He should go back to the hotel and sleep till noon, but he was too restless. If his cronies had been around, he might have headed for a club, but then again maybe not. Club life had lost its appeal. Unfortunately, he was a night owl, and he hadn’t yet figured out what to do instead.

He passed the window of a butcher shop. A stuffed boar’s head stared at him through the glass, and he looked away. The last couple of days had been a bitch. Karli Swenson, his former girlfriend and one of Hollywood’s favorite actresses, had killed herself the week before at her Malibu beach house. Karli had a long history with cocaine, so he suspected that her suicide was drug related, which pissed him off so much he still couldn’t mourn her. One thing he did know for sure-she hadn’t killed herself because of him.

Even when they were dating, Karli had cared a lot more about what was going up her nose than she’d ever cared for him, but audiences adored her, and the tabloids wanted a sexier story than drugs. No surprise, they’d decided he was it. Hollywood’s career bad boy whose heartless ways with women had driven sweet Karli to her grave.

Since those bad-boy stories had helped build his career, he couldn’t blame the media, but he still didn’t like how exposed this was making him feel. That was why he’d decided to go to ground for the next six weeks or so, until shooting for his next picture started.

He’d originally planned to call up an old girlfriend, head for the Caribbean, and get down to the serious business of resuming the sex life he’d put on hiatus a few months before filming on his last picture had started. But the uproar over Karli’s death made him want to put more distance between himself and the States, so he’d decided to go to Italy instead. It was not only the country of his ancestors but also the place where the initial filming on his next picture would begin. He’d get a chance to soak in some atmosphere, slip into the skin of a new character. And he wasn’t bringing along any publicity-hungry old girlfriends to get in his way.