Mind Over Matter

giving.
    Holding himself back, he watched her climb higher. That was what he wanted, he realized, to give her everything there was to give. When she arched and shuddered, the force whipped through him. Power, he recognized it, but was driven to leash it. His mouth found hers and drew on the sweetness. How could he have known sweetness could be so arousing?
    The blood was pounding in his head, roaring in his ears, yet his body continued to move slowly with hers. Balanced on the edge, David said her name a last time.
    “Aurora, look at me.” When her eyes opened, they were dark and aware. “I want to see where I take you.”
    Even when control slipped away, echoes of tenderness remained.

10
    A lice Robbins had exploded onto the screen in the sixties, a young, raw talent. She had, like so many girls before her and after her, fled to Hollywood to escape the limitations of small-town life. She’d come with dreams, with hopes and ambitions. An astrologer might have said Alice’s stars were in the right quadrant. When she hit, she hit big.
    She had had an early, turbulent marriage that had ended in an early, turbulent divorce. Scenes in and out of the courtroom had been as splashy as anything she’d portrayed on the screen. With her marriage over and her career climbing, she’d enjoyed all the benefits of being a beautiful woman in a town that demanded, then courted, beauty. Reports of her love affairs sizzled on the pages of glossies. Glowing reviews and critical praise heaped higher with each role. But in her late twenties, when her career was reaching its peak, she found something that fulfilled her in a way success and reviews never had. Alice Robbins met Peter Van Camp.
    He’d been nearly twenty years her senior, a hard-bitten, well-to-do business magnate. They’d married after a whirlwind two-week courtship that had kept the gossip columns salivating. Was it for money? Was it for power? Was it for prestige? It had been, very simply, for love.
    In an unprecedented move, Alice had taken her husband’s name professionally as well as privately. Hardly more than a year later, she’d given birth to a son and had, without a backward glance, put her career on hold. For nearly a decade, she’d devoted herself to her family with the same kind of single-minded drive she’d put into her acting.
    When word leaked that Alice Van Camp had been lured back into films, the hype had been extravagant. Rumors of a multimillion-dollar deal flew and promises of the movie of the century were lavish.
    Four weeks before the release of the film, her son, Matthew, had been kidnapped.
    David knew the background. Alice Van Camp’s triumphs and trials were public fodder. Her name was legend. Though she rarely consented to grace the screen, her popularity remained constant. As to the abduction and recovery of her son, details were sketchy. Perhaps because of the circumstances, the police had never been fully open and Clarissa DeBasse had been quietly evasive. Neither Alice nor Peter Van Camp had ever, until now, granted an interview on the subject. Even with their agreement and apparent cooperation, David knew he would have to tread carefully.
    He was using the minimum crew, and a well-seasoned one. “Star” might be an overused term, but David was aware they would be dealing with a woman who fully deserved the title and the mystique that went with it.
    Her Beverly Hills home was guarded by electric gates and a wall twice as tall as a man. Just inside the gates was a uniformed guard who verified their identification. Even after they had been passed through, they drove another half a mile to the house.
    It was white, flowing out with balconies, rising up with Doric columns, softened by tall, tall trellises of roses in full bloom. Legend had it that her husband had had it built for her in honor of the last role she’d played before the birth of their son. David had seen the movie countless times and remembered her as an antebellum tease who made Scarlett O’Hara look like a nun.
    There were Japanese cherry trees dripping down to sweep the lawn in long skirts. Their scent and the citrus fragrance of orange and lemon stung the air. As he pulled his car to a halt behind the equipment van, he spotted a peacock strutting across the lawn.
    I wish A.J. could see this.
    The thought came automatically before he had time to check it, just as thoughts of her had come automatically for days. Because he wasn’t yet sure just how he felt about