He had introduced me as his personal assistant, which raised a few eyebrows, mostly because no one was quite certain what that was. He’d then gone on to extol the remarkable characteristics of Moonsong without ever quite describing them, and explaining that he would be personally overseeing the security on the project and that everything concerning the campaign must first be cleared through him, although he never quite got around to explaining what “everything” was. Oh, yes, those ferns at the local bar would be rattling tonight.
He dismissed me to my luxurious new office—which did have furniture, by the way—with absolutely no instructions whatsoever. So what am I, a mind reader? I played with the computer, helped myself to tropical-flavored mineral water and macadamia nuts from Stillman’s private collection, and watched an American talk show on television. At five o’clock, which coincidentally was the time the talk show was over, I went home.
It’s not my fault the man doesn’t know how to handle his employees.
His eyes narrowed again, briefly, and I could see him trying to mentally rearrange his approach to dealing with me. I was glad to know I could keep him off-balance.
He said, quite calmly, “All right. Now I know why you destroyed the graphic. It was a clever joke. But not nearly as clever as the design itself. I hope you kept a copy, because I want you to present it to the account execs at the staff meeting tomorrow morning.”
Fortunately, there was a chair at my back. I sank into it. My self-congratulation at keeping him off-balance disappeared in a puff of smoke. I couldn’t even answer. I just stared at him like a tongue-tied child.
He glanced around the apartment curiously, and I could detect a faint aura of self-satisfaction in his stance now. “Is there anything to drink?” he inquired. “No, don’t get up. I’m perfectly capable of serving myself.”
I ignored the hint of sarcasm and got up, anyway. The activity helped to clear my head. “I, um, think I have some wine. And some cherry brandy someone gave me for Christmas.”
He wrinkled his nose at that. “Wine.”
He followed me into the kitchen. It was a big, old-fashioned room with a weathered brickwork island and copper pots hanging from a rack. There was a bay window filled with African violets and geraniums. I have good luck with flowers; I don’t know why. While I rummaged around in a cabinet for the bottle of burgundy someone had brought to dinner once and never opened, Noel looked around appreciatively.
“This is a nice place,” he said. “How did you find it?”
My apartment was actually one-third of a renovated warehouse—Phillipe had the second-floor space and the ground floor belonged to a female artist with two Dobermans. It wasn’t just nice; it was spectacular. The walls were ancient brick, the arches that led from room to room were part of the original space; the floors were gleaming hardwood. Every room had a fireplace, although the one in the kitchen didn’t work. The huge, arched windows in the living room looked out over the water, and I rarely bothered to draw the curtains. Perhaps its most enchanting feature, however, was the garden bathing room, featuring a cedar whirlpool, a separate sauna and a glass roof. One could sink into a haven of warm, frothing bubbles and count the stars at night.
The apartment was eclectically furnished with castoffs from the attics of aunts and cousins, siblings and grandparents. To my family, I have always been “poor Victoria” as in, “Darling, when the Limoges arrives, let’s give the old china to poor Victoria,” and “Poor Victoria, sleeping all alone on that cheap cot. She should have Grand-maman’s bedroom suite.” My relatives are well-to-do and have excellent taste, so “poor Victoria” was not a designation to which I objected in the least.
There was a beautifully carved antique armoire that hid a cheap department-store television set. A reproduction Duncan Phyfe table had been distressed and painted to look like a badly treated original. The sofa was big and old in a faded tapestry print with feather-stuffed cushions that practically embraced the body when one sank onto it, and there were two big, overstuffed chairs drawn up before the fireplace, one in plum-colored velvet and one in worn and often-brushed emerald green. Both the chairs and the sofa were liberally draped with colorful shawls, which disguised Socrates’s persistent attempts to sharpen his claws on other people’s belongings. There were Tiffany lamps, some real, some not, and Oriental carpets on the hardwood floors, all of them faded and none of them real. The walls were hung with my own artwork—pen-and-ink sketches of human nudes, an oil seascape, a colorful abstract, an impressionistic landscape depicting the lake at the foot of Castle St. Clare—all representative of my various artistic “periods.” There was one painting in the bedroom that I hoped Noel Duprey never saw. Or perhaps, like most of us, he wouldn’t recognize himself on canvas.
