Amber Affairs

by Patricia Rice

  “Brilliant, people, thank you!” he called after they read the last line. “Acts Two and Three will be shorter, more action-packed, I hope. That’s where we apply the emotional screws.”

  “That’s where Fee comes in,” Amber said, taking the step down from the raised platform that had probably once been a church sanctuary.

  She rocked the bohemian look of Gypsy skirts and ruffled blouses, but he really wanted her to show off the figure she’d never learned to flaunt. His mind cruised costumes while she talked.

  “Put your intermission after Act One,” she said as she handed back the script, “since you say that it’s longest. Fee will set up a buffet. I’m not sure how she plans to get the right food to the right people, but she’s been practicing. If there’s any guilt in the audience, Teddy will hunt it down after that.”

  Josh hugged her. She leaned against him for one glorious moment before pulling away.

  “Do I want to know what Fee has been practicing?” he asked, reluctantly giving her space.

  “Go over to the café in the morning and find out. She needs new material. I think we’re down to only two reporters hanging around, and she’s reduced both to tears, so she’s learning to push emotional buttons with her food. I hear that it’s worse than a bar at midnight in there.” Amber kissed his cheek and ambled back to collect Zeke.

  “How would you know about bars at midnight?” Josh called after her.

  “I read books.” She laughed and headed out the side door where Oscar waited to drive her over to the pool. Now that Crystal was gone, she had returned to swimming after hours.

  “I’ll bring the others tomorrow,” Val said, keeping the script.

  “Can Fee bring her magic brownies or whatever to test on me?” Josh asked as Val turned to leave. “I’d rather avoid drunken reporters until we have something to report.”

  The diva waved acknowledgment and departed, with Lance on her heels. Interesting, but none of his business.

  “Tessa is driving up,” Ernest reported as they headed for Josh’s car. “I’ll be glad when you make up your mind about what to do with Willa’s company. I sooo want to fire her.”

  “Mean, very mean, what did the airhead do to you?” Josh’s brain was brimming with the rewrites he wanted to make and the new scene he needed to draft. He didn’t have room for catfights.

  “The list is too long,” Ernest said airily. “Are we good for sending out press releases about your little production? Maybe once this memorial is over, we can head home.”

  Head home? Did he even have a home anymore? His beach house really was the toy box Willa had called it—a place for the childhood and toys he’d never had.

  But he had a life and a career to conduct, and it couldn’t be from here. Shit.

  With Oscar the Bodyguard to scare off strangers and the hedge to prevent intruders, Amber had worked out a routine. Now that Crystal was gone, Zeke joined Josh and her in their after-hours swim. Oscar took Amber and Zeke back to the cottage. And when all was dark, Josh drove down to town, parked his car, and jogged up the lane to join Amber in her bed. They didn’t fool anyone, and the routine didn’t leave much time for conversation, but Amber still needed the anchor of her own turf.

  In the morning, Josh jogged over to the studio to work, leaving his car in town so reporters didn’t know about Cass’s place.

  “Walker called,” Amber whispered as Josh climbed between the sheets some hours after their first read-through of the script. “He says the sheriff wants to close the case but all he has is thee and me. If we had gang ties, we’d be behind bars now.”

  “He doesn’t know we have our own secret gang. You were brilliant tonight, thank you.” Propped on one arm, he leaned over to cover her face in heated kisses.

  “The Lucys are a gang more dangerous than the ones the sheriff knows about,” she agreed, stroking his hard back. “But if this memorial doesn’t work, we could go broke living behind bars and hiring lawyers.”

  “Now there’s justice—Willa leaves me her fortune to defend myself for killing her. I suppose Ivan will take the money away, and we’ll have to go to public defenders. How will that play as an ending for the script?”

  She laughed and caressed his hip. She loved everything about having this man in her bed, so she hoped they weren’t going to prison anytime soon. “I thought you were leaving it up to the audience to decide the guilty party. What are you calling it?”

  “Haven’t decided. Justice Prevails probably doesn’t set the mood.”

