Glitter Baby (33 page)

“I—I had it made especially for you.” He cleared his throat again. “This guy I know. I did a pencil drawing for him.”

“It’s beautiful.” She spoke politely, as if she’d just received it. Still she wouldn’t look at him.

His feet shifted in the gravel. “I don’t want you to go, Flower. All that stuff last night…” His voice sounded hoarse, as if he were getting a cold. “I’m sorry.”

She wouldn’t cry, but the effort cost her, and her words sounded as broken as her heart. “I can’t—I can’t take any more. Let me go.”

He drew a ragged breath. “I did what you said. I read the book. You…You were right. I—I’ve been locked up inside myself too long. Afraid. But when I went to get you by the pool last night…All of a sudden I knew I was a hell of a lot more afraid of losing you than I was of anything that happened fifteen years ago.”

She finally turned to look at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. She pulled off her sunglasses and heard him clear his throat again and suddenly realized he was crying.

“Jake?”

“Don’t look at me.”

She turned away, but then his hands were on her arms, and he was pulling her from the car. He squeezed her to his chest so tightly she could barely breathe. “Don’t leave me.” He choked out the words. “I’ve been alone for so long…all my life. Don’t leave me. Jesus, I love you so much. Please, Flower.”

She felt him crumbling. All the protective layers he’d built around himself were breaking away. She finally had what she wanted—Jake Koranda with his emotions stripped raw. Jake letting her see what he’d never shown to anyone else. And it broke her heart.

She covered his tears with her mouth, swallowed them, made them disappear. She tried to heal him with her touch. She wanted to make him whole again, as whole as she was. “It’s all right, cowboy,” she whispered. “It’s all right. I love
you. Just don’t shut me out anymore. I can take anything but that.”

He gazed down at her, his eyes red-rimmed, all the cockiness stripped away. “What about you? How long are you going to keep shutting me out? When are you going to let me in?”

“I don’t know what you—” She stopped herself and rested her cheek against his jaw. His smokescreens were no different from her own. All her life, she’d tried to find her personal value in the opinions of others—the nuns at the
couvent
, Belinda, Alexi. And now it was her business. Yes, she wanted her agency to succeed, but if it failed, she wouldn’t be any less a person. There was nothing wrong with her. She’d been just as much a victim of her misconceptions as Jake.

Try to feel some compassion for the kid you were
, she’d told him. Maybe it was time she took her own advice and felt a little compassion for the frightened child she’d been.

“Jake?”

He muttered something into her neck.

“You’ll have to help me,” she said.

He slipped his fingers in her hair, and they kissed long enough to lose track of time. When they finally moved apart, he said, “I love you, Flower. Let’s get this car out of here and drive down to the water. I want to look at the ocean and hold you close and tell you everything I’ve wanted to say for a long time. And I think you have some things to tell me, too.”

She thought of everything she needed to tell him. About the
couvent
and Alexi, about Belinda and Errol Flynn, about her lost years and her ambitions. She nodded.

They got the car back on the road. Jake drove, and as they began their slow crawl down the drive, he picked up her hand and kissed her fingertips. She smiled, and then she gently pulled away. Her purse held a compact with a pocket mirror. She flipped it open and began to study her face.

What she saw was unsettling and disturbing, but she didn’t turn away as she’d been doing for so many years. Instead she stared at her reflection and tried to take in her features with her heart instead of her brain.

Her face was part of her. It might be too big to fit her personal definition of beauty, but she saw intelligence in her reflection, sensitivity in her eyes, humor in her wide mouth. It was a good face. Well-balanced. It belonged to her, and that made it good. “Jake?”

“Hmmm?”

“I really am pretty, aren’t I?”

He looked at her and grinned, a wisecrack ready to slip from his mouth. But then he saw her expression, and his grin disappeared. “I think you’re the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen,” he said simply.

She sighed and settled back into her seat, a satisfied smile on her face.

The motorcycle rider waited until the Jag disappeared around the bend before he came out from behind the scrub. He lifted his helmet, took in the road. Then he headed up the rutted drive to the cantilevered house.