I was glad to know Noel did not have a completely atrophied sense of the aesthetic, and I was glad he appreciated my taste. But I knew what he was really asking was not how I had found this apartment, but how I could afford it. I made a good salary, but waterfront property like this was not cheap.
I finally answered him. “It’s a sublet. One of the owners is an actor, and he’s touring with Les Misérables. An advantage of making friends with humans—they have all the good apartments.” I found the wine and blew the dust off the label, holding it up to him. “Is this all right?”
He took the bottle from me as I got to my feet. “What happens when the tour is over?”
“Nothing, probably. The other owner is the architect who redesigned this building, and she has apartments all over North America.” I rummaged in a drawer for a corkscrew. “They’ll probably move into one of her other buildings.”
He murmured, “You do know interesting people.”
I found the corkscrew and was perfectly willing to open the bottle myself, but Noel took it from me. I went to the china cabinet for glasses, and after only a moment’s hesitation decided on the real crystal my grandmother had given me for my twenty-first birthday. After all, if one doesn’t break out the good stuff when the heir designe of the entire empire drops in, what is it for?
After a surreptitious check to make sure they were clean, I returned to him with the glasses. He took them both in one hand and expertly poured a measure of wine into each. He handed me mine.
“Shall we drink to our new association?”
Finally I gathered my flyaway wits about me and said, “Wait a minute. Before we drink to anything, let me make sure I understand you. Did you mean it? You want me to present my design to the group tomorrow?”
He met my gaze levelly. “It depends. Do you have a copy?”
And then I understood. The son of a cur thought I had stolen the graphic—from Stillman, probably. Stillman, who had never had an original thought in his life. Who couldn’t produce a graphic like that in three years, much less in three hours. Noel Duprey thought I had stolen it from Stillman’s hard drive, passed it off under my signature and destroyed it so that its true origins couldn’t be traced. I wanted to throw my glass of wine at him.
Fortunately, I have excellent control of my temper. In fact, the angrier I get, the colder and more polite I become. It has always been my method of dealing with strong emotion—to retreat rather than advance. You would have to have had my childhood to understand why.
So I very calmly set aside my wineglass, went over to the rolltop desk that sat against the brick wall beside the fireplace and opened it. The desk had belonged to my grandfather. I’m sure Noel was wondering how I could afford that, too.
I moved aside a recipe folder, a file box of unpaid bills and the accordion file where I keep my tax receipts, and pulled out a diskette holder. I’m no fool. I back up everything onto floppy.
I held up the diskette. “The original,” I told him. I took out another diskette and another. “Also the original project folder on Ambition for Men, the logo for Celestial and the entire campaign plan for Forgotten—television and print ads, graphics, slogan and even the bottle design, for God’s sake. I must say, they must ha
ve really liked that one. They didn’t change a thing.”
Noel held my gaze. His face revealed absolutely nothing. Then he said evenly, “I know.”
There was no chair behind me that time. Somehow I managed to stay on my feet.
He must have taken my dumbfounded silence for lack of comprehension, because he repeated, “I knew no one in that office was capable of coming up with a design like that in such a short time. Hell, most of them are still trying to figure out what Moonsong is. So I did some checking. I’ll say this for your colleagues, they aren’t shy about admitting how easy you are to steal from. Most of them were only too anxious to brag about how they’d taken your ideas and ‘improved’ them.”
The flesh around the corners of his eyes tightened, and he took a sip of his wine. Actually, he tossed it back like hard liquor, without tasting it. I had the feeling this was not something a man of Noel’s refinement did lightly. He was angry—not at me, but for me.
