by Lee Winter
“Um, hi?” Maddie pulled herself to her feet.
“Am I to take it from this dramatic display that you approve, too?” Elena asked.
Maddie blushed, lost for words. She nodded.
Perry laughed. “It must be good, she’s robbed of speech.” His eyes twinkled, and he turned back to Elena. “No adjustments needed. I’ll leave it with you and make my escape. You can have fun repairing Ms Grey’s stunted vocabulary.” He gave Maddie a wink, gathered the “mirror ball” blue dress, now stuffed back in its garment bag, and headed for the elevator.
“It’s so stunning,” Maddie said, still transfixed. “Who is Véronique Duchamp?”
“Perhaps the world’s greatest designer,” Elena replied, “which you’d know if you had even the slightest interest in fashion.” She spun around and went back to her office.
Maddie followed. She rounded the corner and found the media boss standing at the window, staring out.
“How can anyone get to be as old as you are…what, mid-twenties?…and fail to grasp even the basics of fashion?” Elena asked the glass in front of her.
Maddie thought about what Perry had said, that people who didn’t acknowledge the part of Elena that loved fashion failed in her eyes. She wondered how to answer the question truthfully.
“Fashion speaks to everyone differently. I mean, while it never really interested me—”
“I’m shocked.” Elena’s tone was mocking but contained amusement too.
Maddie shoved her hands in her jeans pockets, her gaze sliding over the beautiful back before her. The scoop in the back of her dress ended just above the curve of her ass. It was exquisite. The dress, not her ass. Actually, no. Both were. “But it doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the beauty of fashion. Especially when it’s right in front of me.”
There was a silence, and Maddie lifted her eyes, finding Elena had been watching her in the window’s reflection. Their gazes locked.
“And how do you know what beauty is if you don’t understand the most basic thing about style?”
“I have eyes.” It came out more as an exhale, and Maddie saw surprise in Elena’s reflection.
Maddie glanced down, unsure what she was doing, because she sure as hell couldn’t be flirting with Elena Bartell. That would be insane. She noticed a silver frame on Elena’s desk. Between pictures of powerful billionaires and elite fashion designers was a photograph of Elena with her husband. She stared at it. At him. His expression was so predatory. Why did the smug bastard always look so hungry? In every online photo she’d ever seen, he always looked the same.
Out of her periphery, she saw Elena turn from the window and notice what Maddie was looking at.
Elena’s face shifted from intrigued to cool. “So…you don’t look Japanese.” Her voice was now all business.
“Uh…no?”
“The next visitor I expected in here was Mihoko Morita. Unless Style Tokyo’s editor-in-chief has become an Australian with a cult-band fetish, you are not her.”
“Oh, well, I think Felicity’s picking her up right now. That’s why I’m here, not her. She asked me to drop this off.” Maddie put the USB stick on Elena’s desk.
“Playing courier? But I thought you were a reporter. Isn’t that what you keep telling me?” She gave Maddie a dissecting look.
“It sounded like an emergency,” Maddie said. “Soooo…uh…you’re welcome.”
She fidgeted. It was weird being in here, in the inner sanctum, seeing how powerful Elena really was. The way the executives had bowed and scraped on their way out. Elena had her own driver and a fancy luxury car and a helipad, for God’s sake, probably with an actual helicopter parked on it. And that dress she was wearing? If it wasn’t worth five figures, she’d be shocked.
Elena studied her for a few moments. “Ah,” she said, eyes glinting. “And now you see.”
“See what?”
“It’s unsettled you seeing me here.” Her tone was wry. “Well, you don’t have to remain, since it makes you uncomfortable.” She gave her fingers a flick in Maddie’s direction, her lips drawing down. She fiddled with some paperwork on her desk. It was incongruous since she was still wearing her killer red dress. Garnet dress. Whatever.
“You’re wrong.”
“What?” Elena lifted her head.
“I mean yes, sure, this place is…well, it’s…”
“Pretentious, you can say it.” Elena’s eyes sparkled.
“I mean, yes, this office is all business. But that’s not you.”
