bloody clever, aren’t you?”

  “Like I said, I learned from the best.”

  While he continued to play, she slid off the edge of the stage and framed him in. “One last shot before I go.” She snapped, changed the angle, and snapped again. “I’ll call it Rock Icon” She laughed when he called her a nasty name, then packed the camera in her case. “Shall I tell you what rock and roll is, Johnno, from someone who doesn’t perform, but observes?”

  He gestured with the harmonica, then cupped it again to play softly as he watched her.

  “It’s restless and rude.” Walking back, she laid a hand on his knee. “It’s daring and defiant. It’s a fist shaken at age. It’s a voice that often screams out questions because the answers are always changing.”

  She glanced up to see her father standing behind Johnno, listening. Her smile swept over him. “The very young play it because they’re searching for some way to express their anger or joy, their confusion and their dreams. Once in a while, and only once in a while, someone comes along who truly understands, who has the gift to transfer all those needs and emotions into music.

  “When I was three years old, I watched you”—she looked back up at Brian—“all of you, go out onstage. I didn’t know about things like harmony or rhythms or riffs. All I saw was magic. I still see it, Johnno, every time I watch the four of you step onstage.”

  He toyed with the copper column at her ear, then sent it spinning. “I knew there was a reason we kept you around. Give us a kiss.”

  Her lips were curved as they touched his. “See you tomorrow. You’re going to knock them dead.”

  It was dusk when she walked to her car. Sometime during the afternoon it had rained again. The streets were shiny, and the air was cool and misty. She didn’t want to go home to an empty house. Michael was working late, again.

  When she started the car, she turned the radio up loud, as she liked it best on aimless drives. She would entertain herself for a couple of hours, look at houses in the glow of street lights, try to decide if she wanted the beach, the hills, or the canyons.

  Relaxed, she set the car at a moderate pace and let the music wash over her. She didn’t check her rearview mirror, or notice the car that fell in behind her.

  Michael stood in front of the pegboard in the conference room and studied his lists. He’d made another connection. It was slow work, frustrating, but each link brought him closer to the end of the chain.

  Jane Palmer had had many men. Finding them all could be a life’s work, Michael thought. But it was particularly satisfying when he turned one up whose name was on the list.

  She had used Brian’s money to move out of her dingy little flat and into bigger, more comfortable quarters in Chelsea, where she’d lived from 1968 to 1971, until she’d bought the house on King’s Road. For the better part of ’70, she’d had a flatmate, a struggling pub singer named Blackpool.

  Wasn’t it interesting, Michael thought as he rubbed eyes dead-dry with strain, that while the McAvoys had been living in the hills of Hollywood, Jane Palmer had been playing house with Blackpool? Blackpool who had been at the McAvoys’ party that night in early December?

  And odd, wasn’t it just a bit odd, that Jane hadn’t mentioned the connection in her book? She’d dropped every name that could have made the slightest ring, but Blackpool, an established star by the mid-seventies, didn’t rate a footnote. Because, Michael concluded, neither of them wanted the connection remembered.

  McCarthy stuck his head in the door. “Christ, Kesselring, you still playing with that thing? I want some dinner.”

  “Robert Blackpool was Palmer’s live-in lover from June of ’70 to February of ’71.”

  “Well, call out the wrath of God.”

  Michael slapped a file in McCarthy’s hand. “I need everything there is to know about Blackpool.”

  “I need red meat.”

  “I’ll buy you a steer,” Michael said as he walked back into the squad room.

  “You know, partner, this whole business has ruined your sense of humor. And my appetite. Blackpool’s a big star. He does beer commercials, for Christ’s sake. You’re not going to tie him to a twenty-year-old case.”

  “Maybe not, but I’m down to eight names.” He sat at his desk and pulled out a cigarette. “Somebody stole my damn Pepsi.”

  “I’ll call a cop.” McCarthy leaned over. “Mike, no fooling around, you’re pushing this too hard.”

  “Looking out for me, Mac?”

  “I’m your goddamn partner. Yeah, I’m looking out for you, and I’m looking out for myself. If we have to go out on the streets while you’re strung out like this, you’re not going to back me up.”

  Through a veil of smoke, Michael studied his partner. His voice, when he spoke, was dangerously soft. “I know how to do my job.”

  It was a tender area. McCarthy was well aware of the razzing Michael had taken his first years on the force. “I’m also your friend, and I’m telling you, if you don’t ease off for a few hours, you’re not going to do anybody any good. Including your lady.”

  Slowly, Michael unclenched his fists. “I’m getting close. I know it. It’s not like it was twenty years ago. It’s like it was yesterday, and I was there, right there going over every step.”

  “Like your old man.”

  “Yeah.” He braced his elbows on the desk to scrub his hands over his face. “I’m going crazy.”

  “You’re just overcharged, kid. Take a couple hours. Ease off.”

  Michael stared down at the papers on his desk. “I’ll buy you a steak. You help me run the make on Blackpool.”

  “Deal.” He waited while Michael shrugged into his jacket. “Why don’t you give me a couple other names? Marilyn’s on a new kick and we’re getting nothing but fish this week anyway.”

  “Thanks.”

  Emma stopped the car and looked at the house through the rising mists. She hadn’t consciously decided to drive to it. Years before she had sat in the car with Michael and studied the house. It had been sunny then, she remembered.

  There were lights in the windows. Though she could see no movement, she wondered who lived there now. Did a child sleep in the room where she had once slept, or where Darren’s crib had stood? She hoped so. She wanted to think that more than tragedy lived on. There had been laughter in the house as well, a great deal of it. She hoped there was again.

  She supposed Johnno had made her think of it, when he had talked of growing older. Most of the time she still saw them as they had been in her own childhood, not as men who had lived for nearly a quarter of a century with fame an
d ambition, with success and failure.

  They had all changed. Perhaps herself most of all. She no longer felt like a shadow of the men who had so dominated her life. If she was stronger, it was because of the effort it had taken to finally see herself as whole, rather than as parts of the people she’d loved the best.

  She looked through the gloom to the house nestled on the hill, and hoped with all her heart she would dream of it that night. When she did, she would open that door. She would stand, and look, and she would see.

  Releasing the brake, she started down the narrow road. Six months before, she knew, she wouldn’t have had the courage to come alone, to open herself to all those feelings. It was good, so good not to be afraid.

  The headlights flashed into her rearview mirror so close, so fast, they blinded her. Instinctively she threw a hand up to block the glare.

  Drunk and stupid, she thought and glanced for a place to pull over and let the car pass.

  When it rammed her from behind, her hands clamped automatically on the wheel. Still, the few seconds of shock cost her, and had her veering dangerously close to the guardrail. Dragging the wheel back, she heard her tires squeal on the wet pavement. Her heart jackhammered to her throat as she slid sideways around the next turn.

  “Asshole!” With a trembling hand she wiped a smear of blood from her lip where she’d bitten it. Then the lights were blinding her again, and the impact of the next hit had her seat belt snapping against her breastbone.

  There was no time to think, no room for panic. Her rear fender slapped against the metal guard as her car shimmied. The car behind backed off as she fought her own out of a skid. She saw the tree, a big leafy oak, and used every ounce of strength to jerk the wheel to the right. Panting, she concentrated on maneuvering around an S turn, pumping her brakes to slow her speed.

  He came again. She caught a glimpse of the car, burned the image into her brain before the lights glared against her mirror again. Though braced for the impact, she cried out.