17
The last few days had been such an utter and complete shit storm that she might just as well have lunch with Dart Benedict, Justine thought. She was tired of making excuses to put him off and in the state she was in, she welcomed any diversion. She was mildly curious to find out why this man, who ran such an important and long-established agency, had kept after her to make a lunch date. Obviously he wanted something or he wouldn’t be bothering with her, but at least there was no particular agenda of presumption involved. Even if there had been, Justine thought grimly, Necker and Aiden had already made her feel so intensely presumed upon that any further presumption would merely fade into the general murk.
How could Necker have dared to send her that outrageously lavish piece of unwanted furniture? It was such an obvious bribe, masquerading as a gift. Everything about the little desk reeked of the kind of largesse she could expect, if she had fallen in with his wishes. It was an utterly unwelcome responsibility. Justine wasn’t at home during the day, so she hadn’t been able to get it picked up and sent back. What’s more, sending it back meant, infuriatingly enough, having it properly repacked and suitably insured since, as Aiden had pointed out, it must be exceedingly valuable.
She didn’t want to owe Necker anything! Justine picked up the light desk and carried the damnably exquisite thing into a little dark room that she never used and tried to tell herself that it didn’t exist except as a nuisance she’d have to deal with eventually.
But the desk refused to disappear from her mind. It was as if Necker had reached out into her house with a giant hand and placed it there himself. It seemed to exist—to be alive!—in its unlit room, as inescapably radiant in her mind as if there had been a spotlight trained on it night and day. She could clearly see the porcelain plaques on the drawers with their tender, gay bunches of brilliantly painted flowers, framed by a particular shade of apple green with a turquoise tint to it. The central plaque with it coat of arms, three towers with a coronet surmounting them, was unforgettable. If it hadn’t come from Necker, she would at least have found someone to identify its first owner. Natural curiosity would have carried her that far.
If she’d come across the desk in an antiques shop—but only at a bargain price—even though it was so many light years more elegant that the objects she was normally attracted to, she might have been tempted by its supremely harmonious form. Then, Justine thought, she would have kept it in her bedroom to enjoy looking at, to wonder over. She might even have amused herself by writing a note on it, wondering about the generations of women who had sat there before her, writing to lovers, sending invitations to balls, confirming orders to their dressmakers. It must have been first made for a woman of taste, a woman who demanded luxury and quality. There was no question that the desk was a work of great craftsmanship, Justine had to admit that to herself. She didn’t blame the desk, she blamed the giver.
She didn’t want it! The mysterious object was a part of another civilization, an artifact of a way of life utterly foreign to her, and it belonged in a museum, not in her own, very personal, non-museum-quality home. It didn’t matter what charm it had, the desk had invaded her privacy, as Necker had intended it to. Justine felt as if he had presented her with a magnificent tiara, held her down with one hand, forced the tiara on her head with the other, and informed her that she had to wear it every day whether she chose to or not.
Necker had presumed, unbearably presumed, for he had sent the desk before the blizzard, probably as soon as Gabrielle d’Angelle had called to spring the trap with the news that her three models had been chosen for the Lombardi prize. That haste showed how sure he’d been of her acquiescence, how easily he thought he could buy his admission into her life.
As for Aiden, there was only a difference of degree between his presumption and Necker’s. Aiden—Justine brooded, feeling sick at heart—Aiden had become another kind of presuming invader in her life. She’d opened her door to an unknown contractor and the next thing she knew he was wrecking her furnace, kidnapping her and enticing her into a sexual enslavement. No man, ever, had reached her inner core as Aiden had. Passion, uncontrollable and overwhelming, had been irresistible for a few days, but how quickly it had led to demands on her privacy. He’d said he didn’t “want any explanations” about the desk, when that was exactly what he wanted, what he expected.
Why the hell did the fact that a man could almost make you come by looking at you sideways, mean that you had to tell him things you wanted to keep to yourself? Wasn’t it as basic as that? Wasn’t that an example of classic male sexual control, the sort of control she’d always feared her girls would be exposed to by the model-collectors who pursued them, the kind of control that caused models to do things no sane girl would do?
She hadn’t trusted herself to see Aiden again. She couldn’t resolve his suspicions without revealing Necker’s existence in her life. It would be equally impossible to spend time together pretending that the desk didn’t exist. Worst of all, if she saw him for dinner, as he’d been phoning and asking her to do, she wouldn’t be able to think of anything but whether it would be only decent to wait until after dinner to make love. Decent or indecent, it didn’t matter, Justine admitted to herself. A quick fuck on her doormat, the second he put a foot inside her house, would do just fine. And then another. Her brain told her body that it was dangerously enraptured and that knowledge scared the hell out of her.
Yes, this was a good time to see what Dart Benedict was after. He was neither father nor lover nor friend. He was powerful and much gossiped about, but there was no emotional element involved in breaking bread with him. He was the kind of man who brought out all the cool, strong independence she had so recently, so foolishly, congratulated herself on possessing.
