Читать книгу Dial M for Mischief - Kasey Michaels, Кейси Майклс, Kasey Michaels - Страница 6

THE SKY WAS UNUSUALLY bright the day his daughters buried Teddy Sunshine, the sun a big yellow ball chasing away all the early-morning clouds, if not the chill temperatures.

Jolie Sunshine, when she noticed the sun, wondered whether her father had ordered it up or if it was some sort of sick joke dealt them by fate.

In contrast to the brightness of the day, the small crowd around the grave site resembled nothing more than exotic black crows beneath the blue canvas canopy with Fulton Funeral Home stamped on the overhang. The only other colors were those of their pale faces and the blanket of bright red roses draping the bronze casket.

When I kick off, I want to go out like a Kentucky Derby winner—draped with roses. Big red ones. Don’t you forget!

“We remembered, Teddy,” Jolie whispered under her breath, earning her quick, inquisitive looks from her sisters, which she ignored.

Roses they could do. What his daughters couldn’t do was to have their father buried with a full police funeral. Murderers didn’t get that kind of honor.

Jolie swayed slightly between her sisters as the priest read a final prayer. The three held hands as they stood in their birth order: Jade to Jolie’s right, Jessica, the baby, to her left. Teddy’s Irish setter, Rockne, reclined stretched out at their feet, wearing his Notre Dame Fightin’ Irish kerchief around his neck.

They were quite the dazzling trio, Teddy Sunshine’s girls; Teddy’s Angels, he’d only half-jokingly called them, harking back to the days of that old television show, Charlie’s Angels, which Teddy said the movie couldn’t really hold a candle to for sheer enjoyment.

Jade could almost be typecast in the role Kate Jackson had played in the mid-seventies. Beautiful, refined and all business.

Jessica could be a fresher, more lush and whole-some Farrah Fawcett, with brains as well as looks. Although, as Jessica had pointed out more than once, her teeth weren’t as big.

But Jolie? Jolie didn’t fit Jaclyn Smith’s role, the one heavy on brains and beauty but also on sex appeal. Jolie was brunette; she was always told she was photogenic, but she had also spent most of her life believing herself to be too tall, too thin, too angular. Her mouth was too wide, her lips too full, her hair too straight, her hands and feet too long.

Hell, she’d spent most of her teenage years carrying the nickname Jolly Green Jolie.

Whenever she stood between her sisters, taller than either Jade or Jessica, she felt plain beside Jessica’s almost too-perfect beauty and stupid when compared to Jade’s quick, incisive brain—a living, breathing example of middle-child syndrome.

It was only when she was in front of the cameras that Jolie didn’t feel awkward, inept, a giraffe in a field full of graceful gazelles. When the lights came on, all her self-doubt disappeared and she could be anyone she dreamed she could be.

How she longed to be somebody else today, rather than a grieving daughter. How she longed to talk to Teddy Sunshine just one more time, watch as his big Irish smile lit up a room brighter than any Hollywood klieg lights and made her feel so very special, so very loved.

Most of all, she wanted to hear his laugh, a laugh that could fill her world.

But now—in the shade beneath the blue canvas tarp, except for the droning voice of Father Sheehan and the sobbing of two maiden aunts from Buffalo Jolie would have been hard-pressed to name correctly—silence, cold and uncomfortable, was all around them.

There should be a Philadelphia Police Department honor guard in attendance, at the very least. Taps played. A salute fired. A flag ceremoniously folded and presented to Jade, as the oldest.

But the Sunshine daughters had to make do with a priest who had never known Teddy, filling in for Father Muskie, who was on his annual vacation in the Canadian north woods and out of touch, unknowing that his good friend and gin rummy partner had died in disgrace.

What the Sunshine funeral did have was press. Lots of it. Print and television news, along with about two dozen dredges of the tabloid-journalism pool, paparazzi hoping for a few good photographs, and some Mary Hart look-alike from one of the evening celebrity-magazine shows.

The local reporters had shown up to put a fairly boring cap on the Teddy Sunshine story: the ex-cop turned P.I. who’d eaten his gun after squeezing the life out of mayoral candidate Joshua Brainard’s beautiful wife.

