The Perfect Woman (Rose Gold Book 2)

by Nicole French

  Because it would be wrath.

  Make an honest woman out of you.

  It wasn’t a proposal. It wasn’t even a question. Calvin had made this marriage seem like he was doing Nina a favor. Her. One of the two apparent heirs to the great de Vries fortune. Him, a no-name, amateur investor. Doing her a favor.

  Eric hadn’t shown today. Of course he hadn’t. Because of what Celeste had done to his girl. His love.

  So many ruined because of her grandmother’s vengeance. Nina had witnessed the blackness in her grandmother’s face when she swore that no one in the family was above punishment. She had felt the sear of her threats when she announced to the entire family, time and time again, that she would not tolerate disgrace.

  An honest woman out of you.

  And so, Nina had said yes.

  The announcement was placed the next day. St. Mark’s was booked two weeks later. And here they were.

  Grandmother knew it was a farce. Of course she knew. Celeste de Vries loved a spectacle, and Nina was this family’s princess. This wedding was supposed to be at St. John the Divine, with a thousand guests, three separate receptions, a Vogue spread, and a season full of engagement parties and events that would last at least a year. Not this. A paltry hundred and change smashed into this sauna of a church. A quick garden party reception with chicken breasts instead of king crab. A weekend-long honeymoon on Long Island instead of Europe for the summer.

  This was Celeste de Vries’s version of a shotgun wedding. And if Nina dared run away now…she was terrified to find out what Celeste’s version of the actual shotgun might also be.

  “Nina.”

  This time, Calvin’s voice was a hiss again, full of serpentine consonants. Frantic and incensed.

  Nina blinked, and Peppe’s face was replaced by Calvin’s. He was wearing lifts today, and her, only kitten heels, so for once they were almost eye to eye. It was Calvin who had insisted on this absurd dress in the middle of summer. Who demanded Nina choose (and pay for) the gaudy engagement ring at Tiffany’s when she would have done with something smaller and more tasteful, or nothing at all.

  “Can you say something?” he whispered fiercely.

  A thin line of sweat drew a streak through his face. The man was wearing makeup, Nina realized. She was about to marry a man who was wearing makeup, sweating like a pig through his tuxedo, and was looking at her across the altar like he wanted to beat her black and blue.

  “Ms. de Vries?” ventured the minister, who now looked equally uncomfortable in the afternoon heat. “Do you need a moment?”

  But Nina’s tears were gone.

  Her heart was numb.

  Peppe was gone. And Nina already had the only thing from him she could keep.

  A baby. Who would maybe, one day, have a father.

  She cleared her throat and stood up straight, now taller than Calvin again, even in his lifted shoes.

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I’m ready.”

  And then, in a much louder voice:

  “I will.”

  Now

  Chapter Four

  June 2018

  Nina

  I counted to one hundred before opening my eyes.

  Waited for the door to catch.

  For the footsteps to recede.

  For the invasion to cease.

  Yes, okay. Perhaps it was a bit extreme. But to be candid, I think you would do the same if you had put up with the man for ten years.

  You would fake sleep to escape that ham-fisted touch. The intrusive fingers. The painful slap.

  It’s the least you would do. Truly.

  It wasn’t until the shuffle of leather soles on parquet and marble completely faded, and the faint ring of the elevator announced my husband’s departure that I finally greeted the day. On the other side of the triple-pane windows, the sun shone, but New York threatened. I couldn’t hear her, of course. Such was my privilege, ensconced in my tower. Twenty stories above traffic horns and subway rumbles. Silence is one form of currency in this city, and only the rich—like me—have it.

  But even here, the tips of the high-rise buildings of midtown, just across the park, still threatened to pierce. New York is a dangerous city. A city full of weapons. Some I’d been learning to use all my life. Others I couldn’t touch.

  There was a soft knock on the door, and I sat up, checking that my injuries from last night weren’t visible.

