A Woman Worth Loving. Jackie Braun

in apprehension. She’d made mistakes, too many to count, and she wasn’t sure she deserved the second chance she’d been handed. But she intended to make the most of it.

      New and improved, as the saying went.

      After fully regaining consciousness, she’d made a pact with God. She was going to turn her life around. She wasn’t going to continue taking baby steps toward redemption. She was going to tackle the job with all the gusto of a long jumper. As an act of good faith she’d decided to start by giving up smoking. The hospital was a smoke-free facility and she was desperate for a cigarette right now, the craving so strong she actually had nibbled on one thumbnail. Nicotine addiction. She supposed it was just one more example of the self-destructive recklessness that had been her modus operandi for much of the past decade.

      For a while the night before as she’d floated in the breach between this world and the next, she’d thought she had seen an angel. That had given her a bit of a shock since, truth be told, she had figured, in spite of her recent attempts to change, she would be taking the down elevator to the afterlife. She couldn’t recall the angel’s features, but he had been blond and…hero-like. He had crashed into her house and rescued her from her stepson’s murderous grasp.

      The lack of oxygen must have really played tricks on her mind, because she vaguely recalled being cradled in his arms. She’d felt safe then, protected, and she had experienced something akin to longing when, drifting toward unconsciousness, she’d sworn the man had lowered his head and dropped a light kiss on her temple.

      Audra frowned. She must have imagined that. No one had kissed her with such sweet tenderness in too many years to count. And certainly her Good Samaritan or guardian angel or whatever one chose to call him wouldn’t. The police told her he’d given his name as Scott Smithfield.

      Smithfield! It seemed incomprehensible that her larger-than-life hero and that omnipresent paparazzi photographer were one and the same.

      Although she couldn’t have picked the man out of a lineup if her life depended on it, Smithfield had snapped dozens of unflattering photographs of Audra during the past couple of years. His work was top-notch, she had to admit, even though he had a knack for showcasing her in the worst possible light. The exposure she didn’t necessarily mind. What would be the point of behaving outrageously in public if not to garner free publicity and keep her name out there? But Smithfield’s work didn’t just expose, it damaged. It had managed to make her the butt of jokes among Hollywood’s insiders and power players.

      For a long time she had blamed him for the fact that her career was in the toilet, but now she could admit she was the one responsible for that.

      She glanced at the throng of tabloid photographers lined up outside the exit, waiting for her to appear. Scanning the crowd, she wondered if Smithfield was out there now. They all looked the same holding up those bulky black cameras. God, but she didn’t feel up to facing any of them this morning. But she would have to. Her chauffeur-driven stretch limousine had just lumbered around the hospital’s horseshoe-shaped main driveway and come to a stop.

      “Ready, Mrs. Winfield?” the aide asked.

      He was a big man, with a barrel chest and a tattoo on both forearms. He looked more like a bodyguard than a health care worker, which was fine with her. Audra figured she needed a bodyguard right about now.

      “Ready.” The word came out an unintelligible rasp and so she nodded instead. Then she sat up straighter in the wheelchair and squared her shoulders as the automatic doors parted for them.

      She kept her gaze riveted on the limo and the rear door her driver, Nigel, held open, but she might as well have been striding up the red carpet on Oscar night the way the photographers and assorted tabloid reporters hollered out her name. Only the fact that they were held back by hospital security kept them from blocking her path.

      “Audra! Audra! Look this way.”

      “Over here, Audra!”

      “Turn to your right, gorgeous!”

      “Take off the scarf!”

      “Show us your neck!”

      In the past, she had always hammed it up for the cameras. She’d been more than willing to pose provocatively. On this day, though, she faced them stoically. When she reached the limo, she climbed in, closed the door and melted back against the seat cushions. No more, she thought. I’m no longer that woman.

      “Where to, Mrs. Winfield?” her driver asked.

      “Home,” she managed to murmur hoarsely after a couple of attempts.

      As the limo took the familiar route toward the Brentwood estate a wave of loneliness swamped her. Henry’s mansion wasn’t her home. His son had pointed out that very fact in rather indelicate terms the evening before, right after which he had grabbed her by the throat.

      “I wasn’t going to keep the house,” she whispered now. She still wasn’t going to keep it, or anything else of Henry’s for that matter, although she didn’t think the man who had attempted to kill her deserved it, either.

      “Excuse me, ma’am?”

      “I don’t want to stay here,” she rasped a little louder as the limo turned up the estate’s tree-lined driveway.

      “Where do you want to go, ma’am?” Nigel inquired politely.

      Unbidden, Trillium Island came to mind. Audra had been gone ten years and married three times, but that small patch of land tucked up in the northeastern corner of Lake Michigan was the only place that had ever qualified as home, she realized now.

      It was spring in Michigan, which could mean the weather was either bone-chillingly cold or warm enough to forgo a coat. The trillium would be in bloom on the island that bore its name. She’d always loved those flowers and the three snowy-white petals that served as a reminder to weary inhabitants that summer was just around the corner.

      When Audra had left the island at age twenty, she’d burned the proverbial bridge behind her. She’d never intended to return. At the time, she’d convinced herself she was leaving because she craved excitement and wanted to live in a big, busy city. Now she could see that she hadn’t left Trillium so much as she had run away from it, chased by demons that she’d only recently begun to understand and to exorcise. Demons that still filled her with shame and embarrassment after all these years. But she was determined that those events would no longer define her. Nor would they define her sexuality.

      Of course, the past wasn’t the only reason she’d fled Trillium. In part, Audra supposed she sought fame and fortune to prove to all of the islanders who’d sold her short that she was every bit as smart, determined and talented as her straight-A, straight-arrow fraternal twin.

      Thinking of her sister, Audra made up her mind. It was time to go back. It was time to confront her past, and it was time for the New and Improved Audra Conlan to make things right with the people she had wronged.

      She would start with Ali. She’d deserved an explanation and an apology for more than a decade.

      “Keep the car running, please,” Audra whispered. “I won’t be long. I just need to throw clothes into some suitcases.”

      “Are you going on a trip then, Mrs. Winfield?” Nigel asked. He was older than her father and had been employed for at least a couple dozen years by her late husband. Whatever he thought of her, and she was sure it could not be good, didn’t show in his bland expression.

      Audra offered him her first genuine smile in a very long time.

      “Not a trip, Nigel. I’m going home.”

      It was nearly midnight, but Seth wasn’t sleepy. Nor was he hungry, he decided, tossing aside the half-eaten burger he’d picked up at the takeout joint up the street. He glanced through the stack of evening newspapers—both tabloid and more legitimate press—spread over the coffee table in his sparsely furnished apartment, and took a long pull from his beer. He, or rather his alter ego Scott Smithfield, had not taken any