The look vanished immediately. But it was more than he had managed to elicit from her for the entire weekend. He had been staring at her the whole time, trying to get precisely this: something, anything that would have given him the sign he needed, and she had been avoiding him so completely, refusing to meet his eyes, that he had known it was an entirely deliberate strategy. Only now that she was safely married to his father had she permitted herself this swift glance, a sort of release.
Applause broke out, pattering up to the extraordinary frescoed ceiling of the ballroom, as bride and groom processed back down the aisle. Bart stood and watched them go, his hands thrust into the pockets of his grey-and-white-striped trousers. Liilia and Sirje flitted across the carpeted dais to him and Conway, smiling angelically: twin beauties, available where Adrianna was not: younger, more charming, much more willing to please.
But they were not their sister. Bart had spent some time with them that weekend, enough to know that although they were intelligent and confident, they lacked Adrianna’s iron will, her sharp wit, her dominating personality. Even as he extended his arm to Sirje, whom he was supposed to escort into the drinks reception that would precede the celebration dinner, his thoughts were entirely on her older sister. His new stepmother.
Conway was already folding Liilia’s fingers round his black-jacketed arm, winking at her as they started down the red carpet; Jeffrey and Adrianna had reached the end of it, the guests standing up now, still applauding. Bart looked at his older brother, whose blond head was ducked over Liilia’s, saying something that was making her laugh. Sirje fell in beside Bart, her beautiful face upturned to him, probably waiting for him to say what a lovely ceremony it had been, how happy he was for her sister and his father. Adrianna’s sisters were much more typically feminine than she was, more pliant, waiting for the man to speak first, ready to be amused by even the weakest joke he might make.
Well, Bart thought, from the look of Conway, that suited him down to the ground. No more Samantha to organize his life for him and be the ideal wife; he seemed to be much keener on an ideal concubine instead. A year ago, if Bart had been asked what kind of woman he would settle down with – if he ever did – he would unquestionably have answered by describing a Liilia or a Sirje type. Now, however, he had developed a taste for stronger meat.
The Mayor was stepping down from the carved lectern, extending his arm to Adrianna’s mother with the anticipatory smile of a sixty-five-year-old Italian man who has been assigned the company of a beautiful woman twenty years younger than him as a dinner companion. Mrs Rootare moved towards him, the blue topazes dancing enticingly in her ears, expensive chypre perfume emanating from her warm skin, her thick hair, tinted lighter than her daughter’s to disguise the grey, pulled back from her face in a very flattering style.
But even as she placed her hand on the Mayor’s arm, she was surveying Bart, her new grandson-in-law, with eyes narrowed in suspicion.
Chapter Thirty-One
Adrianna needed to open both the double doors to her suite to be able to manoeuvre through it in the wide hoop skirt. She was remembering scenes from films like Gone with the Wind, wondering how wide those doorways had been; this was something you never considered until you found yourself strapped into a hoop. Rhett Butler hadn’t carried Scarlett O’Hara upstairs in this kind of dress, of course. It had been a velvet dressing gown, as she remembered. Much easier. If Scarlett had been wearing a hoop she would have been completely safe from her husband’s advances; he’d have swiftly realized it was far too much work to get it off.
Why are you even thinking like this? Adrianna asked herself wryly. No one will be sweeping you off your feet and carrying you up a staircase for years to come, whatever you wear!
It was time for her to take off the dress, and frankly, she was more than ready to do so. After the initial excitement of seeing herself as she had always imagined she would look on her wedding day – a princess from a fairy tale, her dress sewn with real jewels – the boning of the corset was cutting into her painfully, and she was longing to be able to walk normally without having to ensure that the four-foot-wide hoop didn’t bump into walls, doors and tables.
She hadn’t even been able to sit down; she had found out the hard way that women wearing hoop skirts back in the day had only been able to perch on specially made padded stools. And she was very thirsty, as she hadn’t drunk anything all morning so that she wouldn’t need to go to the toilet once she was strapped into her dress. That too would have been impossible. They would have needed to find her a chamberpot.
