Free Caress Part Two (Arcadia) by Josie Litton Page A

world as
she was suggesting.
    “More hypocritical, you mean,” I said, just to see how she’d
respond. “They would have been better off being honest with each other and with
themselves.”
    “Maybe they were afraid of what would happen if they did
that,” she countered.
    “How so?” I asked.
    “Just that the world must have seemed very fragile to them
after everything they’d been through—the Depression, World War II, the atom
bomb. Maybe they thought that if they threw out all the rules, everything would
fall apart.”
    “So they hid behind them instead? That can’t have been good
for anyone.”
    “No,” Emma said softly, “I don’t suppose that it was.
Deception never is.”
    Rather than let her think about the giant deception that had
derailed her own life, I said, “Speaking of deceit, maybe Prentice had a woman
on the side. That could be why he kept the suite at the Plaza.”
    Her eyes widened. It was clear that this idea had never
occurred to her. After everything she’d been through and her avoidance of
commitment, I liked that infidelity wasn’t on her “go to” list of options.
    “Do you really think so?” she asked. “He and Margo were
supposed to be such a romantic couple. There was talk that they were going to
be married.”
    I opened my mouth to say something really stupid about how
guys didn’t always keep their dicks in their pants when they should. Fortunately,
my brain engaged in the nick of time.
    The last thing I wanted was her having any doubts about my
own capacity for faithfulness, especially when that absolutely would not have
been justified. Emma was the first—the only—woman I’d ever met who made me
think about porches, rocking chairs, sunsets, and all that crazy stuff.
    “Then there’s probably some other explanation,” I said quickly.
“Perhaps whoever buys the apartment will get to the bottom of it.”
    I didn’t really think that Yuri would try although he might
surprise me given that he had a thing for Margo Stark’s movies. Hell, with his
resources, he might even be the one to finally solve the mystery of what had
sent her into decades-long seclusion.
    “Here’s a thought,” I said as a possibility popped into my
head. “Maybe Prentice really was dicking around, Margo found out, and she
killed him.”
    Those gorgeous blue eyes that I could get lost in suddenly
got even bigger. “ She did? But she spent the rest of her life mourning
him.”
    “Maybe, or instead of grief perhaps what she was really
overcome by was guilt.”
    The more I thought about that, the more I liked it. I wasn’t
anywhere near as interested in Margo as my sister, Caroline was, or Emma
herself for that matter. But I still didn’t like the idea of the actress being
collateral damage for whoever had killed Prentice. I’d much rather that she was
the architect of her own life even if that meant she’d made some bad choices.
    Emma looked taken aback but she didn’t dismiss the idea out
of hand. Instead, I watched as she turned it over in her mind.
    “For Margo to have killed Prentice,” she said, thinking out
loud, “she would have had to get out of the Arcadia that night without being
seen. There are several back entrances so that wouldn’t necessarily have been a
problem.”
    “There also wouldn’t have been any security cameras,” I
pointed out. “They hadn’t been invented yet.”
    She nodded. “But by the time she got downstairs, Prentice
would already have been gone. She would have had to catch up with him and
somehow get him to walk into the alley where he died.”
    Even as she spoke, she was shaking her head. “On top of all
that, she would have had to bring a gun with her from the apartment. That makes
it all premeditated. I just can’t see Margo behaving in such a way.”
    “Unless it was Prentice’s gun,” I said. “Caro told me
something about him planning to go after organized crime as part of his
presidential campaign. If he really did intend to do