Public Secrets

the McAvoy murder?”
“He’s my father. Miss—”

She laughed then, long and loud and delighted. “Better and better. Let’s call it fate, Michael.” Her hand slid up his thigh. “Relax.”
He wasn’t stupid. And he wasn’t dead. When she closed her hands over him, the pleasure speared through him like a heated blade. And so did the guilt. It was ridiculous, he told himself. She was gorgeous, dangerous—every man’s darkest fantasy. He’d had his share of women, starting with Caroline Fitzgerald on the night before his seventeenth birthday. They’d lost their virginity together, sweatily and clumsily. He’d learned a lot since good old Caroline.
Angie slipped the cigarette from his fingers, leaving it to smolder in the ashtray as he hardened against her palm. He was going to be sweet, she thought. So very sweet. And the irony—the irony was beautiful.
“I’ve never had a cop,” she murmured as she nipped at his lip. “You’ll be the first.”
He felt the breath back up in his lungs, thick and hot. He shook his head to clear it. He had one flash, achingly lucid, of sitting with Emma on the winter beach. Then Angie stood up. With a flick of her hands, she unsnapped her belt. She had only to shrug her shoulders to have the red silk slithering to the floor. Beneath it her body was white and lush and naked. She ran her hands over it, lingering, caressing as adoringly as a lover. Before he could find the strength to stand, she was straddling him. On a groan of pleasure, she pressed his mouth against one perfect, polished breast.
“Do things to me,” she murmured. “Do anything you like.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

T HE SUPERMARKET TABLOIDS had a field day.
A NGIE P ARKS’S R OOKIE L OVER
The Inside Story
T RIANGLE OF P ASSION AND M URDER IN H OLLYWOOD
They leaped on the connection with the McAvoys and played it like a brass band. In New York, Emma tried to ignore the gossip and prayed it wasn’t based in fact.
It was none of her business, she reassured herself as she spent hours in her darkroom. Michael was no more than a friend—an acquaintance, really. They had no actual ties, and certainly no relationship. Except for the kiss they had shared.
She was romanticizing. One kiss meant nothing. She hadn’t let it, couldn’t let it. Even if she had felt—she wasn’t sure what she had felt. It hardly mattered. If Michael had indeed been drawn into Angie’s web, she could only feel sorry for him. The idea of feeling betrayed was ludicrous.
They each had their own life. He on one coast, she on the other. And she was at last, at long last, doing something with hers.

She was working for Runyun. She might be a lowly assistant, but she was Runyun’s lowly assistant. In the past ten weeks, she’d learned more from him than she had learned in years of classes, stacks of books. Working by the glow of her red light, she gently moved a print in the developing fixer. She was getting better. And she intended to be better yet.
One day, she thought, she would give Runyun a run for his money.
Professionally, she was going exactly where she wanted to go. Personally … her life was in upheaval.
Her mother. How could she explain what it felt like to know that the woman she had faced in the dim room in London had given birth to her? Would she ever be able to separate and understand her feelings? And her fears? No matter what reassurances Bev had given her, she’d never be able to shake the greatest fear of all. Could she be like Jane? Deep down, were there seeds that would sprout one day, changing her from what she wanted to be into what she had been born to be?
A drunk. A cheap, bitter drunk.
How could she escape a fate that rushed at her from all sides? Her mother, her grandfather. Her father. No matter how she blinded herself to it, she had to accept that the man she loved most was as much a slave to drink as the woman she wanted to hate.
It terrified her.
She didn’t want to believe it. She was afraid not to.
No good. It did no good to dwell on it, she told herself and hung the rinsed print to dry. Emma studied it, critically, before moving back to her enlarger.
Since she was sick of worrying about herself, she decided to worry about Marianne. Emma knew her friend had taken to cutting classes, meeting Robert Blackpool for lunch or drinks in whatever spot was currently trendy. From there they would often crawl the clubs—Elaine’s, Studio 54, Danceteria—where Blackpool could be seen.
There were nights