The Love Killers Read Online Free

raised in different countries; their whole lives were completely alien to each other. Occasionally they met, and there was a true warmth between them, a love that crossed their very obvious differences. They understood each other and never criticized the other’s way of life.
    Their father, Jim Lawrence Brown, had never married either of their mothers. Margaret was five when her mother died, and Jim had moved on, taking the child with him to California. There he met a married woman separated from her husband. Jim and Margaret moved in with her, and eventually the woman gave birth to Lara. A year later, when she and her husband decided to get back together, they gave Jim the child and six thousand dollars to move on again. The money tempted him. He didn’t argue.
    With the cash he bought an old car and trailer, which served as a sort of home. At seven years of age Margaret was completely in charge of one-year-old Lara.
    Jim was a natural drifter; he was always in a dream, playing his guitar, chasing pretty women, or sleeping. He drove them to Arizona, where they stayed on a farm owned by a widow named Mary Chaucer. She took care of Lara and insisted Margaret start school. ‘The girl is very bright,’ she told Jim. ‘Advanced for her years. She must have an education.’
    After a while Jim began to get restless. He had been far too long in the same place, only now he was tied by two children, and it was a responsibility he wasn’t up to. Lara often thought that was why he must have decided to marry Mary Chaucer. She was older than he, a plump, smiling lady who never complained.
    Exactly one month after their marriage, Jim took off, leaving nothing more than a scrawled note instructing Mary to look after his kids.
    Margaret was nine. She was the one who found his note. It was a coward’s note, full of apologies and five hundred dollars.
    Eight months after his departure Mary gave birth to Jim’s third daughter, Beth, a child he never even knew existed.
    After that things were different. With no man around, work at the farm became slapdash and unorganized. Mary was always tired and sick. The baby wore her out. Money started to run short, as did the once-smiling Mary’s temper. Margaret was packed off to boarding school, while Lara was sent to relatives of Mary’s in England. They did not see each other again for ten years, by which time Margaret was attending college on a scholarship and Lara was doing well as a teen model in London.
    Beth, now ten, lived with Mary in a small apartment. She went to school while Mary worked.
    Margaret wanted to help them, but it was hard enough managing to pay for her own education—an education she was determined to have.
    At sixteen Lara was quite beautiful, natural, with none of the polish she later acquired. She was happy living in England; in fact, to Margaret she seemed almost completely English—accent and all. They spent a weekend together in New York and the closeness of their early years was still there.
    Time went by and they went their separate, highly individual ways. Occasionally they wrote or phoned. But the need for contact was not there; there was a deeper bond of love and security.
    Mary Chaucer died of cancer when Beth was fifteen, and although both her sisters invited her to come and live with them, she preferred a more independent life and went off to a hippie commune with her boyfriend, Max.
    Margaret didn’t object. She was already launched on an equality-for-women project. Her first book,
Women
—
The Unequal Sex,
was about to be published. Her star was beginning to shine.
    In London Lara met and married Jamie P. Crichton, whose father happened to be one of the richest men in England—and Jamie was his only heir. Unfortunately, their marriage did not last longer than a year, however, it was long enough to establish Lara as a personality in her own right. The gossip columns hardly went to press without carrying