Drop Dead Gorgeous

  DROP DEAD

  GORGEOUS

  Heather Graham

  ONCE THEY WERE LOVERS… UNTIL THEIR CAREFREE WORLD WAS SHATTERED BY MURDER

  Now a successful author, Sean Black has returned to his Florida hometown to lay his ghosts to rest. But some still believe him guilty of the crime for which he was acquitted—a night of tragedy that has haunted him for fifteen years. Lori Corcoran also remembers that night—and the dizzying moment of passion that changed her life. She too has come home—to memories, secrets—and a burning desire for the only man she has ever wanted.

  Now the moon-kissed night illuminates a passion that was meant to be—and a past that has come dangerously alive. For as Lori's heart catches fire in Sean's arms, another murder rocks the exclusive area of South Beach. And somewhere in the shadows, a killer vows to destroy everything, including a precarious and precious love…

  prologue

  The guy had the kind of smile that just sent shivers racing down her spine.

  Eleanor Metz hadn’t seen too many men like him, and at nearly thirty-three, she felt she’d seen a fair quantity of men. She might have even said that she was a connoisseur of men. She’d married three of them. They came in all varieties, and some were nice, and some were jerks. Unfortunately, it seemed that most of the nice ones looked like Pillsbury Dough Boys, or beanpoles with BVD’s, but that was okay. It took all kinds to make the world, right? She tried to be nice to nice guys.

  But really good-looking guys were hard to come by. And since most guys in general were about as honest and dependable as the route of a tornado, it made sense to enjoy the company, body, and talents of a good-looking guy before he departed—since not even the Pillsbury Dough Boys or beanpoles could be counted on in a pinch.

  She had glimpsed him just briefly.

  The South Beach dance club was busy on a Friday night. She saw him through the crowd, and then he seemed to disappear into it. There were dancers everywhere; the music was played by a young disc jockey who kept the place rocking. Right now the English group Republica was blaring over the laughter and the pickup lines, and the room itself seemed to pulse with the beat. With all the movement, she simply couldn’t figure just which way the guy had gone.

  He had looked familiar—like a face from the distant past. Or maybe not so distant a past. It was disturbing, maddening. Who the hell was he?

  Did she care? Hell, no. She just wanted to find him again.

  It would be nice, of course, if she did know him. If they did share a past, if her mystery man was someone she had known, and with whom she could laugh over some bygone incident. Break the ice. If there was ice. She just had a feeling about this guy …

  But she couldn’t see him anymore.

  She sighed, having just refused a second go-round with the paunchy tourist with the heavy accent who was watching her now. She pretended to sit with her friends as if she were just exhausted and didn’t want to dance again. Her tourist might be chubby, talk funny, and be the last guy in the world she’d ever want to sleep with, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He was one of the nice guys—but about as sexy as a mackerel.

  “Slim pickings tonight,” Abby Denhoff said. Abby was older, nearly forty, and often had a world-weary look about her. She’d been married twice, and agreed with the general premise that all men were primates. She was looking for an old guy—the older the better. Both of her husbands had left her for younger women. She now wanted a man so old that he was about to kick off any minute—he just had to have money. That way, when he left her—death being another way to depart—she’d be able to afford a lifestyle, at the least.

  “Yeah, slim pickings,” Eleanor said, not about to share her excitement over the strangely familiar, drop-dead-gorgeous guy she had just seen. Abby was looking for an old guy to marry, but obviously she wasn’t going to find too many of them in this club. She still liked younger guys to play with.

  Eleanor picked up her cocktail glass, toyed with her straw a minute, then anxiously finished her drink. Her third. She usually stopped at two; tonight she was feeling restless. She’d gone through one more husband than Abby, but she wasn’t nearly as bitter, since she’d been the leaver instead of the leavee. She felt badly about the husbands she’d left, but she liked spice and variety in life, and she’d always been a sucker for a good-looking man.

