Never a Bride Read online

  Dear Reader,

  I’ve always been a fan of serial drama. Some of my fondest memories are playing with my dolls while my mother listened to “The Guiding Light” on the radio. (Yes, the radio!)

  By the time I started school, “Guiding Light” had moved to television and I’ll admit to occasionally sticking a thermometer into my mother’s morning tea, so it would look as if I had a fever and could stay home to watch the latest episode in the tumultuous life of the Bauer family. The trick was to not keep the thermometer in the hot tea too long!

  Years later, I’m still hooked on the Bauers, so when I was invited to write for Temptation’s Bachelor Arms miniseries, it seemed natural to write a serial trilogy. (With a sixty-year-old murder mystery to liven things up.)

  In Never a Bride, three friends—Cait Carrigan, Lily Van Cortlandt and Blythe Fielding—come together to celebrate Blythe’s wedding.

  The daughter of a much-married actress, Cait has no intention of repeating her mother’s mistakes. Marriage, she vows, is not for her.

  Until she meets Sloan Wyndham, a devastating screenwriter with a dark and secret past. A man determined to change her plans.

  I hope you enjoy Cait and Sloan’s stormy romance. Stay tuned for Lily’s story in Book Two of my wedding trilogy—For Richer or Poorer.

  Happy Reading!

  JoAnn Ross

  Come live and love in L.A. with the tenants of Bachelor Arms

  Bachelor Arms is a trendy apartment building with some very colorful tenants. Meet three confirmed bachelors who are determined to stay single until three very special women turn their lives upside down; college friends who reunite to plan a wedding; a cynical and sexy lawyer; a director who’s renowned for his hedonistic life-style, and many more…including one very mysterious and legendary tenant. And while everyone tries to ignore the legend, every once in a while something strange happens….

  Each of these fascinating people has a tale of success or failure, love or heartbreak. But their stories don’t say a secret for long in the hallways of Bachelor Arms.

  Bachelor Arms is a captivating place, home to an eclectic group of neighbors. All of them have one thing in common, though—the feeling of community that is very much a part of living at Bachelor Arms.

  THE TENANTS OF BACHELOR ARMS

  Ken Amberson: The odd superintendent who knows more than he admits about the legend of Bachelor Arms.

  Connor Mackay: The building’s temporary handyman isn’t telling the truth about who he really is.

  Caitlin Carrigan: For this cop, her career is her only priority.

  Eddie Cassidy: Local bartender at Flynn’s next door. He’s looking for his big break as a screenwriter.

  Jill Foyle: This sexy, recently divorced interior designer moved to L.A. to begin a new life.

  Lily Van Cortlandt: This vulnerable, loving woman can forgive anything other than betrayal.

  Natasha Kuryan: This elderly Russian-born femme fatale was a makeup artist to the starts of yesterday.

  Gage Remington: Cait Garrigan’s former partner is investigating a decades-old murder that involves the residents of Bachelor Arms.

  Brenda Muir: Young, enthusiastic would-be actress who supports herself as a waitress.

  Bobbie-Sue O’Hara: Brenda’s best friend. She works as an actress and waitress but knows that real power lies on the other side of the camera.

  Bob Robinson: This barfly seems to live at Flynn’s and has an opinion about everyone and everything.

  Theodore “Teddy” Smith: The resident Lothario—any new female in the building puts a sparkle in his eye.

  Never a Bride

  JoAnn Ross

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Prologue

  New Year’s Eve 1933

  1933

  LATER, GUESTS WOULD tell police there had been no foreshadowing that Hollywood’s most infamous murder was about to take place.

  It was nearly midnight. A white moon rose in a star-spangled sky, creating a silvery path on the darkened waters of the Pacific Ocean below. From inside William Randolph Hearst’s 118-room Palisades Beach Road house, came the sounds of a party in full swing. The glittering, star-studded evening belied the fact that the rest of the country was suffering in the grips of a depression. The light from hundreds of crystal chandeliers—imported from Europe—reflected off the women’s glamorous silver and gold lamé evening gowns and created rainbows in the diamonds that blazed from their ears and wrists. The men were handsome in white tie, and those who weren’t matinee idols had so much money, it didn’t matter.

