A Woman Worth Loving

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.

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.