Widow - Anne Stuart [44]
According to his early-morning phone call with Gregory, no one had seemed the slightest bit interested in the whereabouts of one Connor Maguire. He probably should have used a different name when he showed up at the villa, but he tended to find it easier to keep his lies to the absolute minimum. But if Charlie decided to start looking into her insurance consultant, it would be easy enough to track down the name of Connor Maguire among the registered aliens working in Italy. And it would lead her to the Starlight, not some nice, boring insurance conglomerate.
But apart from Gregory’s general antsiness about getting things done, there was nothing to suggest he needed to rush things. He had a few days’ grace. And despite his editor’s demands for information, he’d told him next to nothing. He’d learned early on that knowledge was power, and that no one could be trusted. He’d fill Gregory in when he was ready to, and not a moment sooner.
In retrospect, he realized he shouldn’t have kissed Charlie. He’d been wanting to ever since he’d first seen her—hell, he wanted to do a hell of a lot more than kiss her. And covered with plaster dust, trembling with panic, she’d been damned near irresistible.
But he’d almost overplayed his hand. She stood frozen in his arms like the ice princess he knew she’d be, and the panicked beating of her heart doubled when he put his mouth on hers. He should have pulled back then, feeling the iciness of her skin, but he’d given in to temptation, vaguely aware that she was too frightened to move.
Frightened of what, for Christ’s sake? She’d been married to a notorious womanizer. The old goat had gone through some of the world’s most beautiful women, including Charlie. And she had a fiancé. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been having it regularly.
Maybe he was just too rough and crude for her. Pompasse had been an elegant old man, and if he knew Charlie as well as he was beginning to, then she’d probably chosen another creature of refined tastes for her fiancé, someone just like her. Not a working-class bloke from the outback who…
Who what? Who was out to find out every bit of dirt he could about her marriage, her dead husband, and even about her if he thought it would sell books? Who was entirely willing to sleep with her, and just about anyone else in the household, in order to further his cause? Who could end up turning her over to the Italian police if it turned out she’d killed the old man?
He couldn’t see Charlie killing. She was so guarded she didn’t allow herself to feel that much of anything. Besides, she was probably the least likely suspect. She’d been in New York—and even if she had made a fast trip over to Florence to off her former husband, she would have left a paper trail. And besides, she had no reason to do it.
So then, who did it?
It didn’t matter in the slightest that the police didn’t seem to suspect a thing. Bestsellers were made of just such stuff. If he was going to present Pompasse’s death as a murder, then Gregory would be expecting a suspect. And he still wasn’t sure who he liked the best for the role of killer.
Charlie would be the most interesting, of course, but it would be far too easy for her to prove her innocence. He had to preserve the shreds of his so-called journalistic integrity. If he smeared her without reasonable proof, it would destroy what credibility he did have. Of course, he didn’t have to outright accuse her in the book—he just had to use enough innuendo to titillate the readers of highbrow trash. He could destroy a life without much effort at all. Not that he particularly wanted to, but he refused to allow sentimentality