  The Chivas and soda she’d downed was strong because the bartender was a primate, and had tried to pick her up by making killer drinks. God, but did some of these orangutans think that any woman over twenty-five was an easy lay? Fool. Unfortunately for him, he had green teeth. He wasn’t even a primate who could be enjoyed for sheer entertainment purposes.

  “See anyone interesting at all?” Jenna Diamond asked, curling a strand of hair around her finger. She was twenty-eight with wide brown eyes, not as cynical as Abby. They all worked at a downtown Miami bank, and being single and friends, they tended to do their clubbing together on Friday nights when the work week was done.

  “No,” Eleanor lied, “but maybe I’ll go look around.” She winked. “If I don’t come back, don’t worry about me!”

  “I’m probably going home soon,” Abby said, yawning. “And I won’t be worried about anyone except for the men in my dreams. Both of you behave decently now—we’re not hard up enough yet to mate with primates. See ya Monday.”

  “Monday,” Eleanor murmured, moving on through the crowd, looking for the elusive, familiar stranger—Mr. Right.

  She bumped into a tall, thin fellow who was kind of cute and she danced with him, thinking that he had promise, but then his toupee began to slip and he lost appeal. She smiled, thought of an excuse, and slipped away. She still couldn’t find the guy, so she danced next with a short, friendly Latino who reminded her of a small version of Desi Arnaz. Then, hot, winded, and discouraged, she stepped out into the back alley of the club.

  He was there, standing by his car. He grinned when he saw her. That killer-gorgeous kind of a smile that sent her heart racing. God, he was hot. And it wasn’t that she would stoop to a one-night stand with a primate, and she wasn’t easy or anything of the sort; it had just been so long since she’d even seen such a guy that she was…

  Dying.

  She could already feel him on the inside.

  Okay, so tonight she’d be easy. Besides, maybe she knew him. There was that strange something that was familiar about him…

  “Coming with me?” he asked her. Cocky. Damned cocky. He had a right to be.

  “Maybe,” she told him, smiling as she walked toward his car. But as she neared him, she saw something in his face change. A warning bell went off inside her. Confusion stirred within while she thought madly and then…

  Her eyes had fallen and she could see inside his car. See what he had in the front seat.

  Oh, God. Her mother had warned her, her friends had warned her. Watch out. Your lifestyle is too loose. Playing around may be fun, but watch out, be careful. Some men are worse than primates. Some men are deranged.

  And some are killers.

  She dragged her eyes back to his, feeling a paralyzing, instinctive fear take hold of her. He was still smiling. She wanted to scream; her heart slammed against the wall of her chest.

  She couldn’t scream. It was as if she were living out a nightmare; her vocal cords were frozen. He was familiar, hell yes, he was familiar. She didn’t just know him, she knew him well. And she suddenly knew a truth that had eluded her for years.

  She knew truth…

  And terror.

  She turned and started to run. And it was then that the tire iron slammed against her skull. And she saw and felt no more.

  1

  The ringing of the phone sounded like a five-alarm fire. Jerked cruell
y from a sound—and admittedly, slightly drunken sleep—Sean Black reached over to pick up the receiver.

  He encountered flesh as he fumbled for the telephone. The woman next to him made a grumbling noise and wiggled her rump. He stared at the blanket-covered feminine mound at his side, surprised that she was still with him and trying to remember more of the night gone by. He didn’t think he’d had quite that much to drink in a very long time; it had been years since he’d actually been drunk.

  Coming home had done it.

  “Hello?” he said, staring at the sheet-covered curves of the woman. What had her name been? Maggie, Molly—something with an M. Pretty woman, thirtyish, sleek dark hair cut in a short, sophisticated style, good body, good face, great lips and tongue—and a talent for using them. She was a freelance writer who did travel articles for a number of papers and local interviews for an area literary magazine. Molly-Maggie—or whatever her name was—had been fun, the kind of woman who didn’t play games, who liked sex, wanted sex, and was good at sex. Yeah… he liked her. He just hadn’t remembered asking her to stay all night, but since she hadn’t wanted dinner, he’d seen to it that they got a great dinner from room service, and hell, how many bottles of wine had they had? He should stick with Jack Daniel’s or beer when he drank, he told himself, running his fingers through his hair. Wine in little crystal stemmed glasses was a killer. His head was pounding.

