The Widow

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Authors: Anne Stuart
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lover, until the day he’d seen her blown to pieces by a land mine in Kosovo.
    But lying back on the hard wooden pew, he could almost see her up there in the stars. That’s where she’d be—not in some traditional heaven wearing white robes and playing a harp. For one thing, the lady was tone deaf. For another, she didn’t believe in that sentimental crap.
    No, she’d be up there in the stars, looking down at him, telling him what an asshole he was for being sentimental about her. Telling him what a bastard he was for even thinking about using someone like Charlie Thomas. Telling him to stop wasting his life with trashy tabloids and get back to work on a real paper.
    He wouldn’t listen, of course, but then, she’d been used to that in life. It wouldn’t come as any surprise in death. But she’d still be watching, nagging at his conscience. And maybe once he managed this final, monumental score, maybe he’d leave Europe, go back home, find himself a small-city newspaper and a plump wife and forget all his demons.
    Maybe.
    In the meantime he was going to do one more search of the church ruins. There were all sorts of nooks and crannies, hidden places where someone might stash a fortune’s worth of paintings. Finding out where those paintings had gone was at least as important as finding out how Pompasse really died. Given the monetary value, it was probably even more important to his pragmatic public.
    One thing, though—Maguire needed to concentrate on the task at hand and keep his mind off the widow. There’d be time enough to deal with her.
    Â 
    Even with the heavy damask cover stripped from her bed, the old room still brought Charlie almost suffocating memories. The windows, wide open to the warm autumn air, did nothing to make the room inviting—it felt both cold and claustrophobic.
    She swept the makeup and perfume into the trash, not even hesitating, and by accident some of the scent spilled, filling the room with its cloying fragrance. Pompasse had had it blended especially for her on her eighteenth birthday, and it had never suited her. It was too heavy, too sophisticated a scent for the child that Charlie had never really been, and now it was too strong and melodramatic. She put the waste bin in the hall and closed the door, then moved to the window to breathe in the fresh air.
    The perfumer who’d made the scent had been one of Pompasse’s lovers, she remembered. A thin, secretive woman who’d watched her out of dark, hungry eyes. Pompasse had insisted she accompany him to Rosa’s shop. “How else will she know what will be the right scent for you?” he’d said, and Charlie had already known it was useless to argue. Pompasse had always gotten his own way.
    So his former mistress had blended a fragrance for the cherished wife, and Charlie used to dream that Rosa had put poison in it, to eat into her skin and her soul. Not that Rosa would have hesitated, had she had the ability, but she was no medieval poisoner, and the thick scent of her perfume was the only revenge she could take.
    Charlie was jet-lagged and worn-out. And she really didn’t want to lie down on that bed. It was a huge, carved affair, brought from some castello in the north. She pushed against it with all her might, but it wouldn’t budge—it might as well have been nailed to the floor.
    On impulse she walked through the adjoining bathroom and knocked on the door that had once led to Pompasse’s bedroom. It now housed the unsettling Mr. Maguire, but she hadn’t heard or seen him come upstairs, and she expected the room was abandoned.
    She knocked again, then pushed it open, wondering what she’d do if Maguire were standing there.
    The room was deserted. But that wasn’t what surprised her. If the studio had been a shock, the bedroom was even more so. It had been stripped of everything—including the paintings that Pompasse had

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