Priceless

by Olivia Darling

  “You can practice while you’re getting your hair blown out,” Jessica suggested.

  Carrie sat under the dryer at Jo Hansford running through her speech. Meanwhile, another aesthetician attended to her nails. That done, she returned to the office. Jessica had made sure that her dress was perfectly pressed. It was a black silk jersey by Azzaro, simple yet sexy, with a plunging neckline that was accented by a diamanté clip. Carrie applied her own makeup with the expertise that came from years of covering up her acne scars. She put a little heavier makeup on her eyes than usual. Like a ballerina preparing for her stage debut, she wanted to be sure that the people at the back would be able to see and understand her expressions. On her feet she wore a pair of Louboutin’s highest heels—his Altadama platform pumps in gray water snake leather. They gave her almost another six inches in height.

  The result was pretty impressive, even if Carrie thought so herself.

  “You look amazing,” said Jessica.

  “Thank you. Good enough for the new head of Ehrenpreis London?”

  “Definitely.”

  Jessica gave Carrie a little squeeze, though she was careful not to crease her dress. “I know you’re the boss, but I’m so proud of you,” she said. “This is your night.”

  It really is, thought Carrie.

  CHAPTER 18

  Nat Wilde put rather less preparation into his look for the Ehrenpreis launch that night. To be honest, he was surprised to have been invited. But the invitation on his desk had his name and a “plus one” neatly written on it in a calligraphic hand. He hadn’t had to blag his way in at all, which was a little disappointing in some ways, since Nat considered himself to be a very good blagger and liked to exercise his skills from time to time.

  At six-thirty, he showed up at the fine wines department in search of his partner in crime.

  “Come on, then, Harry. Let’s go and find out what Ehrenpreis think they’re made of.”

  “I don’t know if we ought to go,” said Harry, who didn’t quite have Nat’s brass neck.

  “Nonsense,” said Nat. “I had an invitation and you’re my chosen guest. Plus, I need you there to let me know how much they’ve spent on the wine. Half an hour? They won’t have time to lynch us.”

  Still, while Nat strode into Ehrenpreis as though he were on their board of directors, Harry slunk into the showroom like a burglar casing a joint.

  “Will you try not to look so shifty, Harry? We are here at their invitation, after all.”

  “I don’t know why they invited us. They just want to gloat.”

  “Of course they do. It’s all about showing off. But the last thing we want to do is give them the impression that we are in any way impressed by all this.” Nat waved his hand around the room. “This gaudy frippery. Would you look at that terrible wallpaper? I don’t know what they expect will look good against a red like that. Much too bright. Nouveau.” He ran his finger along the top of a mantelpiece as though inspecting for dust. “Someone needs to tell them they’re not in the colonies now.”

  “That’s their wine guy,” said Harry. “I recognize him from the trade press.”

  Nat glanced at the man Harry pointed out. He looked every inch the wine expert from his red nose to his gaudy silk cravat. But then Nat’s attention was drawn to someone altogether more interesting.

  “Well, I never,” he said, subconsciously straightening his tie. “What is she doing here?”

  “Who is it?” Harry asked anxiously.

  “Remember that bird I told you about? The one from the old masters’ party?”

  “The athletic American divorcée?”

  “The very same. There she is. Chatting to old Frank Ehrenpreis. I think I should go and reintroduce myself.”

  Nat swiped a couple of fresh glasses of champagne from a passing waiter.

  “Stay here, Harry. Don’t say anything stupid.”

  Nat weaved through the crowd toward his target, practicing his opening lines as he moved. He was a little disappointed that Carrie Barclay hadn’t called him to let him know she was going to be in town—not least because she was obviously still looking for artwork and he had plenty to sell—but he felt confident that he could charm her into spending the evening with him again. There was no need to fear rejection. His resolve stiffened as he remembered that night at Claridge’s when she’d been so hot and wild. Carrie Barclay may have been a tiger, but Nat Wilde could tame any pussy …

  As he got within six feet of her, Carrie turned in Nat’s direction. He fixed her with his best smile and raised both champagne glasses. Carrie smiled back at him. Her big blue eyes flashed in recognition. It seemed like quite a warm smile. Excited. She obviously remembered their night at Claridge’s as well and as fondly as he did.