They returned an
hour later, shivering with cold from their rambling, kiss-filled walk along the ocean. Jake lit a fire and laid a comforter in front of it. They undressed each other and made love—slow and tender. He mounted her. She, him. Her hair drifted around them both.

Afterward, they ceremoniously burned his manuscript, and as one page after another went up in flames, Jake seemed to grow younger. “I think I can forget it now.”

She rested her head against his bare shoulder. “Don’t forget. Your past will always be part of you, and you have nothing to be ashamed of.”

He picked up the poker and pushed a loose page back into the flames, but he didn’t say anything, and she didn’t push him. He needed time. It was enough for now that he could talk to her about what had happened.

She called the office and told David she needed a few days off. “It’s about time you took a vacation,” he said.

She and Jake shut out the world. Their happiness felt iridescent, and their tender, passionate lovemaking filled them both with a sense of wonder.

On their third morning, she was lying in bed wearing only a T-shirt when he came out of the bathroom wrapped
in a towel. She inched up against the suede headboard. “Let’s go horseback riding.”

“There’s no good place to ride around here.”

“What do you mean? There’s a stable not three miles away. We passed it yesterday when we out for a drive. I haven’t been on a horse in months.”

He picked up a pair of jeans and seemed to be inspecting it for wrinkles, something she’d never known him to care one thing about. “Why don’t you go by yourself? I need to catch up on some work. Besides, I have to ride all the time. It’d be a busman’s holiday.”

“It won’t be fun without you.”

“You’re the one who pointed out that we have to get used to separations.” He stumbled over her sneakers.

She looked at him more closely. He was fidgety, and an outrageous suspicion struck her. “How many Westerns have you made?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take a guess.”

“Five…six. I don’t know.” He seemed to have developed a sudden reluctance to drop his towel in front of her. Snatching up his jeans, he carried them back into the bathroom.

“How about…seven?” she called out brightly.

“Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I guess that’s about right.” She heard him turn on the faucet and then the sounds of a noisy toothbrushing. He finally reappeared—bare chest, jeans still unzipped, a dab of toothpaste at the corner of his mouth.

She offered her most polite smile. “Seven Westerns, did you say?”

He fumbled with his zipper. “Uh-huh.”

“A lot of time in the saddle.”

“Damned zipper’s stuck.”

She nodded her head thoughtfully. “A
lot
of saddle time.”

“I think it’s broken.”

“So tell me? Have you always been afraid of horses, or is it something recent?”

His head shot up. “Yeah, sure. Yeah, right.”

She didn’t say a word. She merely smiled.

“Me? Afraid of horses?”

Not a word.

Another jerk on the zipper. “A lot you know.”

He was determined to gut it out. He even managed an appropriately belligerent sneer. Her smile passed from sweet to saccharine. Finally he dropped his head. “I wouldn’t exactly say I was afraid,” he muttered.

“What exactly would you say?” she cooed.

“We just don’t get along, that’s all.”

She let out a whoop of laughter and fell back on the bed. “You’re afraid of horses! Bird Dog’s afraid of horses! You’ll have to be my slave forever. I can blackmail you with this for the rest of your life. Backrubs, home-cooked meals, kinky sex—”

He looked hurt. “I like dogs.”

“Do you now?”

“Big ones, too.”

“Really?”

“Rotweillers. Shepherds. Bull mastiffs. The bigger the dog, the more I like it.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Damned right you are.”

“Very impressed. I was starting to think you were more of a Chihuahua guy.”

“Are you crazy? Those suckers bite.”

She laughed and threw herself into his arms.

On their last day together, she lay with her head in his lap and thought about how much she didn’t want to fly home alone tomorrow, but Jake needed to stay in California for a few weeks to take care of all the business he’d neglected while he’d been writing his book.

He made a paintbrush out of a lock of her hair. “I’ve been thinking…” He trailed the curl over her lips. “What
about—what do you think would happen…” He painted her cheekbone. “What if we…got married?”

A rush of joy shot through her. She lifted her head. “Really?”

“Why not?”

Her joy bubble slipped aside just enough to reveal a tiny yellow caution light. “I think—I think it’s too fast.”

