Parisian Affair (4 page)

Should she try somehow to weather yet another
financial crisis and continue to work? Or should she admit defeat
and find a nine-to-five job to support herself, working on her
jewelry in her spare time?

The thought almost made her physically ill,
as it had so often in the past.
Why do I have this need to prove
myself ?
she wondered.
Why is it I can't be content with a
job designing for a brand-name jewelry house? Why is it I can't be
happy designing jewelry that can easily be mass- produced?

Over the past few years she'd had several
opportunities to sign on with one major jewelry manufacturer or
another, but she had always turned down these offers, regardless of
how lucrative they were or how desperately she needed the money.
She preferred being able to control the production of her own
designs and was protective of her independence.

In the past, she'd also been told by more
than a few cooing department store buyers who loved her
designs—buyers like Fiona Bennett—that they would order huge
quantities of her work. But Allegra had long since resigned herself
to the impossibility of filling such orders; her designs were
virtually impossible to reproduce inexpensively. And damned if she
was going to let factories in China or elsewhere make cheap
facsimiles of her jewelry, substituting inexpensive metal for gold
or platinum and man- made stones for real gems. She'd seen other
jewelry designers do it, and their work had become
unrecognizable.

Ideally, she had hoped to land at a big-name
jeweler like Buccellati or Bulgari or Verdura with her own label,
much as Elsa Peretti and Paloma Picasso had done at Tiffany. She
had envisioned ads in fashion magazines and newspapers many times:
Allegra Sheridan for Verdura
. Or Bulgari. Or whatever. But
that simply hadn't happened. She had come to New York with a lot of
talent and ambition, but she didn't have a grand family name or the
kind of connections that might make her a shoo-in at a topflight
jeweler. That was not to denigrate the work of Paloma Picasso or
Elsa Peretti. She appreciated their designs and applauded their
success, but she wondered if they would've been able to succeed on
the level they had without their names and who they knew.

So here I am
, she thought as her gaze
shifted northward, toward the West Village
, a victim of my own
standards. Going broke so nobody can see or wear my
jewelry
.

What she needed was a retail outlet, a very
expensive proposition in New York City. When people saw her jewelry
used in magazine fashion spreads, they should be able to hop in a
taxi and go to the shop where the jewels came from. In her case
that was impossible. They had to call a telephone number and make
an appointment—a practice, she had long since discovered, that
eliminated a vast majority of the buying public. Forget those who
made impulse purchases. There was no shop to feed their habit. But
she had spent a small fortune on assembling the necessary tools of
her trade, and the first few years paying off those purchases.
Opening a shop had been an impossibility.

She was so lost in thought that when Todd
quietly crept up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, she
was startled. 'Oh, jeez, Todd,' she said, jerking out of her
reverie. Without turning around, she instantly recognized the feel
of those big hands on her shoulders and the distinctly masculine
aroma. 'I didn't hear you come in. You scared the daylights out of
me.'

'Sorry,' he said. 'I didn't mean to.' He
gently massaged her shoulders and planted a kiss atop her head. 'I
have an idea,' he said, looking out at the lights of the city
twinkling in the quickly descending winter darkness.

'What's that?' she asked, enjoying his
attentions to her weary shoulders and back.

'Let me treat you to an extravagant dinner,'
he said, his voice a seductive whisper. 'Just the two of us. Hell,
Ally, that'll make us both feel a whole lot better.'

Allegra's ears perked up, and she turned to
him and looked up into his lively green eyes. 'You saw Jason on
your way up, didn't you?'

He nodded. 'Yep,' he said. 'Told me the news.
I'm sorry.'

'I don't want to talk about it now,' she
replied.

He shrugged and smiled. 'Fine. You won't hear
another word about it from me if that's what you want.'

'Good,' she said. 'Anyway, you can't afford
to take us to an extravagant dinner, and you know it. But it was
sweet of you to offer.'

'I'll put it on my card,' he offered.

'You mean it's not maxed out?'

'Not yet,' he said.

