River’s End

“Everything that had happened to me before that moment took second place.”
    “You were married that same year.”
    “Neither one of us was the cautious type, or the patient type.” His gaze drifted off, and Noah wondered what images he could see playing against the ugly bare walls. “It didn’t take us long to figure out what we wanted. What we wanted was each other. For a while, that was enough for both of us.”
    “Tell me,” Noah said simply, and waited while Sam took out his contraband cigarette, lighted it.
    “She’d been in Ireland with her sister, taking a couple weeks between projects. We met in Hank Midler, the director’s, office. She came in—wearing jeans and a dark blue sweater. Her hair was pulled back. She looked maybe sixteen. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.”
    His gaze arrowed back, shot straight into Noah’s eyes. “That’s not an exaggeration. It’s the truth. I was used to women—to having them, enjoying them. One look at her, and she might have been the first. I think I knew, right then, she’d be the last. You may not understand that.”
    “Yes, I do understand it.” He’d experienced that rush, that connection, when this man’s daughter had opened her apartment door and given him a faintly annoyed frown.
    “‘Been in love, have you, Brady?”
    “I’ve been in something.”
    Sam let out a short laugh, then looked past Noah again, seemed to dream. “My belly clutched up,” he murmured. “And my heart... I could actually feel it shaking inside me. When I took her hand it was like . . . yes. You. Finally. Later, she told me it had been exactly the same for her, as if we’d been moving through our lives to get to that moment. We talked about the script, went about the business as if both of us weren’t reeling. Afterward, I asked her to dinner, and we agreed to meet at seven. When I got home, I told Lydia it was over.”
    He paused, laughed a little, drew deep on the cigarette. “Just over. I wasn’t kind about it. wasn’t cruel. The fact was, she’d simply ceased to exist for me. All I could think of was that at seven I’d see Julie again.”
    “Was Julie involved with anyone at that time?”
    “She’d been seeing Michael Ford. The press played it up, but it wasn’t serious. Two weeks after we met, we moved in together. Quietly, or as quietly as we were able to.”
    “You met her family?”
    “Yes, that was important to her. It was a lot of work for me to bring Jamie around. She was very protective of Julie. She didn’t trust me, thought Julie was just another fling. Hard to blame her,” he said with a jerk of his shoulders. “I’d had plenty.”
    “Did it bother you that Julie’s name was linked to a number of men at that time? Ford was just the latest.”
    “I didn’t think of it then.” Sam pulled the stub of the cigarette out of his mouth, crushed it out with a restrained violence that had Noah’s eyes narrowing. “It was only later, when things got out of control. Then I thought about it. Sometimes it was all I could think about. The men who’d had her, the men who wanted her. The men she wanted. She was pulling away from me, and I wanted to know who was going to take my place. Who the hell was she turning to when she was turning away from me? Lucas Manning.”
    Even after twenty years, saying the name scored his tongue. “I knew there was something between them.”
    “So you killed her to keep her.”
    The muscles in Sam’s jaws quivered once, and his eyes went blank. “That’s one theory.”
    Noah gave him a pleasant smile. “We’ll talk about the rest of the theories some other time. What was it like working with her on the movie?”
    “Julie?” Sam blinked, lifted a hand to rub it distractedly over his face.
    “Yes.” Noah continued in the same mild tone. He’d thrown Sam off rhythm, exactly as he’d intended. He wasn’t about to settle for well-rehearsed lines and perfect phrasing. “You were getting to know each other on two levels during the shoot. As lovers, and as actors. Let’s talk about what she was like as an actor.”
    “She was good. Solid.” Sam dropped his hands into his lap, then lifted them onto the table as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. “A natural. The term’s overused, but it applied to her. She didn’t have to work as hard as I did. She just felt it.”
    “Did that bother you? That she was better than you?”
    “I didn’t say she was