Duchess (10 page)

Irene's voice softened. “He told me that you'd be upset, but that maybe you'd understand.”

Understand.

Rosie glanced at Irene through her peripheral vision. The woman clung to the end of the bed, stared at Dash as if she might shatter, so much love, so much fear on her face, it could skewer Rosie through.

Yes, she understood exactly how it felt to lose the father of your child. To want and believe in something so much you didn't stop to consider the consequences. To hope that love might be enough.

Oh Irene.

Rosie couldn't breathe. She put down Dash's hand, tucking it back onto the bed. Then, she bent over and gently kissed his forehead. Her lipstick left an imprint as she pulled away. Good-bye, Dash.

“He's all yours, Irene,” she said, backing away from the side of the bed. Irene stared after her.

Rosie offered her a sad smile.

Irene pressed a hand to her mouth then moved over to the chair, sat, and bent her head toward his hand. Began to weep.

“I'm so sorry for your loss,” Rosie said quietly. Then she left them there, the ventilator wheezing out his last breaths.

The scent of the funeral flowers chased her out of the house and into the November sunshine. A glorious day with the sun high overhead in a cloudless sky. Seventy degrees, a slight wind caressing the palm trees, rippling the pond, the feathers of the swans.

Not a day to bury a friend.

Rosie unpinned her hat, removing the long black veil and setting the pillbox on the patio table. Even here, she couldn't escape the sympathy bouquets. White hydrangeas, lilies, roses.

She pulled out a rose from the bouquet, walked with it to the edge of the pool.

“You have to make a decision, Roxy. The bank won't wait.”

She smelled the rose, ran her fingers along the silky petal. Fletcher would probably follow her to the bottom of the pool if she flung herself in. “Why today? Can't we wait one day after we bury poor Dash to sign away his dream?”

“Because the buyer won't wait. Because it's four million dollars, Roxy. And because, if you don't, then it'll all be on you to make it work. You'll have to pay the bank, roust the studio back into the black.”

“And I'm just a silly blond starlet who doesn't know a thing about running a studio?” She glanced over her shoulder to Fletcher. And oh good, Marley stood behind him, the studio's lawyer, a man built like a bull and ready to trample right over her.

She brought the rose to her nose. “Who is this buyer?”

“He doesn't want his name given out. Not until the deal is signed.”

She stared at the pool. “What makes this deal different from the one Warner offered us? Or Louis Mayer?”

“He's independent. You wouldn't be absorbed into another studio and join their cast of stars. You'd stay on as Palace Studios' lead actress.”

“And give up control of my life, my contracts…”

“You'd get to stay in your home.”

It seemed the longer Dash had lingered, the more word escaped of his financial woes. The press simply couldn't escape the tragedy of a life cut down in the prime.

The studio tried to spin it as a tragic accident. Probably Fletcher's handiwork, or better yet, Leo, the studio's press agent. But she read the faces of the congregation at today's funeral. Hunger.

Even Rooney had pulled her aside at the wake and suggested she sell him her contract before the bidding started.

She didn't have the courage to ask about Rolfe. Thankfully, she didn't have to because he showed up at the funeral.

Without a scrape, as if he hadn't crashed in a fiery pyre. Apparently he'd bailed out, but she hadn't seen it behind all that black smoke.

Rolfe had sat in the audience, third pew to the left of the First Methodist Episcopal Church, not meeting her eyes as she delivered Dash's eulogy. One of her best performances, she thought.

She made Dash practically sound like St. Peter.

Rolfe had escaped before she could leave her pew, disappearing into the throng outside the church.

She ran a finger between her eyes, rubbing away the dark throb there. “And Irene, what happens to her and her little boy?”

Silence behind her made her turn.

Fletcher was frowning at her. “What do you care?”

Irene had given birth to a healthy seven-pound baby the day before Dash died of sepsis. Roxy couldn't bear to look at her at the funeral, sitting with the studio as if she might be just one of the legion of secretaries.

Especially when Rosie found Irene's picture on the bureau next to Dash's bed while trying to find something of Dash's to give to the undertaker.

So, Dash had loved someone other than himself.

She
felt like the other woman when she looked at Irene trying to soothe her newborn.

“She should go back to Ohio,” Marley said. “It's not the studio's concern.”

Rosie stared at her reflection cast across the pool, a long, looming shadow. Go back to Ohio.

“What if she doesn't want to leave? What if her home is here?”

“She has nothing here.”

Except her memories. Her dreams.

“I remember when Dash showed me this house. I'd landed on his hotel room doorstep and asked him to make me a star. He could have closed the door in my face, made me get in line at Central Casting, but he didn't. He gave me a place to stay, gave me a screen test, and groomed me for a part. He even made a place for you, Fletcher, gave you a chance to make movies. And he had the screenplay for
Star for a Day
written for both of us. To give us what we wished for.” She considered the rose then tossed it into the pool, watched it drift on the clear water.

She turned. “What would it take to keep the studio?”

Fletcher stilled. “Four million dollars.”

“You know I don't have that.”

“You can't keep the studio—”

She held up her hand to Marley. Looked at Fletcher.