  “Mrs. Gardner?” The familiar, timid voice of my personal assistant sounded through the oak.

  I sighed. What an unemployed housewife needed with a personal assistant, I really couldn’t say. It was even more pathetic than the fact that I couldn’t do without her. I wasn’t sure when Moira Lemon and I began our daily routine of wake-up calls like I was the dauphiness of France, but close to a decade later, here we were.

  “I’m up,” I called as I swung my legs out from under my duvet. “Come in.”

  Moira strode in, followed by a maid wheeling the espresso cart, just as I was wrapping a gray silk dressing gown over my torn chemise. The maid left, but my assistant remained outside the door as I walked into the en suite to examine the damage to my body in the mirror over the vanity.

  “Nice busy day today,” Moira called cheerily. “Would you like your cappuccino, Mrs. Gardner?”

  I pulled open the robe, frowning distastefully at the rip in the silk nightgown. Another one for the trash. “Yes, please, Moira.”

  As the sounds and scents of the coffeemaker filtered in, I continued my inventory-taking. I was married to a man who gifted me his negligence ninety percent of the time and made up for it in the worst possible way the other ten. But what had once been an occurrence two or three times per year, when my husband was actually home, had become almost nightly since Calvin’s arrest five weeks ago for racketeering, bribery, and human trafficking. Since his travel was stunted while the trial began, I was a convenient place to take out his frustration. Particularly since January, when I refused to comply with his other wishes.

  Frigid bitch.

  It could be worse, I thought numbly. From the neck up, I looked relatively normal. My blonde hair was a mess, but Mikael, my stylist, would fix that later. My light gray eyes, a little too big for my face, were framed with dark circles, but I had concealer. My bottom lip was puffed slightly, but nothing lipstick wouldn’t hide.

  We had a deal, after all. Anything but the face. And he only broke that deal sometimes.

  Elsewhere, there were a few small bruises at the base of my neck left over from last Tuesday, but I thought I could cover those up too. It was the large one I could feel forming on my inner thigh, deep under the skin, that might make it difficult to walk properly later.

  A decade ago, I had been called sharp. Striking. Full of promise. Now look at me. Thirty years old, haggard, beaten.

  And what’s more, I deserved it.

  The fuck you do, doll.

  I suck in a sharp breath as the voice—deep, coarse, and utterly hypnotizing—echoed in the back of my mind. Uncalled for, but when was it ever? Matthew Zola’s voice was a bell whose ring never faded. Once I’d heard it, I couldn’t sleepwalk through this life anymore.

  I still wasn’t sure if that was for better or for worse. These days, maybe the latter. Since, of course, he turned out to be the man prosecuting my husband.

  I splashed a bit of water on my face, wincing as it dribbled over my lip. I ignored it and went about the mundane tasks of cleaning myself up for the day.

  There was another knock on the door. I opened it to let Moira in. The older woman set my coffee on the vanity, then began running through the day while I brushed my teeth.

  “Spencer will be here in twenty minutes for your morning Pilates. After that, you have cycling at seven forty-five. Your gym kit is on the bureau. You reached three hundred miles last week, so I picked up some new sneakers too. Be careful about blisters.”

  I quirked a smile in the mirror. Moira had started laying clothes out for me w
hen I was in the throes of postpartum depression and had never stopped. I didn’t always use them, but it was a sweet gesture. My own mother had never even done that.

  “After that, you’ve got acupuncture at nine around the corner from the studio.”

  I winced as the marble countertop pressed into my thigh. Acupuncture would be good today, but the look on the practitioner’s face when I removed my clothes would not. “Reschedule that for next week, please. And then?”

  “Blowout with Mikael, then lunch with your mother at noon. She wants to discuss the Met luncheon she’s planning in honor of your cousin’s recent contributions. I assume you’re planning to go?”

