Genuine Lies by Nora Roberts Read Free Book Online

to Timbuktu to sit through a chicken dinner with a bunch of bloody Republicans. It may be the nation’s capital, but it’s Timbuktu to me. I didn’t vote for the sucker, I’m not going to have dinner with him.” She gave a snort and tapped the cigarette partially out on the corpses of others. “You handle it. That’s what you’re paid to do.” Hanging up, she waved Julia toward a seat. “Politics. It’s for idiots and bad actors.”
    Julia placed her briefcase beside her chair. “Shall I quote you?”
    Eve merely smiled. “I take it you’re ready to get to work. I thought we should have our first session in a businesslike atmosphere.”
    “Wherever you’re comfortable.” Julia glanced at the mound of scripts. “Rejections?”
    “Half of them want me to play somebody’s grandmother, the other half want me to take my clothes off.” She hefted a foot clad in a red sneaker and gave the pile a shove. It toppled over, an avalanche of dreams. “A good writer’s worth a king’s ransom.”
    “And a good actor?”
    Eve laughed. “Knows how to turn straw into gold—like any magician.” She lifted a brow when Julia took her tape recorder and set it on the coffee table. “What’s on and off the record is up to me.”
    “Naturally.” She’d simply make sure to get everything she wanted on the record. “I don’t break trusts, Miss Benedict.”
    “Everyone does, eventually.” She waved a long, narrow hand studded with a single, glowing ruby. “Before I begin breaking mine, I want to know more about you—and not just the crap in your press kit. Your parents?”
    More impatient than annoyed, Julia folded her hands in her lap. “They’re both dead.”
    “Siblings?”
    “I was an only child.”
    “You never married.”
    “No.”
    “Why?”
    Though there was a little twist of pain, Julia’s voice remained level and calm. “I never chose to.”
    “As I’ve been in and out of the institution four times, I can’t recommend it, but it seems to me that raising a child alone would be difficult.”
    “It has its problems, and its rewards.”
    “Such as?”
    The question threw her so that she had to school herself not to squirm. “Such as having only your own feelings to rely on when making decisions.”
    “And is that problem or reward?”
    A faint smile curved Julia’s lips. “Both.” She took her pad and a pencil out of her briefcase. “Since you can give me only two hours today, I’d like to get started. Naturally I know the background information that’s been made public. You were born in Omaha, the second of three children. Your father was a salesman.”
    All right, Eve decided, they would begin. What she had to learn she would learn as they went along. “A travelingsalesman,” Eve put in as Julia pressed the record button. “I’ve always suspected I had several half siblings scattered through the central plains. In fact, I’ve been approached many times by people claiming relationships, and hoping for handouts.” “How do you feel about that?”
    “It was my father’s problem, not mine. An accident of birth doesn’t equal a free ride.” Steepling her fingers, she sat back. “I made my success. On my own. If I were still Betty Berenski from Omaha, do you think any of those people would have bothered with me? But Eve Benedict’s a different matter. I left Betty and the cornfields behind when I was eighteen. I don’t believe in looking back.”
    That was a philosophy Julia both understood and respected. She began to feel thrumming excitement—the birth of the intimacy that made her work of this kind so successful.
    “Tell me about your family. What it was like for Betty growing up?”
    With her head back, she laughed. “Oh, my older sister will be appalled to see in print that I called our father a philanderer. But truth is truth. He hit the road to sell his pots and pans—always sold enough to keep the wolf from the door. He would come back with little trinkets for his