Buch lesen: «A Woman Worth Loving»

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS easy to have regrets about the way she’d lived her life when a man’s hands were wrapped around her throat, thumbs pressing insistently on her windpipe to cut off her oxygen supply. In truth, though, the excuses Audra had made for her bad behavior hadn’t seemed valid for a while now.

It’s not fair.

That thought registered even as her vision began to dim.

After all, she had been changing her ways—discreetly, which perhaps explained why the tabloids’ most recent headlines had still labeled her a gold digger.

Audra didn’t like the moniker, although she supposed she had been called far worse. Still, she had married for love and, after that, for emotional security. Wealth hadn’t been the quality that had attracted her to any of her husbands, including the late Henry Dayton Winfield the Third. He’d been kind, undemanding. He’d been…safe. And she had been determined that this marriage would work despite the gap in their ages. She had been determined that this time she would not fail. Marriage number three would not end in divorce like the previous two, leaving her disillusioned and her heart a gouged-out husk.

“Lying, manipulative witch,” spat the man squeezing her throat.

Audra was incapable of disputing his words. How ironic that when she had been capable of speaking out in her own defense, she hadn’t bothered.

In general, she hadn’t cared what other people thought about her or what adjectives they used to describe her, as long as they’d spelled her name right. She’d known her soul wasn’t completely black even if the rag-reading public thought differently. Since her most recent marriage in particular, she’d taken steps to restructure her lifestyle and realign the egocentric pattern into which she had fallen since coming to Hollywood. She was no Mother Teresa, but she had found great satisfaction and personal fulfillment by becoming involved with children’s charities in recent years, working quietly behind the scenes lest someone accuse her of exploiting the already-exploited in an attempt to salvage her flagging acting career.

While the tabloids might call her a gold digger—and the man trying to kill her clearly saw her that way—she had in fact made an appointment with her lawyer that very afternoon to rework her late husband’s will so that his rightful heirs would inherit the vast estate.

She didn’t need the money, nor did she feel entitled to it. She had amassed a fair bit of wealth on her own, thanks to a few smart investments. Still, she could understand why some people who didn’t know her, and who only read tabloid stories about her, would see her as a candidate for stoning.

As she floated near the edge of consciousness, the past thirty years played through her mind like some poorly acted, made-for-television movie. That was galling, but apropos. She’d never made much of a name for herself in Hollywood, at least not the kind that could be repeated in polite company.

She’d caused her share of trouble and heartache, bitterness and outright rage, which, she thought with the brutal honesty of the dying, was exactly how she found herself in her current predicament. She’d pushed the envelope too far, thumbed her nose at convention one time too many.

At one point she’d felt she’d had good reasons for being a wild child, a rebellious teenager and then an adult who’d lived scandalously enough to become weekly tabloid fodder. Those reasons had ceased to matter, perhaps because Audra had finally realized they didn’t absolve her from responsibility or translate into happy endings.

You reap what you sow. How often had she heard that advice while growing up? Yet it had taken her all this time to understand and accept the truth of those simple words.

And now it was too late to complete her metamorphosis.

As the saying went, the chickens had come home to roost, and the head cock now had his big hands encircling her neck. With each passing second his grip grew tighter.

And tighter.

And tighter.

I’m not ready to die.

Even as that panicky thought registered anew she prepared for the inevitable, praying for forgiveness from the God she’d only recently become reacquainted with, and wishing she could seek the same from the many people she had wronged over the years. Her sister topped the list.

I’m so sorry.

The words whispered through her mind, unable to make it past her gasping lips. Surrendering to the blackness rimming her vision, Audra accepted that her apology was too little, and, like her bid for self-respect, had come too late.

Through the telephoto lens of his digital camera, Seth Ridley watched the blonde open the door to her stepson. Now, there was a kicker. The blonde and the stepson were about the same age. But then, Audra Conlan Howard Stover Winfield was not known for being conventional.

Or conservative.

Not many women could pull off four-inch red stiletto heels, but she did—he swallowed hard—a little too well. The skimpy excuse for a skirt covered just enough of her bottom to keep a man’s imagination engaged and his libido working overtime. Her blouse was white, although nothing about it could be called virginal. The neckline scooped low, offering a tantalizing view of cleavage.