Dart Benedict was a long-range planner, blessed with a cold, accurate objectivity, so clear and powerful that he could use it on himself as well as on others. In the late-1970s, when he was a splendid twenty-five, he’d married, picking Mary Beth Bonner, a large, placid, utterly plain but immaculately groomed post-debutante who had the advantage of being an heiress in her own right as well as the only child of rich parents. Mary Beth, accustomed only to mild attention from the most hopelessly boring of society boys, was astonished at her luck in attracting Dart. He could have had any one of her friends he wanted, in spite of his being in the model agency business, an occupation that was regarded with the deepest suspicion in her conservative world.
In addition to Mary Beth’s fortune, her other desirable attributes included old-fashioned good manners, a lack of imagination, a low sex drive, a passion for country living and a firm sense of self-discipline that ensured, insofar as such things could be predicted, that she would never embarrass Dart by running to fat or to drink. Most important of all—after her money—Mary Beth was a deeply religious Catholic. Dart converted from Methodism in order to marry her, knowing that Mary Beth guaranteed the background he’d decided he must have: a home life built on a rock and free from financial worry.
Dart had grown up in Philadelphia, where his family’s justifiable pretensions to antiquity and status were being slowly and sordidly destroyed by divorce, drink and a chronic mishandling of funds. During his undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania, Dart distanced himself from his parents, looking for the quickest path to future security. He evaluated his own abilities with his unsparing clarity.
There was no question that he functioned best outside of any classroom. He had enormous success in dealing with the most ambitious and alluring of his female classmates. They flocked around him, treating him not as a possible boyfriend, but as someone whose advice they sought, whose judgment they valued and acted on. No question about it, Dart told himself, he had a Godgiven knack for dealing with women. What’s more, he had the ability to judge degrees of female beauty. He had an inborn accuracy of eye for the often blurred line that separated the large number of girls who were pretty, even exceptionally pretty, from those few who had true, bone
-deep beauty. His sexual needs were inexhaustible and he was careful to satisfy them with the pretty girls, not the beauties. When he graduated, Dart was able to get his first job in a modeling agency by persuading the two most beautiful girls in his class to follow him into the business that he had decided was made to order for him.
Soon after Dart married Mary Beth, he borrowed some of her money to open a small agency he called Benedict. Mary Beth busied herself creating a life of calm and elegance in the Fairfield County horse country just outside of North Stamford, to which Dart commuted every day. He had imagined that perhaps six months after the honeymoon he would resume his wallowing in the luscious variety of sexual pleasures the world of models offered him so freely. This was the only place in which his self-knowledge failed. Dart managed to hold off less than three weeks before he resumed his clandestine lunch-hour affairs in his old bachelor apartment in New York, but otherwise his plans were perfectly executed. Mary Beth was soon happily pregnant; she shopped in Greenwich, rarely ventured into New York and showed little curiosity about his work.
Now, not quite twenty years later, Dart and Mary Beth Benedict had long been pillars of Connecticut society. They had six children, ranging from nineteen to three, and Mary Beth, who adored her husband more than ever, was hoping for another baby. Dart’s apartment remained a well-kept secret inside the modeling community and none of the hundreds of girls he’d brought there had ever expected more from this firmly married father of six than he was willing to give.
He had one hell of a good life, Dart thought as he waited for Justine Loring. On the one hand, it was beautifully centered, well rounded and full of calm contentment and dignity, the sort of life his parents had thrown away so selfishly. He and Mary Beth had founded a handsome, well-bred dynasty. On the other hand, he had married so intelligently that he was able to preserve an area of freedom other men could only dream of. Drugs—of course he sometimes enjoyed drugs, but as a connoisseur, a civilized gourmet, happy to share the best stuff available with those clients who expected it. And what real man should be denied women in all their variety? He’d organized his life around his most necessary pleasure, and when he’d finished with a girl, there was always good business use to be made of her. Both of them gained in the transaction.
But there was an area of his existence left to be satisfied, Dart told himself. As his success in the business had grown, so had his ambition. His agency, aside from three women’s divisions, had a men’s division, a children’s division and a thriving branch in Hollywood, as well as profitable affiliations with major agencies in Paris and Milan. But Ford, Elite and Lunel were larger than Benedict in total billings. It infuriated him to own the fourth largest modeling agency in the world. There was something that fundamentally smacked of failure about being fourth in anything, he saw that all too plainly. It had an unpleasantly humorous flavor, like winning the gold medal for the luge at the Olympics. Although no one in his weekend world ever saw him as anything but a glamorous success in a field that had gained a certain respectability and enormous fascination, Dart could not escape the fact that after more than twenty years in the agency business he might never be the leader of the pack.
Unacceptable, he decided, as he rose to greet Justine. Simply unacceptable.
“Justine, you’re more beautiful than ever,” he said truthfully. He’d give damn near anything to have her working with him. There was no one in town to equal her reassuring way with young models, and young and younger were the key words today. Recently he’d lost several most promising kids to Loring Model Management because their mothers were more willing to entrust their daughters to Justine than to him, in spite of the relative smallness of her agency. And Justine had a tremendous eye for potential. Sometimes it was better than his, Dart had to acknowledge. She’d signed girls he hadn’t wanted, and turned them into useful moneymakers, even potential stars. He’d turned down April Nyquist, for example, because she had impressed him as too classic a blond to be salable. He’d thought that one Daryl Hannah was all the market could absorb and he was still kicking himself for that mistake.
