A Woman Worth Loving

“Ready.” The word came out an unintelligible rasp and so she nodded instead. Then she sat up straighter in the wheelchair and squared her shoulders as the automatic doors parted for them.

She kept her gaze riveted on the limo and the rear door her driver, Nigel, held open, but she might as well have been striding up the red carpet on Oscar night the way the photographers and assorted tabloid reporters hollered out her name. Only the fact that they were held back by hospital security kept them from blocking her path.

“Audra! Audra! Look this way.”

“Over here, Audra!”

“Turn to your right, gorgeous!”

“Take off the scarf!”

“Show us your neck!”

In the past, she had always hammed it up for the cameras. She’d been more than willing to pose provocatively. On this day, though, she faced them stoically. When she reached the limo, she climbed in, closed the door and melted back against the seat cushions. No more, she thought. I’m no longer that woman.

“Where to, Mrs. Winfield?” her driver asked.

“Home,” she managed to murmur hoarsely after a couple of attempts.

As the limo took the familiar route toward the Brentwood estate a wave of loneliness swamped her. Henry’s mansion wasn’t her home. His son had pointed out that very fact in rather indelicate terms the evening before, right after which he had grabbed her by the throat.

“I wasn’t going to keep the house,” she whispered now. She still wasn’t going to keep it, or anything else of Henry’s for that matter, although she didn’t think the man who had attempted to kill her deserved it, either.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

“I don’t want to stay here,” she rasped a little louder as the limo turned up the estate’s tree-lined driveway.

“Where do you want to go, ma’am?” Nigel inquired politely.

Unbidden, Trillium Island came to mind. Audra had been gone ten years and married three times, but that small patch of land tucked up in the northeastern corner of Lake Michigan was the only place that had ever qualified as home, she realized now.

It was spring in Michigan, which could mean the weather was either bone-chillingly cold or warm enough to forgo a coat. The trillium would be in bloom on the island that bore its name. She’d always loved those flowers and the three snowy-white petals that served as a reminder to weary inhabitants that summer was just around the corner.

When Audra had left the island at age twenty, she’d burned the proverbial bridge behind her. She’d never intended to return. At the time, she’d convinced herself she was leaving because she craved excitement and wanted to live in a big, busy city. Now she could see that she hadn’t left Trillium so much as she had run away from it, chased by demons that she’d only recently begun to understand and to exorcise. Demons that still filled her with shame and embarrassment after all these years. But she was determined that those events would no longer define her. Nor would they define her sexuality.

Of course, the past wasn’t the only reason she’d fled Trillium. In part, Audra supposed she sought fame and fortune to prove to all of the islanders who’d sold her short that she was every bit as smart, determined and talented as her straight-A, straight-arrow fraternal twin.

Thinking of her sister, Audra made up her mind. It was time to go back. It was time to confront her past, and it was time for the New and Improved Audra Conlan to make things right with the people she had wronged.

She would start with Ali. She’d deserved an explanation and an apology for more than a decade.

“Keep the car running, please,” Audra whispered. “I won’t be long. I just need to throw clothes into some suitcases.”

“Are you going on a trip then, Mrs. Winfield?” Nigel asked. He was older than her father and had been employed for at least a couple dozen years by her late husband. Whatever he thought of her, and she was sure it could not be good, didn’t show in his bland expression.

Audra offered him her first genuine smile in a very long time.

“Not a trip, Nigel. I’m going home.”

It was nearly midnight, but Seth wasn’t sleepy. Nor was he hungry, he decided, tossing aside the half-eaten burger he’d picked up at the takeout joint up the street. He glanced through the stack of evening newspapers—both tabloid and more legitimate press—spread over the coffee table in his sparsely furnished apartment, and took a long pull from his beer. He, or rather his alter ego Scott Smithfield, had not taken any of the dozens of shots of Audra as she’d left the hospital, or later, when she’d arrived at the Los Angeles airport and boarded her deceased husband’s private jet.

“The almost late Mrs. Winfield was on time for her flight today,” one tabloid report quipped darkly.

