Pearl and I were talking, but barely. My calls were clipped and businesslike. I sent her a Birkin handbag, replete with cell phone and replacements for her other “stolen” stuff. She needed a new purse, anyway. The old one I stashed away in a suitcase.
Meanwhile I waited like a lonely crocodile in his patch of territory; no mate, no friends (except for faithful Rex), biding my time until Pearl wouldn’t be able to bear being away from me anymore. Only then would I make my move.
I had two things to sort out: sell my share of HookedUp to Sophie, once and for all, and deal with the dreaded Laura.
If I wanted to make things work with Pearl, even if she was being irrational about Sophie, I had to extricate myself from HookedUp. Because, seriously, how much money and power does a person need? I’d proven myself—I’d never have to work again if I didn’t want to. It was a small sacrifice to pay for a smooth road ahead with the woman I loved.
But Laura . . . Jesus, that was an unquantifiable problem waiting—like a grenade—to detonate.
I dialed her house number. I was hoping to get James on the line, to tell him what was going on—to get his crazy wife under control and keep her away from me for good. But James hadn’t been answering his cell, so I wasn’t surprised when Laura picked up. As I stood in the kitchen in my apartment, I opened the fridge door, wondering what I should snack on, but the moment I heard Laura’s voice, I lost my appetite.
“Hello darling,” she cooed.
“How did you know it was me?” I asked with suspicion—I’d hidden my number.
“Gut feeling.”
I slammed the fridge door shut so hard I heard a bottle smash. “I am not your darling, Laura. I don’t ever, ever want to see you again. Your shenanigans with me at the Connaught were bad enough, but what you did to Pearl, saying that Sophie had tried to kill you and would do the same to her was beyond imagination. She was terrified. Terrified.”
She chuckled. “That was the idea.”
“I’m marrying Pearl so you might as well accept it and get out of my fucking life.”
“You won’t marry Pearl, Alex my love, when I tell you what I know.”
Blood pounded in my ears. “What do you know?”
“I think it’s something we need to discuss, face to face. I’ll come to New York—we can have a little chat.”
“No!” And then I said calmly, “I have business to attend to in London. I’m going to Provence to see about house stuff—I’ll pick up those books of yours and bring them over to your place. And I’ll pick up my Aston Martin from your garage, too. That way, you and I will break all ties and we won’t ever have to see each other again.”
“So final. So dramatic! Well, Alex darling, if you like a little drama, I can guarantee I won’t disappoint.”
“No more games, Laura—really, this isn’t funny.”
“I thought our time together at the Connaught was hilarious, and if I remember rightly, you did too.”
“The drugs had me laughing, but I can tell you it wasn’t bloody funny standing with my dick poking out like a fucking torpedo in front of my sister and Indira Kapoor.”
Laura cackled into the line, her breath hitching in hysterics.
“So when I next come to London, I’ll bring those books, get my car, and sayonara, okay?”
“No, Alex, it’s not okay. I’m still in love with you. Surely you must have guessed that by now?”
“What you have for me, Laura, isn’t love; it’s some sort of sick obsession. If you loved me you’d want me to be happy. Please, I beg of you—leave me, and leave Pearl in peace to get on with our lives.”
“But I can’t do that—I want your baby.”
I knew it! That was what she was after when she laced my Bloody Mary with Viagra, and God only knew what else was in that cocktail. I hung up on her, my stomach coiling with fury. She was beyond insane. When she had her accident and the doctors said she hadn’t suffered brain damage, I now knew they’d got the prognosis wrong. This woman was not right in the head. Okay, she had always been highly-strung, demanding and spoiled, but this? This behavior was psychotic.
My cell rang again. I ignored it. Laura, wanting to wind me up some more. But then I glanced at the screen and saw it was Elodie. I opened the fridge again to get out a drink.
“Elodie,” I said with relief, cracking open a beer, “what’s up?”
“I’m outside your door. I forgot my key.”
