A Woman Worth Loving

by Jackie Braun

  Still, when the dispatcher posed the question a second time, he replied, “Yeah, I’ll stay with her.”

  He answered a couple more questions and gave their location, and he agreed to remain on the line after the dispatcher told him police and emergency medical personnel were on their way. Then he set the phone aside and sat cross-legged on the floor—waiting, watching her. It was something he did well when it came to this woman.

  Audra moved and made a little gasping sound. Her eyelids opened wide, the residue of fear clouding the startling blue of her irises. He’d always wondered if her eye color was the result of contact lenses, but up close he didn’t think so. Now, her glazed gaze swerved to Seth and she struggled to move back and away when he leaned closer.

  “No!” she tried to yell, but it came out a stingy whisper.

  In her panic, she raised one hand as if to strike him. He easily subdued the feeble attempt, pulling her half onto his lap in the process.

  “I’m not going to hurt you.” The words mocked him, so he tried again. “You’re safe for now.”

  Whether his message registered or she was too exhausted to continue struggling, he wasn’t sure, but she slumped into the crook of his arm, apparently unconscious again.

  Seth examined the hand he still held. The five-carat diamond on her third finger reflected the cheery flames that danced in the hearth. But the skin was cold and slightly blue, and as he absently weaved his fingers through hers, he realized that although Audra Conlan Howard Stover Winfield had always seemed larger than life, she was actually delicate.

  Up close he discovered secrets that his camera lens had never betrayed, like a dainty crescent-shaped scar on her left temple and a small brown beauty mark on the underside of her chin. Tiny imperfections that made her seem more vulnerable, more human.

  His great nemesis unmasked as mere flesh and blood.

  He could hear sirens in the distance, growing louder as the people who got paid to respond to emergencies raced toward the Winfields’ estate. Was it a trick of the light or had her eyelids flickered again?

  “Hear that? Help’s almost here.”

  Her raspy breathing evened out until its rhythm was once again slow and steady.

  “I never doubted that you were a survivor,” he murmured. But it wasn’t bitterness he felt. Attraction was the edge to this particularly dangerous sword. And, God help him, he’d felt it since the first time he’d snapped her photograph two years before.

  No one else in the room was conscious to question his action or to remind him of it later, so Seth gave in to the bewitching scent of her perfume and the odd protectiveness he didn’t want to feel. Lowering his head, he inhaled deeply and then, before he even fully understood what he intended to do, he brushed his lips over the scar on Audra’s temple.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AFTER the doctor authorized her release, Audra waited with an aide in the hospital lobby for her driver to arrive. A pair of dark sunglasses shaded her eyes and she had covered her trademark platinum hair with a long silk scarf, the ends of which were tied loosely around her neck to hide the bruising. She knew she wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all herself, with the disguise she had purchased in the hospital’s gift shop.

  The morning papers were probably full of details about the attack and what had motivated it. Her late husband had left nearly everything to his young bride of less than a year, rather than his son and heir. Plenty of those who read the articles would work up more sympathy for Henry Dayton Winfield the Fourth, whose wife had just given birth to Henry Dayton Winfield the Fifth, than they would for the thrice-married Audra, the not-so-little matter of attempted murder aside.

  She pushed the glasses more securely onto the bridge of her nose and shuddered in apprehension. She’d made mistakes, too many to count, and she wasn’t sure she deserved the second chance she’d been handed. But she intended to make the most of it.

  New and improved, as the saying went.

  After fully regaining consciousness, she’d made a pact with God. She was going to turn her life around. She wasn’t going to continue taking baby steps toward redemption. She was going to tackle the job with all the gusto of a long jumper. As an act of good faith she’d decided to start by giving up smoking. The hospital was a smoke-free facility and she was desperate for a cigarette right now, the craving so strong she actually had nibbled on one thumbnail. Nicotine addiction. She supposed it was just one more example of the self-destructive recklessness that had been her modus operandi for much of the past decade.

