by Клео Коул
As I moved off the sand, and onto the vast green carpet of lawn, I heard snickers from the men, confused laughter from the women. Someone made a loud joke and pointed to a nearby garden table of wrought iron. Raw oysters and sushi surrounded the centerpiece of a life-size representation of Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus—the iconic fifteenth-century painting of a naked woman emerging from an oyster shell on the shores of the Mediterranean. Here the grace and delicacy of that masterpiece of Renaissance style was rendered in ice.
No, I wasn’t as naked as Venus. Or as beautiful. But the carved-in-ice part—yeah, okay, that was me.
I shivered again and smoothed my clothes, trying to regain a shred of dignity by tugging at the clinging canvas skirt, folding my arms over my wet, skintight Polo. As I continued moving through the crowd on the lawn, a woman touched my arm. She was young and very beautiful, eyes wide on a too-perfect face (possibly sculpted like that chilly statue of Venus, but with a surgeon’s instruments instead of an ice pick). Her blond hair was swept back to reveal a pert nose, high cheekbones, bee-stung lips, and a flawless forehead the color of ivory.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Got bored. Went for a midnight swim.”
The woman blinked vacantly.
The young man at her side looked away, offering me his profile—handsome but boyish, with sideburns so long, they nearly went back in time, to early-seventies muttonchops. He appeared to be waiting for me to recognize him, but I actually didn’t have a clue.
“By the way, have you seen David Mintzer?”
The woman’s eyes grew wider. She shook her head. “I don’t know him, but there are lots of people here I don’t know.” Then she blinked as if in surprise when a thought sprang into her pretty, pampered head.
“Wait a minute! Oh, gawd. I’ve seen that Mintzer guy on TV. He works for Oprah, doesn’t he?”
“Ah…That’s okay, I’ll find him on my own.”
Stepping off the lawn and onto the cold stone patio, I continued moving among the surprised partygoers—socialites and show business personalities alike—who parted at my barefoot, sopping wet approach as if I were carrying a tray of bird flu appetizers.
I recognized New York City’s most public real estate tycoon—the one with the reality show and the trademark hair. I spied a popular young singer, a famous movie director who was now doing commercials for a brand of camera film, and that handsome movie actor, Keith Judd, who’d given Joy his cell phone number—the creep.
I even saw David Mintzer’s lawsuit-happy neighbor, Marjorie Bright. The heiress stood chatting with a group of well-dressed men and women. While I watched, she dropped a cigarette butt and crushed it with an elegant sandal, even as she fired up a fresh smoke with a gold filigreed lighter.
In fact, the only people I didn’t recognize were a group of graying, balding, pudgy men gathered around some lounge chairs, drinks and cigars in hand. Their conversation appeared quiet and sober compared to the festive people around them.
Earlier that summer, David mentioned such men to me at a similar gathering Cuppa J had catered. He told me these men only seemed anonymous and interchangeable. In truth they were the real movers and shakers of the business world.
“They don’t appear impressive, but believe me these low-key, unglamorous little men buy and sell the billion-dollar talent around them like any other commodity. Like pork bellies or oil futures. Scary, isn’t it?”
What was scary for me at the moment was that I had risked my life to follow a clue that could lead to David’s mortal enemy, and now I couldn’t even find David to tell him. Even worse, my bedraggled appearance was continuing to garner attention, which I tried to ignore.
I passed a table occupied by a local senator who appeared on the Sunday morning chattering-class news shows like clockwork. Unfortunately, I couldn’t help staring for a few seconds—and this politician noticed me when his eyes met mine. We both froze, and I immediately looked away, but it was too late, the burly man not far away from the senator’s side noticed me staring, as well.
By the time I approached a knot of people gathered around an outdoor bar, to ask again about David, the senator’s bodyguard came up behind me and grabbed my left elbow—and his grip was not gentle.
“Hey!” I cried. “Let me go. I’m a neighbor. My name is Clare Cosi—”
“Come with me, and don’t make any trouble.”