“The door’s not locked, I’m in the kitchen.” I gulped down the whole bottle of beer almost in one go and the fizz prickled my nose; Laura had made me thirsty.
Elodie giggled into the line. “Oh. Duh! Okay.”
She came into the kitchen and I took a double take. She wasn’t dressed in her usual Goth attire and looked quite beautiful without all that black makeup on her eyes. She was wearing skinny jeans tucked into elegant black boots, and a pink, scoop-necked sweater accentuated her delicate neck. But the headphones she was wearing still gave her a street-cool look. She was slim, as always, but didn’t look like a scrawny sparrow anymore. I gave her a big bear hug. I’d missed her. She hadn’t been coming into the HookedUp offices much lately, because she said she was getting her art portfolio together.
“I was thinking about making an omelet or something. Are you hungry?” I asked.
She sat down. “What?”
“Take your headphones off and maybe you can hear me. What are you listening to, anyway?”
“Royals,” she said.
“Hungry?”
“Sure.”
I narrowed my eyes at her suspiciously. “Really, you’re eating now?”
“A girl’s got to eat.”
“Great. That’s great.” I got some ingredients out of the fridge, cracked open some eggs and whipped them in a bowl. Elodie watched me with curiosity. I doubted she did any cooking herself. Lucky about the massive choice of take-out in New York, or she probably would have starved from laziness.
“You’re pretty flashy, breaking eggs with one hand.”
“I worked as a sous chef in a restaurant in Paris once upon a time.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said.
“There’s a lot of stuff you don’t know about me.”
“I know that you and Maman left home very young and had to look after yourselves, but she never tells me details. What did she do as a job?”
“She worked as a waitress,” I lied. “Hey, Elodie, I forgot to ask you; how’s the portfolio coming along? Still taking photos? Still making those angry angel collages?”
“Going okay, I guess, but I need to get away for a while,” she said, not wanting to look me in the eye.
I lit the gas. “What’s wrong? You’re not paranoid about being followed again, are you?”
“I need a break, but I don’t want to go back to Paris. I want to do some traveling or something. Backpack around Asia. I can go with my roommate Claire.”
“You know what? There’s a lot to see right here in the United States. There’s no need to go schlepping around dodgy foreign countries when there’s too much unrest in the world right now. Go to the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone Park, why don’t you?”
To my surprise, she replied, “Okay, good idea.”
I tore some fresh basil leaves, sprinkling bits into the pan. “I have a car . . . well, it’s Pearl’s car. It’s in San Francisco and needs to be brought to New York. Is your driver’s license in order? And your friend’s?”
Elodie got up and took a couple of beers out of the fridge and offered me one. “Yup. Cool plan. Can we take as long as we like to drive cross-country?”
“Sure. No rush. Just be careful. Don’t go over the speed limit—be prudent. Speak to my assistant Jimmy—he can get you your plane tickets there, hotels, whatever you need. You can even stay with Pearl’s brother. In fact, I’ve spoken to Pearl about the idea, and she’s cool with it all.”
“Why is Pearl’s car in San Francisco? I thought you guys had gone to LA?”
“We did, but she
stayed on. Went to visit Anthony. Now she’s in Hawaii visiting her dad.”
Elodie ran her gaze over me, dissecting me, drilling her eyes into my thoughts. “You look guilty, Uncle Alexandre. What’s going on with you and Pearl?”
“Nothing.” I tried to suppress the heat-rush I felt, by turning on the sink faucet and putting the underside of my wrists under cold running water. A trick I learned in the Foreign Legion. As if on cue, my cell started buzzing. The words LAURA popped up on the screen. Elodie picked up my cell without pressing anything, but saw who the caller was.
She arched her brows. “Well aren’t you going to answer it?”
I shook my head. Fucking psycho Laura, leave me alone!
“She called me the other day, you know. She wanted to know Pearl’s number. What’s up?”
“Keep away from Laura, Elodie. Don’t answer her calls and do not, whatever you do, give her any information about anything or anybody at all.”
“But Laura’s nice! She was always really friendly to me.”