The story went on to say no one was sure where she’d gone in the jet, which had made several stops before returning to California without her on board. Some speculated she was in Michigan, in the affluent Detroit suburb listed in her official biography as home.

But Seth thought differently. Through his meticulous research he’d discovered that Audra actually hailed from a small island community off the northern Michigan mainland. He’d bet his Nikon and every last lens he owned that she was going home. After all, wasn’t that where people always went when they needed to lick their wounds?

In the pictures she wore dark glasses, a scarf and the same sexy outfit she’d had on the night before. But she didn’t wave to the cameras, flash that wide smile of hers or even acknowledge the flock of photographers. That certainly was out of character, but then it was harder to flirt while riding in a wheelchair. Besides, a near-death experience tended to have a chilling effect on most folks. Apparently Audra was no exception.

“Attack subdues Hollywood’s flamboyant party girl,” a photo caption read.

Not for long, Seth thought. People like Audra didn’t change. Why would they? No one expected them to. No one demanded it. As Seth knew most painfully, the rules the rest of the world observed didn’t apply to celebrities, even someone like Audra, who was famous for being infamous. They did as they pleased, often without paying any meaningful price.

Audra certainly hadn’t paid. The old anger and bitterness resurfaced, shredding the veil of compassion he’d felt for Audra the evening before. While Seth had been busy burying his stepfather and half sister, and sitting vigil by his mother’s bedside, Audra’s high-priced lawyer had seen to it that she hadn’t been charged in the accident, even though her actor boyfriend, Trent Kane, had been at a party at her house and had left drunk and high behind the wheel of her car.

She’d worn black to Kane’s funeral, Seth recalled from the tabloid photographs, and then a year later she’d marched down the aisle for the third time as Henry’s bride, expanding her wealth by a cool couple billion dollars when he’d kicked the bucket before the couple had celebrated a single wedding anniversary.

“You’re going to pay, sweetheart,” Seth murmured to one of the grainy black-and-white photographs, relieved he was over whatever weakness he had succumbed to while she’d lain unconscious in his arms the evening before.

After he’d handed her over to the emergency medical technicians, Seth had spent half the night giving his statement to the police. Then, he’d wound up missing Audra’s exit from the hospital because he’d spent half the morning having his busted-up camera repaired.

“Too bad you didn’t get that shot of her being choked,” the repairman, who knew him only as Smithfield, had said. “I bet the tabloids would have paid out big for it. You could have retired.”

Seth had merely smiled. He was not ready to hang up his camera just yet, and money wasn’t the issue. He had plenty of it, thanks to various insurance settlements from his family.

Taking another gulp of his beer, he glanced at the photograph of his family that hung on the wall. He’d taken that picture two years ago, just hours before the fatal accident. Later, he’d had it enlarged, professionally matted and framed. In it, his sister and mother wore smiles, although the smiles didn’t reach their eyes. His stepfather stared back, no hint of a grin in his tightly compressed lips.

The old argument echoed in his Seth’s head for a moment. The raised voices taunted him because one of them was his own. The familiar pain lanced through him as it always did, leaving that hopeless ache in its wake. Three hours after he’d snapped that shot, his stepfather and half sister were dead, and a serious and eventually fatal injury had left his mother comatose.

He’d never said goodbye to any of them.

I never got to tell them all how sorry I was.

The guilt jabbed again, but Seth ignored it.

He had a job to do, a crusade to finish. Booting up his computer, he connected to the Internet. Fifteen minutes and a few clicks of the mouse later, he was booked on a nonstop flight to Detroit Metropolitan Airport that would leave Los Angeles in less than eight hours.

CHAPTER THREE

IT LOOKED the same.

Audra stood at the ferry’s rail and watched the island grow larger in the bright morning light. There were more houses north of the boat dock than she recalled. Big houses with huge windows to take advantage of the incredible view of the lake. But so much of it was still the same, as if the island were some sort of Brigadoon, untouched by time.

She’d been in Michigan for four days and it had taken her that long to screw up her courage. The trip over from Petoskey only took about half an hour, and all the while she kept wondering what she would say to her sister when they finally stood face-to-face.

Sorry for disappointing you.

Sorry for hurting you.