Lovegame(72)
It doesn’t take long before we’re settled on a couch in Melanie’s sitting room, poring over three photo albums filled with pictures of the Romero family in days past. Melanie is in most of the pictures, which is not exactly a surprise to me. Any more than her willingness to open up, to tell stories about the places they’ve been and the people they’ve known, is. It’s very obvious that she loved every part of her life as both Hollywood sex symbol and dedicated wife of genius director Salvatore Romero. These photo albums were supposed to give me insight into Veronica, and they are, just not in the way I had originally expected them to. I’ve wondered before what it must have been like for her growing up with the parents, the lifestyle, she had. Now I’m seeing it firsthand, listening to her mother talk about it, and I can’t help feeling for her.
Growing up with Jason as a brother was no picnic for me, but at least I always knew where I stood with him. Growing up Melanie’s daughter…I’m not sure the same thing can be said. It must have been a very unsteady, very capricious way of life. For the first time, her secret house away from all this makes perfect sense to me. If I was living her life, I’d need a bolt-hole, too.
We’re in the middle of the second photo album, admiring pictures of Melanie (and Veronica, of course) at Waimea Canyon in Hawaii when I get my first glimpse of him. William Vargas/Liam Brogan. He’s in the background of the picture, helping what looks to be a nine-or ten-year-old Veronica out of an SUV while Melanie blows kisses at the camera in the foreground.
One of his hands is holding Veronica’s while the other is on her lower back. There’s nothing glaringly inappropriate about the way he’s touching her, except for the way he’s angled into her. And the fact that her face is completely blank. The same kind of blank it was when I was showing her the door at my hotel this morning.
The thought infuriates me, destroys me—the idea that I put the same look on her face that that bastard did. Almost as much as the knowledge that he had unfettered access to her for what my research indicates is almost three years.
It’s been twenty years since this picture was taken and still I want to grab Melanie, want to shake her, want to demand to know what the f*ck she’d been thinking. Vamping for the camera, blowing kisses at her besotted husband, hamming it up while her daughter was right behind her, in the hands of a madman?
Of course, hindsight is twenty-twenty and the fact that this picture is still in the album attests to the fact that Melanie hadn’t had a clue what was going on. Then again, how could she when she was so wrapped up in herself and her perfect, movie star life?
I’m judging her harshly, I know, and I need to make sure I don’t go near the book until I’ve had some time to cool down and think it through. But it’s hard to do that when I’m sitting here looking at a picture in a family photo album of the man that so badly damaged the woman I l—
The second the thought runs through my head, I shut that shit down deep. I shove it into a dark, shadowy corner of my mind where I can either deal with it much, much later or simply ignore it completely. I’ve known Veronica four days, I remind myself. Four days. We’ve had passionate fights and even more passionate sex, but that’s it. That’s all there is to it. All there will ever be to it. Because the idea that I would be so stupid as to fall in love with a woman this damaged when I have absolutely nothing to give her, nothing to help her, is ludicrous. Veronica has been hurt enough. The last thing she needs is to deal with all the baggage that comes with me, too.
“Who is this?” I ask, pointing at the picture of Brogan as I interrupt Melanie’s soliloquy.
“That’s Veronica, silly. She—oh.” She stares at the picture hard for several seconds, a strange look on her face. “I didn’t realize he was in that photo.”
“Who?” I push.
“No one.” She takes the album from me, starts to pull the picture out from between the plastic. But she catches me watching her and at the last minute just straightens it up. “Just an old bodyguard of Veronica’s.”
Picture time is obviously over, though, because she closes the book and then stacks it on the coffee table underneath the other two.
“We should probably get back to the party,” she tells me as she pushes to her feet. For the first time since I got here tonight, she looks closer to her own age than her daughter’s. “The birthday girl can’t go missing too long.”
“Of course not.” This time I’m the one to push open the suite door that leads to the hallway. “I’m sorry for monopolizing your time.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. Anything I can do to help the man writing about my baby girl for Vanity Fair. Did you find any photos you like in the albums? I’m happy to have copies made for the magazine.”
“There are a few, actually. But let me talk to Vanity Fair and see what they say first, before you go to the trouble.”
“Honestly, it’s no trouble. I think the one of her and me in the polka dot bikinis would be cute. And maybe the one of us on the red carpet when Salvatore won his first Oscar. And the one of us at the Acropolis. Her hair was adorable that day.”
And Melanie had been at the height of her beauty, in a skimpy little dress that showed her legs to their best advantage. Big surprise. Is it any wonder Veronica has trouble opening up? Melanie herself has so many agendas I’m not sure how she keeps them all straight.