The rest were here for Jolie Sunshine, movie star—and may they all go straight to hell.

Rockne slowly clambered to his feet as the priest walked past, shaking hands with all three Sunshine daughters, and then collapsed onto his belly once more, raising his sad brown eyes to Jolie. He hadn’t eaten anything for the past two days, even when she had gotten down on the floor early this morning and gone face-to-face with him, one of his favorite treats clamped between her teeth as she’d mumbled, “Yum-yums. ’Ook, ’Ock-nee, yum-yums.”

Now there was a picture for the tabloids: Movie Star Fights Pooch for Doggy Treat, Fears Rise Over Mental Collapse of Fan-Fave Sunshine.

Like she’d give them the satisfaction. She’d get through this. They’d all get through this.

“Okay, it’s over, Jolie. Time to say our last goodbyes,” her sister Jade told her quietly.

Jolie felt her knees threaten to buckle once more but steeled herself to remain upright. When they left the grave site, the workmen standing under those trees over there would come back, lower Teddy into the ground, locking away all the real sunshine in her life forever. She wasn’t ready for that. “No, not yet. Please, not yet.”

Jade sighed, squeezed Jolie’s hand. Jade, the oldest and, even now, in the midst of their nightmare, the practical one. The one who had stayed with Teddy, worked with Teddy in the Sunshine Detective Agency. The one who had come home to discover Teddy’s body and then called her sisters, broken the news to them without tears, without hysterics. Just, “Daddy’s dead—I need you here. Now.”

“Honey, we have to face the cameras. One last time, and then we can go home, begin to figure this thing out. Okay?”

“Come on, Jolie, Jade’s right,” her sister Jessica urged. “We’ll face them together. Just ignore the slimy bastards, say ‘No comment’ if you say anything at all as we keep moving toward the limo. You know the drill.”

Jolie looked wryly at her sister, the blond bombshell who was currently on sabbatical from her own job as an on-air investigative reporter. “Slimy bastards, Jess? Aren’t they your comrades-in-arms?”

Jessica rolled her huge sherry-brown eyes even as she tossed her head, her long blond hair falling forward once more to frame her face. “Puh-leez. I’m the real deal. What’s waiting on the other side of the road are the dregs of humanity. Entertainment reporters? Bottom-feeding, scum-sucking dirtbags, that’s all they are. But we’re not going to let them get to us. Right?”

Jolie nodded. “Right. Just give me another minute. Just…just one more minute.”

Jessica looked past Jolie to Jade, who only shrugged her shoulders and left the two of them standing where they were while she retrieved a trio of long-stemmed red roses the undertaker had provided. “Here, one for each of us. Jolie? Come on, honey. Follow me, do what I do.”

“Yes, Mother,” Jolie said, smiling for the first time in days as she took the rose. She was an actress. She would act. The grieving daughter approaching at the graveside, kissing the petals of a drooping rose and then placing it on top of the casket that was really empty, a prop, a part of the scene, that’s all. She was the Mafia wife bidding farewell to her mobster husband, gunned down as he ate his favorite pasta in his favorite mobster restaurant. The sweetheart of a fallen World War I soldier who’d perished somewhere in France. The sister of a frontier sheriff ambushed on the streets of Laredo.

Her hand barely shook as she gently laid the bloom on top of the blanket of roses. She was acting. It was all a sham. This wasn’t real. Teddy wasn’t dead. Her daddy wasn’t—

“Oh, God, I’m sorry I’m being such a jerk. Let’s just get out of here before I lose it,” Jolie whispered as she stepped back from the casket and bent down to grab Rockne’s leash. She pushed past Jade, who had been stopped by one of the anonymous, interchangeable aunts.

“What’s the rush? Oh, you want to leave now, Jolie? What a fantastic idea,” Jessica muttered, following after her. “Jade and I would never have thought of that on our own—you long-legged dork-stork.”

“Stuff it, Barbie doll—if you don’t already—and go rescue Einstein from the aunts, will you? I’ll go ahead to the limo, keep the cameras off you guys if I can.” Jolie squared her shoulders. They were the Sunshine girls. They’d hung in this long and they were going to get through this!