  Game on, thought Nat. He ran his eyes appreciatively over her curves in that little black dress and gave an involuntary shudder of pleasure as he thought about being underneath those incredible shoes.

  Then Carrie turned back to old Ehrenpreis, who muttered something before giving her a firm handshake and a clap on the shoulder that seemed an odd sort of gesture to make to a potential client.

  Ehrenpreis walked off in the direction of the auctioneer’s stand. Carrie remained, talking to a younger woman with a clipboard.

  “Carrie,” Nat called, waving her glass.

  But she was following Ehrenpreis.

  “Carrie!”

  She didn’t turn around.

  Now old Ehrenpreis was up at the microphone. He tapped the side of his champagne glass with a pen in an attempt to draw everyone’s attention. It didn’t work, so instead he picked up the heavy wooden gavel and brought it down on the pad with a resounding thwack.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, your attention, please.”

  That worked. The crowd was silenced. Nat, frustrated in his pursuit for a moment, leaned against a wall. Damn, he hoped the speeches would be short.

  “You all know who I am, and most of you have been bored witless listening to my speeches before, so I’m not going to say anything much today except thank you for turning out on this rainy night when you could have stayed home watching—what is it you Brits watch?—Coronation Street.”

  There was a polite ripple of laughter.

  “I am very proud to be able to welcome you to the first London office of Ehrenpreis the Auctioneers. I think you’ll agree that we have a wonderful place here.” He waved his arms to take in the room. “But I can’t take any of the praise for that. It all has to go to this wonderful woman standing at my side …”

  Bloody hell, thought Nat. Is Carrie Barclay screwing that old bastard? He was torn between feeling disgusted that she would even consider such an old codger and impressed that she’d bagged herself one of Manhattan’s wealthiest bachelors. Perhaps his proximity to the grave was exactly what had attracted Carrie to him.

  Ehrenpreis continued. “You may already know her as head of fine art sales at Ehrenpreis New York. Well, now I’m exceptionally happy to be introducing her as head of Ehrenpreis London. Ladies and Gentleman, I give you the fabulous Ms. Carrie Klein …”

  “Good God,” said Nat out loud in shock. “Carrie Klein?”

  Glowing from Ehrenpreis’s praise, Carrie took the microphone from him and launched into her own speech of welcome. She’d gone over her speech while sitting under the blow-dryer, but instead she gave a very successful off-the-cuff vote of thanks to the team she had brought from New York and their new London counterparts. She made extra-special effort to ensure that the room gave Jessica a little round of applause.

  Nat Wilde wasn’t listening. As Carrie thanked her new team, he was already slinking back through the crowd toward Harry. He gulped the glass of champagne he had pinched for Carrie en route. “My God,” said Harry. “You screwed the new head girl at Ehrenpreis. Didn’t you recognize her?”

  “Of course I bloody didn’t.”

  “But she must have recognized you. Bloody hell, Nat. Did she ask you anything about Ludbrook’s? You
better report yourself to compliance.”

  “The hell I will. The news that I shagged that monster is going no further than this room. Understand me?”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t recognize her. Don’t you ever read the trade press?”

  “Of course I read the bloody trade press. She doesn’t look like that in her corporate picture. She used to have a mustache.”

  “Looks pretty hot right now.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Harry. Don’t make it worse. Let’s go. This party isn’t turning out to be half as much fun as I’d hoped.”

  From her place on the podium, Carrie spotted Nat and Harry making for the door.

  “Finally,” she purred into her microphone as she gestured to her fleeing rivals. “I’d like to thank the good people of Ludbrook’s for crossing New Bond Street to be with us tonight. And wish them the very best of British luck.” She paused. “They’re going to need it.”

  In that moment, Carrie Klein had declared war.