I didn’t know what to think.
His expression was hard when he turned his gaze on me again. “Why did you keep doing it?” he demanded. “Why did you let them steal your work like that, not once but over and over? Why didn’t you report it?”
I was surprised at his naiveté. “To whom? My superiors were the ones doing the stealing.” Then I lifted one shoulder in an uncomfortable shrug. I was aware that, when I put my reasons into words, I sounded like a fool. “Besides, they were good ideas. I wanted them to be used.”
He looked at me for such a long time that I wanted to squirm. He has a piercing gaze, have I mentioned that? It’s the kind of gaze you can feel even when your back is turned, going through you like a knife. No one could meet it for long.
Then he said, “What else haven’t you told me? Rest assured, I can find out your secrets, as I trust I’ve already proven twice this day. But I would rather not be bothered. I have enough on my mind, as it is.”
Oh, yes, I had no doubt he could find out anything he wanted. He knew about Jason. He knew about my purloined campaigns. What else was there?
Still, I might have made up something, so intimidated was I by him, if it hadn’t been for that last comment. I prickled. I didn’t like to think of anything about me, particularly my “secrets,” as being a bother.
So I said, very sweetly, “I believe everyone should have some surprises in life. So why don’t I just let you find out for yourself?”
I returned the diskettes to their holder, closed the desk, then brushed past him to pick up my wineglass.
He followed me back into the living room. “I didn’t come here to spar with you, Victoria,” he said in that clipped, authoritarian tone that I had begun to notice became more pronounced when he was not quite as sure of his position as he would like to be.
“What did you come for?” I demanded.
I lived a quiet, predictable kind of life and I liked it that way. In one day I had had more excitement than I generally endured in a year and I simply wasn’t ready for any more surprises. I needed a chance to absorb what I had already learned.
But Noel was no longer looking at me. He had brought himself up short and was staring with a look of repressed disgust and disbelief on his face, at something on the floor. “What is that?” he inquired.
Socrates drew himself up to his full cat height, arched his back and hissed. He could hardly be blamed. He had never smelled a male werewolf before.
I regarded Noel with sublime patience. “That,” I informed him, “is a cat.”
Noel looked from Socrates to me, making no attempt to disguise his opinion of either of us. “You let a cat live here?”
I replied. “No. He lets me live here.”
“That,” Noel informed me, “is disgusting.”
Many werewolves don’t like cats. I’ve never understood why.
I fixed a gaze on my faithful friend and said mildly, “Socrates, kill.”
Socrates, who often exercises better judgment than I do, merely flipped his tail and walked away.
I shrugged and sat down on the sofa, tucking one leg beneath me. “You were saying?” I invited of Noel.
He glanced again at the retreating Socrates, stepped carefully around the spot where the cat had been, and came into the living room. He moves with the most exquisite grace. There is something sensual in watching him.
He took a seat in the plum-colored velvet chair opposite me. Its loose, plump cushions molded themselves around his long body, its rich antique color brought out the lights in his hair. I have the eye of an artist; I notice things like that.
I also have the instincts of a woman. And no female could fail to notice Noel Duprey, wherever he was, whatever he did.
He took a sip of his wine, and he said, “In answer to your question, I came because we have work to do.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “It’s eight o’clock at night. Did I ask if this job came with a raise?”
He regarded me steadily through those unrelenting green eyes. He said, “I have been traveling since seven o’clock this morning. Before that, I had approximately four hours’ sleep and before that, I was awakened at three o’clock in the morning to fly to Alaska. So please don’t push me, Ms. St. Clare. I’m having a very bad day that has already lasted thirty-six hours too long.”
I felt appropriately chastised. I dropped my eyes to my glass, cleared my throat a little, then glanced back up at him. “What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“It occurred to me that I just told a half-dozen experts in the field that I would be in charge of the Moonsong campaign,” he answered simply, “and I don’t have the first idea how to begin. I was hoping you did.”
