A Woman Worth Loving. Jackie BraunЧитать онлайн книгу.

      CHAPTER ONE

      IT WAS easy to have regrets about the way she’d lived her life when a man’s hands were wrapped around her throat, thumbs pressing insistently on her windpipe to cut off her oxygen supply. In truth, though, the excuses Audra had made for her bad behavior hadn’t seemed valid for a while now.

      It’s not fair.

      That thought registered even as her vision began to dim.

      After all, she had been changing her ways—discreetly, which perhaps explained why the tabloids’ most recent headlines had still labeled her a gold digger.

      Audra didn’t like the moniker, although she supposed she had been called far worse. Still, she had married for love and, after that, for emotional security. Wealth hadn’t been the quality that had attracted her to any of her husbands, including the late Henry Dayton Winfield the Third. He’d been kind, undemanding. He’d been…safe. And she had been determined that this marriage would work despite the gap in their ages. She had been determined that this time she would not fail. Marriage number three would not end in divorce like the previous two, leaving her disillusioned and her heart a gouged-out husk.

      “Lying, manipulative witch,” spat the man squeezing her throat.

      Audra was incapable of disputing his words. How ironic that when she had been capable of speaking out in her own defense, she hadn’t bothered.

      In general, she hadn’t cared what other people thought about her or what adjectives they used to describe her, as long as they’d spelled her name right. She’d known her soul wasn’t completely black even if the rag-reading public thought differently. Since her most recent marriage in particular, she’d taken steps to restructure her lifestyle and realign the egocentric pattern into which she had fallen since coming to Hollywood. She was no Mother Teresa, but she had found great satisfaction and personal fulfillment by becoming involved with children’s charities in recent years, working quietly behind the scenes lest someone accuse her of exploiting the already-exploited in an attempt to salvage her flagging acting career.

      While the tabloids might call her a gold digger—and the man trying to kill her clearly saw her that way—she had in fact made an appointment with her lawyer that very afternoon to rework her late husband’s will so that his rightful heirs would inherit the vast estate.

      She didn’t need the money, nor did she feel entitled to it. She had amassed a fair bit of wealth on her own, thanks to a few smart investments. Still, she could understand why some people who didn’t know her, and who only read tabloid stories about her, would see her as a candidate for stoning.

      As she floated near the edge of consciousness, the past thirty years played through her mind like some poorly acted, made-for-television movie. That was galling, but apropos. She’d never made much of a name for herself in Hollywood, at least not the kind that could be repeated in polite company.

      She’d caused her share of trouble and heartache, bitterness and outright rage, which, she thought with the brutal honesty of the dying, was exactly how she found herself in her current predicament. She’d pushed the envelope too far, thumbed her nose at convention one time too many.

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