“Was is the operative word. That accident changed her.”
“So what’s that got to do with Pearl? Why does Laura want to get in touch with her? Why didn’t you go with Pearl to Hawaii?”
I switched off the gas burner. “Would you get us a couple of plates and some silverware?”
Elodie got up. “Why didn’t you go to Hawaii with her?” she asked again.
“She needed space. Needed to sort a few things out.”
“I doubt it. Pearl’s crazy about you—anyone can see that. It’s you, I bet, playing games. Playing ‘I need space’ games. So typical.”
“We both need a little break.”
“Yeah, right. That’s male code for “back off.”
“Not at all. I want to be with Pearl . . .she just needs some time on her own and—”
“Ha! You’re just making excuses so that you can behave how you like without any thought for Pearl.”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Elodie.”
She sneered at me. “I don’t know what you’re doing, juggling two women at once. Typical man behavior. As if male babies were born with a mean gene in them. You’re all the same—all of you. The only difference is, some hide it better than others but the bastard gene is buried into every man’s DNA.”
She had a point. “That, mademoiselle, is a very uncalled for and rude accusation!”
She put the plates on the table. “I know more about men than you think.” She blew air out of her lips—pouting while she spoke.
“Elodie, I thought you were meant to be going to art college this fall, anyway, not traveling about and wasting your time.” I served up our omelets and sat down.
“Next year.”
“Don’t procrastinate.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“And cool it with the cocky attitude, okay?”
She gave me a salute. “Okay, sir!”
Elodie was right. I had the bastard gene in my DNA. What was I playing at? All this, Let Pearl come to me, was bullshit. I loved Pearl. Damn it, I couldn’t be happy without her. I was going to go and find her, whether she was ready or not. I was so in love with Pearl Robinson, I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.
We belonged together, and I didn’t want to spend one more day without her. I’d already wasted enough time.
DAD
PEARL
SO HERE I WAS at my father’s, in his romantic house made of bamboo, away from the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, away from the aftermath of my messed-up life. “At least you’re still alive,” Anthony reminded me. “And not, as you feared,” he said, “some victim of Sophie’s.” Perhaps he had a point.
I thought about Sophie a lot. Mulled over everything. Maybe Alexandre was right . . . I was paranoid, being unfair. I’d watched too much Dexter and CSI on TV. Whatever, I’d made my bed and had to lie in it now. He didn’t want me back. I could hear it in his voice when we had spoken. Businesslike. Polite, but cold. Unemotional. How it killed me to hear him talk to me that way.
Now I spent the days looking at the ocean, watching the waves rise and fall, listening to the surf and sound of birds. I had penned several letters to Alexandre. Not emails, but real letters on paper. But they ended up in the trash, crumpled up—like my thoughts, confused, shocked, as if the last five months had been one long dream, as if this phantom Frenchman never existed at all, that he was just a figment of my imagination.
Speaking of dreams, I was possessed. Not by needle-dick and company. No. That seemed to be over. I was possessed, obsessed by Alexandre. Not only did he occupy my thoughts in the waking hours, but when I closed my eyes too. Constantly there. He was in my subconscious, my conscious, flowing through my veins, beating in my heart. He was everywhere. I saw his peridot-green eyes sparkling with happiness, looking down on me while I slept. But when I opened my lids, there was emptiness; my soul like a void of black, a deep, dark cavern of misery. Misery I had brought upon myself.
I had been trying to reach Laura all this time. I even asked Elodie if she could get her number for me, I was that desperate. She gave it to me. I left Laura a message but she still hadn’t called back. I needed answers. Was Alexandre just in denial? Denial about how crazy Sophie was, or was he speaking the truth? Whatever, I realized that I was no match for his beloved sister. As Anthony had pointed out, I was the water and she was the blood. Ironic that. Blood is thicker than water didn’t exist in French, yet Alexandre was taking every word of that to heart, polishing each letter of that phrase like a soldier polishing his boots. Until it gleamed and shone like a mirror. Blood is thicker than water.
