One To Watch (49 page)

Bea hadn’t seen Sam since the ruinous kiss-off ceremony in Amboise, and she hadn’t had an actual conversation with him since their date in Champagne, now a full week past—an eternity in
Main Squeeze
time, and seemingly double that in Bea’s emotional journey. For their final date, Alison dressed Bea in dove-gray trousers and a black merino sweater, then handed her a silk bag small enough to fit in her palm.

“Eighteen pennies tied with red ribbon—an old superstition of my grandmother’s,” Alison explained. “She’d give them to us on special days for luck. After she died, my grandfather kept up the tradition, and now all us grandkids do too. They were married sixty years, can you imagine?”

“I honestly can’t.” Bea turned over the little satchel in her hands.

“Anyway, I just thought—for your last date of the season.”

“Thank you.” Bea hugged Alison, marveling that this whole experience had lasted only eight weeks, how little that really was compared to a lifetime.

After all the things Bea had seen in the past week—the shock on Luc’s face when she caught him with Lauren, the slope in Asher’s back as he walked away, the swimming relief in Ray’s eyes as she gave in to her desires and kissed him—was there any sight so uncomplicated and welcome as Sam at the base of the Eiffel Tower, beaming as Bea approached him?

“I know it’s so touristy, but look how BIG it is!” he exclaimed, his eyes full of wonder.

Bea laughed. “Yeah, that’s kind of its thing. You want to ride to the top?”

“No, I absolutely do not!”

He pulled her into a super-tight hug, planting sweet kisses on her forehead and in her hair.

“I missed you so much.” She exhaled.

“You’ve had a big week, huh?”

“Yuh-huh.”

“Well, I’ve got this idea—maybe it’s stupid, you tell me—but I’ve been thinking I might spend the rest of my life making you happy. So maybe today we get a head start?”

“How did you get so good?” Bea looked up at him, her heart swelling with fondness.

“You met my parents—your guess is as good as mine,” he joked, and Bea burst out laughing, reveling in how easy it was to be by his side.

After they finished filming at the tower, they loaded into their vans and went to Bea’s all-time favorite department store, the Galeries Lafayette. From the outside, the Galeries looked like any other building, but inside, they were absolutely spectacular: dozens of chambers filled with the most beautiful clothes, all arranged surrounding a soaring atrium topped with a magnificently patterned glass ceiling. From each little
galerie,
you could stand at a railing and look across the atrium to see the whole wonderful place, every room framed in archways of gleaming gold.

“This is not like Macy’s,” Sam observed, and Bea laughed.

“I’m so glad we got to come here,” she told him. “I have a little tradition that every time I’m in Paris, I stop in to buy a tube of Chanel lipstick.”

“Wow.” Sam grinned. “How’d I land a classy girl like you?”

Bea smiled back. “Just lucky, I guess.”

“I know it,” Sam murmured, pulling her in for a lingering kiss.

After that, they had to separate for a while: For this portion of the date, they were both given personal shoppers to help them select outfits for their dinner that night, a sunset cruise on the Seine. While Sam was off in menswear with a snooty fellow named Augustin, Bea went up to the specialty department with her shopper, Lorraine—one of those impossibly chic Parisian women in her fifties who looked more fashionable in a black turtleneck than most Americans could in couture.

“Well,” she said to Bea in a warm but matter-of-fact tone, “for you I am afraid we do not have many options.”

“I know.” Bea sighed. “I always try to shop here, but I usually just buy shoes and makeup—I never have much luck with clothes.”

“Ah, but this is the fault of backward-thinking designers,” Lorraine assured her. “Today, we’ll make our own luck.”

Lorraine had pulled a few gorgeous dresses for Bea, and while some worked better than others, none were perfect—until Bea stepped into a dress by Tanya Taylor. It was a black silk kimono-style dress embellished with jewel-bright flowers made of rainbow-hued sequins and paillettes that shimmered and caught the light with Bea’s every move. Best of all, the dress had pockets, so Bea could keep Alison’s satchel of pennies with her for the rest of the date.