Adrianna and Jeffrey had already posed for their pictures downstairs. Now, she would ring the employee of the designer who had made her wedding dress, summoning him to help her out of it and into the equally beautiful one made for the dinner and dancing to follow. This was a cleverly scaled-down copy of the original. It was made of the same material, white silk heavily sewn with pearls, but it was uncorseted, and though the skirt was full and billowing it was not a gigantic, Disney-princess construction which needed a framework to give it shape.
First, though, after being unzipped and unhooked from the wedding dress, after the hoop had been unfastened so that she could step out of it, Adrianna would slip into a dressing gown and have any necessary touch-ups performed to her hair and make-up. She had plenty of time; the drinks reception, with hot and cold flowing canapés, was timed to last at least an hour. It would run until the bride descended the central staircase, making an entrance in her second dress, drawing oohs and aahs of appreciation and signalling that the group would move back into the ballroom, which was currently being set up for the formal dinner.
The dresser, together with the hairdresser and make-up artist, would normally have been waiting in her suite for her, ready to spring into action like a race car crew at a pit stop, changing tyres and doing repairs at lightning-fast speed. However, Adrianna had told them all to wait in their rooms until she called them. She had sensed that directly after the wedding ceremony she would need some solitude to process her emotions.
And as so often, her instincts had been absolutely correct. She was exhausted from keeping up a perfect facade while surrounded by the horde of hugely important guests, and she was also in a considerable amount of shock. She could still not quite believe that she had pulled it off, succeeded in marrying Jeffrey Sachs. During the entire arduous process of meeting, courtship and engagement, she had never allowed herself a single moment of uncertainty that she would achieve her goal. She had sensed that if doubt ever crept in, she would be unable to maintain the self-possession and sangfroid required to enthral Jeffrey to the point that he was prepared to turn his life upside down for her. It had been essential to act as if he needed her more than she did him: somehow, she had managed to convince him that was the truth.
From the moment Jeffrey walked into Farouche, saw her standing behind the bar and goggled in admiration, it had been a long and nail-biting process. As she told him that no, she wouldn’t serve him the Shiraz he wanted, but would give him a whisky sour instead, the words had miraculously flowed out of her as if she were a femme fatale in one of the 1940s film noirs that she loved: Lauren Bacall or Rita Hayworth, as cool as ice on the surface but with passion for the right man simmering underneath. Her manner had been perfectly judged, creating a bubble around her which Jeffrey had been desperate to pierce.
It hadn’t all been a role. This was her personality, her style, her way of engaging with people; she was highly sexual, but life experience had made her wary, guarded, and she knew that a certain type of man saw her as an irresistible challenge. She had played a game with Jeffrey Sachs, a dance where she took two steps forward and one and a half back, never fully available, always withholding something that he craved, until, dizzy with desire, he had announced that he was leaving Jade, begged her to marry him, and presented her with an engagement ring so enormous and heavily faceted that it looked more like a weapon than a piece of jewellery.
Having brought J
effrey to this point, she had harried him to speed up his negotiations with Jade to ensure as swift a divorce and remarriage as possible. Her efforts to reunite him with his children, to bring the fractured family together, had been entirely genuine; she had even suggested that Christie be invited to the wedding, and though Christie had declined the invitation, she had done so in a very cordial way, adding a note to say that she hoped to meet Adrianna eventually, and thanking her for inviting Christie’s children and grandchildren to Vanbrugh Manor.
Adrianna had had more than one motive for that invitation. She very much disliked the idea of family estrangement, which stemmed from her own father having run off when she was young, leaving her mother to fend for herself with three young daughters. But also, after Jeffrey’s ridiculous challenge, setting his children to compete for the job of CEO of Sachs, she had realized it was crucial that she get to know them as well as she could. Adrianna had very strong feelings about the future of the Sachs Organization.