'No, Todd,' she said, shaking her head. 'I
won't let you do this. I don't want to feel guilty about using up
the last little bit of credit you've got left. You might need
it.'

Todd grinned mischievously. 'Aw, so what?
Come on, Ally,' he cajoled, holding her arms in his big hands.
'Where's that daredevil I used to know, huh? Where's that beautiful
girl who was never afraid to take chances?'

'She's a woman now,' Allegra said. 'Nearly a
spinster, in fact. With hardly a sou to her name.'

'More the reason to go out and paint the
town,' he said. 'With the straits we're in, what difference is a
few dollars on a credit card going to make? Besides, I've got some
money coming in soon.'

Allegra laughed helplessly. 'That's great
logic, Todd,' she said, reaching up and ruffling his raven black
hair.

'Then you'll do it,' he said, the smile
widening on his face, exposing perfect white teeth.

She nodded. 'I shouldn't, but... I will.'

'That's my girl,' he said, tapping her
playfully on the butt. 'We'll have a blast. We'll both forget about
work tonight. No worries. No cares. Just the night and the food and
the drinks and the dancing.'

'Oh, dancing, too?'

'Why not?' he asked. 'What say we dance all
night long? We'll club hop.'

She laughed again. 'You're crazy, Todd Hall,
and I guess that's why I love you so much.' She reached up and
kissed the tip of his nose. 'Sometimes, anyway.'

His radiant smile didn't change, but Todd
felt his heart leap into his throat. As long as he'd loved her, it
still gave him a thrill to hear her say those words. He wrapped his
arms around her and drew her against him. They kissed long and
deeply, his hands stroking her back tenderly.

'I love you, too, Ally,' he said when their
lips parted. 'And not just sometimes.'

Their relationship had been long and fraught
with trouble—battles, separations, and dramatic
reconciliations—principally because of his wandering eye. But he
was trying to convince her that he had that under control now. His
insatiable sexual appetite was all in the past, he'd sworn. He
wanted her more than ever.

Allegra was a creative designer, gemologist,
jewelry maker, and salesperson all rolled up into one strikingly
beautiful and very sexy package. Todd, on the other hand, had no
interest in gemology as such, and none whatsoever in the rarefied
world of custom jewelry making that she thrived in. He found most
of her customers unbearable, as he did many of his father's
architecture clients and his mother's painting aficionados.

After doing time in army intelligence, he had
taken a job as an investigative reporter. While he excelled at his
work, he quickly grew weary of the newspaper bureaucracy and
politics. He found that he had stories 'killed' on a political
basis or, on the other hand, given unmerited feature space because
his subject happened to be a pet target of a high-echelon editor at
the paper.

Finally, he had settled into something he
loved. He had become a developer in downtown New York, turning old
industrial buildings into luxurious loft apartments. He'd fallen
into it almost by accident. When he'd discovered that rents in the
downtown neighborhoods like Soho and the East Village were
skyrocketing to astronomical proportions, he'd borrowed the money
from his parents to buy a small, derelict building. Then, armed
with architectural plans drawn up by his father, he'd overseen the
conversion of the building into loft apartments. As money began to
come in, he invested it in others, repeating the process until he'd
acquired a considerable fortune in downtown real estate. While he
had to some degree rejected the elite environment of his parents'
world, the exposure to arts and crafts that he had grown up with
served him well now. He had developed an eye for quality and that
which intrigued. He was happy overseeing the rebuilding of the
properties, although the work was all-consuming and had its
headaches. There were times when he had cash flow problems, as he
did right now, because of the heavy commitments, but he knew that
in the long run his efforts would pay off handsomely.

Over the years, he'd made quite a reputation
for himself as a hip, young developer with devastatingly handsome
looks, and his work garnered its share of publicity in the
newspapers and magazines. While he'd always been sought after by
the opposite sex, he quickly became a major babe magnet in New York
City, attracting beautiful, sexy, and sometimes rich young women
who threw themselves at him as if they were offerings to some pagan
god. And Todd had succumbed. More than once or twice. He'd sown
wild oats far and wide.