“Oh? And who am I? You think you now know?”
“No, not yet. But I do know this—this place might be your life, but it’s not you. This is just where you rule the world from. Nothing else.”
“Nothing else? Surely ruling the world is more than that?” Elena scrutinised her. “Do you think so little of what I do?”
“No! Yes. I mean… I didn’t intend it that way, and you know it.”
“Do I?” Elena’s gaze was intense. “You know what they call me, don’t you? All the names? Not to mention all the ruthless things I’m supposed to have done? The rumours are not without foundation.”
“Of course I know what they say. Even if it’s all true, that’s not my point. They’ve left out stuff, haven’t they? You’re not your image. Like, I know you sent Josie home to be with her kid. You didn’t do it because you thought she was infectious.”
Elena gave her a cool look. “Betting on my humanity is not a safe bet, Madeleine.”
“I’ll take that bet anyway.” Maddie lifted her chin. She was met with disbelief, and smiled. Without waiting for a reply, she spun on her heel and headed for the elevator.
The doors opened, and a handsome man stepped out, passing her.
Maddie’s step briefly faltered, as she recognised Elena’s husband. Her neck craned up. The man was impossibly tall.
“Oh, hello.” An assessing gaze drifted over Maddie. It lingered. “I didn’t know Elly had company.”
Elly? Ugh. Maddie turned her attention back to the media boss. Elena’s jaw tightened. Maybe she didn’t like the nickname, either. Or the way he was fixated on Maddie’s chest.
“Richard?” Elena asked. “Why are you here?”
“I was in the neighbourhood.” He finally stopped staring at Maddie’s curves and turned. “Thought I’d see if you’re free. But, honey, what a perfect dress.” He gave a low, dirty chuckle. “Lemme have some of that.”
He strode over to her, slid his arms around her, pivoted her around, and gave her a sudden, thorough kiss. As he did so, he kept his gaze firmly fixed on Maddie, who was frozen to the spot.
Whatever he saw on her face seemed to amuse him. He pointedly slid his hand to his wife’s ass and gave it a possessive squeeze.
Maddie shot into the elevator, sparing herself the vision of whichever of Elena’s body parts Richard was going to brand next with his wandering hands.
Clearly, Elena’s taste in dresses did not extend to husbands.
CHAPTER 8
Miss Bartlewski
Elena leaned back in her Philippe Starke designer chair, having changed into her original outfit, the garnet dress now back in its bag. Gazing out the window, she contemplated plaguing Felicity for an ETA on Mihoko. Perhaps she should spare her chief of staff a meltdown; Felicity was highly strung enough.
She couldn’t focus, thanks to Richard’s over-the-top PDA. Why he still felt the need to fawn all over her in public mystified her. It made her uncomfortable.
Elena assumed it was because he liked to show off his prize catch. She was well aware that her wealth and status made certain men, like Richard, prone to crass preening—but she thought the novelty would have worn off by now, four years on. Tonight, she’d ordered him home only to look over his shoulder and discover the Hudson Metro News’s junior crime reporter had also disappeared.
The memory of Madeleine’s guileless defence of Elena’s humanity also plagued her. The girl was wrong, of course. Elena was ruthless
when needed, and that was necessary. Without her tiger shark alter ego, she’d have been eaten alive in business years ago. These days, she slipped into the persona without thought. That Madeleine insisted on trying to find something more was…unsettling.
She hated this feeling. Elena had no time for wide, trusting eyes that seemed to beg friendship from her. No time for cute, clever wordplays that blurred the lines between admiration and something else.
Did Madeleine Grey truly not understand? Didn’t she grasp what she was in Elena’s world? An employee. A disposable one at that, who—just like all the others who didn’t meet expectations—could be discarded at any time, if business required it.
Clearly, this was her own fault. Elena had been too lax, allowing the young woman to see more of her than she should. She should have snapped Madeleine back into line weeks ago. Why hadn’t she? Why had she allowed a rapport to develop between them, knowing the fate that awaited?
