“Oh, Mr. Gardner, it’s not what it looks—”
“Calvin, please.” Gardner offered a kind, if somewhat forced, smile that made his otherwise dull features warmer. The hand on Nina’s wrist relaxed but didn’t let go. “You shouldn’t be here alone. If there isn’t anyone you’d like to call, I could come in and sit with you. If you want. Only until—until you need to go in.”
As awkward as the offer was, he almost looked eager. And as alone as Nina felt, it almost seemed sweet. More attention than anyone had given her recently. Except, of course, one.
She opened her mouth to tell this Calvin everything she knew she should say. That he was mistaken. That she was in the neighborhood looking for a fabric store, or got lost on her way to the Queens MoMA, or some other tall tale that would protect her reputation and keep him at arm’s length.
But suddenly, the idea of walking into this crumbling building, up the stained carpeted steps to a waiting room that was probably just as depressing made Nina want to cry all over again. Calvin seemed to understand, pulled her close enough that she could smell his mild scent of cheap deodorant, aftershave, and sweat. His light brown eyes were unwavering, unwilling to let her look away.
“Oh—okay,” she said, surprising even herself. “Yes, I would appreciate that. Thank you.”
Gardner released her wrist then, but only to prop open the door. He then took her other hand and helped Nina limp up the stairs in her broken shoe, all the way to the clinic on the second floor. Into the waiting room that was as predictably beige and decrepit as she had imagined. Where three other women sat with their toes touching, trying as hard as she was not to make eye contact with anyone else in the room.
Nina sat down while Calvin went to the receptionist to check her in. He returned with a form in hand.
“Do you want me to help you fill it out?”
Nina’s hands were shaking. Shame and dread pressed on each of her shoulders.
Principessa. I love you.
Oh, would Peppe still say that if he saw her now? Or would he be relieved that she was saving him from another kind of shame and ruin?
“No,” Nina said. Suddenly, she couldn’t stop shaking her head, back and forth, back and forth. She couldn’t do this, could she? No, she should. Or maybe she shouldn’t.
She was twenty years old. Too young to be a mother. Too young to weather the tabloids, the press, all the unwanted attention when she was discovered pregnant out of wedlock. Too young for her family to turn on her like they had turned on Eric.
Would Peppe be the next to die in a bathtub?
She was much too young for that, just as Eric had been.
Ultimately, she was too young for love.
Principessa.
Nina turned to Calvin, a man she hardly recognized, but who was the only person in that moment who seemed like he knew her at all. His face was blankly sympathetic, like a character on a sitcom. Practiced and flimsy, but still kind. Like he was doing what he thought he was supposed to in this awkward situation, rather than what Nina actually needed.
It was all she deserved anyway.
Nina stared down at the paper and raised the pen to the first line of the intake form. It wanted her name and address.
She scratched a line.
Terror shot through her.
Everything was wrong.
She dropped the form to the floor and turned to Calvin.
“I c-can’t,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I need to go home. Can you take me home?”
Calvin swallowed, looked at the empty form on the floor, then back up to Nina. “Are you certain?”
That same strange eagerness pervaded his voice.
Do you want me to get an abortion? Nina almost asked. But instead: “Y-yes. Yes, I’m sure.”
Calvin eyed her for one moment more, almost like she was an animal in a zoo doing something out of the ordinary. But the expression only lasted a moment before several others consumed him. Sympathy. Kindness. Friendship.
And then…knowing.
“Don’t worry, princess,” he said as he helped her back up onto her ruined shoes. “I’ll take you home. And we’ll take care of everything.”
Chapter Two
June 2008
“You’re going to have to do something about that, you know.”
Nina turned from where she was watching a few tourists in a canoe push away from one of the docks in front of the Boathouse on the Central Park Lake. When Calvin had asked her to meet him at the tourist trap, she’d agreed partly because it was a nice day, and partly because he’d simply been so nice to her in the four weeks following their awkward meeting in Jackson Heights.
Well, perhaps nice wasn’t the right word.
Knowing.
Attentive.
Invested.
These were more accurate, and Nina wasn’t sure how she was supposed to feel about them. But Calvin was the only one who seemed to care what happened to her these days. And he was the only one who understood what was going on beneath the surface since that strange, hot May afternoon.
“I’m sorry?” Nina asked as she pushed a bit of lamb around with her fork. Everything was disgusting right now. “Do something about what?”
Calvin took a large bite of his hamburger, and Nina tried to ignore the way grease pooled slightly at the corner of his mouth or when a fleck of ketchup landed on his shirtfront. His clothes were always stained, either from food like this or the uneven bleach he used to get it out.
Nausea roiled in her stomach.
“Well, you’re getting bigger every day,” Calvin said through a mouthful of meat. “You must have gained an inch around the waist in the last two weeks alone.”
Nina glowered at her salad, as much put off by this man who had known her barely a month inspecting her body like a broodmare, as she was by anything about her being considered “big.” She wanted to ask what right he, a thirty-eight-year-old whose belly looked like it was filled with Jell-O, had to comment on her physique.
