Genuine Lies

tell me anything I need to know about Michael Delrickio. I’d hoped to hear your point of view.”
    “Fine, my point of view is that he’s slime oozing around in an Italian suit. The worst kind of slime because he enjoys being exactly what he is.” His eyes glittered. “He profits from the miseries of the world, Julia. And when he steals, blackmails,maims, or kills, he lists it all under the tidy heading of business. It means no more and no less to him.”
    She sat, but she didn’t reach for her tape recorder. “Yet Eve was involved with him.”
    “I think it would be accurate to say that she didn’t realize precisely who and what he was before their relationship developed. Obviously, she found him attractive. He can certainly be charming. He’s articulate, erudite. She enjoyed his company, and, I’d think, his power.”
    “You were living with her,” Julia prompted.
    “I was going to school in California and making my base with her. I didn’t know how she’d met Delrickio until tonight.” A small detail, he thought, that hardly mattered. He knew the rest, or enough of the rest. And now, due to her own tenacity, so would Julia. “He started coming around—for a swim, a game of tennis, dinner. She went to Vegas with him a couple of times, but for the most part, they saw each other at the house. He was always sending flowers, gifts. Once he brought in the chef from one of his restaurants and had him prepare an elaborate Italian dinner.”
    “He owns restaurants?” Julia asked.
    Paul barely glanced at her. “He owns,” he said flatly. “A couple of his men were around, always. He never drove himself or came unaccompanied.” She nodded, understanding perfectly. Like the gates of Eve’s estate. Power always exacted a price. “I didn’t like him—didn’t like the way he looked at Eve as though she were one of his fucking orchids.”
    “Excuse me?”
    Paul rose and walked to the window. Restless, he tugged the drapes open a crack. The sleet had stopped, but there was a bitterness to the weather he could sense even behind the glass. One didn’t always have to see ugliness to recognize it. “He grows orchids. He’s obsessive about them. He was obsessive about Eve, hovering around, insisting on knowing where she was, with whom. She enjoyed that, mainly because she refused to account to him, and that would drive him crazy.” He glanced back to see her smiling. “Amused?”
    “I’m sorry, it’s only that I’m—well, envious, I suppose, of the way she skillfully handles the men in her life.”
    “Not always so skillfully,” he murmured, and didn’t return the smile. “I walked in on an argument once when he was raging at her, threatening her. I ordered him out of the house, even tried to toss him out myself, but his bodyguards were on me like lice. Eve had to break it up.”
    Now there was no amusement, but a trickle of alarm and memory. Hadn’t Delrickio said something about it being a pity Eve hadn’t let him teach Paul respect? “You’d have been, what, about twenty?”
    “About. It was ugly, humiliating, and illuminating. Eve was angry with him, but she was every bit as angry with me. She thought I was jealous—and maybe I was. I got a bloody nose, a few sore ribs—”
    “They hit you?” she interrupted in a voice sharp with appalled shock. He had to grin.
    “Babe, you don’t train apes to play patty-cake. It could have been worse—a lot worse, as I was doing my best to get my hands around the bastard’s throat. You might not have heard I have a sporadic affection for violence.”
    “No,” she said calmly enough, even while her stomach churned. “I hadn’t. Was this, ah, episode, the reason Eve broke it off with Delrickio?”
    “No.” He was tired of talking, tired of thinking. “As far as she was concerned, her relationship with him had nothing to do with me. And she was right.” Slowly, as if he were stalking, he moved toward her. And, like all things hunted, she felt the quick tremor of alarm that kicked her heart rate from slow to racing. “Do you know how you look just now, sitting with you back straight in that chair, your hands neatly folded? And your eyes so solemn, so concerned?”
    Because he made her feel foolish, she shifted. “I want to know—”
    “That’s the problem,” he murmured, bending over to take her face in his hands. “You want to know when all you have to do is feel. What do you feel now when I tell you I can’t think of