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

that, wouldn’t he have had
the sense to be armed?”
    “He probably would have,” Emma agreed. “The gun was never
found so I suppose that it could have been his. But I still don’t believe that
Margo shot him.”
    “Why not?” I asked.
    “Because she was a warm, vibrant, lovely woman, not some
cold-blooded killer. In the heat of an argument…if they’d struggled and she somehow
got hold of the gun…that I could see…maybe. But stalking him, drawing him into
the alley? None of that fits with who she was.”
    “You’re probably right,” I acknowledged. “But if Prentice
was being unfaithful to her, that could shed some light on his true character.”
    “Besides the fact that it would mean he was a rat bastard?”
    “Besides that. Think about it, she was a huge star, adored
by millions of the same people whose votes he needed if he was going to make it
to the White House. What better way to assure that he wouldn’t get them than to
break her heart?”
    Emma looked at me in bewilderment. “But if that’s true, he
would have been sabotaging his own future.”
    I shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t the future he wanted. His
father’s expectations might have been too much for him. Could be that all he
really wanted to do was take off for Paris, drink wine, and chase women.”
    I must have sounded a little too entertained by that idea
because she looked at me thoughtfully. “Did you want to do that?” she asked.
“Before you took over the business?”
    I liked Paris well enough even though I could barely
tolerate some Parisians. In any case, there were lots better places to be.
    “Me? No way. I wanted to sail a catamaran through the
Pacific Islands, start off in French Polynesia, head west to Fiji, then drop
down to New Zealand and circumnavigate Australia before putting in to Sydney.”
    Abruptly, the impact of what I’d just said hit me. What the
hell was I thinking telling her my college-boy plans for what I was going to do
after graduation? I still had the catamaran, bought the day I turned
twenty-one. I even sailed that sweet lady down to Bermuda occasionally. But I’d
yet to see Fiji or anywhere near it.
    “Why haven’t you?” Emma asked softly. “That sounds like it
would be an amazing adventure.”
    I was tempted to shrug the question off, give her some
bullshit answer, but the look in her eyes stopped me. She deserved better.
    “It probably would have been,” I conceded. “But my dad died
two weeks after I got out of college. We’d barely had the funeral before it
became obvious that the business was under attack. I wasn’t going anywhere.”
    “But you would have gone, if he’d lived?”
    I thought about that. I’d been determined to make the trip,
in no small measure because I knew how much my father hated the idea. He took
it as proof of what he called my feckless nature. He even went so far as to say
that he regretted setting up my trust fund, given what I was doing with it.
    Would I have gone despite all that?
    “Yeah, I would have,” I said. “I admired my dad’s business
success but I didn’t want to be like him and I definitely didn’t want him being
in charge of my future. Taking off for the Pacific basically would have been my
way of telling him to give up on me.”
    Which, now that I thought of it, might explain why I
suspected that Prentice could have been engaged in self-sabotage, whether he
knew it or not. I was no stranger to that myself but at least I’d been aware of
what I was doing. And I hadn’t ended up dead in an alley.
    “Forget about that,” I said, determined to get us off the
subject. Not that I had much hope of success. No matter what we talked
about—Margo, Prentice, kids’ books, probably even the weather—she got me to
open up about myself.
    I needed to get her to do the same. Starting with seeing how
she reacted when she found out where we were going.

Chapter Twelve

 
Emma
     
    “ Ohmygod!” I moaned. “That was the best ever.”
    Fetching