The bodyguard was a head taller than me and as wide as a Hamptons Hummer. His thick neck was stuffed into a too-tight collar, and I noticed a small radio receiver in one ear. The way the wire coiled out of his bullet-shaped head and down the collar of his finely tailored outfit, I was sure I’d just been accosted by an Armani-clad Frankenstein monster.
I tried to yank my arm free, only to have my other arm grabbed by a second man, another bulked-up guard in a dark suit, this one a redhead with a crewcut.
“You are not on the guest list,” said Crewcut. “That means you’re trespassing. Don’t make a scene. You can explain it all to the police.”
Frankie and Crewcut began to drag me away. Heads turned, conversations ceased as I resisted.
“Wait! Listen,” I pleaded. “I want you to call the police. I saw a real trespasser. And I’m worried about the safety of someone who was invited to this party. David Mintzer. He’s here somewhere. I’m a guest at his house, just ask him.”
“Mr. Mintzer has left the party,” Crewcut replied. “His manager, Mr. Papas, drove him home fifteen minutes ago.”
“He’s okay then?” I pressed. “David’s all right?”
Crewcut responded in a monotone. “Mr. Mintzer was just fine when he left the premises.”
“Good,” I said, extremely relieved. “That’s all I wanted to know. You can let me go and I’ll be on my way.”
Naively, I thought the crisis was over. In my mind it was…for David anyway. For me it was just getting started. When I yanked my arms to break free, Frankie refused to release my left one, and Crewcut actually tightened his hold on my right.
“Ow! You’re bruising me!”
Crewcut’s response was to tighten his grip even more. With his free hand, he flipped open a cell to call the police. He was about to bring the phone to his ear when another hand, a strong one, belonging to someone else, reached out and closed on his wrist.
“Let her go,” said the man attached to the hand. “She’s telling the truth. She is a guest of David’s.”
Crewcut looked down his nose at the interloper, a tall, handsome, well-built man in a gorgeous summer-weight Helmut Lang suit. The man I’d seen before—the suit I hadn’t.
Crewcut angrily shook his wrist free of the interloper’s grip. “And are you on the guest list?” he demanded.
With a smug grin, my defender nodded. “I’m on the list, along with Breanne Summour. You know who she is, certainly.”
“Yes, of course,” sputtered Crewcut, releasing my arm. “And you are?”
I faced my impeccably dressed defender with the chiseled features and Caesar haircut, saw the amusement in his dark brown eyes.
“I’m Matteo Allegro,” he said flatly, “this woman’s ex-husband.”
Thirteen
“Clare, you’re soaking wet,” said Matt after the Incredible Hulks left us. “And you have seaweed in your hair.”
I sighed, feeling around for the strand of soggy vegetation, “Hey, a girl’s got to look her best.” I pulled the slime off my head and flicked it away.
Matt’s dark eyebrow rose as he checked out my skintight Polo, his gaze snagging on the wet outline of my full breasts. “I never said you didn’t.”
I felt my cold cheeks flush warm as he smiled and opened his mouth again—probably to say something I’d make him regret—when Breanne Summour walked over.
Tall and thin as a runway model, she wore a flowing white silk pantsuit with glittering silver sandals, her brown hair twisted into a tight chignon to show off the faceted rocks in her ears. Her elong
ated neck was still as annoyingly swanlike as I remembered, her forehead still as wide as an HDTV screen, but her lips looked a whole lot more bee-stung than I recalled. Probably pumped up with collagen for the party, I concluded.
“Clare, isn’t it?” she asked, stepping between me and Matteo.
I nodded, resisting the urge to shield my eyes from the glare of her earrings.
Now it was her turn to look me up and down. Her reaction, however, was far from identical to Matt’s. Not even close. “My god,” she said, her revulsion undisguised. “I didn’t know the drowned rat look was in season.”
Well, Breanne, I thought, if rats are all the rage, you ought to know.