  The scents of French perfume blended together, then wafted over the rooms like a fragrant cloud, mingling with blue smoke from Cuban cigars.

  Crystal glittered, sterling gleamed, champagne flowed. Three jazz bands played in separate rooms and in one of the vast ballrooms, guests crowded around roulette and blackjack tables in the Havana-style casino created just for this gala night. Upstairs, in the many bedrooms, more intimate games of chance were taking place.

  Outside, there was only the soft, unceasing sound of the incoming tide lapping against the glistening sand and the rustle of the sea breeze in the tops of the palm trees. Smoke from the smudge pots that nearby orange growers burned during these winter nights to warm their groves, wafted on the salt air. With the exception of that faint odor of smoke, it appeared to be another perfect night in Lotus Land.

  A woman emerged from the mansion. A moment later, a man followed. Natasha Kuryan, watching from the shadows, recognized them immediately. Indeed, a person would have had to have spent the last year in a cave not to recognize the tempestuous Russian actress and her equally hot-tempered novelist husband.

  Alexandra Romanov, of the deposed Czarist Romanovs and a direct descendant of Empress Catherine the Great, gossip columnist Louella Parsons had excitedly informed her readers, had been signed by Walter Stern, owner of Xanadu Studios, to counter the popularity of MGM’s Dietrich and Garbo.

  And it had worked, beyond Walter’s wildest dreams. Critics and fans alike fell head over heels in love with the doe-eyed, sable-haired beauty whose exotic Russian looks provided a striking contrast to the lacquered blondes of the day.

  Even Natasha, who was considered a beauty herself, could not help but admire the actress’s flawless complexion. As a makeup artist at Xanadu Studios, it was Natasha’s job to conceal movie stars’ flaws. Alexandra—unfairly, Natasha often thought—had none to conceal.

  Cannily taking advantage of the fact that women fantasized about being Alexandra, while men fantasized about getting her into their beds, Walter cast the actress in femme fatale roles, where her sultry love scenes inevitably raised temperatures in theaters all over America.

  Indeed, the waterfall scene in her latest film—Lady Reckless—was so hot, one Hollywood wag professed that it was a miracle the celluloid film hadn’t caught fire.

  Unsurprisingly, Alexandra’s movies routinely earned fines from the Hays commission. The National Legion of Decency boycotted her films. But since Xanadu was one of only two Hollywood studios ending the depression year in the black, Walter Stern cheerfully paid the fines, then laughed all the way to the bank.

  Walter wasn’t laughing the Christmas day Alexandra’s personal life took an unexpected turn that rivaled her torrid screenplays. When the passionate, former Russian ballerina fell in love with Patrick Reardon, the tough-talking, hard-drinking, poker-playing western writer Walter had brought to Hollywood to pen the screenplay of his latest bestseller novel fo
r Xanadu, Tinseltown pundits gave the romance a week. At the most.

  Who wouldn’t fall for the man, Natasha thought with a sigh. He was a true American cowboy, worlds more masculine than the make-believe movie kind. Whenever Patrick would show up on the back lot, women—even big-name stars—made fools of themselves to get his attention.

  When Alexandra and Patrick shocked everyone by eloping on New Year’s Day, the marriage was given a month.

  That had been one year ago, and although Louella Parsons was hinting at recent tension between the couple, the current issue of Life magazine had just declared Alexandra and Patrick to be the most fascinating newlyweds on the planet, stripping the crown from that other famous Hollywood couple, Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., popularly referred to as Cinderella and the Prince.