“You don’t age, Dart,” Justine said, equally truthfully. Dart’s thick, sandy hair had been showing a little grey for a dozen years, but it was still all on his head where it belonged. He was handsome in a bluff outdoors sort of way, a tanned, tall, rugged man who looked as if he sat a horse beautifully, fly-fished the best streams and climbed dangerous mountains on his vacations. Amazing, Justine thought, as they sat down, to look at him you’d say he had to be a nice guy.
“I was surprised, and delighted of course, when your secretary called to say you could make lunch after all. I was sure that by now you’d be off to Paris to be with your girls. Congratulations, Justine! What a coup! When I heard that you’d swept the field I couldn’t believe it, nobody could. You put everybody’s nose out of joint, a small agency like yours getting all three of the picks. But when credit is due, I’m the first to admit it.”
“I was just as surprised as you were—maybe more.” Dart Benedict hadn’t asked her to lunch to congratulate her, Justine thought. That much she was sure of.
“I’m curious, how come you didn’t go to Paris? I’d be over there hovering over those girls if it had happened to me.”
“Good Lord, Dart, I can’t just pick up and leave Loring Management to run itself for two weeks. Frankie’s more than capable.”
“Frankie Severino of song and story. You’re lucky to have her.”
“How true,” Justine said shortly, addressing herself to the menu. “Song and story?” What was that supposed to mean? He’d never met Frankie as far as she knew. She only knew Dart and his wife from parties they’d both been invited to. People in the agency business normally stayed out of each other’s way.
“How many of your other girls are going to do the shows?” Dart asked after they’d ordered.
“Four or five … you know how it is, they won’t make up their minds until the last minute.”
“I’ve got a dozen getting ready to leave for Milan day after tomorrow. Or at least that’s the plan … when did the inmates take over the asylums, Justine? Five years ago—no, two years ago, if I said I had a dozen girls going, a dozen girls damn well were on that plane. Now the best of them are bloody conglomerates, too busy deal-making to face the jet lag. And if they’re not doing hostess gigs on television, they’re bound by their cosmetic contracts not to do runway. The money is so big it doesn’t seem to matter to them anymore.”
“Don’t forget the girls who are flying off to the coast, testing for movie parts.” If Dart insisted on making small talk before getting to his point, whatever it was, she was willing to go along with it, Justine shrugged to herself.
“Tell me about it—that’s what’s happened to Elsie, and she’s done Chanel faithfully for three years. Karl always gave her the bridal gown, so you can imagine how thrilled he is about losing her at the last minute … he’ll never book her again even if she comes back.”
“Elsie? What’s the part?”
“Something Julia Roberts just fell out of, so it could be one of ten scripts. All I know is she left a message with her booker, didn’t dare tell me herself.”
“You’re probably too strong a father figure,” Justine said wryly.
“That’s possible,” Dart said thoughtfully. “But isn’t a father figure exactly what young girls need? Look at you, Justine. You’re what exactly? In your mid-thirties? But you give off a powerful mother figure aura—you make people think of someone baking great bread and making fabulous soups from scratch—all those things no one has time to do anymore. I think, with all due respect to your business acumen, it’s that aura of safety, of home and hearth, that’s made your boutique work so well.”
“Thanks, Dart. If so, I don’t know I’m doing it, but so much the better. There are things you just can’t fake,” Justine made herself smile graciously. Homemade soup her ass!
“You know, Justine, I’m a little worried about you.
Here you are, stuck in New York, when by all rights you really should be in Paris making absolutely sure that each of your girls is okay. But you can’t leave by your own admission because, of all your employees, Frankie is the only one who’s totally trustworthy. None of your bookers can take over the agency for you, can they? What does that tell me? That your shop is paper thin in management. How can you grow quickly in that situation?”
“You’re kind to be concerned about me, Dart,” Justine said coolly. “However, I’ve managed to keep growing at a rate that personally I feel comfortable with. Comfort and total control are important to me. I like being the boss, and I wouldn’t want to share that position with anyone else. To each his own.”
“I understand what you’re saying, Justine, I used to feel the same way, but I didn’t really start getting anywhere until I hired the right people, even before I could afford them, and made myself learn to delegate. When I think that even though Necker himself personally picked all three of your models, you actually didn’t go to Paris … the man owns two other fashion houses, for God’s sake—you could pack them with your girls if you chose to use your charms on him. I’d never have wasted such a clear shot.”
“Dart, what makes you think that Lombardi didn’t choose the girls himself?” Justine asked, going pale.
“Marco Lombardi and I have been the greatest of pals for years. Old, old buddies, veterans of the model wars you might say. He was so furious when Necker crammed your girls down his throat that he picked up a phone to complain to me for half an hour. How can you be sure that our charming mutual friend, that well-known scamp of a Marco, is being halfway decent to them? How do you know they’re behaving themselves? Hmmm? We all know something about the temptations of Paris, don’t we?”
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