  CHAPTER 19

  Nat was in a terrible mood when he got into the office the following morning. His colleagues assumed it was a hangover, but it wasn’t long before the truth about Nat’s mood spread via the gossips in the fine wine department.

  “No wonder we couldn’t find Carrie Barclay in our records,” said Olivia.

  “How could he not have known who she was?” Sarah Jane asked. “I mean, doesn’t he read the trades?”

  But when Lizzy and Sarah Jane Googled the new boss of Ehrenpreis London, they had to admit that they too would not have recognized the glossy blond now installed across the street. All the official pictures of Carrie Klein showed her with brown hair scraped back into a bun and big round glasses. They were completely out of date. Somewhere mid-Atlantic a transformation had occurred.

  As it happened, Nat Wilde had an even less flattering memory of the woman who had set up shop across the road.

  It was such an unflattering memory that Nat wondered whether there were in fact two women called Carrie Klein in the auction business. The thought that this vixen at Ehrenpreis might be the same girl he had met so many years ago made him shake his head in bewilderment.

  It was 1990. Nat had just joined Ludbrook’s from Bonhams. He was the rising star, tipped to be the best auctioneer of his generation. His early sales had been shockingly good. He had the patter. He could hold a room in the palm of his hand and squeeze it until the patrons left with nothing in their pockets but chewing gum wrappers. Nat Wilde could sell anything.

  Every couple of months, a crop of new interns would arrive at the auction house. Most of them were students in the house’s fine art course. An internship was their chance to get their hands on some of the world’s best paintings. Quite literally. Most of the work of an intern involved physically shifting paintings and other objets d’art from one end of the house to the other, while wearing those white gloves and overalls that Nat had come to find strangely erotic.

  Carrie Klein’s internship started fairly inauspiciously. As was usual on the first Monday of the month, Nat and Harry Brown watched the arrival of the new boys and girls from the window of Harry’s office, which had a good view of the building’s entrance.

  “She just has to be mine,” said Nat, watching a pretty redhead wriggle across the pavement in a pair of impractical shoes.

  “So unfair,” said Harry. “I get all the boys.”

  “He’s definitely yours,” said Nat, pointing out a zitty youth in an ill-fitting two-piece. “And she’s mine.” Nat bagged a ditzy-looking blond.

  “Which one of us is going to get that one?” Harry pulled a face.

  “That one” was Carrie Klein, fresh in from the East Coast of the United States. She resembled early pictures of Hillary Clinton. Her hair was arranged in the most unflattering of styles. Half of it was pulled back into a hair band, keeping it out of her eyes. The rest hung limply to her shoulders. Her glasses covered most of her face. Angry red spots covered that part of her face that wasn’t covered by her glasses. She was wearing a Princess Diana pussy-bow blouse of the kind long since abandoned by anyone but society spinsters over the age of thirty-five.

  “Surely some mistake,” said Nat. “She must be meant for Christie’s.”

  But no. She was for Ludbrook’s. Even worse, Carrie Klein was meant for Nat’s very own department. Cruel fate had decreed that the wriggly redhead was the first-ever attractive female intern in the fine wine department. In celebration of that fact, Harry Brown declared it the right day to open a 1947 Petrus.

  Nat was not best pleased to have been saddled with the least attractive of the interns (he thought the girl he’d shagged in human resources might have had something to do with it), but he couldn’t deny that Carrie knew her stuff. She may not have been up for a little frolicking around the office, but she was ready to work and work hard, which was some consolation. And lucky too. Nat’s most prized junior had gone and gotten herself married and was off on a two-week honeymoon in Tuscany. It wasn’t long before Nat had delegated all Clara’s workload to Carrie.

  “It’s perfect,” he said. “Your names are almost interchangeable.”

  “But not,” said Carrie. She was terribly serious.

  Meanwhile, Harry Brown was having terrible trouble with Erica, his redhead. At the end of her first day, she had copped off with one of his juniors after a few too many postwork drinks. Harry had to endure a week of watching them moon around after each other, and another week of tears when the junior’s full-time girlfriend came back from staying with her parents in Barbados and normal service was resumed. Red turned up every morning, eyes brimming with tears. She couldn’t concentrate. She dropped a bottle of ’61 Château Mouton Rothschild in the marble lobby. Not good at all.