As the editor-in-chief of Trend magazine, Breanne knew all about what was in season and what was passé, partly because she was one of a powerful circle of media types who helped deem it so. At the moment, all things coffee were hot and trendy, so said her magazine. Was that simply because of the coffeehouse craze ignited by Starbucks and other newcomers to the java biz? Was it because of Lottie Harmon’s super-hot line of Java Jewelry? Was it because of her friend David’s brand new Hamptons restaurant, Cuppa J? Or…did it have something to do with my ex-husband, coffee buyer and co-manager of that New York City institution, the Village Blend?
Whether the woman had been into coffee first and Matt because of it (or vice versa), two things were true: Matt was overseeing the Village Blend’s expansion into “hot, hot, hot” coffee kiosks in upscale clothing boutiques and department stores throughout the world, and Breanne couldn’t get enough of him.
The two had been seeing each other, on and off for almost eight months now. Not that I was counting. I only knew because Esther Best, one of my part-time baristas back at the Blend, had an annoying habit of pointing out photos of Matt and Breanne. The typical shots, taken at black-tie charitable functions, gallery shows, or restaurant openings, appeared from time to time in gossip columns like New York Post’s Page Six.
Still, I could (almost) forgive poor Breanne for her nasty snipe. Anyone would have been embarrassed to see her date participating in the ugly scene that just took place. So, instead of taking the swipe I was dying to, I simply said—
“So nice to see you again, Breanne.”
Although my words were civil, I just couldn’t resist wringing out my shoulder length chestnut hair right in front of her. The water made a satisfying spat on the patio stones. A woman nearby gave me a dirty look and Breanne blanched whiter than her pantsuit.
Of course, Ms. Summour’s attention span—not unlike her magazine’s flashy, shallow articles—had always been as short as a gnat’s life, and she was already moving on. (Okay, okay, so I’d pushed it with the hair wringing. But people like Breanne Summour were almost too easy to horrify.)
Anyway, seeing Breanne here made me wish my ex-husband had minded his own business. Not that I wasn’t grateful to him for defending me. But spending the night in the Hampton Village jail with drunken college kids would have been a lot less annoying, in the scheme of things, than enduring Breanne’s smugness under these circumstances.
Ms. Summour waved a manicured, beringed hand at a group of guests she apparently hadn’t noticed before. Then, without so much as a “toodles,” she and her diamonds were gone, sweeping across the stone patio to bestow a flurry of air kisses.
After she’d zoomed out of our airspace, Matt turned to me. The sexual amusement was completely gone from his eyes now. Something a lot less playful, a lot less Matt, had replaced it.
“Clare, what’s going on?” he quietly demanded. “Why are you here, dripping wet?”
Clearly, he was taking his emotional cues from Breanne now—at least when it came to caring what people thought of his ex-wife at a public party.
“I could ask you the same question,” I replied, gesturing to Breanne’s back. “Except for the dripping wet part.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just this morning you told me you were totally jet lagged and heading back to the Village for a good night’s sleep.”
“I said a few hours sleep.”
“Whatever! You never mentioned coming out to the Hamptons…with her.”
“Bree knew I was back from the West Coast. She invited me to hop a chartered plane into East Hampton airport and join her for the weekend. I accepted.”
“I can see that’s not all you accepted, from Bree.”
“Excuse me?”
I gestured to Matt’s designer eveningwear, the kind of clothing that cost more than I grossed in a week—more than Matteo grossed in a week, too, because I saw the books.
When we’d been married, Matt’s cocaine addiction had not only eaten through our savings, it had also evaporated his trust fund and left us in terrible debt. He was off the drug now. And he’d become a hard worker. But the Village Blend expansion was a financial risk, and we had a daughter to put through school. Neither one of us had money to burn. Not by a long shot. That was why Matt had refused to give up his rights to use the duplex above the Village Blend during his periodic layovers in New York.
His mother, Madame, still owned the Greenwich Village townhouse that contained both the century-old Village Blend coffeehouse at street level and the duplex apartment above it. When she’d convinced both of us to sign contracts to co-manage and one day co-own the Blend business and its townhouse, she’d neglected to let us know we were not partnering with her but with each other.