  For a while the night before as she’d floated in the breach between this world and the next, she’d thought she had seen an angel. That had given her a bit of a shock since, truth be told, she had figured, in spite of her recent attempts to change, she would be taking the down elevator to the afterlife. She couldn’t recall the angel’s features, but he had been blond and…hero-like. He had crashed into her house and rescued her from her stepson’s murderous grasp.

  The lack of oxygen must have really played tricks on her mind, because she vaguely recalled being cradled in his arms. She’d felt safe then, protected, and she had experienced something akin to longing when, drifting toward unconsciousness, she’d sworn the man had lowered his head and dropped a light kiss on her temple.

  Audra frowned. She must have imagined that. No one had kissed her with such sweet tenderness in too many years to count. And certainly her Good Samaritan or guardian angel or whatever one chose to call him wouldn’t. The police told her he’d given his name as Scott Smithfield.

  Smithfield! It seemed incomprehensible that her larger-than-life hero and that omnipresent paparazzi photographer were one and the same.

  Although she couldn’t have picked the man out of a lineup if her life depended on it, Smithfield had snapped dozens of unflattering photographs of Audra during the past couple of years. His work was top-notch, she had to admit, even though he had a knack for showcasing her in the worst possible light. The exposure she didn’t necessarily mind. What would be the point of behaving outrageously in public if not to garner free publicity and keep her name out there? But Smithfield’s work didn’t just expose, it damaged. It had managed to make her the butt of jokes among Hollywood’s insiders and power players.

  For a long time she had blamed him for the fact that her career was in the toilet, but now she could admit she was the one responsible for that.

  She glanced at the throng of tabloid photographers lined up outside the exit, waiting for her to appear. Scanning the crowd, she wondered if Smithfield was out there now. They all looked the same holding up those bulky black cameras. God, but she didn’t feel up to facing any of them this morning. But she would have to. Her chauffeur-driven stretch limousine had just lumbered around the hospital’s horseshoe-shaped main driveway and come to a stop.

  “Ready, Mrs. Winfield?” the aide asked.

  He was a big man, with a barrel chest and a tattoo on both forearms. He looked more like a bodyguard than a health care worker, which was fine with her. Audra figured she needed a bodyguard right about now.

  “Ready.” The word came out an unintelligible rasp and so she nodded instead. Then she sat up straighter in the wheelchair and squared her shoulders as the automatic doors parted for them.

  She kept her gaze riveted on the limo and the rear door her driver, Nigel, held open, but she might as well have been striding up the red carpet on Oscar night the way the photographers and assorted tabloid reporters hollered out her name. Only the fact that they were held back by hospital security kept them from blocking her path.

  “Audra! Audra! Look this way.”

  “Over here, Audra!”

  “Turn to your right, gorgeous!”

  “Take off the scarf!”

  “Show us your neck!”

  In the past, she had always hammed it up for the cameras. She’d been more than willing to pose provocatively. On this day, though, she faced them stoically. When she reached the limo, she climbed in, closed the d
oor and melted back against the seat cushions. No more, she thought. I’m no longer that woman.

  “Where to, Mrs. Winfield?” her driver asked.

  “Home,” she managed to murmur hoarsely after a couple of attempts.

  As the limo took the familiar route toward the Brentwood estate a wave of loneliness swamped her. Henry’s mansion wasn’t her home. His son had pointed out that very fact in rather indelicate terms the evening before, right after which he had grabbed her by the throat.

  “I wasn’t going to keep the house,” she whispered now. She still wasn’t going to keep it, or anything else of Henry’s for that matter, although she didn’t think the man who had attempted to kill her deserved it, either.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  “I don’t want to stay here,” she rasped a little louder as the limo turned up the estate’s tree-lined driveway.

  “Where do you want to go, ma’am?” Nigel inquired politely.

  Unbidden, Trillium Island came to mind. Audra had been gone ten years and married three times, but that small patch of land tucked up in the northeastern corner of Lake Michigan was the only place that had ever qualified as home, she realized now.

