Now or Never by Elizabeth Adler Read Free Book Online Page A

had left. He had threatened to sue, but he would not. How could he, when it was the truth. What happened next was up to the police and to his fiancée, though it looked as though she was sticking by him.
    Mal shook her head, bewildered. It just went to show the power of that kind of money. Absolutely all that was in the woman’s head was that she had caught a Mr. Rich, and not that when he got tired of her, she might easily be the next to “fall” down those stairs. Because this old man was not about to part with one cent. He would take it to his grave or else leave it all to build a monument to himself—an arts center, or a museum with his name on it—so that when he was gone, he would still be spoken of every day. He intended to live after death if anybody could.
    Mal yawned wearily; even the Concorde could not eliminate time zones and jet lag completely. She wished now she had taken time to see something of London but, except for her own production crew, she didn’t really know anyone there. Of course she’d had plenty of invitations—to dinner, to openings, to charity affairs—the English social season. But that sort of thing was no fun. In fact, it was hard work—just a roomful of strangers who only wanted to be seen with her because she was a celebrity. She would have been the entertainment of the evening. She would have had to smile and be polite, sparkle, and make conversation. She had declined them all.
    Only later, after a solitary room-service dinner in her lavish flower-filled hotel suite, had she wondered wistfully if she had done the right thing. After all, there might have been one person out there whose eyes would have connected meaningfully with hers. There might have been one man who recognized
who
she was, not
what
she was. He might have been someone who could make her laugh, someone she could have fun with.
    The clouds covered the sun, and she wrapped her soft cream robe more closely around her, tucking her bare feet underneath her on the rose-patterned chintz sofa.
    Visitors were always surprised by Mal’s apartment. They expected it to be decorated the way she dressed: cool, simple, and monochromatic. Instead, they got an old-fashioned country house, complete with family pictures and a terrace garden.
    Mal’s home was filled with English antiques and comfortable sofas covered in artfully faded floral fabrics. The tables were crammed with silver-framed photographs. There were rare old books on her shelves as well as current biographies and best sellers and crime fiction, and perfectly lit paintings of ancestors and horses and dogs on her pale, expensive silk-covered walls. There were water-colors of villas in Tuscany and soft English landscapes, andart books piled on the massive oak coffee table in front of the French limestone fireplace. Even on a sultry evening like this, a fire glowed in the grate, its heat combated by air conditioning, simply because she loved the way it looked.
    And she liked flowers around her too, great bouquets of garden flowers: spiky blue delphinium and fragrant white stock, snapdragons and huge daisies, and fat, fragrant, tumbling pink roses that were duplicated in a painting by a great seventeenth-century Dutch artist that hung on her wall. But the evocative scent of lilacs was her favorite, and when they were in their short, sweet season, she wanted nothing else.
    Few people knew it, but in the privacy of her home, more was better for the publicly cool, spare, and uncluttered Mallory Malone.
    Hauling herself from the comfortable depths of the sofa, she walked out onto her terrace. Twin stone fountains splashed musically as she inspected her plants, rooting her manicured fingers in the earth, pulling out an errant clump of chickweed, deadheading the azaleas, picking a tiny branch of rosemary and crushing the leaves for their scent.
    She sat on the carved wooden bench overlooking Manhattan’s towers. “If I closed my eyes,” she said aloud, shutting them tightly,