None of them had cried throughout the funeral mass or the short ceremony at the grave site; they wouldn’t give anyone that satisfaction. All Jolie wanted now—all she was sure the three of them wanted now—was to get this done, get this over and go back to the house Jade had shared with their father.

The house where he had sat in his study, surrounded by a lifetime of achievements nailed to the walls, and used his service revolver to blow his brains all over those signed photographs and commendations.

Jolie looked across the cemetery with its flat bronze plaques fairly hidden in the well-manicured grass, giving the area the appearance of a wide, green park. Pretty, even peaceful, if not for the crowd being held behind rope barricades on the far side of the macadam roadway that wound through the center of the cemetery.

As she and Rockne moved toward the limousine, eager arms were raised and she could hear the whir and snap of two dozen cameras, had to blink at the sharp shafts of sunlight reflected from many of the telephoto lenses pointed in her direction.

Her mouth went dry. Her heart pounded with pain and anger. She wanted to run, longed to run. Felt her hands bunching into fists at her sides because she wanted to hit someone, shake someone, demand to know if they really believed the “public’s right to know” extended to being voyeurs at a funeral.

But she knew she had to keep walking slowly, at an unhurried pace, her head held high, her face shielded somewhat by the large, round sunglasses.

Jolie swore she could hear her father’s big, encouraging voice whispering in her ear.

That’s the way. One foot in front of the other, Jolie, baby, and soon you’ll be walkin’ right out that door…

She was almost there, almost at the limo. She had to hang on just another minute, and they would be out of this madness.

There were a half dozen rent-a-cops on the scene for crowd control, and yet someone wasn’t on the job. One of the paparazzi slipped through the line to do an end-run around the hearse and toward Jolie, snapping his camera as he approached.

“Jolie! Look here! Look over here! Toss the glasses, babe! Let’s see those big baby blues! Come on, honey, you owe your fans something, right?”

Steady, girl. One foot in front of the other…

The rent-a-cops stood back as the photographer edged closer. He dropped to one knee to get a good shot, the telephoto lens still in place. Jolie madly wondered if her fans really needed a close-up of the hairs in her nose.

“Hey, Jolie! What’s it feel like knowing your daddy was a murderer? Gotta be tough, right?”

Something inside her snapped, actually went br-oi-i-n-g. She took a step toward the photographer.

“That’s it, Jolie—nearly perfect. Now ditch the glasses.”

“Don’t do it, Jolie,” Jessica called out, jogging toward her as quickly as she could in four-inch heels. “Don’t react. Just let it go.”

“The hell with that. Come on, Jolie. Look this way. You smile for us when you want us around. Smile for us now!”

Aw, the bloody blue devil with it, sweetheart—go give him a good conk!

Jolie would probably never remember how she got from point A to point B, but she was suddenly there, looking down on the son of a bitch who was still shooting frame after frame up into her face. She’d rather not remember grabbing the camera from him even as she kicked front with one foot, connected with his chest and sent him sprawling on his back on top of Bertha M. Pierce, 1917-2003, beloved wife of Henry.

Yanking open the back of the camera, Jolie ripped out the film, exposing it to the sun, and then pulled back her arm, ready to throw the camera in the photographer’s face. She knew the other photographers and video cameramen were having a field day from their vantage point across the road, but she didn’t care. She’d needed a target for all her anger, her grief, her frustration, and this bozo had volunteered for the job.

And then she heard the scream.

Turning, with the camera still in midair, Jolie saw the interchangeable great-aunts ten yards behind her.

One of them—Aunt Marie; or maybe it was Aunt Theresa—had her right leg jammed up to the knee in a hole in the ground. She wasn’t screaming, even though her mouth was open and moving. She was white-faced with terror.

“Help! Help!” the other aunt, the screamer, cried hysterically. “Somebody’s trying to pull her down!”

Jolie let the camera fall to the ground as Jade and Jessica joined her, the three of them now staring at the aunts. “What in hell…?”