“We’ve known each other for seven years. That’s not exactly fast.”

“But we haven’t been together for seven years. Neither of us can stand to fail at this. We bruise too easily. And we have to be absolutely sure.”

“I couldn’t be surer.”

Neither could she. At the same time…“Let’s give ourselves a chance to see how we handle the separation of having two careers—how we deal with the rough spots that are going to come along.”

“I thought women were supposed to be romantics. What happened to impulse and passion?”

“They’re opening in Vegas for Wayne Newton.”

“You’ve got a smart mouth.” He lowered himself over her and began nibbling at her bottom lip. “Let’s do something about that.”

His mouth moved to her breast, and she told herself she was right not to leap to marry him. They’d both received important insights about themselves this weekend, and they needed time to adjust.

But there was another reason. Some small part of her still didn’t entirely trust Jake, and she couldn’t handle another abandonment.

His kisses dipped lower, her senses ignited, and the world faded away around them.

Success bred success, and now that it didn’t matter so much, everything she touched seemed to turn to gold. She renegotiated Olivia Creighton’s
Dragon’s Bay
contract,
then signed one of the most promising of Hollywood’s new wave of actors. Kissy’s movie was going fabulously well in London, Rough Harbor’s album was getting the kind of airplay that signaled a big hit, and orders were rolling in for Michel’s designs. As icing on the cake, she came back from a business lunch one afternoon to find a Mailgram on her desk, the crux of which read:

ELOPING AT HIGH NOON TOMORROW STOP WILL PHONE AFTER HONEYMOON STOP CHARLIE JUST TOLD ME HOW RICH HE REALLY IS STOP AINT LOVE GRAND

Fleur laughed and leaned back in her chair. Ain’t love grand, indeed.

Jake flew out from L.A. for a long weekend of sex, conversation, and laughter, but he had go back to do some overdubbing. She talked to him two or three times a day, sometimes more. He called as soon as he woke up in the morning, and she called before she went to bed at night. “This is good,” she said. “Since we can’t touch each other, we’re learning to relate on a more cerebral level.”

His reply was typical Koranda. “Cut the crap and tell me what color panties you’re wearing.”

One Friday evening toward the end of February, she returned from the housewarming Michel and Damon had thrown to celebrate moving into their new co-op. Just as she let herself in, the phone rang. She smiled and picked it up. “I said I’d call you, lover boy.”

“Fleur? Oh God, baby, you’ve got to help me! Please, baby—”

Her fingers tightened around the receiver. “Belinda?”

“Don’t let him do this! I know you hate me, but please, don’t let him get away with this.”

“Where are you?”

“In Paris. I—I thought I was rid of him. I should have known—” Her words grew muffled, and she began to sob.

Fleur squeezed her eyes shut. “Tell me what’s happened.”

“He sent two of his henchmen to New York after me. They were waiting in my apartment when I came home yesterday, and they forced me to go with them. They’re going to take me to Switzerland. He’s going to lock me up, baby. Because I stayed away from you in New York. He’s threatened me for years, and now he’s going to—”

There was a sudden click, and the line went dead.

Fleur slumped on the edge of her bed, the receiver still clasped in her hand. She didn’t owe her mother anything. Belinda was the one who’d chosen to stay married to Alexi. She’d been too attached to the limelight his world cast over her to get a divorce, and whatever was happening to her now was her own fault.

Except—Belinda was her mother.

She set the receiver back on the cradle and forced herself to examine the relationship she’d avoided looking at for so long. The memories of their times together slipped before her like the pages of Jake’s manuscript, and she saw with new eyes what she hadn’t been able to see before. She saw her mother for who she was—a weak, frivolous woman who wanted the best from life but didn’t have either the ability or the strength of character to get it on her own. And then she saw her mother’s love—selfish, self-serving, laced with conditions and manipulations—but love nonetheless. Love so heartfelt that Belinda had never been able to understand how Fleur could ever doubt it.

