“Blah—it’s steak and French fries!”
She knew perfectly well why she’d been rushed to the back of Lutece. The chairman of the board of the Echevarria conglomerate didn’t want to be seen with a notorious moonlighting ex-runway model from wholesalers fashion shows in the Midwest, even if she was done up breathtakingly in a fabulous couture gown and diamonds and emeralds. He just wanted the world to get a tantalizing glimpse of her, Lacy fumed, probably to fuel the rumors about his ways with women. His ambivalence was sickening, she decided.
“I won’t contaminate the rest of the people in here,” Lacy muttered. “You really didn’t have to put me in quarantine on Lutece’s back porch!”
“You look exquisite,” he said grimly from behind the menu. “Stop complaining. We’re seated out here because I want to have you all to myself.”
Well, that much was true, Lacy thought, staring at the thick parchment Lutece menu he held up before him. Their waiter would practically have to have roller skates to get their food to them while it was still hot.
She saw him put down the menu with a decisive gesture, but managing to convey that he really wanted to reach over the table and grab her with his big, tanned hands and drag her to him and kiss her until she was breathless.
“Drat,” Lacy said, shaken, as she dug into the crisp French rolls and salt sticks the waiter had brought with the flowerets of sweet, unsalted butter.
Their dinner was a monumental experience, a procession of tiny succulent shrimp steeped in white wine and tarragon, a delicate potage cressoniere, its verdant texture both crisp and ethereal, followed by a melting turbot Normande. Lacy was still devouring the last of the sauce, scraping it up with the tines of her fork, when the chateaubriand arrived.
“Do you always,” her dinner partner asked sourly, “eat like this?”
“Always,” she said, deliberately innocent. “I make starvation wages at Fad.” And starved as a model as a matter of routine, she could have added.
When they were discussing politics, Lacy found he was a Republican. “How can you be a Republican?” she cried, incredulous.
“How can you be a Democrat?” he said icily.
They glared at each other while he lit up a long, black Havana cigar. At least, Lacy glared; he puffed away imperturbably, safe behind a concealing smoke screen. Lacy coughed and choked ostentatiously, without much success.
“Those cigars are made by Cuban Communists,” she protested, trying to wave away the smoke with her hand. Air pollution did devastating things to the skin. “You should be buying American mades. It’s unpatriotic!”
“I know,” he said around the cigar clenched between his teeth. He was studying her intently. “The emeralds match your eyes, Lacy.” He cleared his throat. “I’m still trying to match the name up with the person.”
She was having the same trouble herself. She looked away uneasily, remembering how impossible this whole arrangement was. Friday-night dates. Dinner at Lutece in crazy jewels worth a fortune and a custom-made gown. He was some weirdo, after all, she tried to convince herself. In spite of all the wonderful things that had happened in Tulsa.
“Do I get to take the necklace and the dress home with me?” Lacy asked him carefully.
“No.”
“That’s what I thought,” she muttered under her breath as the waiter bent to pour her another glass of Dom Perignon ‘79 with her dessert, souffle au chartreuse jaune.
Surprisingly she found he had liberated ideas about women. At least in some areas. He was for women’s rights, he said.
“That’s ridiculous.” Lacy finished her glass of champagne and held it out for more. “It doesn’t go with your image, does it?” She stared pointedly at the perfect Armani tuxedo, all his carefully stated power base, and the Communist cigar.
“I was raised poor, dirt poor,” he said imperturbably. “St. Vincent’s Orphanage was in a poor neighbourhood, even the hand-me-down clothes we got were worn out. When I was growing up, I saw poor women go out to work to support their families. It wasn’t a matter of choice. I also saw they didn’t get paid enough for what they do. They still don’t.”
Well, that was a revelation, Lacy thought, looking at him over the rim of the crystal tulip champagne glass. “Are you going to raise the pay scale then,” she asked sweetly, “for women employees at Fad magazine?”
His eyes were enigmatic through the cloud of cigar smoke. “I might, if you can show me how to make it profitable.”