That said…he was right. Her waist had lost its perfect twenty-three-inch circumference a long time ago, and in the last four weeks, her breasts had popped a full cup size, to the point she couldn’t zip half her delicately fitted silk dresses or anything else without elastic in her closet. All that couture might as well have been window drapings.
“Go on,” Calvin said, shoving Nina’s plate toward her. “I ordered you the lamb because you need some iron. I read about it on the internet.”
She perked a brow. “You were reading up on what pregnant women need to eat?”
He scoffed through his food. “Someone had to. I can’t trust you to take care of yourself, obviously.”
He made comments like that a lot. Nothing overt, but it was clear what he was talking about. The fact that he had found her, crying, shoeless, and contemplating abortion gave away something critical about her character. And, apparently, its defects.
Nina pushed her fork at her lamb again. She shoved a bit of lettuce into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “I’m surprised you had time to research,” she said. “Considering how busy you’ve been with your…property development now, isn’t it? In Newark, right?”
He frowned. Calvin didn’t like it when Nina asked about his business. Nina knew that. She was pushing his buttons now, a little tit for tat.
A few questions around her milieu had informed her that Calvin Gardner was currently “between ventures”—upper-class nomenclature for unemployed. Apparently, he had bounced between hedge funds for several years before deciding recently to dip his toe into real estate—hence his presence in Queens, where he was looking at property when they met. The problem was, he didn’t have the connections to procure the investors he needed.
“Grifter,” one person had said.
“Social climber,” said another.
Well. He wouldn’t win any people to his side if they thought he didn’t belong there in the first place.
Not that he told Nina any of
this. The few times she’d asked, Calvin had just clicked his tongue, told her not to worry her little royal head about his business, and changed the subject to the baby in a voice much too loud for her comfort.
Now he barely masked a glare at her before taking another enormous bite of his burger. “God, you really are a princess, aren’t you?” he said through a full mouth. “Can’t do a little research on your own. Think everything about everyone has to be handed to you on a silver platter.”
Nina glared at him. Calvin just chuckled. She watched, cringing as he polished off the rest of his sandwich and tossed his napkin on the plate before wiping his hands on his pants.
“You’re lucky you have someone like me who actually cares about you.”
“I have—” Nina started, but he continued.
“I mean, the next thing you’ll say is that you’re planning to go back to school in the fall.”
The look on Nina’s face must have made it clear that was exactly what she had been planning to do. There were no laws about pregnant women staying out of classrooms.
“Nina, you can’t be serious.” Calvin shook his head, dumbfounded. “What kind of life will this kid come into if its mother doesn’t care enough to prepare for it?” He reached across the table and plucked an untouched potato off her plate. “Now, don’t tell me you’re planning to go back after the birth too. Do you care more about froufy paintings than a baby who needs its mother?”
He snorted, like it was preposterous. Nina kept her mouth closed, unwilling to admit that too was her original plan.
“Since you’ve already decided to flee the father,” Calvin continued, “the least you could do is give it a mother who’s actually present. Or do you want to be like your own? Like mother, like daughter, eh?”
Nina opened her mouth, but nothing came out. All her indignation was suddenly replaced by doubt.
He was right. She didn’t even have a place to live with her baby. She hadn’t given it a single thought.
“Hey, princess.”
Calvin’s voice, suddenly soft, pulled her gaze up. Tears welled, and she hated that she couldn’t stop them. She was everything a de Vries wasn’t: empty of self-control.
He reached out with his soiled napkin and dabbed at her eyes. Nina was too upset to bat it away.
“Calm down,” he said. “Listen, princess. I have a plan. It could save you some grief.” He sat back and looked pointedly at Nina’s still-full plate. “Eat. That wasn’t cheap, you know. At least care enough to nourish your kid.”
Nina didn’t bother telling him that she was more than capable of paying the bill. Instead, she cut a small bit of the lamb, did her best to ignore the nausea rising as she lifted it to her mouth, and waited for Calvin to continue.
“We all know you’ll end up in the papers no matter what—this city loves its royalty, and you, pregnant at twenty, were always going to get some attention.”
The way he said it, like Nina was a specimen they were evaluating together, made her gag. Although that might have also been the mint sauce, which the lamb was absolutely doused in. But she couldn’t deny that, again, Calvin was correct. Even now there were potential photographers meandering through the park, hoping for a glimpse of a celebrity or a socialite. They preferred film or music stars, but they would (and had) settled for someone like her. She and Calvin had avoided the papers thus far, but it was only a matter of time. And when she was visibly showing…
Nina drooped. She’d never have any peace, would she?
The olive farm drifted through her mind. The lazy afternoon. The taste of dry red wine on Peppe’s lips.
Her eyes welled with tears all over again.
“So, the plan is simple,” Calvin said as he plucked a roasted carrot off Nina’s plate and popped it into his mouth. “We make an honest woman out of you.”
Nina almost choked on the over-chewed piece of lamb in the back of her throat. Carefully, she managed to swallow. “We what?”
Calvin leered, his half smile revealing coffee-stained molars on one side. “Look, it would be simple. Your family already thinks we’ve been seeing each other for several months.”
