“Oh…” she said, sounding a little breathless. “You’re here.”
Where did she think I’d be? I was sure that Isaac had passed along the message that I’d be back, just not until late.
She gave me a small, tentative smile as her eyes darted toward the master suite almost as though she was looking for someone else.
She thought I might have brought a woman home with me?
Why the hell would her thinking that shock me? If I wanted to bring a woman to the apartment, I would. We wouldn’t be doing it on the kitchen counter, as enjoyable as that could be, but still--
And if Emma hooked up with someone--
Hell, no! She’d be too busy. I’d see to that.
“Taking the day off, Miss Whittaker?” I was being a douche but I didn’t care. I was too busy watching the flicker of surprise deep in her remarkable eyes, followed by a quick flash of steel.
Oh, yeah, there was a lot more to Blondie than big blues and a reckless streak. She had backbone.
That pleased me. It made her a hell of a lot more interesting than she would otherwise have been. It also made her fair game, at least up to a point.
“On the contrary, Mr. Phelps,” she said coolly. “I’ve actually been making good progress, which I’ll be happy to discuss with you. Over breakfast, perhaps?” She hefted the bag she was carrying. “The bagel place I remembered is still around the corner. I got extra.”
Without waiting for a response, she moved toward the kitchen. I followed. I told myself it was because I just happened to like bagels but the truth is I was enjoying the view. Did the woman have any idea of how she looked from the back? Poetry in motion didn’t get close to it.
“I’ll make the coffee,” I offered, feeling suddenly magnanimous.
There were a few things about the apartment that I already knew had to change and I’d fixed the first of them. Rather than shudder at the thought of coffee from a 1950s style percolator, I’d installed a state-of-the-art espresso/cappuccino machine.
As I got busy with it, Emma found a cutting board and bread knife. Her movements were graceful and economical. With a glance at me, she asked, “Plain or poppy?”
“Poppy.”
“Toasted?”
Incredibly, the refrigerator in the apartment, having been kept in excellent condition like everything else there, was still working after sixty years, leading me to wonder when exactly we had lost the ability to build machines like that. But I still wasn’t ready to trust the toaster.
“Not unless you want to plug in an appliance that hasn’t been used in decades.”
“Never mind. Sandwich or schmear?”
I grinned. If I hadn’t already known that Emma was a New York girl born and raised, I would have right then. She knew deli-speak for just how I liked my bagel.
“Schmear, please.”
As she spread on the thin coating of cream cheese, she said softly, “I wanted to thank you again for giving me this job. Looking around yesterday, I realized just how incredible this apartment really is. It’s not merely a time capsule of sorts. Margo Stark had wonderful taste, or at least her decorator did.”
Pleased that she echoed my own thoughts about the vibe of the apartment, I asked, “Have you figured out how you want to start?”
Emma nodded. “I thought I’d go room-by-room beginning with the major pieces of furniture and art, then itemizing categories such as books, clothing, and so on. I’ll set up the data on spreadsheets by type, valuation, and any other way you’d like to see it. But before I start, do you know if there are any files, receipts for example, that Margo or someone who worked for her may have kept? They could help.”
I was impressed. She’d been here less than a day and she’d already figured out a workable approach that should give me a decent sense of what the apartment contained fairly quickly.
Just not too quickly, I hoped.
“One of the staff rooms at the back is set up for use as a household office,” I said. “Take a look in there. You should also check the desk in the library. Margo may have used that for her own correspondence.”
Emma nodded. “I should have thought to check her desk myself.” She smiled self-consciously. “I just feel a little odd going through her things. That’s foolish, of course. She’s deceased and she just abandoned everything here anyway.”
“I don’t think it’s odd that you have an instinct to treat her property with respect. Trust me when I say that I’ve seen the opposite happen, especially when there are heirs involved who don’t care about anything other than what they have to gain. It’s not a pretty sight.”
As I spoke, it occurred to me that Emma couldn’t have had any opportunity to go through her family’s possessions. The feds would have confiscated everything except her clothes and personal items. Anything else would have been sold for the benefit of her father’s victims.
I wondered how much she missed her former life. Being back in the Arcadia couldn’t be easy for her. I didn’t know which apartment the Whittaker family had occupied, although I made a mental note to find out.
Thinking about that, I realized Emma was waiting for me to answer a question I’d missed. What was it? Oh, right, did I know who Margo’s heirs were.
“From what I understand,” I said, “everything goes to a couple of charities.”
“She had no children?”
The question surprised me. With a sense of stating the obvious, I said, “She lived as a recluse for most of her life.”
“I know…it’s just so hard to make that fit with the woman in the photographs upstairs. She was so vibrant, so engaged…”
I shrugged. “She was an actress. How she looked when she was in front of a camera isn’t necessarily how she really was.”
“I suppose not…”
I could tell that Emma wasn’t convinced but I let it go. We took breakfast out onto the terrace. Over coffee and the bagels, we talked. About the city, now and in the 1950s, and about the Arcadia itself.
