Secret Star Read Free

what was behind thatface, that had deserved that kind of unquestioning emotion?
    â€œWho the hell were you?” he murmured, and was answered by that bold, inviting smile. “Too beautiful to be real. Too aware of your own beauty to be soft.” His deep voice, rough with fatigue, echoed in the empty house. He slipped his hands in his pockets, rocked back on his heels. “Too dead to care.”
    And though he turned from the portrait, he had the uneasy feeling that it was watching him. Measuring him.
    He had yet to reach her next of kin, the aunt and uncle in Virginia who had raised her after the death of her parents. The aunt was summering in a villa in Italy and was, for tonight, out of touch.
    Villas in Italy, he mused, blue diamonds, oil portraits over fireplaces of sapphire-blue tile. It was a world far removed from his firmly middle-class up-bringing, and from the life he’d embraced through his career.
    But he knew violence didn’t play favorites.
    He would eventually go home to his tiny little house on its postage-stamp lot, crowded together with dozens of other tiny little houses. It would be empty, as he’d never found a woman who moved him to want to share even that small private space. But his home would be there for him.
    And this house, for all its gleaming wood and acres of gleaming glass, its sloping lawn, sparkling pool and trimmed bushes, hadn’t protected its mistress.
    He walked around the stark outline on the floor and started up the stairs again. His mood was edgy—he could admit that. And the best thing to smooth it out again was work.
    He thought perhaps a woman with as eventful a life as Grace Fontaine would have noted those events—and her personal feelings about them—in a diary.
    He worked in silence, going through her bedroom carefully, knowing very well that he was trapped in that sultry scent she’d left behind.
    He’d taken his tie off, tucked it in his pocket. The weight from his weapon, snug in his shoulder harness, was so much a part of him it went unnoticed.
    He went through her drawers without a qualm, though they were largely empty now, as their contents were strewn around the room. He searched beneath them, behind them and under the mattress.
    He thought, irrelevantly, that she’d owned enough clothing to outfit a good-size modeling troupe, and that she’d leaned toward soft materials. Silks, cashmeres, satins, thin brushed wools. Bold colors. Jewel colors, with a bent toward blues.
    With those eyes, he thought as they crept back into his mind, why not?
    He caught himself wondering how her voice had sounded. Would it have fit that sultry face, been husky and low, another purr of temptation for a man? He imagined it that way, a voice as dark and sensual as the scent that hung on the air.
    Her body had fit the face, fit the scent, he mused, stepping into her enormous walk-in closet. Of course, she’d helped nature along there. And he wondered why a woman would feel impelled to add silicone to her body to lure a man. And what kind of pea-brained man would prefer it to an honest shape.
    He preferred honesty in women. Insisted on it. Which, he supposed, was one of the reasons he lived alone.
    He scanned the clothes still hanging with a shake of his head. Even the killer had run out of patience here, it seemed. The hangers were swept back so that garments were crowded together, but he hadn’t bothered to pull them all out.
    Seth judged that the number of shoes totaled well over two hundred, and one wall of shelves had obviously been fashioned to hold handbags. These, in every imaginable shape and size and color, had been pulled out of their slots, ripped open and searched.
    A cupboard had held more—sweaters, scarves. Costume jewelry. He imagined she’d had plenty of the real sparkles, as well. Some would have been in the now empty safe downstairs, he was sure. And she might have a lockbox at a bank.
    That he would check