LITMIR.BIZ

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Nothing existed for him. Not even himself. Dr. Mackenzie Parish. That man was gone. Gone.

      Mac set his champagne, untouched, on the marble table by massive glass doors opened to the terrace and the night beyond. A blanket of city lights lay far below, a city as unreal to him as he felt at that moment. He turned from it, pushed his hands into the pockets of his leather bomber jacket and headed for the spiral metal stairs that went down three flights to the garage level.

      He was down two flights when he heard someone call out, “Doc? Hey, Doc!” the sound echoing off the stairwell walls, which were splashed with modern art.

      He looked up, and on the top landing someone was waving to him. Clarisa? Marissa? He couldn’t remember the name of the woman he’d met when he’d walked into the party less than an hour ago. An actress of some sort, he thought, although he’d never seen her in the movies. A woman who hung out at parties like this, a woman who did whatever it took to be close enough to fame to rub shoulders with it.

      She hung over the railing, dangerously close to coming down without using the stairs. “Where you going?” she called, a bit tipsy now, no surprise, the way she’d been drinking champagne. Blond, busty, tattooed on one shoulder, a snake or something, poured into a dress a size too small. Pretty, if one looked at her with unprofessional eyes. But he could see where she’d been “nipped and tucked,” and although it was done well, she wasn’t anywhere near the twenty-something she was pretending to be.

      “See you,” he called out, and started down again.

      “Hey, I’ll go with you!”

      He would have taken her up on the offer three months ago, but now he rejected it out of hand. If he’d still been Mac Parish, doctor to the stars, he would have motioned for her to come on down. She would have been thrilled to be with him. A genius at plastic surgery, a man who worked on the best and brightest, wealthy, famous in his own right. But he ignored her offer now and hurried out of her sight.

      He reached the garage level, pushed open the outer door and met the valet, a man probably working as a valet while he waited to be “discovered.” He was young and good-looking, obviously worked out and had a megawatt smile. “Ready to leave, sir?” he asked brightly.

      “Yes.” Mac handed him his tag and the guy nodded.

      “Be right back, sir,” he said as he set off.

      Mac stood alone and took a breath. He must be real. He could feel the chilly October air rush into his lungs, could hear the drone of voices and the music drifting from the multistoried house. But he still didn’t feel real. He took out his wallet for a tip to give the valet and stopped when he saw the only picture he carried in the slender leather holder.

      It was a small photo of three people, a softly pretty woman, a sleeping baby in her arms, and a man in his early thirties. The man was Mac’s mirror image. Almost a dead ringer, but the man in the picture had shorter hair, no razor cut, but just as thick and sandy blond. Hazel eyes squinted into bright sunlight, eyes set in a face with rugged features that seemed to be all planes and angles. His skin was tanned but not from sets of tennis in the California sun at private clubs. It was from hard work in the outdoors.

      The look on the man’s face was something Mac almost didn’t remember ever feeling, the look of a man who had everything he ever wanted. The delicate blond woman at his side smiled at him as if he was the center of her world. The baby in her arms, swaddled in a blue blanket, linked them forever.

      “You have nothing, Mac. You stopped existing a long time ago.”

      Mac shoved back the memory of those words as headlights arced up the driveway, blinding him for a moment. Then the low throb of the Porsche’s engine vibrated in the air as the car slid to a stop in front of him. The valet got out and took the bill Mac offered him in exchange for the keys. Mac got in, and he drove down the winding driveway to the street below.

      “You can’t go on like this. I won’t let you.”

      The words rang in his memory as he headed south toward Hollywood Boulevard. “You’re lost. You’re so lost.”

      He reached for his cell phone, hit a number and waited for two rings. A woman answered in a sleepy voice. “Yes?”

      “It’s me. I’m coming back. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

      “We’ll be waiting,” she said.

      Mac flipped the phone shut, tossed it on the empty passenger seat and took the last curve so fast that the tires of the sports car squealed on the pavement. When he reached the boulevard, he never looked back. He concentrated on what was ahead of him, and what he had to do.

      “You’re lost, so lost.”

      He was going to find Mac Parish. He wasn’t sure he’d like what he found at the end of his search. But if he was going to try to find himself, that meant going back.

      Chapter One

      Katherine Ames stood in the cramped office of James Lowe, the features editor at the Final Word, a Los Angeles-based magazine that fed into the public’s need to know anything and everything about celebrities and would-be celebrities. She was watching edited video on the largest of five television monitors set on the far wall. “Why am I watching this?” she asked, never looking away from the screen that showed arrivals of the stars and celebrities at a movie premiere.

      “Watch, Kate, just watch.” James said. Lights flashed, and a white limo drew up to the curb at the end of the red carpet. A banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen—Dr. Mackenzie Parish—at the same time James spoke again. “There he is.”

      The limo stopped and the door was opened. The scroll on the bottom of the screen changed to The Doctor to the Stars as the man himself stepped out onto the carpet and into a sea of lights, microphones and interviewers. Fans were held back by security guards and velvet ropes.

      Kate had seen the doctor the way most of the public had, his face plastered all over the gossip pages, filling a lot of space in magazines like theirs, a man with as much “presence” as a lot of his clients, the beautiful and the famous. Now he was standing on the carpet, a tall, lean man, with sandy hair, in a well-tailored tuxedo, smiling, waving, offering his arm to his companion, a tall, leggy blonde with more hair than dress.

      “Look at that guy. He had everything,” James murmured.

      Kate saw Parish turn and for a fraction of a second, he looked right at the camera. His dark eyes narrowed slightly at the glare from the lights. His face sharply angular with a strong jaw, he was clean-shaven and had just enough lines around his eyes and mouth to make him ruggedly appealing.

      He was a striking man, attractive in a definitely male way, with a deep, even tan that set off the color of his longish hair, brushed straight back from his face. The blonde waved and giggled, holding on to his arm as if he were her personal trophy.

      “Yeah, he had everything,” Kate said, slightly taken aback when he smiled at the woman with him. A half smile, really, but enough to crinkle the skin at the corners of his eyes, lifting his lips in what was almost a seductive manner. The man was sexy. Damn sexy. He was listening to a bimbo starlet as if she was telling him the secret of life. Right then James paused the picture, freezing that frame, and the smile.

      “He sure as hell did,” James said. “Everything.”

      “Where’s this going?” Kate asked, turning from the image and feeling oddly uneasy. “This tape’s at least two years old.”

      James was still looking at the monitor, and his pale-blue eyes, even paler in his deeply tanned face, narrowed thoughtfully. With his shock of blond hair styled to a T and his fashionably rumpled look, he definitely looked like a thirtysomething man on the way up. Any way he could get there.

      James finally turned his gaze to Kate. “The question everyone’s tried to answer is, why did he walk away right when he was at the top? He was the best nip-and-tuck man in the city, privy

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