“
Parfait,
” Lorraine approved.

An hour later, the sun was beginning to set, and Bea met Sam on a sleek riverboat whose deck was strung with softly glowing lanterns.

“I finally get you on a boat, and
still
no bikini,” he teased. “This is just mean, Bea.”

“You don’t like the dress?”

“No. I love it.” He leaned in to kiss her cheek.

“You don’t look so bad yourself.” She grinned—he was downright dashing in a marine-blue suit worn with a crisp white shirt and open collar. She saw he was holding something—a small black glossy box.

“What’s that?” she asked, though she had a feeling she already knew.

“I was done shopping before you were, and I had some time to kill,” Sam explained. “Since you couldn’t stop by the lipstick counter, I figured …”

Bea opened the box and pulled out the tube of Chanel—a rich, vibrant red in shade 104: Passion.

“I hope the name isn’t too on the nose,” Sam said. “I saw it and I thought,
Yeah. That’s the one
.”

“It’s perfect.” Bea beamed. “You’re perfect.”

“Well,” Sam said, his voice smaller than normal, “maybe you can wear this when you kiss my cheek tomorrow.”

As they danced on the deck of the boat to the music of a string quartet playing classic love songs, Bea felt like she was living the epitome of a
Main Squeeze
daydream—the place, the dress, and of course, the man. If she was here to find her happy ending, there wasn’t a more perfect one than this. But as she felt the weight of the pennies in her pocket, she thought about Alison’s grandmother’s sixty years of marriage—the long, extraordinary mundanity of a life like that. Not the performance of a fairy-tale finale, of being seen in a relationship, but the reality of actually being in one: the dumb fights and ER visits and thrilling moments you never forget and all the boring, everyday ones in between. Bea knew she wasn’t looking for an ending—not really. She was looking for a beginning.

“Sam,” she said softly, “can I ask you something?”

“Of course, anything.”

“If it had been some other girl here, instead of me, do you think you would have fallen in love with her?”

Sam looked perplexed. “That’s a pretty weird hypothetical.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t phrase that well. I guess what I mean is—we met in this specific place, at these specific times in our lives. For me, I was trying to get over someone.”

“The guy from the other day?”

Bea nodded. “Did you want to talk about that at all?”

“I don’t know,” Sam mumbled. “It’s not really my business.”

“Of course it is.” Bea frowned. “If you’re considering proposing to me tomorrow, you have a right to know what the hell is going on in my life.”

“Are you thinking about a proposal?” Sam’s tone was tentative. “Because … I definitely have been. And this other guy, obviously, I don’t know him, and I don’t know what’s happened between you. But I trust you, Bea. So if you tell me that you and I are good, that’s all I need to hear.”

“You always know the perfect thing to say,” Bea murmured. “And as for a proposal … yeah, I’ve been thinking about it. A lot, actually. That’s kind of what I was trying to ask you about in the first place.”

Sam’s face turned more serious. “What’s on your mind?”

“With everything going on in your life, am I wrong to think that us being together, having a next step, or an anchor point—that that would be a bit of a relief?”

“Are you asking if I would ask you to marry me as an excuse to move out of my parents’ house?”

“No! No, I would never say that. You just seem so certain about us, and I guess I’m trying to get to the bottom of why.”

“Because there’s no way it could be as simple as me being in love with you?”

“I’m not doubting you, Sam,” Bea said quietly.

“It feels like you are.” He took her by the shoulders. “What are you afraid of?”

Bea met his gaze. “I’m afraid that you’re looking for your next chapter, and I’m looking for the whole rest of the book.”

“I want to give you that, Bea,” Sam assured her. “I promise, I do.”

She kissed him gently and told him she believed him.

As day faded into night, their boat docked near the Louvre, and fireworks exploded in showers of sparks and color. Bea thought about the Fourth of July, about the fragile new connection she’d formed with Ray, and about how unknowable life was, how fleeting. In the end, she had only her choices. As she relaxed into Sam’s arms, she felt she was finally ready to make hers.

