by Tracy Wolff
“Did you? And still you took me up on my offer of a tour when you could be upstairs dancing with my daughter?”
I shrug. “I wanted to see how your tour differed from hers.”
“Of course you did.” She crooks a brow. “Always the reporter, Ian?”
“Always the writer,” I correct her.
“Is there a difference?”
“Sometimes.”
She laughs again, ushers me along. “You are entirely too affable for your own good, you know that?”
“And here I thought being affable was a good thing.”
“It is…as long as it’s not a mask to hide something else entirely.”
It’s my turn to crook a brow. “I thought I was the profiler here?”
“Darling, you don’t survive in this town as long as I have without knowing how to read people.”
It’s the opening I’ve been waiting for. “Do you ever make mistakes in reading people? Ever trust someone you shouldn’t?”
“Not very often.” There’s a long pause before she admits, “But that just means when you do make a mistake, it’s a big one.”
“I can imagine.” I follow her down another staircase to the second floor, where Veronica’s and her suites are. “Your daughter seems to feel the same way. She’s very guarded.”
“She’s had to be.”
“Growing up as the adored only child of Melanie and Salvatore Romero…it must have been a lot.”
Melanie stops and looks at me for long seconds and I wonder if I pushed too hard too fast. I want to ask her about Veronica’s childhood and about William Vargas, but if I seem too invasive I’m pretty sure Melanie will clam up and that’s the last thing I want.
“She handled it very well,” Melanie finally says. “Veronica has always been a trooper. Not that growing up our daughter didn’t also come with some fabulous perks, because it did. But yes, she always dealt with the more difficult parts of fame very well—even from an early age.”
“I’m sure it helps that she had such a supportive mother. I think that makes up for a lot.”
“I wish you’d tell her that,” Melanie says with another one of her tinkling laughs. I’m already paying close attention—to everything that’s being said and everything that isn’t—but hearing it puts me on hyperalert again.
“She doesn’t see her childhood that way?” I ask.
“Oh, she does. Most of the time. But all parents have to make decisions their children don’t agree with at one time or another. Sometimes I think Veronica remembers those times more than she remembers the good ones. I mean, it’s hard to forget a cruise around the Mediterranean on a private yacht or skiing in Patagonia in July, but I think sometimes she manages it. The money’s always been there, you know, so things like that get taken for granted, I think.”
Or they’re overshadowed by other, darker things. Things that no vacation, no matter how exciting, can make up for. I don’t say that, though. I can’t, when I still don’t know exactly what it is I’m looking for. “What was your favorite vacation with Veronica? Your favorite place to visit?”
“Oh, there’ve been so many. And not just vacations. Salvatore shot movies in some of the most gorgeous and interesting places on earth and I was in a number of them—which meant we got to live different places for six months or so at a time. Athens, Sydney, Vancouver, Tokyo, London. I would have done anything for that kind of life when I was a child.” She sighs, her eyes taking on a faraway look for several seconds before she seems to come back to herself. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go down memory lane like this.”
“No, it’s fine,” I assure her, deliberately not pointing out the fact that I steered her down that lane on purpose. “I enjoy hearing about that part of your life. Veronica’s life. So much more interesting than my solid middle class upbringing in Boston.”
“Mine, too.” She reaches out, squeezes my arm. “Hey, do you maybe want to look through a couple photo albums of Veronica’s childhood? Maybe you can find a picture or two they’d like to run in the Vanity Fair article?”
“I never even thought of that—I bet the editors would love a few photos of her with her family. Especially with you, since you two look so much alike. I’m surprised they didn’t want you to be a part of the photo shoot they had here the other day.”
“I know. I suggested that Veronica bring it up, but she refused to.” She links our arms once again, uses the connection to steer me toward her own suite. “She’s so famous and yet she gets so embarrassed asking for anything. I tell her all the time that there’s no point being who she is if she doesn’t take advantage of the benefits every once in a while.”
I’ve only known Veronica four days and already I know that’s pretty much the worst thing you can say to her. It’s been said that if you want to know the measure of a person, just watch how they treat the people who can’t help them. She may go all aloof and untouchable sex goddess on me, but that has much more to do with the crazy chemistry between us than it does any ego on her part. With the people at the photo shoot or the waiter at the restaurant where we first met or even the catering staff at tonight’s party, she has always been incredibly gracious.
After observing her for the last few hours, I’m not sure the same can be said for Veronica’s mother. Then again, she’s being more helpful to me than her daughter ever has and that is not a gift horse I’m willing to look in the mouth.
It doesn’t take long before we’re settled on a couch in Melanie’s sitting room, poring over three photo albums filled with pictures of the Romero family in days past. Melanie is in most of the pictures, which is not exactly a surprise to me. Any more than her willingness to open up, to tell stories about the places they’ve been and the people they’ve known, is. It’s very obvious that she loved every part of her life as both Hollywood sex symbol and dedicated wife of genius director Salvatore Romero. These photo albums were supposed to give me insight into Veronica, and they are, just not in the way I had originally expected them to. I’ve wondered before what it must have been like for her growing up with the parents, the lifestyle, she had. Now I’m seeing it firsthand, listening to her mother talk about it, and I can’t help feeling for her.