“Well, yes. Only because you told them that.”
Nina cringed again, remembering the awkward meeting. When she had asked him to take her home, she’d only meant to her building, not all the way up to her grandmother’s Park Avenue penthouse. He’d promptly introduced himself as Nina’s “beau,” like they were characters in an Edith Wharton novel, not twenty-first-century humans. Grandmother had eyed his sweaty, unwashed hand like he was handing her a rotten fish. And then she had turned her gaze to Nina with surprise. And disbelief. And then…disappointment.
“I took the heat off you when you disappeared for the day, didn’t I?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“And haven’t I been here since, helping you through the most difficult time in your life?”
“I suppose, but, Calvin—”
He shook his head. “I’m not going to be made a fool of, Nina. Not by you or anyone else. I’ve come too far.”
She frowned. He had only told her once that he was from somewhere in New Jersey, but beyond that, Nina really knew nothing about his origins except when he made statements like these. He said it wasn’t important, and she never pressed. But it didn’t exactly help the perception that he was the social climber others accused him of being. Especially when she had no idea what he was climbing from.
Calvin polished off another oily carrot from her plate, then caught her examining him. He leaned over the table, his tie hanging dangerously above his empty, but still grease-spotted plate. “Don’t think I’m good enough for you, princess?”
Nina paused, unsure how to answer the question. To anyone else, she might have said “No, of course not!” as vociferously as she could manage, but that would have been more for their comfort than for the sake of honesty. Because she was different from the average person. And she had no reason to question that either.
Her family was one of the oldest in New York, but it went beyond that. Celeste de Vries was the first woman in their four-hundred-year history to retain the title of Chairman of the Board of De Vries Shipping Industries while she waited for her grandson to come of age and inherit his birthright. Countless times, Nina had watched her grandmother handle the sniveling, self-righteous, insecure men who considered themselves titans of their class and of the city. Men who had questioned her every move. She’d torn them all to shreds.
Through all of that, she had raised Eric and Nina. Together.
Still…Nina was not her grandmother. She would never be Celeste de Vries. And it was time to be honest. In all likelihood, she would also never live up to the impossible standards this family set for her.
Nina forced herself to meet Calvin’s eye. “I—of course not. You’ve been very kind to me, Calvin. I’d never say otherwise.”
He relaxed, plucked an oil-soaked beet from her plate, and sat back again. “Good. Then we’re clear.”
Nina frowned. “What? But I—”
“But you what, princess?”
Nina frowned at the cold hunk of meat on her plate. He wasn’t really going to make her say this, was he?
He was.
“To be honest, I really only ever imagined myself marrying someone for love,” she told her food. And immediately flushed red. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wanted to take them back.
Not because they were wrong. Nina did feel that way. But there again was Peppe, his kind, weathered face crinkled with a melancholy smile. Wondering at her naivety, even if he never said anything out loud.
Nina felt as though her chest was twisted into a solid knot. Love. What did that matter now, when the man who owned her heart wasn’t someone she could ever have? Especially in a world where most of the women she knew married for reasons that had nothing to do with their hearts. The notion now seemed childish. Like she was, in fact, the naive young princess Calvin accused her of being.
Calvin looked at Nina like he was sorry for her. “Good lord, did you think I meant forever?”
Nina looked up. “Um, I—I’m sorry, what do you mean by that?”
“I meant temporarily, you silly girl. Obviously this would be an arrangement. We’d share an apartment—separate rooms, of course—for a year or two. However long you think it would take for the bloom to fall off the rose or whatever so I can make an exit that won’t land you in the papers for too long. What do you think your grandmother would prefer? Divorce after a year or a baby out of wedlock?”
It sounded so crass, the way he said it. Nina’s first thought was neither.
As if he could read her mind, Calvin clapped a wide, moist palm on top of Nina’s, its heavy weight trapping hers to the linen tablecloth.
Nina had to fight not to pull her hand away. “And what do you get out of this?”
Calvin shrugged. “It’s simple. I know you’ve been asking around about me, princess. You’re not that subtle, you know.”
Nina had the grace to blush. To whom had he been talking?
“And you’re at least smart enough to know I’ve got some irons in the fire, since you keep asking about them. But I need connections to make them happen.” Calvin shrugged as he finally removed his hand, though he swiped an oil-soaked potato from her plate and popped it in his mouth. “So, you get to avoid disgracing your family and keep your good name. I get to be a part of the de Vrieses, if only for a little while, and I’ll have some doors opened that I need right now.” His face darkened significantly. “Unless you’re looking for a repeat of what happened to your cousin?”
Nina swallowed. The family hadn’t even come close to recovering from that debacle. Eric continued to go rogue, so to speak—currently gallivanting his way around California, as far as Nina could tell from friends—and Page Six was still having a field day speculating about the city’s missing heir.
Calvin knew just as well as she did that her family was not to be trifled with. And that her grandmother wouldn’t take to another scandal.
“I will be a success in this life, Nina,” Calvin said. “It’s the only thing worth doing right.”
The Perfect Woman (Rose Gold Book 2) Page 3