  It was spring in Michigan, which could mean the weather was either bone-chillingly cold or warm enough to forgo a coat. The trillium would be in bloom on the island that bore its name. She’d always loved those flowers and the three snowy-white petals that served as a reminder to weary inhabitants that summer was just around the corner.

  When Audra had left the island at age twenty, she’d burned the proverbial bridge behind her. She’d never intended to return. At the time, she’d convinced herself she was leaving because she craved excitement and wanted to live in a big, busy city. Now she could see that she hadn’t left Trillium so much as she had run away from it, chased by demons that she’d only recently begun to understand and to exorcise. Demons that still filled her with shame and embarrassment after all these years. But she was determined that those events would no longer define her. Nor would they define her sexuality.

  Of course, the past wasn’t the only reason she’d fled Trillium. In part, Audra supposed she sought fame and fortune to prove to all of the islanders who’d sold her short that she was every bit as smart, determined and talented as her straight-A, straight-arrow fraternal twin.

  Thinking of her sister, Audra made up her mind. It was time to go back. It was time to confront her past, and it was time for the New and Improved Audra Conlan to make things right with the people she had wronged.

  She would start with Ali. She’d deserved an explanation and an apology for more than a decade.

  “Keep the car running, please,” Audra whispered. “I won’t be long. I just need to throw clothes into some suitcases.”

  “Are you going on a trip then, Mrs. Winfield?” Nigel asked. He was older than her father and had been employed for at least a couple dozen years by her late husband. Whatever he thought of her, and she was sure it could not be good, didn’t show in his bland expression.

  Audra offered him her first genuine smile in a very long time.

  “Not a trip, Nigel. I’m going home.”

  It was nearly midnight, but Seth wasn’t sleepy. Nor was he hungry, he decided, tossing aside the half-eaten burger he’d picked up at the takeout joint up the street. He glanced through the stack of evening newspapers—both tabloid and more legitimate press—spread over the coffee table in his sparsely furnished apartment, and took a long pull from his beer. He, or rather his alter ego Scott Smithfield, had not taken any of the dozens of shots of Audra as she’d left the hospital, or later, when she’d arrived at the Los Angeles airport and boarded her deceased husband’s private jet.

  “The almost late Mrs. Winfield was on time for her flight today,” one tabloid report quipped darkly.

  The story went on to say no one was sure where she’d gone in the jet, which had made several stops before returning to California without her on board. Some speculated she was in Michigan, in the affluent Detroit suburb listed in her official biography as home.

  But Seth thought differently. Through his meticulous research he’d discovered that Audra actually hailed from a small island community off the northern Michigan mainland. He’d bet his Nikon and every last lens he owned that she was going home. After all, wasn’t that where people always went when they needed to lick their wounds?

  In the pictures she wore dark glasses, a scarf and the same sexy outfit she’d had on the night before. But she didn’t wave to the cameras, flash that wide smile of hers or even acknowledge the flock of photographers. That certainly was out of character, but then it was harder to flirt while riding in a wheelchair. Besides, a near-death experience tended to have a chilling effect on most folks. Apparently Audra was no exception.

  “Attack subdues Hollywood’s flamboyant party girl,” a photo caption read.

  Not for long, Seth thought. People like Audra didn’t change. Why would they? No one expected them to. No one demanded it. As Seth knew most painfully, the rules the rest of the world observed didn’t apply to celebrities, even someone like Audra, who was famous for being infamous. They did as they pleased, often without paying any meaningful price.

  Audra certainly hadn’t paid. The old anger and bitterness resurfaced, shredding the veil of compassion he’d felt for Audra the evening before. While Seth had been busy burying his stepfather and half sister, and sitting vigil by his mother’s bedside, Audra’s high-priced lawyer had seen to it that she hadn’t been charged in the accident, even though her actor boyfriend, Trent Kane, had been at a party at her house and had left drunk and high behind the wheel of her car.