Now Matt and I were stuck. Unless one of us wanted out of the very lucrative deal, both of us had to learn to get along. So far, we’d been doing okay, attempting to remain civil business partners. And since staying a week or more in a Manhattan hotel every month, between his buying trips or other international business, was too much of an expense for Matt, we’d ended up occasional housemates again after a decade of separation.
In any event, that’s one of the reasons I knew for a fact that my ex-husband had a finite set of fine clothes, every piece of which I’d seen already.
“So I have a new suit?” he said defensively. “It was a gift.”
“From Bree?”
Matt’s sour expression answered my question. He looked away. “She has relationships with top designers, Clare,” he said quietly. “Because of her magazine. It’s no big deal, you know?”
“What I know is that it means something when a woman starts dressing a man.”
Matt stared at me, speechless for a moment, and I wanted to take the words back as soon as I’d blurted them. I had told myself that Breanne was just another thrilling new blend, Matt’s flavor of the month—even though she was far from his typical young, bubble-headed bimbo fare (and, yes, I did wonder if maybe that was what bothered me about Breanne more than anything). But it was patently none of my business what her relationship was with my ex-husband, and Matt had every right to tell me to go to hell. But he didn’t. He simply looked uncomfortable that I’d made the observation.
“Clare, I don’t…” he said haltingly. “Bree and I…it’s just a networking thing.” He shrugged, looked away. “She needs an escort that knows which fork to use, someone to open doors for her, hold her coat, give her, you know…”
“Don’t strain yourself searching for a euphemism. I know what it is you give her.”
“It’s not like that. We’re just casual friends.”
I was sure he was serving me baloney, but I bit my tongue, feeling stupid for having let our conversation get even this far. I had allowed myself to fall back into some cheated-on wife pattern when I was no longer his wife. It was embarrassing. And Matt was being more than patient with me.
I was about to apologize when a breeze blew up off the ocean, rustling the Japanese paper lanterns and making my teeth chatter. I hugged myself, shivering, and Matt shook his head. He slipped off the Helmut Lang evening jacket and draped it over my shoulders.
“Listen, Clare, changing the subject won’t get you out of hot water…although it’s obvious the water you just stepped out of was ice cold
.” His eyebrow rose again, a little of the old playful Matt back in his expression. Then he actually smiled. “Anyway, I still want an explanation from you. But first I’m going to borrow Breanne’s car and drive you home.”
“Matt, that’s okay. You don’t have to—”
“I want to talk to David anyway, tell him how the installations on the West Coast are going. I tried to get to him tonight, but there were just too many people surrounding him. I just need to tell Bree where I’m going. Back in a minute.”
I couldn’t argue, mainly because I was too chilly.
I watched Matteo cross the patio, put a light touch on Breanne’s shoulder. She turned from her small circle of friends, smiling—a little forced I thought. They spoke for a moment. The smile disappeared. Her eyebrows rose into that HDTV forehead and she glanced in my direction.
I looked away, watching the rest of the party to pass the time. Matt was at my shoulder again before I knew it. He grabbed my elbow, not much gentler than the security man had a few minutes ago. I couldn’t stop myself from observing—
“It’s amazing what an uplifting effect Breanne has on you.”
“Come on, let’s go.”
“Was Bree cranky?”
“I’m cranky,” he growled, pressing me through the crowd. “Don’t go there.”
“Trouble in paradise?”
We entered the mansion’s crowded first floor, and I gawked at the decor. The Sandcastle was the most extravagant home I’d seen yet. Gothic in style, the place had been fashioned to resemble a medieval castle, complete with a single stone tower. Constructed of granite, glass, cast iron, and heavy wood, the mansion’s rooms (what I saw of them anyway) were huge.
Matteo led me through a split-level living room, the lower portion transformed into a dance floor complete with disco lights. Then we headed down a long hallway, lined with medieval-style tapestries, stunning reproductions of museum pieces. An anteroom held an actual suit of armor. Then there was another hall, this one lined with portraits of medieval knights, and finally we came to the mansion’s grand entranceway.