“A loan, I guess, to cover production costs. A string of B-budget movies made fast, to keep us afloat, and then a few big-named stars to put together a smash hit. And lots of luck.”

But Marley was shaking his head. “You don't have that kind of luck. Or time. Face it, Roxy. The game is over. Dashielle knew that—that's why he hocked the house, drained his bank account. That's why he took his life—”

“No. That's not why he took his life. He took his life because he was selfish and afraid. He took his life because he didn't trust the people who cared about him.”

Her voice had risen, but she didn't care. “Dashielle Parks died because he saw everything he loved falling apart, slipping out of his hands. And he couldn't hold on.”

“And neither can you,” Marley said. “It's over, Roxy.” He met her eyes with something of steel in his. “Sign the papers, before we all lose everything.” He pulled out a file folder and set it on the patio.

“I've already lost everything,” Rosie said, but Marley had walked away.

Fletcher gave her a pinched, hollow look, but followed him out.

She stood in the hot sun, in her black mourning dress, sweat dripping down her spine.

No.

But she picked up the sheaf of papers. The buyer listed himself through a corporation, Essex 315. She flipped the pages, read through the terms. Her eyes caught on a clause about retaining the current contracts of Palace Studios. Which meant she would be sold right along with Palace Studios.

No.

She folded the papers in half, carried them into the house, and dropped them on the long dining table, black and gleaming in the sunshine.

On the center of the table, beside an overflowing bouquet of purple tiger lilies, lay a pair of Dash's gold cuff links.

She scooped them up, examined them in the palm of her hand. They bore the Parks family's crest—a knight's helmet, surrounded by laurels.

He had no family at the funeral, his parents deceased.

And he hadn't legally passed on his name to an heir.

Oh Dash.

She closed the cuff links into her hand and wandered down to his room, pushing open the door.

She'd instructed Louise not to touch the room, to concentrate, instead, on scrubbing the blood from the patio, the hallway. Now, she stood in the door frame of the expansive suite, watching the sun part the heavy green velveteen drapes and graze over his desk, cluttered with papers, books, scripts.

Someone had made his bed, drawing up a chenille coverlet over the sheets, tucking them into the carved mahogany bed, the curved footboard, the ornate, scrolled headboard. She walked over to the high dresser, noted his watch curled into a tray on top. She set the cuff links in the tray.

He'd left his shoes sitting out next to his butler's stand rack. His tuxedo coat and pants hung on it. She walked over to it, ran her finger down the seam of the jacket.

Dash.

She could smell him, the enticing splash of his cologne permeating his room.

And, if she closed her eyes, she heard his steps in the hallway, could feel his hands on her shoulders, his breath on her neck.

Yes, she'd loved him. Or rather, she'd loved his dreams. The hope he had in her.

She slipped the jacket off the hanger, pulled it over her shoulders, slipped her arms through it. It dwarfed her, but she stood at the mirror and rolled up the sleeves. Reached over to grab his white scarf and wound it around her waist.

Stared at her profile. Studio mogul, indeed.

Oh, what was she thinking? She couldn't take over the studio. Hadn't the foggiest idea of how to run something so massive.

Four million dollars in debt.

She sat on the bed.

Once upon a time, she'd been the daughter of an heiress.

In fact, once upon a time, she'd been bequeathed a fortune. But she'd turned it down, wanted to find her own life.

Her own destiny.

She lay back on the bed and stuck her hands into his pockets. Something brushed against her hand, and she pulled it out.

A playbill from the
Star for a Day
premiere. The photograph depicted her wrapped in a fur, Grayson sitting at her feet, staring up at her, as if love struck.

The fantasy of show business.

That's all this was—a fantasy. Maybe, like Irene, she should give up, head back to Montana. Be a mother to Coco.

She laid the playbill on the bed and got up.

Dash had his own private liquor store on the bureau. She uncapped one of the decanters, sniffed, pulled away.

But she filled a glass anyway, two fingers high, and capped it.

She turned and held it to the mirror. “To your dreams, Dash.” She swallowed the heat in her throat as she threw the drink back.

Oh. Everything trembled, the room turning woozy, and she reached out for the dresser. Oh.

Her throat turned to fire, her stomach spasming.

She might be ill.

Pressing her hand to her stomach, she left his room, going back to the dining room. Picked up the contract.

No, perhaps she didn't belong here at all.

She walked out to the patio. Sank onto a lounge chair. Spread the contract out on her lap as the sun began to drift toward the horizon.

Maybe it was time a girl stopped fighting destiny.

“Mama!”

How many times did she let herself curl into the dream? Rosie didn't even bother to nudge herself, to hold back.

Not this time.

This time she let her heart tumble into the fantasy, allowed herself to stand at the end of the road and breathe in the Montana air, the tangy smell of the sagebrush, the bitterroot flowers. Listen to the sound of cattle ranging over the hills. Laugh at the prairie dogs that watched her as she headed toward the big white house, the red barn.

Everything she remembered about Lilly and Truman's home.

She spied Lilly on the porch, her body rounded with pregnancy, her dark hair long again and plaited. And Truman, tall and dark, emerging from the barn, wiping his hands with a cloth, probably working on the engine of their Cessna.