The next morning, Bea woke up in her beautiful suite for her final day of filming her season of
Main Squeeze.
After she’d been to hair and makeup, she donned a custom silk robe embroidered with her initials and met with celebrity diamond purveyor Nils van der Hoeven, who showed her a vast array of dazzling engagement rings. Per long-standing show tradition, Bea was meant to pick her favorite ring, and somehow, magically, in a highly produced segment, the man she’d chosen to be her husband would pick that very same ring to propose with later that day, proving just how well he understood his beloved’s heart’s desire.

Bea wasn’t even sure she wanted a diamond engagement ring, but Mr. van der Hoeven (“Please, you will call me Nils”) had paid good money to advertise his wares on television, so Bea oohed and aahed over his various gaudy confections, all of which were undeniably dazzling, but none of which were remotely her taste.

“I have one more case to show you,” he lilted in his accented English. “These are vintage.”

He opened a black velvet briefcase filled with twenty rings—mostly large Edwardian cuts, with a few vintage Deco settings thrown in. One caught Bea’s eye: The setting was rose gold and considerably less shiny than the rest; upon closer inspection, she saw it had been hammered and carved to resemble a tree branch. The main stone was a round-cut champagne diamond with a couple of obvious flaws, flanked on each side by triangles of three tiny opals that glowed white and blue and green. It was the most beautiful ring Bea had ever seen in her life.

“What’s the story with this one?”

“Ah, this is a very interesting choice,” Nils said, extracting the ring and holding it up to the light. “It was made for a famed heiress in the 1920s, but she called off the wedding—she never married, and the ring was never sold. I acquired it at auction some time ago, and it’s been in my collection ever since. I always wondered why no one snapped it up—but between you and me, I think most brides get skittish when they hear its history. They believe it must be cursed or some such nonsense.”

“Cursed,” Bea echoed, remembering the times she’d used that word to describe herself. “What happened to the heiress?”

Nils looked confused. “As I said, she never married.”

“Sure, but her life—did she do other things? Have a career? Travel the world?”

Nils shrugged. “No one has asked me this before—I would have no way of knowing. Would you like to try it on?”

Bea shook her head and said no, thank you. She told him she preferred a three-carat flawless cushion-cut diamond on a platinum band. He said it was an excellent choice.

After he left, Alison arrived in Bea’s suite for their final fitting together.

“I hope you’ll forgive me,” she said, “but I pulled this for you. We have other options if you don’t like it.”

She held up a long, flowing dress of soft blush satin with wispy sleeves, a deep neckline, and a dramatic slit, accented with strategic bustles embellished with crystalline camellias. Bea ticked off its flaws on her fingers.

“Unforgiving fabric, light color, no structure, and that slit will
definitely
show my thighs.”

“I know, I know, I know, you hate it. Okay, let me show you some others—”

But then she noticed Bea was cracking up.

“It’s fabulous.” Bea beamed. “Who made it?”

“Actually …” Alison said shyly, “I did.”

“What?” Bea was overwhelmed. “Alison, this is a gift.
You’re
a gift. God, what am I going to do without you?”

“Come on, you’re not rid of me yet, I’ll see you for the reunion show, all the red carpets in L.A., we’re going to be together all the time.”

“Promise?” Bea grinned. Alison did, and when she was done tucking and twisting the dress and sweeping one side of Bea’s perfectly formed finger waves out of her face with a beaded clip, Bea felt like the most delicate spring flower, ready to burst into bloom.

The proposal was the crown jewel of any season of
Main Squeeze,
and this year, Bea was forced to admit, Lauren had really outdone herself: The proposal was to take place in the middle of the Pont des Arts, the narrow bridge across the Seine where lovers affixed locks emblazoned with their initials to symbolize their eternal love, with a spectacular 360-degree view of Paris all around them. Bea waited at the southern end of the bridge with Lauren and most of the crew; Sam and Ray were stationed at the other end with their respective field producers, both in cars with darkened windows so that neither would know who was visiting Bea first to receive his rejection and who was about to discover he’d won the season—and Bea’s heart.