Dream Trilogy by Nora Roberts Read Free Book Online

still grinding, she tapped another cigaretteout of her enameled case, lighted it. “He used me, Laura, finagling a booking here where he could pick up the drugs, another there where he could drop them off. I’d just had a shoot in Turkey. Five miserable days. He was rewarding me with a little cruise of the Greek Isles. A pre-honeymoon. That’s what he called it,” she added, sending out smoke in a stream. “He was smoothing out all the little hitches on his amicable divorce, and we’d be able to come out in the open with our relationship.”
    She took a steady breath then as Laura patiently listened. Studying the smoke twisting toward the ceiling, she continued. “Of course, there was never going to be a divorce. His wife was perfectly willing to have him sleep with me as long as I was useful and the money kept coming in.”
    “I’m sorry, Margo.”
    “I fell for it, that’s the worst of it.” She shrugged her shoulders, took one last, deep drag, and crushed the cigarette out. “All the most ridiculous clichés.” She couldn’t hate Alain for that nearly as much as she hated herself. “We had to keep our affair and our plans out of the press until all the details of his divorce settlement could be worked out. On the outside we would be colleagues, business partners, friends. He would manage my career, use all of his contacts to increase the bookings and my fees. And why not? He’d nailed me some solid commercials in France and Italy. He’d finalized the deal with Bella Donna that shot me to the top of the heap.”
    “I don’t suppose your talent or your looks had anything to do with your being chosen as spokeswoman for the Bella Donna line.”
    Margo smiled. “I might have gotten it on my own. But I’ll never know. I wanted that contract so badly. Not just the money, though I certainly wanted that. But the exposure. Christ, Laura, seeing my own face on billboards, having people stop me on the street for my autograph. Knowing I wasdoing a really good job for a really good product.”
    “The Bella Donna Woman,” Laura murmured, wanting Margo to smile and mean it. “Beautiful. Confident. Dangerous. I was so thrilled when I saw the ad in Vogue . That’s Margo, I thought, my Margo, stretched out on that glossy page looking so stunning in white satin.”
    “Selling face cream.”
    “Selling beauty,” Laura corrected firmly. “And confidence.”
    “And danger?”
    “Dreams. You should be proud of it.”
    “I was.” She let out a long breath. “I was so caught up in it all, so thrilled with myself when we started to hit the American market. And so caught up in Alain, all the promises and plans.”
    “You believed in him.”
    “No.” At the very least she had that. He had been only one more in the line of men she’d enjoyed, flirted with. And, yes, used. “I wanted to believe everything he told me. Enough that I let him string me along with that shopworn line about his wife holding up his divorce.” She smiled thinly. “Of course, that was fine with me. As long as he was married, he was safe. I wouldn’t have married him, Laura, and I’ve begun to realize it wasn’t that I was in love with him so much as I was in love with the life I imagined. Gradually he took over everything, because it was easier for me not to have to bother with details. And while I was dreaming of this glorious future where the two of us would bop around Europe like royalty, he was siphoning off my money, using it to finance his drug operation, using my minor celebrity over there to clear the way, lying to me about his wife.”
    She pressed her fingers against her eyes. “So the upshot is that my reputation is in tatters, my career is a joke, BellaDonna’s dropped me as their spokeswoman, and I’m damned near broke.”
    “Everyone who knows you understands you were a victim, Margo.”
    “That doesn’t make it better, Laura. Being a victim isn’t one of the faces I’m comfortable wearing. I just don’t have the