  “Hello?” he repeated, his voice growing more terse.

  “Hey, Sean, Ricky here. Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  He winced, shrugging. He hadn’t seen Ricky Garcia in about thirteen years until a few days ago. Ricky was trying to make up for lost time, so it seemed. But Sean refrained from telling his old friend that hell, yes, he’d wakened him. Ricky was with the Miami-Dade homicide unit. He was supposed to have grown up to become a lawyer, like his dad. Somehow he hadn’t quite made it. Which might have made him a better person. Sean liked him better now than he had when Ricky had been a rich kid. But then, when he’d left town all those years ago, he hadn’t much liked anyone here.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “Oh, hey, I did wake you. How did you like the club?”

  “Fine.”

  “Have a nice night?”

  “Sure.”

  “Meet anyone?”

  Sean glanced over at his bed partner. “No,” he lied.

  “Hey, good, I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”

  “What? Why?”

  “We had a murder last night.”

  “You have half a dozen murders a week here, so it seems when you read the papers,” Sean murmured dryly.

  “Shootings, we’ve had a lot of trouble with shootings,” Ricky admitted. “And stabbings,” he added reluctantly. “Gangs, drugs, stuff like that in the crack neighborhoods. All right, throw in some domestic violence and stray bullets. That’s still a low blow coming from a guy who chose to live in L.A. But this wasn’t a gang killing or a guy who freaked out because his wife turned off the sports channel. It’s different.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Beautiful girl, dead after a hot night out at the very same club I sent you to.”

  Great, he thought. They’d probably be throwing the book at him any minute. He sat stiffly as a sensation of ice water swept through his veins.

  No, maybe not. Not anymore. He was among the “rich kids” now.

  God, but he could still remember what it had been like—the cops coming, dragging him out of the house by the hair, slamming him up against the car to slip the cuffs on him. His father crying, his brother protesting, the cops shoving Michael back as they took him away. He remembered telling his dad he was innocent, that he hadn’t done anything, and his father had believed him, but it hadn’t really mattered. His dad had started dying that same day…

  “She wasn’t killed at the club, and she disappeared from it late Friday night, early Saturday morning. She wasn’t found until the wee hours of this morning—2:23 A.M. Monday, that’s what I’ve got on record—and so far the M.E. estimates she’d been dead at least twenty-four hours before she was found. She wasn’t killed last night,” Ricky said. “Still, it seems like one of those ‘looking for Mr. Good-bar’ kind of things. I thought with what you write for a living… you did ask if you could drive along on anything important. Poor woman is my case, and I’m going in for the autopsy. Something about it is making me a little crazy at the moment, but I don’t know what. Like I knew her or something. Like something is familiar and I should recognize it.”

  Breathe, Sean told himself, loosen up. “What was her name?” he asked.

  “Metz. Eleanor Metz.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell with me.”

  “I didn’t get a good look at her face yet— she was pretty banged up, bloodied and bruised. And you know… decomposition sets in early down here. With the M.E., tech experts, and photographers all busy, I couldn’t try to figure it out at the scene. She’s at the morgue now, though, and the doc on this one is a friend of mine, and a big fan of yours. Or ‘Michael Shayne’s,’ I should say. Whatever made you write under a pseudonym?” Ricky asked.

  Might it have been the fact that he had been acquitted of murder himself? he wondered dryly.

  “I was teaching at the university when I first started writing,” he told Ricky. “And what I do is commercial fiction—sometimes the academic types don’t like that.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. I guess. Still, if it had been me, I’d have had my real name all over everything. Anyway, just bring my friend Dr. Kate Gillespie an autographed book, and I can bring you in.”

  Sean was quiet for a minute, fighting the ice, his jaw clenched, as time ticked by. Ironic. A cop was going to bring him to see an autopsy. It was a damned strange world. For a moment he thought that the last thing he wanted to do was attend the autopsy of a beautiful young woman in South Florida. The whole damned thing was ridiculously ironic.