  Living up to her ultraglamorous image, tonight Alexandra had definitely pulled out all the stops. She was barely clad in a dangerously low-cut white satin gown that flowed over her perfectly sculpted ballerina’s body like mercury, shimmering like the inside of a sea shell in the streaming silver moonlight. The clinging satin dipped below her waist, leaving her smooth back bared but for the crisscross diamanté straps. It was obvious she was wearing nothing beneath the dress but resplendent, perfumed female.

  She was wearing her thick sable hair loose and flowing; her trademark mermaid waves attractively ruffled by the sea breeze. In her right hand she held a champagne glass.

  Her silver high heels were not made for walking in the sand; when she stumbled, Patrick, who’d easily caught up with her, took hold of her arm, as if to steady her.

  Furiously shaking off his touch, she kept walking.

  Equally furious, he grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around.

  Patrick was towering over his wife, looking huge and threatening. His broad shoulders strained the seams of his white dinner jacket, his dark hands curved around her pale white shoulders.

  Besides rounding up cattle, he’d also been a boxer in his youth, earning the money which allowed him to write by knocking people out in western bars. When he’d first arrived in Hollywood, rumors had circulated that he’d killed a man—in Montana, or Wyoming, no one seemed to know which—with his bare hands. Since Reardon had refused to either confirm or deny the stories, they persisted.

  Their faces were close together, but their taut angry poses were definitely not that of lovers. They exchanged words. Hot, angry words Natasha could not hear.

  Suddenly, without warning, Alexandra slapped her husband across the cheek.

  Patrick raised his own broad hand and for a long, suspended moment it looked as if he were actually on the verge of striking her back. Instead, he dropped his hand to his side.

  Then, without another word, he turned and went striding back toward the house.

  Alexandra called out to him, but her words were whipped away by the wind. She threw the champagne glass at his rigid, departing back.

  Then she dropped to her knees in the soft sand and buried her face in her hands, the same way she had in her most recent film, when her married lover had chosen to return to his pregnant wife.

  But this time Alexandra was not acting. From the way her bare shoulders shook, Natasha knew that her weeping was all too real.

  She also knew exactly who’d orchestrated the problems Alexandra and her husband were experiencing. Up until now, she’d hesitated putting herself at risk. But witnessing the unhappy results of all that wicked, behind-the-scenes manipulating, Natasha vowed to tell Alexandra the truth.

  But not tonight. This was too public a place to reveal such unsavory secrets.

  Soon, she decided. Before the premiere.

  The guests at the New Year’s Eve Party never saw Alexandra Romanov again.

  The following morning dawned bright and inappropriately golden. On what should have been her first wedding anniversary, the day before the premiere of her new movie, Fool’s Gold, based on Patrick’s screenplay, Alexandra was found dead in her dressing room in the sun-washed pink Spanish-style mansion she shared with her husband.

  The day they’d moved into the home, shortly after their marriage, their neighbor, a contract writer at United Artists, had warned them that the house, which had been the scene of a mysterious death, was haunted.

  Live in it and your greatest wish could be granted. Or your greatest fear realized.

  Alexandra had been Russian enough to worry; her pragmatic western husband had laughed the story off, declaring it the product of the melodramatic screenwriter’s warped imagination.

  The coroner ruled Alexandra had been strangled.

  Patrick was promptly arrested, tried and found guilty.

  Two years later, on a dark moonless night while the hot Santa Anna winds blew in from the desert, making tempers flair and nerves crackle, Patrick Reardon was executed by the State of California for the first-degree murder of his wife.

  1

  Hollywood

  LAND OF GLITTER and stardust. The Dream Machine. Film capital of the world where Garbo talked and Hepburn sparkled and Glenn Ford put the blame on Mame. Tinseltown, where the opulent glare of klieg lights once set the scene for glamorous star-studded movie premieres at Grauman’s Chinese theater.

  The problem, Cait thought, as she stepped around the strung out crack head who was throwing up atop Lee Marvin’s star on the Walk of Fame, was that if ever a place failed to live up to its glitzy billing, it was Hollywood.