The grin that tugged at my lips was mostly from relief. He might be the bravest and the smartest, an excellent R & D man, probably a pretty good CEO, but he couldn’t be expected to know anything at all about advertising. This, then, would be my job. I had been afraid he was going to ask me to do something hard.
“Sure,” I said, and reached for the sketch pad I kept on the lamp table beside the sofa. “The first thing you do is assemble your team.” I always think better with a pencil in hand, and I began to put it all down for him on the sketch pad. “If I were you, I’d put Leo Fabres in charge. He’s not very creative but he’s awfully clever with details, and he knows when to leave good people alone. Then under him you’ll have a team of artists and a couple of copywriters, and Serena Renard is an outstanding video person.”
He came over to sit beside me on the sofa, to better see the organizational chart I was sketching out for him. His scent was so intoxicating that for a moment I faltered. It spoke of power, strength, sexuality, and it soaked into my pores like sweet oil.
“Go ahead,” he said, looking at the chart and not at me.
I quickly focused my attention again and for the next half hour I told him about the advertising business and the structure of our division. He listened attentively, and I felt very important. I also felt strange and quivery and at times hardly able to concentrate for the simple excitement of being near him.
It’s a hormonal thing. You’d have to be one of us to understand…or perhaps not. Perhaps you’d just have to be a woman who’s had a crush on a man she can never have for most of her life and who, when she finally gets close to him, doesn’t know what to do…or even to feel.
I heard the door close downstairs and Noel noticed at the same time. “Something smells good,” he said.
“Dinner must be ready.” I had been so absorbed in the essence of Noel that I had hardly noticed the other wonderful fragrances that permeated the building.
He smiled. “Ah, yes. Phillipe, the cook.”
Phillipe was coming up the stairs. I excused myself and went to the door.
I opened it just as he arrived and his face was wreathed with delight. “You do amaze me, precious! How is it you always know when I’m about to ring your bell?”
“I can hear you coming,” I said.
He had a plate in his hand covered with a c
loth napkin—the source of the delicious smells—and he was doing his best to peer over my shoulder into the interior of the room. Phillipe is not a tall man, and this was not easy.
He said, indicating the plate, “I know you said not to bother, but the roulade turned out so divinely I simply had to share, and I put a petit-smidge of soufflé on the platter, too…”
As he spoke, he elbowed his way through the door and toward the kitchen. Now he brought himself up short and affected surprise as he looked at Noel. “Oh, mais pardonnez-moi! I did not know you had company.”
Noel got smoothly to his feet and nodded a bow. “Good evening.”
I could have kicked Phillipe in the shins. Instead, I put on my best company manners and said, “Phillipe Renoir, Noel Duprey. Noel is my new boss,” I added totally unnecessarily.
Phillipe thrust the plate at me and went forward with his hand extended, appraising Noel from top to toe. “With pleasure I make your acquaintance, monsieur. I’ve heard so much about you.”
Noel shot me an amused glance, and I smiled weakly. If Phillipe had been close enough, I would have kicked him.
The two men shook hands. Phillipe looked Noel over once more, then turned to me, approval in his eyes. “Well, I must flee. I’m expecting a guest.”
“Thank you,” I said, “for dinner.”
“There’s enough for two,” he told me with a wink. And as he passed close, he murmured, “Precious, he is gorgeous. If you don’t snap him up, I will.”
“Trust me,” I returned dryly under my breath, “he’s not your type.”
I saw him to the door and locked it when he was gone. Then I turned, holding the plate awkwardly in my hands.
Noel said, “I shouldn’t interrupt your dinner.”
And I said at the same time, “Will you have some?”
I should explain that in our culture, food and the sharing of such has a special significance. Two or three generations ago, simple good manners would have required that I, the lowliest member of the pack, silently present Noel, the elite ruler of us all, with the entire platter and then leave the room while he consumed it. The presentation would of course have been even more acceptable had I killed the lamb myself.
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