“Ha! Spoken like a true Republican. Never let a profit interfere with sentiment.” Lacy finished off her third glass of wine. “And you,” she accused, “were raised in an orphanage!”
“And foster homes,” he said, watching her pink tongue as it caught a drop of champagne at the corner of her mouth. “While we’re at it, you don’t put butter on salt sticks. It isn’t done.”
“The French do it,” she said loftily, “and they invented them.”
He put down his cigar to stare at her skeptically. “You’ve been to France, I take it?”
“Sure,” Lacy said, lifting her chin. She was suddenly aware of how tired she was. She’d been on her feet all day in the Garment District, doing interviews and trying to have a confidential talk with Mr. Fishman, and in spite of the lovely green silk backless sandals she wore, her feet hurt. The wine was going to her head, she knew dizzily. She could feel it.
“The first time I went to Paris was when my school sent the sophomore French class over for six weeks. It was crazy. Can you imagine,” she giggled, “two dozen teenage girls in Paris? We drove our teachers wild. We didn’t learn any French, but we faked it like mad to meet French boys. That was our club project—meeting boys and psyching out our teachers. It was the trip of a lifetime.”
The president and chairman of the board, Lacy could see, wasn’t bowled over by the kooky charm of her story about the class trip to France. He probably didn’t believe her. One dark eyebrow was up rather disapprovingly. “You’ve had three glasses of champagne,” he observed.
“Have I?” Lacy asked, smiling happily. In spite of his apparent lack of interest in her story, she went right on making amusing dinner conversation about her high-school French class and the big white clapboard colonial house in East Hampton, Long Island, she’d grown up in, the pony her father had bought for her and her two older sisters and the reputation the Kingston girls had for being spoiled tomboys and the neighborhood brats, even though they were all later elected homecoming queens and successive winners in the Miss Long Island Beauty Pageant. People, Lacy told herself, had enjoyed her stories before; she had a certain reputation, actually, as something of a comedienne. She even launched into her best bit, about the boa constrictor her oldest sister, Felice, had ordered from a direct-mail pet catalog and what her mother had said when it arrived by UPS.
He puffed for a long moment on his cigar, eyes narrowed, before he said, “How did your mother get rid of it? The boa constrictor, I mean.”
“Oh, she didn’t,” she replied, propping her elbow carefully to one side of the remains of the souffle au chartreuse jaune and resting her chin in her hand. “I had very liberal parents. They believed in pets, and, you know—children not growing up with negative attitudes towards repulsive forms of wildlife. They read Dr. Spock all the time. Daddy built a cage for it in the garage. The boa wasn’t too bad at first—it ate mice, but then it graduated to eating white rats.
“Then it sort of developed this thing for our next-door neighbor’s miniature poodle. It was like it was in love with it. Gastronomically,” Lacy added, not able to resist doing her truly comical imitation, which she hadn’t done in years, of Felice’s boa constrictor weaving from side to side behind the wire mesh of its cage, eyeing a small white poodle with gourmet lust. But the wine got the best of her, and she had to grab the table suddenly with both hands. “We had to give it to the zoo,” she gulped.
“Then you must have had,” he said, taking the cigar out of his mouth to stare at her strangely, �
�a very ... untypical childhood.”
“Well, I suppose you could say my family is sort of ... nutty,” Lacy said, wishing the room would stop reeling. “My mother and father were wonderful to us—my mother has a degree in psychology—even if we were, you know, sort of impossible. All of us—my sisters and I—were, well, it’s embarrassing to say this, but people said sort of, uh, unusually pretty,” Lacy said, blushing. “But my parents always encouraged us to do what we wanted to do, even when they knew it would be hard. Like when I started modeling. That was tougher than anybody expected. Especially when you’re just a teenager. I can’t describe what a shock it is to have your face and body treated like a commodity. And what a drag it is when you go from assignment to assignment with your feet hurting because you’re carrying all your makeup and clothes around with you. And fighting off people making passes at you. I was only seventeen,” Lacy said morosely, “when I slugged Peter Dorsey. I laid him right on his back, the louse. He finished me off with what he did to me, though. I’ll never forget it.” How could she? she thought; she’d never had a big contract after that.