Sexy, he thought, unable to stop a low whistle as he clicked off a few shots. Some women would look cheap in that outfit, but he knew from the past couple of years of photographing Audra that the woman the tabloids had dubbed “Naughty Audie” was neither cheap nor easy. She was calculating, shrewd and clever, as her third marriage to the now deceased Henry Dayton Winfield the Third implied, even though the sixty-year-old business tycoon’s death had been sudden and by all accounts, unexpected.

And she was beautiful—sinfully so.

Seth shook off his preoccupation with her looks, annoyed by the unacceptable jolt of attraction he always felt when he saw her. He had a score to settle and a job to do, which was why he was crouched down low outside her home, camera in hand, waiting.

Pictures tell the story.

Seth had always believed that. Pictures of Audra told of life lived in excess, although lately she’d seemed more subdued and almost introspective. Still, as a celebrity—he wouldn’t call her an actress—she’d learned how to work the paparazzi. The camaraderie between Audra and the photographers involved give-and-take and perfect timing. Although Seth always stayed to the back of the pack with a ball cap snugged low over his brow, he had to admit Audra knew where to look, how to pose. His goal, of course, was to get her when she wasn’t smiling or posing, or looking and acting her oddly likable, if outrageous, best.

Times such as now.

As he snapped a few shots of her clandestine meeting with Henry the Fourth, he felt a bit like a voyeur. As a member of the paparazzi, of course, Seth had been called far worse. At one time the disgust and self-loathing over his career switch from serious photojournalist to tabloid photographer had made him almost physically sick. Now he comforted himself with the knowledge that he wasn’t really paparazzi.

Seth had far better reasons for doing what he did than pulling in a handsome paycheck. Personal reasons that surely elevated his new occupation into something almost noble. An editor at one of the rags where Seth regularly sold his work called Seth’s dogged pursuit of Audra a crusade. Seth liked that designation, even if he would give anything—everything—to rewind the past two years of heartache and erase the shattering reason he was on it.

Grief was a powerful motivator. He refused to believe that what drove him might actually be guilt.

He got lucky and Audra left open the curtains in the living room. With the lamps glowing and a fire flickering cheerfully in the hearth as evening settled in outside, the scene looked cozy and intimate and would be easy to photograph thanks to the 1000-millimeter lens on his Nikon D2H.

The grieving widow of six months was meeting with her stepson, no doubt to offer comfort and sympathy, and the word from Seth’s sources was that the conversation between the pair would be limited to moans and grunts. As distasteful as Seth found that prospect, he nonetheless planned to document it.

He’d made a deal with Lucifer, although in this case the devil’s name was actually Deke Welling, a tabloid reporter known for his liberal use of unidentified sources and paid informants in the poisonous articles he penned. Celebrities grumbled about libel, but since they had a hard time proving either that what Deke wrote about them was untrue or published with malice, they rarely followed through on their threats to sue.

Welling was a bottom-feeder, no question about it, but he was a highly effective one. At the moment he also was working on a Hollywood tell-all book in which Audra Winfield would be a featured attraction. Seth had promised to get revealing photos to go with Welling’s revealing text. And he’d promised to pass on any juicy tidbits he uncovered about Audra along the way. The book would be the ultimate in exposure, Seth knew. A hardbound reminder of Audra’s reckless living that would enjoy a much longer shelf life than any tabloid cover.

It was to be Seth’s coup de grâce, and he told himself that afterward he wouldn’t feel this aching anger that had all but consumed him for the past two years. Then he could hang up his paparazzi credentials and Scott Smithfield alias, and finally—finally—be free of the past.

As he watched through the viewfinder, Audra gestured dramatically and then backed away from her guest.

Click-click-click.

Playing coy? Audra? Something about the situation didn’t seem quite right. Henry the Fourth, a heavyset man of thirty-three, wasn’t put off, though. He moved forward.

Click-click-click.

Seth checked the aperture again and then waited for the shot that he wanted. The one that would expose Audra’s duplicitous nature most clearly.

The stepson raised his hand.

Click-click-click.

He appeared to caress Audra’s neck above the diamond choker she wore, and Seth’s stomach lurched.

Don’t let him touch you. The thought came from nowhere. As he watched, the man yanked off the choker and tossed it across the room. A gift from the old man, Seth decided.