These meaningless flirtations, one-night
stands, and brief affairs had taken a toll on his relationship with
Allegra. Besides which, he freely admitted, he'd been
commitment-phobic. He had no ambition or desire to harness himself
to the kind of tempestuous relationship he'd seen in his parents'
marriage. However, as the years rolled by, he had grown weary of
brief, meaningless affairs.

'What do you say I go home and shower and
change, then meet you back here?' he said.

'Good plan, my man,' she replied, poking his
chest with a fingertip.

'Be back in, say, an hour. Hour and a half.
Okay?'

'I'll be ready.'

'Okay,' Todd said. He took the gloves out of
the pockets of his old, worn leather jacket and put them on.
'Ciao,' he said. 'Be back
tout de suite
.' He kissed her
again.

'Ciao.'

Allegra watched as he left the workroom and
disappeared down the hallway to the front door. She locked the door
behind him, then turned and stood glancing around the workroom. Its
floor-to-ceiling shelves were stacked chockablock with see-through
plastic boxes containing lengths of gold, silver, and platinum
wire; sheets of platinum, silver, and gold; casting grain;
semiprecious beads and stones; handmade molds; rubber and plaster
for molding; and countless tools—all the trappings of a highly
organized jewelry maker. And near the German-made worktable, there
were many different kinds of pliers, hammers, and measuring rings.
The various machines and tools used in the work drew her attention:
rolling mills, flex shaft drills with foot pedals to polish and
grind, gravers with different blades, stone-setting burrs, beading
tools, a vulcanizer, wax injection equipment, and polishing lathes.
It amounted to quite an inventory and an expensive one.

On bookshelves, there were catalogues from
the various purveyors of metals and gemstones she dealt with, as
well as those from the machinery manufacturers and toolmakers. Her
treasured drawing books, many of them expensively hardbound, made a
neat row along the shelves in their own bookcase. They contained
the countless detailed drawings she'd made of the jewelry she had
designed and wanted to see brought to life. In some cases the
drawings had become reality.

On the walls hung the drawings of a few of
her favorite pieces of jewelry, alongside photographs of the
finished products. Over the years several customers had thought her
drawings were works of art in and of themselves and had wanted to
purchase them, but Allegra had always refused, preferring that no
one else saw what she considered rudimentary work in the process of
producing an exquisite final product.

What hubris
, she thought now as she
looked around.
But I never imagined then that I would need money
as much as I do now.

Jason's worktable caught her eye, and she
frowned, then crossed to it quickly. 'Damn it,' she swore aloud,
before realizing that it was her fault that he'd left his work area
in such a mess. Had she not ordered him to leave, she would be very
angry with him and justifiably so. Shimmering atop the wooden bench
pin of his worktable was a small fortune in cabochon rubies,
thousands of dollars' worth of small stones that could easily
vanish.

She peered down closer at the pin to see if
she could detect any metal shavings or stone chips, but there were
none. She scooped the rubies up and put them in a suede pouch,
which she placed in the ugly old safe that sat in a corner in plain
view.

She kept a store of her most valuable
semiprecious and precious stones in it, knowing that with its old
combination lock it was no more than a deterrent to an enterprising
thief. The rubies tucked away, she shut the safe's heavy door, then
twirled the brass lock around several times.

Rising from her crouch and stretching her
arms ceilingward, she decided that tomorrow she would have to
remind Jason about their rules, despite her having caused today's
distraction. Rule number one in the atelier was that at the end of
the day each of them had to stow any valuable gemstones in the
safe, then vacuum up any precious-metal shavings from his or her
worktable. The contents of the vacuum were regularly emptied into
containers for each of the metals. The metals, whether gold,
platinum, or even relatively inexpensive silver, were eventually
returned to the refineries from which they'd come. The refineries
bought them by weight. It might seem a miserly practice, but it
wasn't: at hundreds of dollars an ounce for platinum and gold, this
waste had added up to a substantial amount of money over the years.
Behind the polishing lathe, there were even fans that sucked up the
dust and metals produced by polishing. This so-called waste was
sent to the refinery.