“Gopher hole,” the undertaker explained quietly as he walked past the girls. “Happens a couple of times every summer, and they always think one of the dearly departed is reaching up to get them. I’ll dig her out. I keep a shovel in the hearse.”

Jolie forgot about the cameras, forgot about the reporters, even forgot her anger. She involuntarily drew in her breath, air sucking in so long and so hard she thought she might have forgotten how to exhale. And then, when she believed she might faint, something inside of her released. She let loose with a fountain of laughter that had built up inside her and now exploded from her, totally beyond her control.

She laughed until she had to bend over, brace her hands on her knees. And still she laughed.

She laughed until the laughter turned to tears. Hard, racking sobs that sent her down to her knees, because Teddy would have loved the gopher hole so much and then later woven the incident into a huge story twice as funny as what had actually happened.

“Come on, baby, showtime’s over.”

Jolie stiffened at the touch of hands closing around her shoulders, pulling her to her feet. She turned around slowly…to look up into a face she hadn’t seen in five long years.

“Sam? Oh, God…Sam…”

“Yeah, Sam. We’ve got that covered,” Sam Becket said as he slid a protective arm around her shoulders and guided her away from the limousine and toward a sleek black Mercedes parked at the bend of the macadam road. “Your sisters can manage, but we’ve got to get you out of here.”

Jolie tried to slow her steps, but Sam kept a strong grip on her as he hastened her across the grass. “I can’t just leave them to—”

“You can, you are, and for once in your big, independent life you’re going to let someone else take care of you, damn it,” he told her. He opened the passenger door and all but folded her in half to shove her into the front seat as the bottom-feeders stampeded in their direction, cameras flashing and whirring. They plastered their cameras against the side window and windshield, and Jolie covered her face with her hands.

Sam opened the driver’s-side door, pausing a moment to say, “You’ve got three seconds to back off, people. Move it or lose it.”

One of the reporters, microphone in hand now, pushed even closer. The guy had bottle-blond hair, an indoor tan and too-white capped teeth that might make him look good on television but up close and personal he looked a little like a beaver. “Oh, yeah?” he yelled the challenge. “And who are you? Who the hell are you!’

“Me? Well, I’ll tell you, Bucky—I’m the guy who’s leaving now. Two seconds. Which one of you losers wants to be my new hood ornament?”

“You won’t do that. We have a right to—”

Sam’s door slammed. He shoved the key in the ignition and put the transmission into Drive. One quick warning tap on the horn and the large car moved forward.

“Sam, you can’t just run them down,” Jolie warned him, at last realizing what she’d done. “I shouldn’t have snapped like that. I know the drill, I know what they are. I—Sam, don’t!

Outside the car, someone yowled in pain and the rest of the barracudas scurried to safety.

“Oops. Guess I might have rolled over a foot or two, huh?” Sam said, smiling at her. “Yeah, well, it wasn’t as if they weren’t warned. Duck your head, Jolie, we’re almost out of range.”

“My publicist is either going to hug you or shoot you. Me, too, come to think about it,” Jolie said as the Mercedes came to a halt just past the wrought-iron gates, then turned out onto the highway.

“Do you care?”

She looked at him, seriously considering the question. “No, I don’t think I do.” She searched in her pocket and came out with a wad of tissues to wipe at her eyes. “Thank you, Sam. You didn’t have to do this.”

“What can I say? Underdog to the rescue?” He flashed a quick grin at her, and Jolie’s stomach executed a small but powerful flip. How did men do it? Women just got older—and quickly, especially in Hollywood. But men? Men aged, like wine. Sam Becket, she should have realized, could be considered nothing less than the finest vintage.

“All the superheroes to choose from, and you chose Underdog?”

“I guess I’m just a sucker for long, floppy ears.”

“Oh, my gosh—Rockne! I let go of his leash!”

“Jade has him,” Sam said as he moved into the passing lane, one eye on the rearview mirror. “Hold on, we’ve got a tail.”

“No, you have a tail. You’re Underdog, remember?” Jolie turned around on the seat and looked out the rear window. “So can this thing outrun a news van with a honking-huge satellite dish on top?”