  “As I Lay Crying, A Time to Bill, Harpy Spirit. . . I’ve been reading book titles.”

  “Tomorrow is Another Day.” He covered her with his body and began kissing his way down her throat.

  She was glad Zeke’s room was on the other side of the house, and that her expensive foam mattress didn’t squeak.

  Late nights made for late mornings. It was a little after eight before Amber stumbled from bed to shower, leaving Josh still sacked out. She was staring blankly at the open refrigerator when the phone rang. Zeke ducked past her to grab his milk. Giving up on thinking, she reached for the phone.

  “Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with C. . .” Ernest sang into her ear. “What rhymes with Ivan?”

  “Not cool, if that’s where you’re going with this.” Rubbing her eyes, she wandered back to the bedroom to rouse Josh, but he was already in the shower. “What’s Ivan done?”

  “He’s here. He arrived last night with Tessa, and Dell, the persistent pervert. They know Josh isn’t in the lodge. I put Tessa up in the other side of this suite and the Evil Duo in the suite across the hall. Tell Josh he needs to build his own lodge at this rate.”

  Amber grimaced. They really needed to put Dell behind bars. Or maybe he’d mellowed and wasn’t a voyeuristic pervert anymore. Did that ever happen? Just knowing he was in cahoots with Ivan gave her cold shivers.

  She could only manage one enormity at a time. “Ivan can build his own lodge and pay for his own suite. I’ll warn Josh to go to the studio. Do you have any idea what they want?” She sat on the edge of the bed and tried to figure how the minds of a Hollywood exec might work. She failed.

  “Josh’s head, probably. I’m not sure they’re buying the memorial. Have him ring me back.” Ernest hung up.

  Losing her appetite might help her to lose weight, but it was a very bad habit to develop. Now that she didn’t dare stick her head into the café for fear of being hounded, she’d been forced to fix her own breakfast—after asking Fee for suggestions.

  She added seasoning to a few eggs and beat them, listening for the sound of the shower stopping. “You should have stolen those tapes you saw at Dell’s,” she told her nephew. “But I suppose stolen evidence doesn’t hold up in court.”

  Zeke wiped milk from his mouth with the back of his hand and popped up to put toast in the toaster. He was pretty good at looking after himself—thanks to Crystal’s neglect.

  “I know one of the guys that was there. I can have him grab a few of the disks. They’re pretty easy to lift. It’s just a bunch of naked kids though, no big deal.” He spooned up more cereal.

  Not to Zeke, who’d grown up with Speedos and nude beaches. But it was a damned big deal if those images showed up on the internet. “We’ll save that option until we have no other choice. I’m just being lazy.” And protecting herself.

  Maybe it was time to give up passive protection and consider aggression. It would be bad enough explaining a dead body in her backyard to the guardianship judge. Explaining how she could take care of Zeke from jail wasn’t happening. And then if Crystal wanted to present evidence that Amber was shacking up with a suspected murderer. . . None of them came out looking pretty.

  Josh emerged, fully dressed and combing his wet hair. Her heart nearly burst with emotions she couldn’t fully identify. It was just so good to see him again, to know he was happy and healthy and doing well. . . Well, almost. His visitors might turn that around.

  “You’ll wan
t to hie yourself back to the studio, pronto,” she told him, handing him coffee. “Tessa brought a posse. We don’t need any publicity stills of us together so soon after Willa’s death, or that prison cell will be two steps closer.”

  She set out eggs for herself and Josh, then nuked bacon for Josh and Zeke.

  Josh tested the coffee, then took a gulp. “A whole posse? Not just her usual sycophants? If I had to blame anyone for murdering Sarah, it would be Tessa. They competed for Willa’s attention. Does Walker have a timeline yet for Sarah’s death and any suspects?” After popping a bagel in the toaster for himself, Josh straddled a kitchen chair and inhaled eggs and coffee.