Because she was interesting company, the little voice at the back of her brain whispered. Because she treated Elena like a woman worth getting to know, not a powerful contact to cultivate. Because the curious Australian was one of the few people on earth who seemed to genuinely like being around Elena. And, deny it as she might, because it made no sense at all, the feeling was mutual.
Even so, for all Madeleine’s earnest speeches, she had no clue at all who Elena really was. But to be fair, who did? Not even her oldest friend, Perry, or her past or current husbands knew the whole truth.
She closed her eyes and remembered back to a time she preferred to forget. She’d been born Elena Zofia Bartlewski, into a life no one would want. Poverty had its own smell, she’d often thought. It was rising damp, rotting waste, and urine, mixed in with shattered booze bottles, cigarette butts, and human despair.
Her grandparents, who had fled Poland during the rise of the Nazis, had made a new life in New York, where Elena was born. She’d grown up with her parents, grandmother, and three brothers, above her uncle’s run-down tailor shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She’d hated her life and the stifling expectation she would one day work in a local garment factory.
As she entered her teenage years, she knew she would be nothing like the worn-out, sallow-cheeked neighbours she passed each day. Elena had places to go and ambitions to accomplish. She would be a someone one day. She’d show all those stupid, cruel children at school, who mocked her name, her faint Polish accent acquired from years spent at the knee of her live-in grandmother, or her too-big, hand-me-down shoes.
Her mother had taught her to sew at an early age, and she enjoyed it, but her design eye truly flourished the day she stumbled upon some discarded, glamorous fashion magazines. She’d scoured them for every detail, her eye darting from the unique cuts of the bold styles to their stitching and fabric flow.
Her heart pounded furiously. Faster even than that day Jenny Copeland had kissed her on the cheek and called her pretty before sliding her hand to Elena’s waist and squeezing.
Oh yes, Elena Bartlewski, gaze locked on fashions the likes she’d never seen before, at that moment knew exactly where her life would lie. She would run a magazine like this one day. She would leave behind this grinding, grey life and her mother’s and grandmother’s depressing existence spent taking in their neighbours’ washing. The world was bigger than dirty old buildings, peeling paint, and graffitied walls. Bigger than mouldy rented apartments cursed with leaking pipes and cracked walls.
So, she planned. Elena continued at school, ignoring countless offers to date the neighbourhood boys, their hair slicked back and eyes gleaming as they stared at her suddenly developing chest.
At age seventeen, an advertisement in one of the big papers caught her eye, and she could barely dare to hope. She dressed in her best outfit—she’d made it herself from design ideas sourced from an impressive, new American magazine called CQ. Catwalk Queen. The glossy publication needed an assistant to the deputy features editor. Elena didn’t have any of the qualifications they listed, and she was too young, but she desperately wanted the job.
The interview had been curious. On the one hand, the lady with the expensive perfume and designer suit had taken one look at Elena’s threadbare résumé and almost thrown her out of the office. But as her manicured fingers hovered her application over what appeared to be a towering reject pile, she suddenly asked Elena: “Why fashion? Why us?”
Elena’s entire being felt lit up as she explained. She began with the dreamhow fashion crossed countries, divides, ideologies. How even poor Jewish girls could see the same wonder of an exquisitely cut ensemble as a rich socialite in Manhattan. How, at the end of the day, fashion was transcendent…like music or great art. It needed to be celebrated. She added how it had changed her life by giving her a dream of her own. And, for good measure, she mentioned, in passing, that she’d run the fashion publishing world one day.
The interviewer, a poised woman in her forties with a shock of white-blonde hair, promptly dropped Elena’s résumé back on her desk, staring at her, open-mouthed. “Where did you come from?” Then she peered at Elena’s dress. “And where, pray tell, did you get that? I do not recognise the label. And I pride myself on knowing them all.”
Elena launched into enthusiastic detail, explaining how she quite liked the cut of Pierre Cardin’s new women’s suits and had incorporated that flair across the shoulder and bust, but felt the style of Hubert de Givenchy was more interesting and classic, so she’d based most of her outfit on his latest design on page 124 of CQ’s March issue.