To answer her question, Sam put the pedal to the metal, so that Jade had to hold on as she tried to turn around in her seat once more and buckle herself in tight. “How could I have forgotten what a show-off you are?” she asked him, leaning her head back against the headrest as he cut in and out of traffic, the speedometer edging past eighty in the thankfully thin late-morning traffic.

He was all concentration now, and Jolie took the opportunity to look at him more closely. His profile was still sharp, his nose straight and perfect, his cheekbones high, his brow smooth and unlined, his chin rock-solid as he edged past the sunny side of thirty. Thirty-three? Thirty-four? She should probably remember that, but she didn’t.

What she remembered was the thick, dirty-blond hair he wore shorter than the last time she’d seen him, and rather tousled—the kind of tousled that probably cost two hundred bucks a haircut. His fine, unblemished skin was a golden tan, although his right hand was a bit more pale, proving that he’d found time to get in a few rounds of golf while running Becket Imports, one of the many holdings of the embarrassingly rich Becket family.

Mostly what she remembered was how her body fit so well against Sam’s long, lean frame, the top of her head coming up to his chin, when she seemed to tower over most men. The way his hands had moved over her skin, the taste of his mouth, the intense, soul-exploding look in his green eyes as their two bodies merged…

“Where…uh, where are we going?”

“It would be rather senseless to lose the press and then go straight back to your father’s house, don’t you think?”

She nodded, biting her bottom lip. “True. So where are we going?”

“My place,” he said, dipping his head and looking across at her above the silver rims of his sunglasses. “Do you mind?”

Jolie shook her head, ignoring another quick stomach flip. “I don’t think I’m ready to go back home yet, so, no, I don’t mind. You know, I was so busy trying not to look at anybody that I didn’t even see you this morning. Were you at the church?”

“Sorry, no. I was out of the country until late last night and only saw the newspaper clippings my secretary put on my desk when I got to the office this morning. And since I haven’t said it yet, I’m really sorry about Teddy. He was a hell of a guy.”

“He always liked you,” Jolie said, blinking back tears again.

“Not always.”

She turned to look at him. “Excuse me? It was always Sam this and Sam that and ‘Sam is a helluva guy, Jolie.’”

“That probably was before he warned me to stay away from you or he’d rearrange my face.”

“He—oh, he did not. Did he? Omigod, he did! When did he do that?”

Sam looked at her, doing that head-dip thing again so he could hit her with those green eyes of his above the sunglasses. “Do we really want to go into ancient history right now, when we’re getting along so well?”

“No, I suppose not,” she said as she slid down onto the base of her spine and watched the scenery that consisted mostly of enormous cement sound barriers erected to protect the mansions on the other side from the sights and sounds of the highway.

Ten uncomfortably silent minutes later Sam eased onto the Valley Forge exit, and she knew they were now only minutes away from his home in Villanova. Too soon, he turned onto the familiar long, winding lane leading toward his house. His mansion. His humungo—ridiculously humungo for one person, in any case—house that stood at the rear of a cul-de-sac, behind high stone walls, huge wrought-iron gates. And a gatehouse, for crying out loud. Sam’s house made ninety-nine percent of the mansions in Beverly Hills look both insubstantial and faintly tacky.

That was one of the differences, Jolie had decided, between old money and new money. New money shouted. Old money whispered.

“Again, I’m sorry I got to the cemetery so late, although it turned out I got to park close enough to do my Underdog-to-the-rescue bit. I’d expected more of a crowd.”

Jolie was grateful for the change of subject. “There was a crowd, lookie-lous outside of the church. But only the press followed us to the cemetery. And,” she added, sighing, “I guess you really know who your friends are when you’re accused of murder. I can think of at least two dozen faces I should have seen there today and didn’t. They’ll not be welcome once Jade and Jess and I figure out who killed Teddy and that woman, let me tell you.”

He stopped in front of the closed gates. “You’re kidding, right?”

She looked at him levelly, which wasn’t easy to do as she’d raised her chin a good three inches higher into the air. “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

“No. I remember that determined look. I think I still get nightmares, as a matter of fact. But we’re not going to talk about any of that now, right?”

