Free Hollywood Blackmail by Jackie Ashenden Page B

No pictures of family or friends. He could understand the family part, but not the friends. Surely she had them?
    Pausing by a bookshelf, he cast his eye along the spines. She’d always liked books. Had been difficult to get her nose out of one, so it wasn’t surprising she had a bookcase stuffed full of them. A title caught his eye, the spine cracked and broken. Wuthering Heights. Huh, now that one he did remember, because she’d talked to him about it. He hadn’t understood half of what she’d been talking about because books and literature weren’t exactly his thing, but he’d tried to listen. She’d been all passionate about it, all kind of romantic. Understandable, since that’s the way girls were and it wasn’t like the Misty Mansion was full of romance. Sex, yes. Romance, nope.
    Ash pulled the book out of the bookcase, riffled through the pages. And something fell out. He frowned, bent to pick it up. It was a photograph. Of him.
    It felt like someone had landed a punch straight to his gut.
    His own face, much younger, stared out of the picture at him, looking vaguely embarrassed yet smiling all the same. God, he remembered that picture. In the background he could see white sand and blue water. He’d had the day off and had wanted to take her on a proper date. They’d gone to the beach because she’d wanted to go somewhere normal.
    In a room where there were no displayed photos, this was the only one he’d seen.
    Why had she kept it? What did it mean? Did it even mean anything?
    A picture of you in her favorite book? Of course it means something.
    The sound of a footstep came from behind him. Ash didn’t even think, he put the photo back, closed the book, and for some completely inexplicable reason, he slid the book into the pocket of the security guard jacket. Then he turned around.
    Lizzie stood behind him, a suitcase on the floor beside her. Her hair was sleek and dark, and coiled into a neat bun on the top of her head. The uniform had to be fresh because there were absolutely no creases on it anywhere. She looked neat as a pin, the consummate professional.
    “Okay,” she said briskly. “I’m ready to go.”
    The book felt heavy in his pocket all of a sudden and the memory of that date on the beach heavy in his mind. He’d kissed her on the sand, tasting the ice cream he’d bought her on her mouth. It had been the sweetest damn kiss he’d ever had.
    Lizzie raised an eyebrow. “Ash?”
    He put his hands into the pockets of the jacket, his fingers brushing the hard edges of the book. Smiled. “Then let’s go.”
    She’d kept the photo, after all these years, which implied she didn’t hate him as much as she was letting on. Quite what else it meant he didn’t know, but he aimed to find out.
    It was all information. All insights into the woman his Coco had become.
    A woman he very much wanted to find out more about.

Chapter Five
    As she’d approached the long driveway that wound up to Ash’s mansion, Lizzie had been conscious of a small knot of tension sitting right between her shoulder blades. A tension she couldn’t quite pinpoint the source of. But it wasn’t until Ash had directed her up the driveway and into the massive turnaround in front of his house that she understood what the problem was.
    The last Hollywood mansion she’d been in was her mother’s, a vast and tasteless homage to Versailles. When she’d been a little girl, she’d loved it. It had been like a fairy palace and her mother the fairy princess. But then things had changed and Lizzie had discovered that the fairy princess wasn’t all that interested in having a daughter, only an accessory that could get her more publicity. And the mansion had gradually come to seem like an extension of Misty herself—overblown and overdecorated. Like a sheikh’s palace on steroids.
    But it hadn’t been just her mother’s egregious use of interior decoration that Lizzie had hated. She’d also hated the fact that the house had