She was a little hesitant to talk about the building at first. Not wanting to raise unpleasant memories, I didn’t press her. But she opened up at least a little and even went so far as to admit that she’d taken a ride in the dumb waiter once before.
I was still mentally shaking my head over that as we cleaned up and went our separate ways. Generally, I caught breakfast on the run. It surprised me how much I’d enjoyed sharing it with her instead. Just not as much as what I would have enjoyed doing with her both before and afterward.
Instead, I went to the gym. Chase Hollis was there. After I filled him in on my call to Yuri, we hit the handball court where we did our level best to drive each other into the ground.
The work out helped but not for long. Rather than go back to the apartment, I decided to head for the office. Half-way into a prospectus on a new property development, I found myself thinking about Emma again, remembering how she looked with the morning sun caressing her hair and a smile lifting the corners of her luscious mouth.
With a sigh, I resigned myself to the fact that it was going to be another long night.
Chapter Ten
Emma
A week after our impromptu breakfast, I’d made significant progress inventorying the items in the tower apartment and was preparing to begin researching their value. But I was no closer at all to making sense of my feelings for Lucas, as I’d caught myself thinking of him.
That might have been at least in part because I was reluctant to admit even to myself that I had feelings for him. He was my employer. He’d hired me to do a job. Full stop.
But he was also the man who I now had breakfast with every morning. Somehow, our schedules had fallen into sync. We were both early risers but that didn’t really explain how readily we’d gotten into the habit of starting the day in each other’s company.
As distracting as I found it to face Lucas at our preferred spot on the terrace overlooking Central Park, I looked forward to our encounters. Besides the chiseled feat
ures, perfect body, and brilliant mind, I was getting the sense of the man himself.
He liked pigeons or at least he tolerated them. Most New Yorkers I knew called them sky rats and would have been happy if they’d disappeared. While Lucas didn’t go so far as to put food out for them, he would toss the occasion piece of bagel or toast to one brave enough to land near us.
But what he really liked were the hawks. My third day in the apartment, he showed me the nest he had spotted on the roof of a building a block to the north. From then on, I kept an eye out and from time to time, I was rewarded with the sight of a powerful bird of prey soaring out over Central Park in search of its next meal.
I’d also come to appreciate how much he loved New York. He knew it well, not just the affluent parts but everywhere. And it turned out that he was something of an expert on its history. He made the city’s past come alive, speaking of people and events as though they had just happened.
At the same time, he confessed that the one thing he truly disliked about being a New Yorker was that he couldn’t see the stars.
He had a family--a mother, and a younger brother and sister whom he seemed to really care about, although he didn’t say much about them. He did, however, coax me to talk about my own family or what was left of it.
I still wasn’t sure how exactly he managed that. I hadn’t really talked to anyone since everything happened. The truth was that I’d barely even spoken with my mother and brother in the years since.
“My mom remarried,” I told Lucas when he persisted in asking about them. “She’s living in the south of France now, I think. I don’t hear from her very often.”
As in essentially never. Mom was a beautiful woman with a gift for making powerful men want her. She’d had no trouble moving on.
“And your brother?” he asked softly.
A flicker of pain shot through me. In some ways, losing Nathan had been tougher even than losing my mother. Growing up we had been as close as siblings born five years apart could be. He was my big brother and I’d thought that I could always depend on him. But he was also a free spirit with an incurable case of wanderlust, at least until he seemed to find whatever it was that he’d been looking for.
“He’s living in a Buddhist monastery outside of San Diego. The last time I spoke with him he seemed very…calm, very centered.”
And very distant. As though he was viewing me and my struggles from a loftier plane.
Lucas hadn’t commented directly, which was fortunate because I couldn’t have stood any hint that he felt sorry for me. Instead, he’d gone on to speak of other things. The cut-throat nature of the real estate business in New York. The reasons why the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet were flocking to the city. Whether the recent stratospheric prices indicated that we were in yet another financial bubble.
He didn’t seem very concerned about that possibility. I got the impression that Phelps Properties was well positioned to benefit from whatever the market did next.
What did worry him surprised me.
“The gap between the one percent and everyone else is bigger than ever and it’s getting even bigger,” Lucas said. “If that’s not enough, we’re facing technological changes that threaten to hollow out the middle class even more. They’re the bulwark of democracy. Without them, we can kiss freedom goodbye. Something has to give.”
“Have you considered going into politics?” I asked. With his looks and charisma, and the power he already had in the city that seemed like a reasonable choice.
But he just frowned and shook his head. “I value my privacy and in politics there’s no such thing. Besides, I can be just as effective, if not more so, behind the scenes.”
I didn’t want to think about his private life. It was enough that he hadn’t brought a woman back to the apartment. If he was involved with one or more, it wasn’t in his own bed.
Which left me all too free to imagine myself there.
The first time my mind went in that direction, I was standing in the master suite. He’d seemed amused that I’d sought his approval to go in there but I didn’t want to start inventorying its contents without his knowledge.