  I sighed. Once upon a time, luncheons, charities—all of these were daily occurrences, things that, if not particularly fulfilling, at least gave my shadow of a life some meaning. Now, I couldn’t help wondering how much of our “charity” work was simple self-congratulations. I’d rather just write a check and be done with it.

  I spat, then rinsed and replaced my toothbrush in its charger. “Mother really is pulling out all the stops to kiss the ring, isn’t she?”

  Moira didn’t respond, which was basically her way of agreeing with me. It didn’t take rocket science to figure out what was going on. Less than a year ago, my cousin Eric had returned to the family fold after a ten-year absence. He might have been the black sheep of the family, but he was welcomed as its prodigal son. The last of the line of birthright de Vrieses. Heir to the bulk of our now-passed grandmother’s considerable fortune, including controlling ownership of the family company).

  Now that Grandmother was gone, Eric was the de facto head. Which made Mother and me nothing but poor relations, relatively speaking. I realized that we weren’t exactly in line at the food bank, but considering that De Vries Shipping was valued at something close to twenty billion, my supposed fifty-million-dollar inheritance and the similar amount handcuffed in my trust were paltry in comparison. Mother too had her own, plus the estate near Southampton, but again, neither came close to Eric’s newfound wealth.

  I couldn’t lie. When the will was read, I was hurt. Really hurt. Not because of the money. And I loved Eric. I had even come to love his wife. What did I care if my portfolio or theirs expanded by a factor of ten or ten billion? No, it was the fact that in the end, Eric’s last name mattered more than the decade I had spent with our grandmother while he had been off doing God knew what. They say blood runs thicker than water, but in our family, gender trumped all.

  My husband, however, definitely cared about the money. After all, it was the reason he married me. And it was why, six months after the will was read, he was still quietly trying to get my other family members to fight it in probate. So far, he hadn’t succeeded.

  So, for now, Eric paid the bills. And Mother would want to do what was needed to keep that faucet running, which included sucking up to the new head of family and the wife that no one thought belonged on the Upper East Side.

  “Okay, lunch,” I repeated after splashing water on my face and grabbing a towel. “What else?”

  “An appointment with Dr. Raleigh at three.”

  I dropped the towel. “Is it that time already?”

  Moira shrugged. “It’s been six months. You missed your last appointment, and the receptionist called.” She looked up from her list. “Shouldn’t I have made it? I assumed you’d want to look nice for tonight. Not that you don’t always, of course. But since it’s special…”

  I frowned into the mirror. “Special how?”

  Moira blinked. “Well, since it’s your anniversary, of course.”

  We both stilled as my sudden awkward silence landed in the middle of my bathroom like a wet blanket. Moira wasn’t stupid. She had been my assistant for nearly ten years, which meant she understood at least something of the distance between Calvin and me, even if she didn’t know what happened behind closed doors.

  “Mr. Gardner’s assistant hasn’t said anything to me about it,” Moira said quietly. “I assumed you were planning something at home. Might be nice not to think about…everything.”

  It was her kind way of suggesting I should probably do something to distract from the embarrassingly public trial we were facing in a matter of weeks. And offering to help, should I need it.

  I cleared my throat. “Um, yes. I suppose I am. But nothing you need to worry about. Thank you, Moira.”

  I leaned closer to the mirror again, more in order to avoid Moira’s gaze than because I really saw anything. I pressed at my skin, eyeing the minuscule, practically nonexistent wrinkles at the corners of my eyes. I didn’t have nearly the work done regularly that many of my friends had. But they also didn’t smile. Or laugh. Or love. And until recently, neither did I.

  I love your laugh, doll. That voice again, reprimanding me. Don’t you change a fuckin’ thing.

  I stood back from the mirror. Matthew wasn’t the only person who had ever called me perfect.

  But in front of him was the only time it had ever felt like the truth. When I had had less sleep than this. When my face was tear-stained and blotchy. When my lips were swollen and hard-kissed.

  To him, I was perfect. If only for a moment.