Well, very soon it would be decided. In a few hours, her stupid old King-Lear-acting husband would stand up, clink his wine glass, look around the room filled with guests stuffed with superb food, sipping their coffees, loosening their belts, and make his announcement. Ah well, he would be coming up to the suite to collect her when she was ready to make her second appearance of the day, and then she would have some firm words with him about how to resolve the entire messy situation . . .
There was a bottle of champagne waiting for her in an ice bucket on the monumental porphyry marble table in the window embrasure with the superb view over the Grand Canal. Canapés too, arranged on exquisite fine china plates with gold borders, decorated with the emblem of the ducal family that still owned the palazzo: tiny bites of cherry tomatoes, mozzarella and basil, the classic Venetian cicchetti; arancini balls of fried rice; polenta crostini topped with baccalà mantecato – whipped salt cod pureed with cream – black olives with parsley and tiny pieces of red pepper. Adrianna walked over to the table to pour herself a glass of champagne. Picking up the bottle, she promptly put it down again and stuffed a polenta crostino into her mouth, following it in quick succession with two more.
Her eyes closed in sheer bliss. She never ate anything that had been fried or cooked in cream. For other dieters, a very rare treat might have been ice cream, or strawberries dipped in chocolate, or cheesecake. But for Adrianna it was something savoury, like the crostini. Or the arancini, of which she proceeded to have two. She could almost feel herself bloating; even more shockingly than this mini binge, however, was the fact that she didn’t give a damn.
This wouldn’t last. She was highly vain about her appearance, and knew perfectly well that she could not afford to be one of those wives who snagged the rich man and then let herself go. But despite her clear awareness of the bargain she had entered into with Jeffrey, Adrianna could not summon up even a tiny flicker of guilt that she had just eaten five mouthfuls of very fattening carbs and was now pouring herself a brimming flute of champagne. If she couldn’t pig out on her wedding day, when could she?
‘Adrianna!’ a voice hissed outside the door of the suite.
It wasn’t Jeffrey, who had a key card. Nor the dresser, make-up artist or hairdresser, none of whom would dream of imposing themselves on her, let alone hissing her first name so intimately. A hammer pounded at the base of her throat under the weighty pearl and diamond choker, which suddenly felt as if it were strangling her. She reached up, unfastened it, dropped it to the table, where it landed with a heavy clatter. And then, moving as fast as she could in the hoop, which meant a fast series of short, almost dancing steps, she hurried across the suite and opened the door to find Bart standing there.
‘What are you doing?’ she blurted out, and then hated herself for saying something so obvious. She was never obvious.
‘Let me in, please!’ Bart pleaded.
Her hoop skirt entirely filled the doorway, its circle belling into the corridor. There was no way he could possibly gain access to the suite if she didn’t let him in, and doing that would be a terrible idea for all sorts of reasons.
And yet she stepped back without a word. She told herself that it would be better than to keep Bart standing in the corridor beating on the door like a madman, and she was already concocting an excuse for Jeffrey if he came in early and found Bart here. Bart was desperate to be CEO, she would explain: he had tried to grab a last-minute opportunity to beg his father’s new wife to put in a good word for him.
I need just one thing of my own, she told herself, the pounding at her throat ever more insistent. Just one lovely thing before I have to spend the rest of Jeffrey’s life with him . . .
Bart strode in, slamming the door behind him, and advanced on her. It was exactly like the moment in a film that made you sigh with delight, the one you replayed again and again when you were alone, the hero taking the heroine’s face in his hands and kissing her passionately. In the film, of course, the heroine’s huge hoop skirt would not tilt wildly off balance with the sudden contact of the hero’s muscular thighs, making her shriek and grab his arms for balance. Bart mistook this for womanly enthusiasm and kissed her even harder, making her cling to him even more. She allowed herself to close her eyes and, for just a little while, kiss him back.