Growing up with Jason as a brother was no picnic for me, but at least I always knew where I stood with him. Growing up Melanie’s daughter…I’m not sure the same thing can be said. It must have been a very unsteady, very capricious way of life. For the first time, her secret house away from all this makes perfect sense to me. If I was living her life, I’d need a bolt-hole, too.
We’re in the middle of the second photo album, admiring pictures of Melanie (and Veronica, of course) at Waimea Canyon in Hawaii when I get my first glimpse of him. William Vargas/Liam Brogan. He’s in the background of the picture, helping what looks to be a nine- or ten-year-old Veronica out of an SUV while Melanie blows kisses at the camera in the foreground.
One of his hands is holding Veronica’s while the other is on her lower back. There’s nothing glaringly inappropriate about the way he’s touching her, except for the way he’s angled into her. And the fact that her face is completely blank. The same kind of blank it was when I was showing her the door at my hotel this morning.
The thought infuriates me, destroys me—the idea that I put the same look on her face that that bastard did. Almost as much as the knowledge that he had unfettered access to her for what my research indicates is almost three years.
It’s been twenty years since this picture was taken and still I want to grab Melanie, want to shake her, want to demand to know what the fuck she’d been thinking. Vamping for the camera, blowing kisses at her besotted husband, hamming it up while her daughter was right behind her, in the hands of a madman?
Of course, hindsight is twenty-twenty and the fact that this picture is still in the album attests to the fact that Melanie hadn’t had a clue what was going on. Then again, how could she when she was so wrapped up in herself and her perfect, movie star life?
I’m judging her harshly, I know, and I need to make sure I don’t go near the book until I’ve had some time to cool down and think it through. But it’s hard to do that when I’m sitting here looking at a picture in a family photo album of the man that so badly damaged the woman I l—
The second the thought runs through my head, I shut that shit down deep. I shove it into a dark, shadowy corner of my mind where I can either deal with it much, much later or simply ignore it completely. I’ve known Veronica four days, I remind myself. Four days. We’ve had passionate fights and even more passionate sex, but that’s it. That’s all there is to it. All there will ever be to it. Because the idea that I would be so stupid as to fall in love with a woman this damaged when I have absolutely nothing to give her, nothing to help her, is ludicrous. Veronica has been hurt enough. The last thing she needs is to deal with all the baggage that comes with me, too.
“Who is this?” I ask, pointing at the picture of Brogan as I interrupt Melanie’s soliloquy.
“That’s Veronica, silly. She—oh.” She stares at the picture hard for several seconds, a strange look on her face. “I didn’t realize he was in that photo.”
“Who?” I push.
“No one.” She takes the album from me, starts to pull the picture out from between the plastic. But she catches me watching her and at the last minute just straightens it up. “Just an old bodyguard of Veronica’s.”
Picture time is obviously over, though, because she closes the book and then stacks it on the coffee table underneath the other two.
“We should probably get back to the party,” she tells me as she pushes to her feet. For the first time since I got here tonight, she looks closer to her own age than her daughter’s. “The birthday girl can’t go missing too long.”
“Of course not.” This time I’m the one to push open the suite door that leads to the hallway. “I’m sorry for monopolizing your time.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. Anything I can do to help the man writing about my baby girl for Vanity Fair. Did you find any photos you like in the albums? I’m happy to have copies made for the magazine.”
“There are a few, actually. But let me talk to Vanity Fair and see what they say first, before you go to the trouble.”
“Honestly, it’s no trouble. I think the one of her and me in the polka dot bikinis would be cute. And maybe the one of us on the red carpet when Salvatore won his first Oscar. And the one of us at the Acropolis. Her hair was adorable that day.”
And Melanie had been at the height of her beauty, in a skimpy little dress that showed her legs to their best advantage. Big surprise. Is it any wonder Veronica has trouble opening up? Melanie herself has so many agendas I’m not sure how she keeps them all straight.
The second we enter the ballroom, I feel Veronica’s eyes on me. I turn to find her and we lock gazes for several long, loaded seconds. I start to cross to her but I’m still shaken from seeing that photo of her with Liam Brogan, still burning with rage at the knowledge that he was ever that close to her, and the suspicion—no, the knowledge—that before he left here he’d been even closer.
The sick son of a bitch.
Back when I was a profiler working this case, there were a few things about Brogan’s murders that always bothered me.
The escalating age of the victims that I was certain was modeled after a child who was growing into a young woman while the agents in the case were certain the girl was long grown.
The voyeuristic staging of the body that the others always thought signified a fantasy that he was playing out but that had always seemed nearly performance-like in nature to me.
And perhaps, most important, the way the crime seemed so much more about the rape than it did the actual murder, as if death was an afterthought instead of the goal.
We had caught him, despite our differing opinions regarding motive, but the whole thing had left such a sick taste in my mouth that I’d left NCAVC not long after. But the case had haunted me, the questions I’d never gotten answered poking at me even through the success of Belladonna and my subsequent books. At the time, I hadn’t had a clue where those answers would take me, any more than I’d realized just who stood to get hurt by them.