Jolie knew what he was saying without really saying it, and since the last thing she had energy for was a five-year-old fight, she sat up straight as the gates swung open. Sam eased the Mercedes through the opening and stopped.

“Isn’t that—”

“Carroll Yablonski, yes. Although the last person who called him Carroll is probably still in traction,” Sam said as the human fireplug lumbered toward the window Sam was lowering. “Bear Man? No visitors, okay? I’m not home to anybody. Oh, and if any reporters show up and try to give you a hard time, you have my permission to eat them.”

“That’d be fun. Got the choppers for it now, thanks to you.” Carroll grinned, showing off a too-large set of obvious dentures. Then he leaned his head in low and looked across the interior of the car at Jolie. “Hullo, Miz Sunshine. Love your movies. Seen ’em all. Tough break about your daddy.”

“Thank you Car—Bear Man. I appreciate that.”

Bear Man stepped back a pace, banged the flat of his hand on the roof of the car to give the all-clear, and Sam continued up the curved driveway.

“Well, I’m waiting,” Jolie said quietly.

“He needed a job.”

“I thought he was a professional wrestler in one of those W-W-W-W thingies. And a star, too.”

“He was—until he had his head run into the turnbuckle a few too many times. They may fake that stuff, but people still do get hurt. Bear Man needed a job that didn’t tax his scrambled brains too much. He needed somewhere to live. I just happened to be able to help him out, that’s all.”

“The quarterback taking care of his offensive linemen,” Jolie said, smiling at him. “Did Carroll—Bear Man—ever graduate? I don’t remember.”

Sam stopped the car at the top of the circular brick driveway, just in front of the arched wooden door that, Jolie knew, was so thick it could probably withstand a battering ram…or a bazooka. “No. He just couldn’t keep up his grades. Probation for one semester, and then he lost his eligibility and dropped out. But we kept in touch.”

“More than can be said for you and some other fellow grads of good old Temple U. Not that we attended the same years. All I got to hear about back then, though, was Sam Becket, the scholar, the quarterback, the legend.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning nothing,” Jolie said, unbuckling her seat belt. “I’m saying all the wrong things. I just buried my father, for God’s sake. Forget I said anything.”

He put his hand on her forearm to keep her in her seat. “I’ve missed you, Jolie.”

She looked down at his hand, willing him to remove it, wishing he had put his arms around her. “Not enough, Sam.”

He moved his hand. “Let’s go inside and find you something to drink. Find us both something to drink.”

She didn’t wait for him to come around and open the door for her but stepped out into the now warm June sun to stand looking at the house she’d visited a hundred times. They’d made love in most of those rooms. Twenty-three of them. Including one memorable interlude in the barrel-vaulted formal dining room that had involved the genuine Tudor-era table, a pair of sturdy, low-hanging wrought-iron chandeliers and the cream puffs that were supposed to be their dessert.

Which they were. Sort of…

Her cheeks had been flushed with embarrassment the entire next evening as she’d sat at the bottom of the table, playing hostess, while Sam had entertained the mayor and his wife to help launch the man’s reelection campaign. Especially when dessert had been served. Cream puffs. Sam had winked at her as one was set in front of her on a Rosenthal dessert plate. He’d then told the mayor how the chandeliers in the room were rumored to have been an acquisition of his notorious ancestor Ainsley Becket in the late 1700s, back when privateering was an acceptable way of life.

And why did she have to think about all of that now?

Her cell phone rang, shaking her out of her uncomfortable thoughts, and she rummaged in her bag, glad for the interruption.

“Hello?” She looked at Sam, mouthed Jade. “You and Jessica want to what? I know nobody knows about him, but what does that have to do with—I don’t know, I’ll have to ask him. But won’t you be followed?” She listened a moment and then rolled her eyes. “Mea culpa. How could I ever even think the great Jade Sunshine couldn’t elude a—hey, Secret Squirrel, I said I’ll ask him. Give me a minute, all right? Munch on a walnut or something.”

