Genuine Lies

challenge, a role she has agreed to play with great verve—and one in which she takes no direction. Any miscues or broken scenes are her responsibility. She blames no one. Beyond the talent, the beauty, that rich, smoky voice or sharp intelligence, she is to be admired for her unflagging sense of self.
    “You’re not one to waste time.”
    Julia started, then quickly shifted to look behind her. She hadn’t heard Paul approach, had no idea how long he’d been standing reading over her shoulder. Deliberately, she turned her tablet over. The wire binding clicked smartly against the glass.
    “Tell me, Mr. Winthrop, what would you do to someone who read your work uninvited?”
    He smiled and made himself at home in the chair across from her. “I’d cut off all their nosy little fingers. But then, I’m known to have a nasty temper.” He picked up her glass and sipped. “How about you?”
    “People seem to think I’m mild-mannered. It’s often a mistake.” She didn’t like him being there. He’d interrupted her work and invaded her privacy. She was dressed in shorts and a faded T-shirt, her feet were bare and her hair was pulled back in an untidy pony tail. The carefully crafted image was shot to hell, and she resented being caught as herself. She lookedpointedly at the glass he lifted to his lips again. “Shall I get you one of your own?”
    “No, this is fine.” Her obvious discomfort amused him, and he liked the fact that she was so easily rattled. “You’ve had your first interview with Eve.”
    “Yesterday.”
    He pulled out a cigar, making it obvious that he intended to settle in. His hands, she noted, were wide at the palms, long of finger. More suited to lifting the silver spoon he’d been born with, she thought, then crafting complex, often grisly murders for the pages of books.
    “I realize I’m not sitting in an office with my nose to a grindstone,” Julia told him. “But I am working.”
    “Yes, I can see that.” He smiled pleasantly. She’d have to do better than hint to shake him off. “Care to share your impressions of your initial interview?”
    “No.”
    Undaunted, he lighted the cigar, then hooked an arm over the back of the wrought iron chair. “For someone who wants my cooperation, you’re very unfriendly.”
    “For someone who disapproves of my work, you’re very pushy.”
    “Not your work.” With his legs stretched out, his feet comfortably crossed at the ankles, he took a slow drag, expelled it. The scent of smoke stung the air, intrusively masculine. It crept around the perfume of flowers like a man’s arm around a reluctant woman. “I disapprove only of your current project. I have a vested interest.”
    It was his eyes, she realized, that gave him his greatest appeal—and, therefore, her greatest problem. Not the color of them, though some women were bound to sigh over that deep, vital blue. It was the look in them, the incredible focus of them that made Julia feel she was not being looked at, but into.
    A hunter’s look, she decided, and she wasn’t about to be any man’s prey.
    “If you’re concerned that I’ll write something uncomplimentary about you, don’t worry. Your part in Eve’s biography probably won’t take up more than part of one chapter.”
    Writer to writer, it would have been an excellent insult if his ego had been on the line. He laughed, liking her better for it. “Tell me something, Jules, is it just me, or all men?”
    The use of her nickname threw her almost as much as the question. Like a kiss instead of a handshake. “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Sure you do.” His smile was friendlier, but his eyes still challenged her. “I haven’t managed to pull out all the sharp little darts from the first time I met you.”
    She fiddled with her pen and wished he would just go away. He was entirely too relaxed now, and that made her all the more tense. Men with his degree of self-confidence always left her groping for her own. “As I recall, it was you who launched the first attack.”
    “Maybe.” He rocked back in his chair, watching her. No, he didn’t have her measure yet, but he would.
    She frowned as he rose to drop the cigar stub in a bucket of sand at the edge of the terrace. His was a dangerous body, she noted, all lean muscle and grace. A fencer’s body. Since he was the kind who wouldn’t be caged, a smart woman had to deal with him with her imagination behind locked doors. Julia considered herself a smart