She booked herself on a morning flight to Paris. It was too early to call Jake, so she left a note on Riata’s desk telling her to let him know she had some emergency business out of town and not to worry if she didn’t call him for a few days. She didn’t want either Jake or Michel to discover where she was going. The last thing she needed was for Jake to show up in Paris with a pair of Colt revolvers and a bullwhip. And Michel had suffered enough from Belinda’s indifference.

As she left the house, she played out various scenarios in her head, each one uglier than the last. Belinda might think this was only about her, but Fleur knew better. Alexi was using Belinda as human bait to bring his daughter back to him.

The house on the Rue de la Bienfaisance stood gray and silent in the Parisian winter twilight. It looked as unfriendly as Fleur remembered, and as she gazed out the window of the limousine she’d taken from her hotel, she thought about the first time she’d seen the house. She’d been so frightened that day—afraid to meet her father, aching to see her mother, worried that she’d dressed wrong. At least this time, she didn’t have to be concerned about her clothes.

Beneath her satin and velvet evening wrap, she wore the last gown Michel had designed for her, a wine velvet sheath with tight-fitting sleeves and a deeply slashed bodice embroidered at the edge with a web of tiny burgundy beads. The dress had the uneven hem that was becoming Michel’s trademark, knee-high on one side, dipping to mid-calf on the other, with beadwork emphasizing the diagonal. She’d put her hair up for the evening, arranging it more elaborately than usual, and added garnet earrings that winked through the tendrils fanning her ears. At sixteen she might have thought it wise to appear at Alexi’s door in casual dress, but at twenty-six she knew differently.

A young man in a three-piece suit answered the door. One of the henchmen Belinda had referred to? He looked like a mortician who just happened to have a degree from Harvard Business School. “Your father has been expecting you.”

I’ll just bet he has.
She handed over her evening cape. “I’d like to see my mother.”

“This way please.”

She followed him into the front salon. The room stood cold and empty, its only ornamentation a display of white
roses that fanned the mantelpiece like a funeral spray. She shivered.

“Dinner will be ready momentarily,” the mortician said. “Would you like a drink first? Some champagne perhaps?”

“I’d like to see my mother.”

He turned as if she hadn’t spoken and disappeared down the hallway. She hugged herself against the cryptlike chill of the room. The wall sconces cast grotesque shadows on the gruesome ceiling frescoes.

Enough of this. Just because the mortician had closed the door to seal her in didn’t mean she had to stay here. The heels of her pumps clicked against the marble as she slipped out into the hallway. Head held high against invisible eyes, she walked past the priceless Gobelin tapestries on her way toward the grand staircase. When she reached the top, another mortician with neat hair and a dark suit stepped out to block her from going farther. “You have lost your way, mademoiselle.”

It was a statement, not a question, and she knew she’d made her first mistake. He wasn’t going to let her pass, and she couldn’t afford an early defeat when she needed to conserve all her strength for her battle with Alexi. She cut her losses. “It’s been so long since I was here that I’d forgotten how large the house is.” She retreated to the salon, where the first mortician waited to lead her to the dining room.

Another spray of white roses and a single china place setting adorned the long mahogany banquet table. Alexi had launched a war of nerves, carefully orchestrating everything to make her feel powerless. She glanced at the diamond watch Jake had sent her and pretended to stifle a yawn. “I hope the food is decent tonight. I’m hungry.”

Surprise flickered across his face before he nodded and excused himself. Who were these men with their dark suits and officious manner? And where was Belinda? For that matter, where was Alexi?

A liveried servant appeared to attend her. She sat alone
in her wine velvet gown at the end of the vast, gleaming table, her garnets and beads winking in the candlelight, and concentrated on eating her dinner with every appearance of relish. She even asked for a small second helping of chestnut soufflé. At the end, she ordered a cup of tea and a brandy. Alexi could dictate how he played his portion of their game. She would determine how she played hers.

The mortician appeared again while she toyed with the brandy. “If Mademoiselle would please come with me…”

She took another sip, then dipped into her purse for compact and lipstick. The mortician made his impatience known. “Your father is waiting.”

“I came here to see my mother.” She snapped the compact open. “I have no business with Monsieur Savagar until after I’ve spoken with her. If he won’t permit that, I’ll leave immediately.”