Genuine Lies

anything but peeling you out of that proper little dress, ofseeing if that perfume I watched you spray on hours ago is still clinging to your skin—just there—under the curve of your jaw.”
    As he ran his fingers along the line, she moved again. But rising was an error in judgment, only bringing her up hard against him. “You’re trying to distract me.”
    “Damn right.” He tugged down her zipper, chuckling as she tried to wriggle aside. “Everything about you has been distracting me from the moment I met you.”
    “I want to know,” she tried again, then gasped as he jerked the dress down to her waist. His mouth was on her, and his hands, not gently, not seductively, but with a possessive fervor that edged toward frenzy. “Paul, wait. I need to understand why she ended it.”
    “It only took murder.” His eyes blazed as he dragged her head back. “Cold-blooded, calculated murder for profit. Delrickio’s money was on Damien Priest, so he eliminated the competition.”
    Horror widened her eyes. “You mean he—”
    “Stay away from him, Julia.” He dragged her against him. Through the thin silk she could feel the heat that poured from his flesh. “What I feel for you, what I might do for you, makes what I felt for Eve all those years ago nothing.” He caught her hair in tensed, fisted fingers. “Nothing.”
    Even as she shuddered with excitement he pulled her to the floor and showed her.

Tucked into her robe, Julia sipped a brandy. Her body was heavy with fatigue and sex. She wondered if this was what it might feel like to find herself tossed up on a dry shore after a wild battle with a violent sea. Drained, exhilarated, dazed, because she had survived the violence and the uncanny beauty of something so primitive and so ageless.
    As her pulse leveled and her mind cleared, the word Paul had spoken before dragging her into that turbulent sea echoed in her head.
    The word was
murder.
    She understood even though they sat close together on the sofa, the silence between them intimate, that this balance between them could be so easily skewed. However frenzied their mating, it was here, in the quiet after, while the air cooled and thinned again, where they needed to reach each other. Not just a hand linked with a hand, but again, that small, vital matter of trust for trust.
    “As you were saying,” she began, and made him smile.
    “You know, Jules, some might call you focused. Others might consider you just a nag.”
    #x201C;I’m a focused nag.” She laid a hand on his knee. “Paul, I need to hear this from you. If Eve has any objections to what you tell me tonight, it stops there. That’s the agreement.”
    “Integrity,” he murmured. “Isn’t that what Eve said she admired in you?”
    He touched her hair. They sat like that for a moment before she spoke again, quietly.
    Shaken, Julia rose to pour more brandy. She’d said nothing throughout Paul’s story of how Damien’s competitor had died, Eve’s suspicion it was murder—-murder ordered by Delrickio.
    “We never spoke of it again,” Paul had ended. “Eve refused to. Priest went on to win the title, then retired. Their divorce caused some commotion for a while, but that died down. After a while I began to see why she had handled it that way. Nothing could have been proven. Delrickio would have had her killed if she’d tried.”
    Now, before trying to speak, she sipped and let the hot punch of liquor steady her voice. “Is this why you were against the bio? Were you afraid Eve would tell this story and put her life in jeopardy.”
    Paul looked up at her. “I know she will. The right time, the right place, the right method. She wouldn’t have forgotten; she wouldn’t have forgiven. If Delrickio believes she’s told you and you’re contemplating printing it, your life won’t be worth any more than hers is.”
    She watched him as she took the seat beside him. She would have to go carefully here. All the years she had been on her own, making her own decisions, following her own code made it difficult to explain herself. “Paul, if you had believed, really believed that going to the police would have brought justice, would you have walked away from it?”
    “That’s not the point—”
    “Perhaps it’s too late for points. It comes down to instinct and emotion, and that infinite gray area between right andwrong. Eve believes in what she’s doing with this book. And so do I.”
    He grabbed at a cigar, struck viciously at a