  She’d worn black to Kane’s funeral, Seth recalled from the tabloid photographs, and then a year later she’d marched down the aisle for the third time as Henry’s bride, expanding her wealth by a cool couple billion dollars when he’d kicked the bucket before the couple had celebrated a single wedding anniversary.

  “You’re going to pay, sweetheart,” Seth murmured to one of the grainy black-and-white photographs, relieved he was over whatever weakness he had succumbed to while she’d lain unconscious in his arms the evening before.

  After he’d handed her over to the emergency medical technicians, Seth had spent half the night giving his statement to the police. Then, he’d wound up missing Audra’s exit from the hospital because he’d spent half the morning having his busted-up camera repaired.

  “Too bad you didn’t get that shot of her being choked,” the repairman, who knew him only as Smithfield, had said. “I bet the tabloids would have paid out big for it. You could have retired.”

  Seth had merely smiled. He was not ready to hang up his camera just yet, and money wasn’t the issue. He had plenty of it, thanks to various insurance settlements from his family.

  Taking another gulp of his beer, he glanced at the photograph of his family that hung on the wall. He’d taken that picture two years ago, just hours before the fatal accident. Later, he’d had it enlarged, professionally matted and framed. In it, his sister and mother wore smiles, although the smiles didn’t reach their eyes. His stepfather stared back, no hint of a grin in his tightly compressed lips.

  The old argument echoed in his Seth’s head for a moment. The raised voices taunted him because one of them was his own. The familiar pain lanced through him as it always did, leaving that hopeless ache in its wake. Three hours after he’d snapped that shot, his stepfather and half sister were dead, and a serious and eventually fatal injury had left his mother comatose.

  He’d never said goodbye to any of them.

  I never got to tell them all how sorry I was.

  The guilt jabbed again, but Seth ignored it.

  He had a job to do, a crusade to finish. Booting up his computer, he connected to the Internet. Fifteen minutes and a few clicks of the mouse later, he was booked on a nonstop flight to Detroit Metropolitan Airport that would leave Los Angeles in less than eight hours.

  CHAPTER THR
EE

  IT LOOKED the same.

  Audra stood at the ferry’s rail and watched the island grow larger in the bright morning light. There were more houses north of the boat dock than she recalled. Big houses with huge windows to take advantage of the incredible view of the lake. But so much of it was still the same, as if the island were some sort of Brigadoon, untouched by time.

  She’d been in Michigan for four days and it had taken her that long to screw up her courage. The trip over from Petoskey only took about half an hour, and all the while she kept wondering what she would say to her sister when they finally stood face-to-face.

  Sorry for disappointing you.

  Sorry for hurting you.

  Sorry for running off…with your boyfriend.

  It hadn’t been as sordid as all that, of course, not that Ali would believe her. Or that Audra had ever tried to convince her otherwise.

  Audra had merely accepted a ride from Luke Banning. He’d been leaving the island, too, heading for the ferry at the same time. She’d hopped on the back of his Harley and neither of them had looked back. They’d parted ways on the mainland. He’d headed east to New York, driven as always to prove his worth. Audra had gone west to Hollywood, seeking fame. She wasn’t quite sure when she’d decided to settle for infamy.

  She felt the ferry’s great engine reverse, slowing the big boat’s forward motion so that it bumped gently against the dock before stopping. The steel gangplank lowered with a mechanical hum and the cars began to drive off. Audra followed them on foot. She’d left her rental back on the mainland to slow her escape just in case she gave in to her nerves and tried to retreat.

  Scanning the crowd, she sucked in a breath and bit her lower lip. So many faces. A lot of them were familiar despite the passage of ten years. Some of the people recognized her as well. She could tell by the way their gazes swiveled back to before their expressions twisted in censure. Otherwise they didn’t acknowledge her. No surprise there. None of the islanders had ever gone public about her ties to Trillium, apparently too disgusted by her to admit she’d been born and raised here.