  “Cancel the appointment with Dr. Raleigh, please,” I said to Moira as I straightened and picked up the coffee on the counter. “I’ve decided to see what life is like without the needle for a while.”

  Moira nodded and made a note. “Very well. Do you have a preference for breakfast?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t like much more than coffee before my trainer. “Just a poached egg and grapefruit, please.”

  “I’ll be sure it’s in the dining room, Mrs. Gardner. After that I’m taking out the dry-cleaning and then making sure Patricia is available to nanny again this month and in August. We want to have everything in order before Miss Olivia returns this weekend.”

  I smiled at the mention of my daughter. “It will be nice to have her home for a bit, won’t it?”

  Moira smiled back. Olivia wasn’t just the light of my life. My assistant, the cook, the maid, the doorman—they all adored her as well. “Yes, it certainly will.”

  She didn’t say, as she had years before, that she wished Olivia could stay longer, and why didn’t we just hire a nanny for the entire summer, not just for a few weeks. Moira never explicitly stated that she understood why my daughter attended school in another state or why she would go to a sleepaway camp in England. Instead, her eyes dropped to the bruise on my chest where my dressing gown had fallen open, then flickered back up when I tugged it closed.

  I willed myself to look her in the eye. What would she say if she knew I’d given that one to myself?

  Moira turned toward the door. “I’ll be on my cell phone if you need me, of course. Have a wonderful day, Mrs. Gardner.”

  Her footsteps echoed my husband’s, as did the sound of the bedroom door opening and closing, leaving me alone again. I turned back to the mirror, pausing for a moment. And then, slowly, I pulled off my robe.

  The bruise on my chest was flowering a bit more now, and the bottom of my lip was positively purple. I turned my hip out to examine my inner thigh—just a hint of color there, but the skin was tender and swollen.

  You have to take care of yourself, doll.

  My lower lip trembled. It had been nearly five weeks since I’d seen him. Seven since I’d toppled into the small brick house on the edge of Brooklyn and confessed the truth buried in the depths of my soul.

  I love you.

  And Matthew, of course, loved me too. For a few brief, shining moments, I had envisioned a future away from this plush jail. Seen myself living in that tiny townhouse, breaking bread with his raucous family in the Bronx. Fleeing the man I was chained to for the man who set me free. Since meeting Matthew, I had craved freedom. And for scant moments, I tasted it in his arms.

  Until he told me I couldn’t. Until he had broken my heart. And told me I had to come back.

  “Nina,” he said in a voice portend
ing certain doom. “Baby, I don’t think you understand. You have to go. You have to go back home.”

  My eyes popped open with shock. Disbelief. “What? Why?” After the night of passion—no, love—how could he be saying this?

  “Because,” Matthew said. His head dropped. Shame emanated from his beautiful body like some sort of sick halo. “I can’t protect you from this investigation. But being married to Calvin…” He shook his head, looking ill. “That will.”

  Suddenly, I was gasping for air.

  The problem with addiction is that once you start, you physically can’t stop the wanting.

  The problem with love is the same.

  The course of the day seemed utterly impossible. I touched a finger to my swollen lip. The flash of my diamond—a gaudy, glittering lie—made me squint. I couldn’t do this anymore.

  I just want to see him, I told myself. Nothing illegal about that.

  Before I knew it, I had trudged back into the bedroom, sunk into the covers, and taken my phone from the nightstand. It took only a few more seconds to pull up his name—or the pseudonym I had given him—in my contacts.

  I couldn’t.

  I shouldn’t.

  Just like last time, the text was short and sweet, and before I knew it, flying through cyberspace.

  Me: I need you. Please.

  The phone lay silent in my hand for a long time. But just when I was about to give up and shove my legs into Lycra like it was my armor against the world, the phone vibrated.

  Maya: What time?

  I closed my eyes in relief, my chest expanding at just the thought of his face in front of mine.

  Nina: Two o’clock. Our room.

  Chapter Five

  Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,