His hands were crushing her earrings into the soft skin of her neck, her tiara into her scalp, and she didn’t care. In fact, for a shocking few seconds, she no longer saw the extremely expensive jewellery Jeffrey had given her as the spoils of war, or her wages, but as shackles he had put on her, nailed through her earlobes, clamped to her scalp, weighing her down; fetters she needed to tear off so that she could be free—
This image was so opposed to everything she had struggled for that her hands came off his arms in reflex. Instead of holding him close, she was shoving him away, a strong woman who was more than able to send him off balance. She was still, however, incapable of saying a word. The film noir femme fatale who had ensnared Jeffrey Sachs had vanished, and in her place was a pathetic heroine from a romantic comedy, struck dumb by a man’s kiss. She writhed in embarrassment.
It was Bart who finally said: ‘You taste really good! Did you eat some cheese just now?’
He took a long breath, staring at her, his eyes on a level with hers, their irises so flooded with blue that she felt she was falling into them, tipping over a cliff edge into a deep azure sea.
‘I think I might be falling in love with you,’ he said simply.
Adrianna gaped at him. She never did this either. She had known that her wedding day would provide many unique experiences, but these were not the ones she had been expecting. In his morning suit, dressed so formally but so dashingly, his blond hair delightfully tousled, he not only acted but looked as if he had stepped out of a romance novel. Of course, this being Bart, who was always perfectly clad, the silk tie was the exact blue of his eyes, the pale-grey waistcoat cut snugly to show off his flat stomach, the trousers tight enough that . . .
No. She dragged her eyes upwards again. But his own were so extraordinary, and fixed on her so imploringly, as if he actually meant the insane words exploding from his mouth, that this barely helped.
‘I’ve been thinking about it all weekend, and I honestly don’t think it’s because I can’t have you, if you see what I mean?’ he was saying. ‘That would be so obvious, wouldn’t it? Man who never settles down falls for his father’s new wife because she’s forbidden fruit! But it’s not that. It’s you. You’re exactly the kind of woman who would suit me. God knows if you feel the same! Why should you? You were quite right when you said I was useless, a pretty toy. I’ve never really done anything – well, I suppose I’ve raised loads of money for charity, but that was only doing things I liked doing anyway, so I honestly can’t count that—’
Adrianna stepped towards him so fast the big skirt swayed wildly, grabbed his face and kissed him as passionately as he had kissed her, her fingers tangling in his blond curls. She had no intention of entering int
o an affair with him. Cheating on Jeffrey at all, let alone with his son, would simply be too dangerous. There would be enemies, rivals, people surrounding them, employees of Jeffrey’s who would be all too willing to run to her husband or the press with wild stories.
Not even the most powerful people in the world were safe from gossip. And being safe was one of Adrianna’s greatest priorities in life. It would have been even if her prenup had not contained huge financial penalties for being unfaithful to her husband.
So this was her unexpected goodbye to being this close to a hard young man’s body, to feeling strong muscles and smelling the fresh scent of his skin, to showing real desire rather than allowing someone to do what he wanted to her. Then she pushed him away once more. She had never been a risk-taker; this was already much further than she should have gone. Both of them were breathing so quickly, staring at each other so wildly, that if Jeffrey had walked in at that moment, no excuse in the world about Bart wanting the CEO position could possibly have convinced even her doting bridegroom that nothing suspicious was going on between his bride and his son.
‘I just want to make you happy! Let me make you happy!’ Bart said, and before she had any idea what he was about to do, he had dropped to his knees, pushed up her skirts, lifted the hoop and crawled underneath it. His hands wrapped around her thighs, working their way up. She was not wearing tights or stockings, as the dress was so heavy and hot she hadn’t wanted any more layers: she could feel his hot breath on her skin, and her entire body froze as he grabbed her silk underpants and pulled them down.
From across the room, she heard a click, the lock released with the key card. The doorknob turned. Her legs felt like jelly, but she could not move an inch. She had no choice but to stand there as the door swung open and watch as into the room strode her husband, a deep frown on his face, followed, for some inexplicable reason, by her mother.
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