  He was about to refuse.

  Then he didn’t.

  Hell, he didn’t have another idea for a book at all at the moment, while he’d resigned from his position at the university five years ago when he’d realized his enthusiasm for fiction. He could probably have latched on to some kind of an interesting field trip, but he’d been feeling too restless.

  And when he’d agreed to come here on the publicity tour, he’d called first to arrange to have the Coconut Grove stop be his last. Then he’d arranged to close up his Malibu Beach house to spend a few extra weeks. Then he’d determined he was going to spend at least a month here to work. He’d meant to come back for a time, long enough to dispel a few ghosts of the past. So he was here. To work.

  If he was going to work, he might as well take advantage of the opportunity to attend the autopsy of a murder victim. He’d be a damned fool—or one hell of a poor writer—not to.

  It was just that… Here. Of all places.

  Miami did forgive a guy. Apparently, anybody could be forgiven. Still, it was bitter. Damned bitter.

  “Sean?”

  Maybe it was, at long last, simple justice. Maybe he’d always wanted to come back home as a hot shot just to have revenge. Tear a few things down to size; let a few people know that two could play games when there was so much in life that could be bought.

  Then again, maybe he just wanted peace. He’d had his pride, he’d made his way—he’d become a success. But he’d never found peace with what had happened.

  He looked over at Molly-Maggie. Lots of affairs, good fun. But there were times he felt as if he were copulating like a damned battery bunny and still coming out of it empty as all hell. Empty was better than pain, he reminded himself. No damned commitments for him. The Molly-Maggies of the world were just what he intended to keep in his life.

  “Sean?”

  He remembered Ricky on the other end of the line. Ricky had held out an olive branch. Of course, he’d held it out to a New York Times best-selling author with three movie deals in the works instead of to a poor kid from the w
rong side of the street.

  Cynical. Hell but he was cynical.

  “Yeah,” he told Ricky. “Thanks, I’ll be ready.”

  He hung up the phone. Molly-Maggie had pulled the sheets from her face, and she stared up at him. “Leaving? Another interview?”

  “Yeah, something like that.” He shrugged ruefully. “Sorry we can’t have breakfast. Or…”

  Molly-Maggie was pretty. Good face, good body. Great lips. He felt himself hardening as he apologized. “Sorry we don’t have more time,” he said huskily.

  She shook her head, pretty brown curls bouncing. “Honey, I don’t need a lot of time.” She grinned wickedly, and it sounded as if she purred just like a cat as she added, “And I do just fine with protein for breakfast!”

  So saying, she threw the sheets over her head and rubbed her body down the length of him until she had him in her hands and mouth. His blood swiftly quickened… damn, but she was good. A matter of minutes and she was on top of him, moving like a jockey.

  He had five minutes left to shower, and was downstairs waiting when Ricky came by in his unmarked patrol car. He swore softly at himself as he got into the car.

  He’d still forgotten to ask if her name was Molly or Maggie.

  Lori Kelly Corcoran pulled her Jeep Wagoneer into the driveway, studying the old house on Alhambra as she did so. Great old place, a real Merrick home, one of the houses built by the founder of the city for his own family. It had balconies, fireplaces, a curving staircase, two stories, and three bedrooms— all around a central courtyard.

  What it didn’t have was decent plumbing or electricity, but then, if it had possessed such simple marvels of contemporary living, she wouldn’t have been able to afford the place. And she did love the house. She just hoped that Brendan would grow to love it, too. As it was, coming here might be a bit of an adjustment for a fourteen-year-old boy. He hadn’t seen the house until now; she had been inside only one time herself. She had once thought that she was never coming back to the Miami area—not on any kind of a permanent basis. But that had been before Gramps had taken sick. He didn’t intend to leave. His roots were here; her mother, father, and brother were here. She’d asked him to come to New York, but he couldn’t leave the others he loved and who loved him as well, even if he had always had a soft spot in his heart for her.