She saw his face go suddenly rigid as he stared at her. “Who,” he said with sudden deadliness, “is Peter Dorsey?”
“Peter Dorsey is the source of all my troubles,” Lacy explained, discreetly smothering a hiccup. “He is New York’s most lecherous photographer, and he ruins plenty of girls. I’m not going to bore you with what he did to me, but it was plenty. On the other hand,” she said, giving him an unfocused smile, “if it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
The chairman of the board, she saw, vaguely puzzled, looked as though he had gone back to chewing pieces of scrap metal. “Peter Dorsey,” he said, chomping out each word, “is a photographer in New York?”
“Yes,” Lacy said. Violently he pushed back his chair and got to his feet. “What did I do now? Aren’t we going to have more champagne? What about coffee?” she cried, disappointed. “Don’t you want a brandy and another cigar?”
“I’m going to take you home,” he said through clenched teeth. “After—after we’ve gotten you out of that dress.”
They went back to the condominium tower on Sutton Place in the softly purring Rolls Royce limousine with the dark-tinted windows, and Lacy, exhausted after a hard day in the Garment District and two dinners, one of spaghetti she’d had at home and the other at Lutece, plus several glasses of chenin blanc, Château Rothschild superieur ‘78, and a half bottle of Dom Perignon, fell asleep on the black panther’s shoulder. She didn’t even wake up when he lifted her carefully from the Rolls and carried her in his arms through the condominium’s underground garage to the elevator and her first regularly scheduled Friday-night date as per their arrangement.
Twelve
Lacy was having the most marvelous dream. She had a tremendous headache—which wasn’t the marvelous part—and she had to hold her throbbing brow with both hands, moaning softly, needing somebody to do something about it.
Then there was this beautiful, sleek black panther, naked with soft, subdued light on his satiny skin, making his body gleam like the gold in the étagères cases in his Sutton Place apartment, who padded across the thick carpeting to the bathroom to bring her a glass of water and two aspirins.
“I feel sort of sick,” Lacy told him plaintively. She put the aspirins in her mouth and took a big gulp of cold water without opening her aching eyes.
“Do you need to throw up?” the black panther said, purring all around her protectively in a soft, velvety voice. He held her close against his lithe, muscular body comfortingly.
“No,” Lacy said, sighing, “I just want this headache to go away.”
“You had too much wine,” he murmured. He pressed her face against his big chest with its fine mat of wiry black hairs and tenderly supported the back of her head with one big hand. “And you worked too hard this week, much too hard.”
They lay down together in the lush vegetation of some beautiful Serengeti plain with the dark stars above them and the warm breath of the jungle caressing their perfectly bare, intertwined bodies. In this drowsy, languid state of her dream, Lacy felt the heat of a large, firm hand on the curve of her hip and turned into it, sighing again, pressing the hard points of her nipples against his slightly furry chest.
“It was all that spaghetti,” she whispered, reminding him of the dinner she’d eaten at home before they ever went to Lutece. Not believing him, of course, when he said they really had a dinner date.
But all these problems were solved now, she knew, because she was back where she belonged, in the silky paws of that powerful body that stroked her hips and the length of her thigh so carefully and buried its softly breathing lips into the warm recesses of her throat. She felt the panther’s grip on her tighten abruptly when she moved her bare knee to slip it between the sprawl of his long, muscular legs.
Lacy clung very tightly to him in the lovely dream, sliding her arms around his neck to close her fingers in his thick, slightly damp hair, which smelled like pine smoke and Ralph Lauren’s Polo. He was big and hard, Lacy found dreamily, the rod of his flesh wanting her so fiercely that it seemed it moved slightly, searching her out.
“Darling,” the black panther growled into her throat, “you’re making it tough for me to hold you like this and not do anything. Can’t you—”
The tall grass where they lay shifted under them, the warm winds of Africa blowing hot and voluptuously as he tried to pull Lacy’s hips away from his groin just a fraction. But Lacy clung to him even more tenaciously, her legs and hips seeking him until she was half lying across the sprawl of his big body, absorbing the motion of his slow, labored breathing as his chest rose and fell.