  The mystique was definitely gone. The distinct scent hanging in the air was no longer that of fame and fortune, but pepperoni pizza. And despite the bronzed-edged stars embedded in the surface, the sidewalk she’d spent the past four hours strolling was definitely no yellow brick road.

  A black clad guerrilla poet, sporting a purple mohawk, spiked black leather dog collar and a gold ring through his pierced nostril shouted out a rendition of his latest epic, drawing a small crowd of fascinated, yet wary tourists.

  Nearby, a stunning black prostitute, wearing a tight red spandex dress and skyscraper, ankle-killing high heels, swayed seductively to Marvin Gaye singing from her boom box. Cait thought she looked a little like Diana Ross.

  A late-model black Mercedes pulled to the curb in front of Cait. A moment later the passenger-side window rolled down. Displaying a definite lack of interest, Cait sauntered over.

  “Yeah?” She cracked her gum and studied her long crimson fingernails.

  “Do you want to go out?” the driver, a fifty-something guy asked. He wasn’t all that bad looking, and the suit looked to be an Armani, but he was definitely no Richard Gere.

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether I decide I like you.” She combed her hand languidly through her fiery hair and settled down to play verbal Ping-Pong. “What did you have in mind?”

  “I have seventy-five dollars,” he said.

  “Good for you.”

  Instead of getting fed up and driving away, he smiled, revealing a row of straight white teeth which if not caps, had to have been bonded. “I like a lady with an attitude,” he said. “Tell you what, sweetheart, this is your lucky night. I’ll make it a hundred.”

  Rather than appear thrilled, Cait shrugged. “You’re on.”

  When she heard the door unlock, she climbed into the car, settling down in the wide leather seat. “I’ve got a place around the corner,” she said. “On Sunset.”

  When she named the motel, he said, “I know it.” That, plus the fact he’d played the pickup game so well told Cait this was not his first time cruising the boulevard.

  The Mercedes had the requisite phone, along with a fax. His nails had been buffed and his haircut, like his suit, carried the unmistakable look of Beverly Hills. Although she’d graduated from college with a minor in psychology, Cait figured she’d live to be a hundred and never figure out why guys who seemed to have so much going for them would be willing to pay for sex.

  He slanted her a sideways glance. “I like your outfit.”
/>   “Thanks.” She crossed her legs, giving him an enticing flash of thigh.

  “You wearing anything under that skirt?” It was a leather micromini, red as sin and tight as a tomato casing.

  “That’s for me to know.” When he put his hand on her bare leg, Cait gave him the smile she’d been withholding. “And for you to find out.”

  The promise had his fingers squeezing his approval in a way she knew would leave bruises.

  He pulled the Mercedes into the parking garage, then followed her into the motel room, which did not pretend to be anything other than what it was. There was a bed, a rickety wooden chair and a wastebasket. Period.

  The lumpy, too soft mattress sagged when he lay down on the bed. He folded his arms behind his head, crossed his legs at the ankles and said in a pleasant enough tone, “Why don’t you strip for me?”

  “What if I said dancing was extra?” Cait couldn’t resist asking.

  His eyes narrowed. “I’d suggest you not get greedy.”

  She smiled. “Just wondering.” She reached behind her back, began to unzip the snug bustier, which, like her skirt was red leather, then stopped. “You know, you seem like a really nice guy, and it’s not that I don’t trust you, but—”

  “Right.” He lifted his hips, reached into his pocket, pulled out a gold money clip, peeled off five crisp new twenty-dollar bills and held them out to her.

  “Thanks.” She’d no sooner tucked the bills into the bustier when two men burst into the room from the adjoining bathroom.

  “What the hell?” The man was on his feet in an instant, looking scared to death.

  “Police,” one of the intruders said, flashing his shield.

  “Gotcha,” Cait murmured with a rush of satisfaction. “You’re under arrest,” she announced. “For soliciting.”

  The man relaxed now that he knew he was not about to be robbed. Or worse. “Hell,” he muttered in a resigned voice. “I want to call my attorney. To come get my car.”