  “From what Samantha has told me, they can’t establish a solid time of death for Sarah, so we’re the only suspects,” Amber told him. “In any logical world, Sarah should have arrived during the morning while I was in town and you had an entire press conference watching you. But if she arrived in the wee hours, you were at the studio alone. I was inside the cottage with no witnesses until Zeke woke up. But if they think I’d drag her into the backyard, walk across blood on my porch, and return with a bodyguard to say ‘Oh, gee, look, blood’—the sheriff has seen too many crime shows.”

  But Willa’s phone was in her kitchen, and she had no idea how it got there.

  Of course, given her lack of height and cooking abilities, that phone could have been on the top shelf since she bought the place, and she wouldn’t have known it. Even Viking Samantha had to climb on a chair to reach that cabinet when they’d done the smudging.

  “That neither one of us owns a knife or knows how to use one or has a motive is inconsequential when there’s no one else around who fits the pattern either,” she added with a sigh, trying to see the sheriff’s perspective.

  “That phony blackmail evidence is all they have,” Josh said with a shrug. “Everyone had reason to kill Willa, but Sarah was a nonentity. A killer wouldn’t see her as a potential witness since she wasn’t anywhere around when Willa died. I don’t know why the hell she would have been near your cottage. . .” He sipped his coffee and frowned. “Yeah, I do, if the real killer planted Willa’s phone in your cabinet during the burglary and Sarah had an app for tracing it. . .”

  “She called the police. She had no reason to trace it herself,” Amber pointed out.

  “Unless there was something on the phone that she didn’t want the police to see. Sarah wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box. She may have thought of something after she reported it and came up for damage control. It was the middle of the night when she called the sheriff. He may have told her he’d check in the morning.”

  “The county doesn’t have enough money for a patrol up here. The sheriff should have called Walker, but it’s a territorial thing, I think.” Amber finished her eggs and washed the plate.

  “The mean sheriff wants to arrest the pretty girl before the hero can come to the rescue,” Zeke said prosaically. “They really can’t arrest you, Aunt Amber, can they?”

  “No, sweetheart, they cannot. Judge and jury would laugh them out of court the minute I waddled in. No way could I haul bodies around,” she reassured him, wishing she could reassure herself that everyone operated on logic. “Fee said she could use some help around the café. Did you want to pick up brownie points with her or play video games somewhere?”

  “Mayor Monty said I can help at the cabin today.” He jumped up. “They’re putting in utilities for the trailer pads, and he wants me to watch Fee’s dog. Can I?”

  Amber had always loved the way the small community came together at times of trouble. Fee’s significant other kept his fingers on the pulse of the town. Monty knew the trouble swirling around them.

  “May I,” she corrected. “And yes, you may, as long as you pay attention to Monty. There’s a lot of big equipment out there, so you have to be very careful. Put on your boots. I don’t want you stepping on nails.”

  Zeke dashed off to find the hiking boots she’d bought for him. Like all Abercrombies, he was built sturdily. Mayor Monty was an ex-jock. They’d do well together.

  “A small town is good for him, isn’t it?” Josh asked thoughtfully, finishing her thought. “He can live the normal kid life we never had.”

  “Except there’s no school here. I have to come up with a plan before the custody hearing. So let’s make this memorial guilt thing happen. I need brain space for planning a future that doesn’t include prison bars.”

  Josh leaned over and kissed her. “We’ll work it out together—after I break the Evil Duo in two. But if I’m going to finish this script and toss Tessa out, I won’t see you at lunch. Miss me?”

  “Like a sore tooth,” she agreed in their old pattern of insults, standing on her toes and kissing him back. “Don’t kill Ivan, but push Dell over a cliff if you can. No one will care.”

  “It’s that kind of talk that will put us behind bars, sweetheart,” he drawled.

  She almost felt a chill when he opened the front door and departed. She prayed she wouldn’t be seeing him behind bars, from either side of the door.

  Twenty-six

  “Can’t sign any of this, Tessa,” Josh said, flinging the stack of documents back on the desk in the suite parlor. “The corporation hasn’t been transferred to my name. I’m not on the board of directors. You’ve wasted your time. So, tell me why you’re really here.”