“Yeah, pal, I wouldn’t want a reminder of my dead father at a time like this, either,” he murmured, pushing aside the weird press of emotions that had him wanting Audra to turn the stepson out of her home before things could progress.

But then Seth wouldn’t get what he was after, he reminded himself. And so, holding the camera steady, he depressed his index finger.

Click-click-click.

The stepson advanced farther still, and Audra retreated…back…back.

Seth swore under his breath and, craning to one side, inwardly pleaded, “Don’t move out of range. Don’t move out of range.”

He was both relieved and disturbed when he realized Audra was backed up against a wall.

“Nowhere left to run,” he whispered. He sometimes felt that way himself.

Through the camera’s magnified eye, Seth watched her face. She appeared pale and something suspiciously akin to fear shadowed her expression. Transferring his gaze to her ungainly suitor, Seth told himself that what Audra more likely felt was revulsion. Like his old man, the son’s most attractive quality was his bank account.

Click-click-click.

Intuitively Seth knew that the next shot would be the one to tell the whole story. Worth a thousand words, as the saying went.

He was right—dead right—but he didn’t take it.

Maybe later he would think about that. But when he realized the widow Winfield was being choked to death by her stepson, he merely reacted, going on gut instinct and some primitive need that ordered him to protect her.

He flung aside his Nikon, unmindful of what it would cost to replace either the camera or its pricey telephoto lens, and took off like a bullet from his hiding spot in the bushes just outside the fancy entrance to the Winfields’ Brentwood estate. Thank God the wrought-iron gates hadn’t closed after the arrival of Audra’s visitor. The length of manicured lawn seemed to stretch endlessly as he literally raced against time to reach her, to save the very woman he had vowed to destroy.

He hit the unlocked door at a full-out run, splintering the wood around the jamb in his haste, not to mention bruising his shoulder. He didn’t feel it. He didn’t even flinch. Inside the foyer he turned to the left, his hand raised and already curled in a fist when he entered the living room.

“What the…”

Those were the only words Henry the Fourth managed to utter before Seth’s right hand connected with the other man’s jaw. The guy dropped to the floor, where his head bounced twice on the gleaming hardwood with sickening thuds. Then he was sprawled out, unmoving, right next to the woman he had been trying to strangle to death.

The sight of Audra had Seth’s blood running cold. She looked so still, so lifeless. And while he had no qualms about invading her privacy and trying to expose every last unflattering detail of her personal life to public scrutiny and scorn, that wasn’t the same as wanting her dead.

He couldn’t exact revenge on a dead woman.

Oddly enough, though, revenge wasn’t what he was thinking about as he crouched beside her prone form and placed the tips of his index and middle fingers against the underside of her jaw. Just below them, red and purple bruises were already forming a macabre necklace.

When he felt her weak pulse, he swore in relief and shifted forward until he was on his knees. He didn’t miss the irony that it was the pose fit for prayer. He recalled exactly how long it been since he’d called on a higher power. The results had been less than satisfactory.

“Looks like you’ll make it,” Seth murmured.

He’d seen her up close through his camera lens on hundreds of occasions, but this was the first time he’d ever touched her. He smoothed the long, white-blond hair back from her face, trying not to notice that it was silky and incredibly soft. Then he reached for the cell phone clipped to the waistband of his jeans and tapped in 9-1-1. After what seemed like an ungodly amount of time, the disembodied voice of the dispatcher came on the line.

“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”

“A woman has been choked, nearly to death. She needs an ambulance.”

“Is she conscious?”

Audra’s eyelids had flickered a couple of times, opening enough at one point that Seth could see her dilated pupils, but he doubted that counted.

“No, but she’s breathing on her own. Her attacker may need medical attention, too,” he added as an afterthought, sparing a glance in the prone man’s direction. Henry the Fourth was still out cold. “He, uh, hit his head when I pulled him off her.”

“Can you stay with her until help arrives?”

Seth didn’t answer immediately. He didn’t want to get involved, especially with this woman, which seemed absurd. In a way, his and Audra’s lives had been intertwined since the fateful afternoon two years earlier when a middle-class family had been wiped out in an automobile accident near Big Sur. The family had been Seth’s. His younger sister and stepfather had died at the scene. His mother had remained alive in only the most basic sense of the word for a couple of months before finally succumbing to her closed-head injuries. Now it was the woman Seth blamed for the accident who was fighting for her life.

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.