All the same, I was undeniably curious to see how strong his presence would be in the space he was occupying temporarily. If I’d had to guess, I would have said ‘very’.
But my first impression on stepping into the suite was surprise. Margo Stark had been a sexy, gorgeous, ultra feminine movie star. Her boudoir--and that’s exactly what it should have been--cried out for brocade wallpaper, chandeliers, a canopy bed, one of those old-fashioned dressing tables with a three-part mirror, maybe even a fainting couch.
Instead, I found myself looking at a room that seemed far better suited to a man. Certainly, the darkly paneled walls and carved mahogany furnishings including a large four-poster bed had a masculine vibe. I could see Lucas feeling right at home among them.
Inevitably, my gaze focused on that bed. It was neatly made up, the burgundy covers pulled smooth without so much as a wrinkle. Apparently, he didn’t need servants trailing after him.
Being instinctively tidy myself, I appreciated that in another person. Still, my wayward mind conjured a vision of the covers strewn on the floor, the pillows tossed aside and two bodies--
I really needed to get a grip! Lucas and I were in a good place. I was getting my job done and we were able to enjoy each other’s company without a lot of weirdness.
Of course, I was vividly aware of how my body reacted to the mere thought of him, not to mention the way he had of cropping up in my dreams. But that didn’t stop me from genuinely liking him and appreciating the time we had together.
The last thing I wanted to do was screw that up by giving him any hint of my wayward thoughts. If nothing else, I didn’t need the humiliation.
Wrenching my eyes from the bed, I managed to focus enough to make a quick inventory of the contents of the room. As I was finishing, I realized that I should check the closets.
There weren’t any but there were two large dressing rooms, one clearly intended for a man with fitted cabinets and drawers matching the style of the bedroom. It was empty except for the clothes that Lucas must have brought with him. The other…
Whoa! When the rumors claimed that Margo had walked out of the Arcadia with nothing but the clothes on her back, they weren’t kidding. She had left behind a wardrobe fit for a queen of Hollywood, and I’d just found it.
Stepping into the dressing room felt like venturing into an Aladdin’s cave filled with silks, satins, and tulles in jewel colors. At a glance, I saw dozens of pairs of shoes, evening gowns, day dresses and suits, and the lingerie… Oh, my god, the lingerie! It alone made my mouth water.
Just inventorying the dressing room would take at least several days by itself. On top of everything else, I’d have to get up to speed on vintage 1950s clothing before I could have any hope of putting a valuation on what I’d just found.
What a horrible job that would be! I was grinning as I backed out and carefully shut the doors behind me.
The rest of the day passed quickly. At noon, I went for a run in Central Park to clear my head. George was on duty and we chatted briefly. After a shower, I settled back to work in the library.
Margo hadn’t just collected books, she’d also read them. Everything from Shakespeare to Balzac to Hemingway. I even found scattered notes in the margins of several in the same delicate hand as the notes I discovered in her desk.
Looking at what she had thought was especially noteworthy, I began to piece together who Margo was and how she felt about various aspects of life.
She was a romantic. Regarding Ophelia she wrote--Poor girl! What a bastard Hamlet is! But she was also a realist. Balzac’s Cousin Bette, surely one of the most scheming, manipulative women ever put on paper, merited this remark--She’s in Hollywood now!
I laughed when I read that but I sympathized, too, remembering my brief experience with Heather. Apparently, versions of Cous
in Bette cropped up everywhere.
I worked into the evening, not looking forward to the hours when I would inevitably lie in bed, wondering where Lucas was or when he’d be home. I never heard him come in. He was just there again every morning.
That evening I decided that I needed a diversion. Women my age were heading out to bars with their friends, dancing the night away, meeting interesting or at least tolerable guys. I was spending way too much time thinking about a man I had no business thinking about at all.
That needed to change. Now that I had a better handle on the job, I’d be smart to carve out some time to relax. Join a gym, maybe. Even entertain the possibility, however remote, of meeting people who wouldn’t freak when they heard my name.
But for the moment, the best I could do was decide to explore the screening room next door to the library. It was the 1950s version of a home theatre and I loved it.
Oversized couches and chairs faced a large, rolled down movie screen. At the back was an old-style projector. Along the walls were shelves holding round metal canisters filled with movies from the era before streaming, before DVDs, before even video tape.
I hesitated to touch them but temptation overcame me when I found a copy of “The Lady is a Flirt”, the movie that had made Margo a star. A few minutes on-line and I had instructions for how to load the reel into the projector.
The movie was up and ready to go, and I was just about to turn off the lights in the screening room before settling in to watch it, when I heard the front door to the apartment open.
Surprised, I glanced at the time. It was barely 9:00 pm. Lucas never got home this early. Concerned that something might be wrong, I went to meet him.
Chapter Eleven
Lucas
I walked home from the office. Half-way there, it started to rain, not heavily but enough so that by the time I stepped into the apartment, my hair was plastered to my head and I needed to get into dry clothes.
Caress Part One (Arcadia) Page 6