“Sweet darling,” he murmured raggedly, resigned to the demanding weight of her pressing body, “you’re everything I’ve always wanted. You’re so warm, so wonderfully responsive, and so exquisitely lovely—ah, Lacy, I’ve been looking for you all my life. God, how I want you right now!”
“I want you, too,” Lacy told him drowsily, her lips softly kissing the hard, clenched Sine of his jaw. “I adore you actually,” she whispered, her mind sliding off into the warm, slumberous darkness. “I’ve never forgotten you.” She yawned. “You’re the most fantastic lover I’ve ever had.”
Under her, he went very still. “Lacy, don’t tell me that,” he growled. “I don’t want to hear about your other men.”
But as the dream folded its shimmering gray wings about her and bore her off to sleep, Lacy was trying to explain to him about prom night and Bobby Sullivan in the front seat of his Buick. Who probably had, she realized years later, no more experience with sex than she’d had. All that it had amounted to that night was hurried fumbling and quick pain, and then it was all over. Leaving Lacy to wonder why it had happened in the first place. She had vowed it would never happen again. At least not until she met the man who was perfect, and she fell in love with him, and then it would be wonderful. Just as it was now. Whereas poor Bobby Sullivan was married now and had a perfectly lovely wife and a little daughter, even though he still couldn’t look her in the eye when they met on the street in East Hampton.
Lacy couldn’t be sure she was actually explaining all this. The story of how it had all happened was perhaps still in her head. Unspoken.
“Lacy,” he said, his eyes staring up into the darkness as he held her against him, “what I wanted to tell you that morning in Tulsa was—unh!” He shuddered as her groping hand seized the hot, silky center of his power, her fingers wrapping around the throbbing flesh to close on him, grasping him tightly. “Oh, God,” he grated after a long moment, “you haven’t gone to sleep like this, have you?”
But she had.
As the first light of dawn crept over the towers of Manhattan’s East Side and made its way into the windows of the exclusive condominiums of Sutton Place, Lacy awoke with a start.
She was in bed, she realized, opening her eyes wide. Naked. And the president and chair
man of the board of Echevarria Enterprises, Inc., was in the bed with her. Actually, she saw, trying to focus her eyes, he was propped on one elbow watching her, looking rather haggard.
Lacy blinked. It was definitely déjà vu to be waking up with him like this. “You haven’t slept,” she muttered, seeing his red-rimmed eyes.
He looked down at her tenderly. “I couldn’t have,” he murmured, “even if I’d wanted to. You have your hand around a slightly overstimulated part of my anatomy.”
“Good grief,” Lacy cried, releasing him at once and sitting bolt upright in the bed. It was all coming together. What was she doing here? The Friday-night date! “Oh, no,” she wailed. “I fell asleep! I just blew everything!”
“Take it easy,” he said, watching the graceful arch of her body, the thrust of her breasts as she lifted her arms to clutch her head in despair. He checked the heavy gold Rolex on his wrist. “I don’t leave for my Connecticut house until eight o’clock. We’ve got plenty of time.”
“Time?” Lacy leaped out of bed. “My clothes! Who took off my clothes? I don’t remember getting in bed with you!”
“You insisted on getting out of the dinner gown,” he said calmly, lying back with his arms behind his head to watch her. “You said you wanted to hold up your end of the bargain and give it back. In fact, you threw it at me.”
“Never! Oh, how do I manage to get into these things?” Lacy raked her hands through tangled hair. “It’s too much, this whole thing—I must be going crazy! Designing that dress and having it made, and diamonds and emeralds, and feeding me dinner at Lutece! Not to mention putting a detective on my trail to see that I didn’t cheat on you.” She was searching frantically through the bedclothes to see if she could find her skirt and sweater. The green evening dress was on the floor. “It’s weird—it’s paranoid! You’re not normal! I’ve got to get out of here!”
“Are you always this way in the morning?” he said, a slight frown between his eyes.
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