“What’s up, Pearl?” I nearly jumped out of my skin, but it was only my dad coming up behind me. He laid his warm hands on my shoulders and gave me a little squeeze. “You’ve been very silent lately, sweetie, very introvert—that’s not like you at all.”
I turned around, holding one of his hands on my now bony shoulder—I could hardly eat lately. “I’m sorry Dad, sorry I’m being so dull and boring.”
I regarded his handsome, rugged face. His sand-blond hair fell limp about his high cheekbones, his crow’s feet etched in hard lines about his dark blue eyes that revealed a man who had lived life. Suffered and pushed himself to the limits. His face was a map. He had a reckless air about him, mixed with a soft vulnerability that made him hard to resist. I thought about Natalie and saw how she must have fallen head over heels in love with him, but ran because she needed to protect herself. Running . . . that’s what I was good at too. Dad could break a heart because you wanted more from him, and he wasn’t able to give more. He was a self-absorbed person, yet kind and caring. Self-absorbed, because it was hard to penetrate his shell. What is he thinking? she must have wondered, why can’t he open up?
“It’s time you learned how to surf,” he said in his deep voice.
God he was handsome. I supposed I wasn’t meant to notice things like that because he was my father, but I wasn’t blind. Natalie must have been crazy about him, however much she was in denial.
“What happened between you and Natalie?” I asked, ignoring the surf request. He had been pushing that one on me for as long as I could remember.
“I tried, sweetie, I tried.”
“Why did she come running back to New York so soon, then? What did you do?”
He let out a sigh. “The way I see it? She was scared. Scared by her strong feelings for me. Natalie is a woman who has always been in control of situations. She’s a tough businesswoman, a negotiator. She wanted to negotiate me, didn’t want to lose herself in me.”
I was doing the same to Alexandre. Negotiating. Negotiating about Sophie. It was interesting to hear a man’s point of you on how some women behaved.
“So you were hard on her?” I asked.
“Not at all. I felt that she was trying to manipulate me into being somebody I wasn’t.”
“She’s so beautiful,” I said.
“She’s that, alright.”
I frowned. “Poor thing. Hurricane Sandy has really knocked the wind out of her. I was going to go back to New York to help her in any way I could, but she wants just to be with her family.”
My dad answered sadly, “I’ve called her several times to try and comfort her, but I guess she’s just not willing to talk about it. She still won’t return my calls.”
I sat there pensively, his hands still cupping my shoulders. The view of Hanalei Bay was spectacular: a hilly carpet of emerald green stretching to the deep blue of the ocean ahead. Coconut palms swayed like ballet dancers in the gentle breeze, and a cockerel crowed for the fourth time in a row. An early morning mist was rising almost like smoke it was so thick, dissipating into the air as it ascended into the cobalt blue of ice-clear sky. It was just after dawn. As usual, I couldn’t sleep and my father had gotten up early so he could get in some surf time.
“Come with me, honey. Come and surf. Surfing will clear your mind, it’s the zen of life. Surf and all your troubles will melt away.”
“It’s your addiction, isn’t it?”
“It’s my sanity, Pearl.”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
And then he did something that he had never done before with me. His voice deepened into a commanding, strict tone. He suddenly sounded like an old-fashioned father from the Victorian age who might spank his children or put them to bed with no supper. “No, Pearl. I’ve had enough of you moping around like some lovesick, surly teenager. You are coming surfing and that’s the bottom line.” He clutched my hand and pulled me up out of my chair with a strong jerk.
I stood there stupefied.
He barked, “You are my daughter and I’m going to make you a surfer, once and for all. When you next see that French boyfriend of yours you can show him just how good you are. Give him something to be impressed about. You think he’d like to see you as you’ve been all week, hunched over in that chair staring at waves all day long? Or making work calls? No, honey, he was attracted to an active girl full of joie de vivre when he met you, a woman who went rock-climbing on that first date. Show him what you’re made of.”
Hooked Up: Book 2 Page 40