  Nat soon came to realize that he had gotten the better end of the bargain. It was quite a change to have a female in the office who didn’t fire up his testosterone. It was, Nat considered, actually somewhat relaxing. Because he didn’t feel he needed to put on a show, he was able to get some paperwork done. And there was something rather nice about being able to discuss business with someone who was actually interested in that side of things. It was clear that, unlike most of her contemporaries in the art history course, Carrie did not view a career in an auction house as a brief interlude before marriage, babies, and Labradors. Fine art was Carrie’s life.

  At the end of Carrie’s two-week stint in his office, Nat decided she deserved some kind of reward. Ordinarily, he would have taken the intern out to lunch, since he was still married at the time. But his wife was away, and Harry was not available for dinner. So, Carrie got upgraded, as it were.

  “Dinner?” Carrie put her hand on her heart as she repeated the word.

  Nat nodded. He was faintly pleased with her reaction. Even though he didn’t fancy Carrie Klein, it was good to see that she was as excited at the prospect of dinner with him as any other girl.

  “Wiltons,” he told her. “Eight o’clock. Wear a skirt.”

  Carrie had been in a trouser suit most days that week.

  “I don’t have a skirt,” she said. “Though I do have a pair of culottes.”

  “Anything,” said Nat. “Anything but those bloody slacks.” They were a total abomination.

  Nat felt quite pleased with himself as he got ready to go out that night. He was doing a nice thing for sweet little Carrie Klein. A charitable thing, almost, making her feel appreciated. It would be good to have half a bottle of wine and be in bed early. Nat could very nearly see the attraction of a quiet life.

  But at seven-fifteen, just as he was about to walk out the door, the telephone rang. It was his wife, Miranda. Much-Admired Miranda, as he had called her when they were courting. He didn’t call her that very often now. She sounded in a bad mood. She so often was these days. Her father and grandfather had been very big in investment banking, and Miranda had settled into a permanent state of disgruntlement when she’d realized that Nat wasn’t going to be pulling down anything like the sa
me money.

  The conversation began badly.

  “What are you doing?” Miranda asked.

  “Nothing,” said Nat automatically.

  “Nothing? What do you mean ‘nothing’? You can’t be doing nothing,” Miranda parried. And a row ensued. As he thought back on that fateful evening, almost twenty years later, Nat couldn’t remember what he and Miranda had argued about. It had probably, like all their arguments, ranged far and wide and brought in transgressions that he thought had been forgiven months earlier. He had a vague recollection of Miranda saying she should have followed her mother’s advice and married Piers Mackesy, the tosser wine merchant Nat had seen off with a punch on the nose outside Brooks’.

  Whatever they argued about, the result was that Nat left the house in a very different mood from the one he had been luxuriating in before Miranda’s call. Gone was the sense of calm benevolence. Now he was angry with his wife and wanted to make her pay for having called him all those names. By the time Nat got to Wiltons, Carrie’s fate was sealed. It no longer mattered that she wore glasses as thick as the bottom of a champagne bottle and was dressed in a shirt with a piecrust collar that kept everything to the imagination.

  Nat ordered two glasses of champagne.

  “I don’t normally have an aperitif,” Carrie began. “I find that a glass of wine over dinner is enough for me.”

  “Well, it’s not enough for me,” said Nat grimly.

  Carrie sipped in quiet astonishment as Nat swallowed his glass of champers down in one. Mood and charm restored by the bubbles, he became much more the Nat that Carrie had nursed a small crush on. A whole bottle of burgundy later, he had his hand on her knee.

  Poor Carrie. The last thing she’d intended to do on her trip to London was sleep with a married man, but she had been working so hard at impressing Nat with her expertise in art, she hadn’t listened to enough in-house gossip to even know that he was married. And so she was unduly flattered when Nat removed her glasses and told her that she had nice eyes (even though she couldn’t stop blinking with her specs off).