She pressed the open phone to her chest and looked at Sam, who was smiling at her in a way that told her he still enjoyed listening to the Sunshine sisters bicker like little children. “Jade and Jess want to come here, talk, maybe spend the night until the last of the press takes a hike from our front yard. I’ll tell them no.”

“No, don’t do that. If the press is still bothering you at the house, it seems logical to bunk here, at least overnight. I’ve got plenty of room.”

Jolie put a second hand over the phone. “But I don’t want them to come here. Say no, Sam. Be a beast.”

He reached for the cell phone, and since she was holding it between her breasts and the contact was a little too intimate, she let him take it from her.

“Jade? Hi, it’s Sam. Good to hear your voice again, too. No problem, somebody had to do it. Hysterical?” He grinned at Jolie, who glared daggers back at him. “I wouldn’t say exactly hysterical. But you know how she is…yeah, right. Sure. See you then.”

“You know how she is what?” Jolie demanded, following him up the three shallow steps to the front door. “How is she, Sam?”

He placed his thumb against a small, discreet panel cut into the woodwork of the doorjamb, and the door swung open soundlessly. “How she’s prone to be a bit dramatic at times,” he said as Jolie stared, bug-eyed, at the panel. “But that probably comes with the territory with actresses, right?”

Jolie pointed at the panel. “It beats being paranoid, Chester. And why not a retinal scan? Or didn’t you want to be seen as going overboard? Jeez.”

“Ah, that brings back memories. I haven’t been Chester for a long time. And I took the security system in exchange for a pair of Ming-dynasty floor vases I’d been trying to unload for two years. I don’t even need to key in a code once I’m in the house, thanks to the thumb pad. Clever, yes?”

“Uh-huh,” Jolie muttered vaguely as she entered the large flagstone-floored foyer, mentally throwing away the key to Sam’s front door that she’d refused to part with for five long years. She stopped to take a look around, wondering what else had changed in her absence.

But she should have known. Furnish your house in antiques and you don’t exactly go running out to JCPenney every couple of years for a new pseudo-suede lounge chair with built-in cup holders and a pocket for the TV remote.

She removed her sunglasses and walked straight ahead, into the living room that stretched nearly across the entire rear of the house. A person could bowl in Sam’s living room, which he sometimes called “the lounge” or “the salon.” But only when trying to impress somebody who wanted to be impressed, as she recalled. “How long before Jade and Jessica show up?”

“Two hours or more, I guess. They’re going to go out for lunch once they can get shed of the aunts—Jade’s words, not mine—and then they have to give the reporters the slip. That reminds me—I have to call down to Bear Man and alert him that they’re coming. Why do you ask?”

He asked the question from only a foot or two behind her, so that Jolie found herself beating a retreat to one of the sets of French doors that led out to the flagstone terrace and the Olympic-size reflecting pool that stretched lengthwise away from the house between two rows of slim, tall Italian something-or-other evergreens. We made love in the pool, too…more than once…

When she turned around, it was to see that Sam had also removed his sunglasses. And loosened his tie, unbuttoned the top button of his crisp white dress shirt. How she longed to feel his arms around her, to feel something other than grief.

Distance. She needed to put some distance between them. Fast.

“I just…I feel grubby. Do you mind if I take a shower?”

Sam bowed his head slightly and waved her toward the foyer and the wide circular staircase that led upstairs. “Be my guest. You know where everything is. Oh, and I think there’s still a few pieces of your clothing in a bottom drawer in my dressing room.”

“You think?” she asked, her heart beginning to do its pounding-too-hard thing again.

“All right, Jolie, I know. I had the bathroom and dressing room remodeled last year, and Mrs. Archer asked me what to do with a few things.”

“And you told her to put everything in a bottom drawer? Why, Sam?”

He looked at her levelly, a muscle working in his cheek. “Just go take your shower, Jolie, all right? I’ll find Mrs. Archer and have her make up some sandwiches for us before she leaves for her sister’s anniversary party.”

She caught her bottom lip between her teeth as she nodded. It took everything she had not to run from the room but to only walk away and not look back.

But that wouldn’t work. It hadn’t worked then, it wouldn’t work now. She’d been looking back for five long years…