  With wild curly red hair straight from a box, Tessa stalked up and down the room. She was sturdy where Willa had been slim, but they were of a similar height. That was the only similarity Josh could detect. Maybe the shoes—Tessa seemed to be wearing some of those red-soled designer things Willa took such pride in. Since Tessa had the run of Willa’s mansion, they could have been Willa’s shoes for all he knew.

  But shoes didn’t make a competent executive.

  “I need you to tell me it’s okay to sign them,” she said nervously. “Willa wouldn’t let me sign anything, even though the lawyer says our agreement allows it. That one contract alone is for half a million dollars. I don’t want to be responsible if we can’t pay it.”

  “And Ivan is telling you that you can’t sign it, isn’t he?” Josh rolled his eyes and picked up the contracts again. It was all double-speak to him.

  “He’s telling me I’ll be personally liable if I do.” Tessa flapped wet lashes and performed her best heroine-needs-hero act. “If you’ll just say it’s okay, sign something telling me I’m in charge, I’ll take care of it. I know Willa negotiated those contracts, so they’re good.”

  Josh rolled his eyes at the performance—there was a good reason Tessa had failed as an actress.

  Ernest took the papers and scanned through them. “They’re for the Chinese film project she was working on, nothing to do with yours, Josh. Ivan only works with old white guys, so he doesn’t want to deal with this if he grabs Willa’s company. Willa spent months working with this director and the sponsors to get an agreement. It’s a pretty solid deal. She even lined up insurance against emergencies, although probably not to cover her death.”

  “Excellent,” Josh said in satisfaction. “Sign them all, Tessa. I’ve put Ernest in charge. Run any others by him. The company isn’t Ivan’s yet, and no one has revoked your authority.”

  Yet. He could see Tessa wasn’t suited for an executive position. Willa simply liked people she could control. But with Ernest’s knowledge and Tessa’s ability to sign deals, the company could function for a while longer.

  Tessa scowled and snatched the papers from Ernest. Josh detected more competitiveness in action. Willa had thought competition made her staff work harder. Josh hated the stress.

  “Why don’t you work with Ernest from here?” Josh suggested. “Stay for Willa’s memorial on Saturday. I have to go back to writing the script, so I’ll head back to my office.” And avoid Ivan and Dell, if he were really lucky. He was amazed they hadn’t barreled through the door at first light.

  “You’re not staying here?” Tessa asked, a little too casually.
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  “The reporters are driving me insane. I found a studio with a view and a guard cat where no one can find me. And no, I’m not staying with Amber, so pass that on.” Josh walked out, tired of Tessa, tired of business, tired of the scene that he’d have to return to one of these days.

  Writing this script was cathartic. Half of Hollywood would have heart attacks if they recognized his characters. The other half would roll on the floor, laughing, then wait for the nuclear fallout.

  Ivan and Dell would definitely not be in the latter half. If he used those red-soled shoes. . . Josh chuckled thinking about it. Tessa wasn’t one of his favorite people anyway.

  With few weekday appointments and unable to take walk-ins for fear of reporters, Amber was reading her lady bodyguard’s cards when she heard Oscar greet a customer.

  She dropped the deck when she recognized Dell’s voice.

  “Oh crap and filthy word,” she muttered, gathering the scattered cards. “Better take the position, Nellie. That’s the devil out there.”

  “Ohhh, goodie. Can I shoot him?” The retired security guard patted her vest pocket.

  “I don’t think bullets can stop him.” At the sound of an unfamiliar authoritative roar overpowering Oscar’s rumble, Amber clenched her molars. What were the chances Willa’s father might be here with Dell? Pretty darned good. “Why don’t you offer to run over to the café to pick up lunch? Then tell whoever is behind the counter that I may have trouble.”

  “I’ll tell them to deliver. I don’t want to miss the fun.” Nellie sashayed back to the front room, all seventy-plus years of her. Even a granny bodyguard was skinnier than her, Amber noted with a grimace.

  Wondering how one went about tossing one’s weight around as she’d read in books, she waited while Nellie took names and returned, pretending she was a secretary. “Okay if these two gentlemen visit? One Ivan Powell and Dell No-Name.”