Now I do, but I’m in too deep to stop. For myself, for the book, and—most important—for Veronica.
Which is why I stand my ground, eyes locked with hers across the crowded ballroom but unsure of what I should say to her—or even, what I want to say.
Finally, I say to hell with it and head toward her. After seeing that picture, after all the crap that’s been chasing itself around in my head, I want to touch her. To hold her. To make sure that, after everything I fear she’s gone through, she really is okay.
But I waited too long. As I cross the ballroom, her eyes dart from me to her mother and back again. Then she very coolly, very deliberately, turns her back on me.
If this was any other day or if I hadn’t just seen proof of her exposure to Brogan, I might be tempted to ignore her very obvious No Trespassing signs. But today is what it is—it’s the day I woke up to see that I had all but savaged her while we made love and it’s the day I saw a picture of Brogan’s filthy hands all over the young girl she once was. If she’s putting up walls then I’m damn well going to respect them.
And so I don’t finish crossing the ballroom. I don’t approach her. I don’t even side-eye the many men—and a few women—who are very obviously vying for the chance to warm her bed tonight.
I head out instead, handing my ticket to the valet at the front door. I’m one of the last to arrive—and one of the first leaving despite the late hour—so he’s back with my rental car in only a couple of minutes. The small BMW looks out of place amid the Ferraris and Bentleys, but instead of bothering me as it would some in this town, it actually amuses me. At least until my phone buzzes and I glance down to see that Veronica has texted me an address. No explanation, no invitation, not even a time to show up. Just an address in Manhattan Beach and a number I can only assume is a gate code.
I stare at it for long seconds, trying to decide if it means what I think it does. I can’t help thinking that I’m getting ahead of myself, but when I turn to look up at the ballroom in an attempt to find an answer to a question I’ve barely let form, I see her. She’s on the balcony, leaning against the wrought iron with her hair blowing gently in the wind as she looks down at me.
I glance back at my phone, think about texting her to ask what the hell is up. But before my thumb can so much as press the first key, she’s gone and I’m left staring up at an empty balcony and wondering how the fuck the guy with all the research is also the one constantly standing around trying to figure out what the hell just happened.
Chapter 20
It takes me a lot longer to get out of the house after the party than I planned on—like close to two hours more. But Mom took forever saying goodbye to people and then she wanted to do a full party postmortem, no matter how many times I promised her we’d do it, when we met for breakfast on her actual birthday. I only escaped because I told her if she kept me any longer I was going to fall asleep behind the wheel—and even then she tried to talk me into staying the night at the house.
But I don’t sleep in that house. Ever. And she knows it, too, which is why she took my refusal fairly well despite the number of times she brought up the idea. And by fairly well I mean she pouted only for about five minutes. That’s pretty much a record for her.
By the time I’m finally on the road to Manhattan Beach, it’s a little after three in the morning and I figure Ian is long gone. No matter how much he wants me, there’s no way he sat outside my house for more than an hour and a half. Especially without knowing for sure that the address I gave him actually belonged to me.
I’m still not sure why I did it when I’ve made it such a point not to invite anyone to my home. I can tell myself it’s because I don’t want to be alone tonight, that between the bathtub and the garden I don’t trust mysel
f not to do anything else crazy. But while that might be true, I also know that it’s much more than that, too.
The minute he waltzed me out to that balcony and apologized, I knew we were going to end up in bed again.
I don’t know what’s going on between us—or even if there is an us. All I know is that I can breathe when Ian’s touching me, really breathe, in a way I haven’t been able to for far too long. When he’s got me tied to the bed and all of his attention is on me, I feel safe. In control. Like I can handle whatever the world dishes out to me.
It’s only when it’s over, when I’m back in my own head—or he’s back in his—that things go wrong.
Since I invited him to my home this time, I’m hoping that maybe neither one of us will kick the other one out once the sex is done. Maybe we’ll even be able to have breakfast together in the morning.
That is if he defied all reason and actually waited for me.
I tell myself not to be disappointed, assure myself that it will be okay if he’s gone once I get home. It’s beyond rude to expect him to wait this long for me, especially without so much as a follow-up message. And though all of those things are true, when I turn onto my street I still make a point of stopping at the guard shack instead of cruising straight through the gate.
“Hi, Curtis,” I say to tonight’s guard. He’s new enough—and young enough—that he straightens up the second he catches sight of me, his eyes going wide and his cheeks going ruddy. The kid is so obviously not from L.A. that I can’t help being completely endeared.
“Ms. Romero! Hello. Hello.” He fumbles for his clipboard, nearly drops it on the hood of my car in his haste to show me what’s on it. “I didn’t realize you weren’t home. A man checked in about an hour ago, saying he was going to your address.” He checks the clipboard again, though I’m pretty certain he’s got the name memorized by now. “A Mr. Ian Sharpe. I let him through because his name is on the list.” He turns back to the laptop resting on his desk. “It says here you called his name in a little after midnight.”