“Although,” she continued after inhaling quickly, “the Givenchy in Vogue, on page 76, was probably more engaging to the masses, with the longer cut and clever use of contrasting tones, but the one in the CQ issue was definitely more classic. There was no comparison in the end.”
Elena had stopped and sat back uncertainly when the other woman ceased breathing, and she’d wondered if it was somehow wrong to take inspiration from famous designers. She had blushed then. Maybe she’d made a dreadful faux pas, because who was she? A poor seventeen-year-old girl who hemmed rich people’s clothes after school for petty cash. And, oh God, maybe it was tacky that she’d taken elements from more than one designer and fused them to create a whole new look. Was that not done?
She swallowed and contemplated crawling out then and there, before things got any more humiliating.
The other woman seemed to read her mind. “Stop fidgeting. You will not go anywhere. Now, you are completely unqualified for the job you applied for…”
Devastation washed over Elena. It was so overwhelming that she gasped.
The interviewer lifted her hand and continued, “…but so help me, I will not let you leave these doors without being on my staff somewhere. Let me talk to Human Resources. Don’t move an inch.”
And that was the day Elena Bartlewski entered the world of publishing. Initially, she was a personal assistant to Clarice Montague, the woman who had just interviewed her. A woman she later learned was a brilliant editor. Clarice would drill into Elena the need for excellence in all things.
By her twentieth birthday, Elena Bartlewski was no more. Elena Bartell was born, and that byline appeared on her well-researched and increasingly prolific fashion features. She became features editor at twenty-two, under Clarice’s guiding hand and much to the shock of many more seasoned staff.
By twenty-four, she’d acquired the appropriate accessory for every ambitious young woman in the late nineties—a husband. It went with the shoulder pads, charcoal business suits, and pastel blouses. Clarice told her it would stop any whispers about where her interests might lie. The suggestion there might even be rumours had shocked her, because she’d had no time to date anyone. Still, business was business. So she’d proposed to Spencer Fielding, the up-and-coming CQ books editor, during her lunch break one day. He’d looked at her, startled, over his glasses, and blurted out, “Yes, of course.”
Spencer had a few rumours of his own he’d wanted put to rest,
she found out later.
It was a perfectly bland pairing, not lit by excitement in or out of bed, but, well, that was marriage, wasn’t it? After the first month, they didn’t even bother with the marital bed. She’d never understood what the fuss was about on that score. And if she ever felt the tendril of desire for someone else or noticed the sensuous curve of a model’s neck or a well-shaped female backside, that was something else she pushed aside. Business came first. Ruling the world meant sacrifices. It meant you did not get distracted. You certainly did not explore certain things, no matter how tempting.
By twenty-five, she was being groomed to take over for her retiring mentor as editor-in-chief of CQ, destined to become the world’s youngest fashion editor. She would be the toast of the town. Adoring, doting, and ambitious designers would arrive from all corners of the world to kiss her feet. She would win it all.
Except that never happened.
Clarice died, suddenly, as her blackened lungs gave out after all those classic long-handled cigarettes, and Elena’s anointing instead turned into a power struggle.
Emmanuelle Lecoq. Even her name filled Elena with loathing to this day. Elena had resigned a month after the job she was meant to have was stolen from under her nose.
The day Clarice died with her beautiful LV heels firmly on, everything changed. No one else knew, but she’d left Elena a collectible, black Hermes bag along with a note, It’s all yours now. Inside were all the documents pertaining to the CQ shares Clarice had acquired over the years in bonuses and stock options. She had bequeathed them to Elena.
So Elena found Tom Withers, a brilliant accountant and business manager, and through him cashed the shares in slowly over twelve months, to ensure CQ’s stock didn’t plummet. She began a small company she called Bartell Corporation. And because he was no longer needed, she dispensed with the husband.
Spencer had merely shrugged, packed a suitcase, and banked her divorce settlement cheque. She hadn’t seen him since, except when he bobbed up to promote his latest novel in her newsfeeds. Elena didn’t miss him in the slightest. She had no doubt the sentiment was mutual.