Hustle Sweet Love

by Davis, Maggie;

  Lacy bit her gleaming red underlip. How could anyone turn down the opportunity to wear this in the more glittering places of New York City? The answer to that was, she couldn’t.

  “I have to do something with my hair,” she muttered. The disco cloud of curls had to go. “It doesn’t work with what I’m wearing.”

  She pulled out the rest of the bobby pins that had held the little disco hat in place, grabbed her hair in both hands and crammed it into a French twist at the back.

  As Lacy squinted at the mirrors on the far side of the room, she knew it had worked. Her hair swept up gave the right imperial effect, enhanced by a borderline carelessness. As she put the bobby pins back into place to hold it, she felt something cold and heavy slide around her throat.

  The necklace Michael Echevarria was putting on her was a shade of ruddy gold that indicated the true antique, probably not of the last century but of the one before that. Rococco swirls of gold flowers and vines worked in the ancient thick metal were studded with smooth cabochon stones, either rubies or garnets.

  The gown was designed to match the priceless necklace, Lacy saw, a little dazed. All that antique gold. She couldn’t help wondering if the Smithsonian or the Frick Museum had found anything missing lately.

  “Since your ears are already pierced, I think you can manage these by yourself,” he murmured at her ear. His hand offered a set of matching gold earrings over her shoulder, each with a precious red stone in its carved-flower center.

  “We’re going by armored car, of course,” Lacy quipped. It was nothing to joke about; she’d never seen anything like the heavy gold necklace; even the great diamond and emerald suite paled by comparison. Did anybody have this much money, even Michael Echevarria?

  In the mirrored reflection, his dark, chiseled features watched her with an intent expression that said how beautiful she was.

  So much careful planning had gone into this. The ruby velvet gown. The antique necklace. He was looking at her, Lacy realized with a shock, like a work of art that he had in his possession at last. The concentration in those brooding gray eyes was astonishing.

  “Michael?” Lacy said uncertainly. That stare made her uneasy. If she had to choose between being an art collectible and a rehabilitation project, she’d choose the latter.

  “Michael,” she murmured, surrendering, turning around and moving into his arms.

  “You’re so lovely I can’t believe it.” He cleared his throat. “Lacy, I think I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. It’s incredible.”

  Want? she thought, staring back. He was viewing her like a hungry man views a thick sirloin steak! Was that all she meant to him? She loved him! She was absolutely wild, crazy, freaked-out in love with him—couldn’t he see it?

  “Michael, darling,” Lacy murmured experimentally. It was the first time she had called him that.

  “My God, sweet Lacy,” he muttered, his gray eyes dazed. “I think—l”

  The telephone in the bedroom began ringing. Two low, musical notes, but definitely a telephone.

  “Boston,” he murmured abstractedly.

  “Lovely.” Whatever Boston was, it would have to wait. One minute more and he’d know she loved him. His mouth was only inches away from hers, the tension unbearable.

  “One of our banks is going under.” His voice was low and husky. “The examiners have been working all weekend.”

  Lacy slid her hands under the formal coat, feeling his fine, hard body warm through her finger tips. “Let’s not go to the opera,” she whispered.

  “If that’s what I think it is,” he muttered, “I’ll be going to Boston. I’ll know just as soon as I answer that call.”

  His words broke the spell. Before Lacy could tighten her hold on him, he pulled his hands away.

  “Michael?” Lacy cried, her fingers clutching air. She watched him stride to the desk in the corner of the room to answer the phone.

  He can’t do this, she told herself. A few seconds more and she would have told him she loved him! She stared, dumbfounded, as he spoke a final word into the telephone, hung up and came back to her, a towering, splendid figure in formal evening clothes.

  “It was Boston,” he said with a slight frown. “The one call I had to take here tonight.

  “You look very lovely in that dress,” he added, moving past her and going to a long line of doors that covered one wall of the room.

  She looked very lovely in the dress? His dismissal of her was totally absent-minded! Lacy watched as he slid back his wardrobe doors to reveal seemingly endless racks of suits.

  “There’s no time to call for the Lear jet,” he was saying. “Damn, I’m going to have to take the shuttle out of La Guardia.”

  Lacy listened in disbelief. They’d been practically in the middle of a kiss! She could hardly believe this was happening. She watched as he pulled a Louis Vuitton suiter out of the closet and threw it on the bed. He began to toss socks and underwear into it from one of the wardrobe chests.

  “Do you need all those socks?” He seemed to have forgotten her completely. “Or are you packing for a centipede?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, tossing a couple of immaculately laundered Brooks Brothers shirts after them. “Why don’t you pick some out for me?”

  Still numb with the suddenness of it all, Lacy bent over the bed in her exquisite red velvet gown, the gold antique necklace swinging forward heavily, and chose six pairs of French-made elasticized men’s socks. She rolled them up neatly to put in the Vuitton luggage. She gathered Michael Echevarria was taking the shuttle jet to Boston. That meant they weren’t going to the opera.

  She still couldn’t believe it.

  “Haven’t you got a valet?” With all these clothes, he must have somebody to take care of them. She trailed behind him to pick up the pieces of his formal evening clothes he was discarding.

  “He’s on vacation,” he said from the bathroom. She heard him swearing under his breath about a missing electric shaver. “See if you can find me a pair of black shoes in there,” he called out to her. “There’s a shoe rack in the closet.”

  Lacy found not one but several enormous shoe racks filled with handmade boots, both Western and military style, loafers, lounge slippers, evening pumps and glove-leather oxfords of all descriptions.

  One moment, she told herself, holding up a pair of Gucci wingtips in black kid, she was all dressed up like the front cover of Town and Country, on her way to be publicly displayed at the Metropolitan Opera wearing a fortune in gowns and jewels, and the next minute the president and chairman of the board had forgotten she was there. So much for being a priceless work of art. “Michael,” she said crossly from the depths of the closet, “have you ever been married?”

  “No.” He came to stand in the door of the bathroom barefooted and bare chested, clad only in black trousers. “See if you can find a shirt for me,” he said, throwing the electric shaver onto the bed next to the overnight case.

  “Am I going to Boston with you?”

  “No. Not unless you’re an accountant.” He pulled off the evening trousers, showing a brief glimpse of symmetrically muscled legs and dazzling black-on-black houndstooth Cardin briefs before stepping into a pair of tailored gray pants and zipping them up. “You don’t happen to be an accountant, do you?” he said seriously.

  That was the last straw.

  “I’m not an accountant—I’m a writer, remember?” Lacy folded up the white Brooks Brothers shirts and put them into the suitcase. “Who’s going to take me to the opera? Or should I start getting out of these clothes?”

  “The detective, Moretti.” He picked up the shirt she’d laid out for him and shrugged his big shoulders into it. “Don’t forget a couple of ties, will you?” he said. “He’s Italian. All Italians know opera, he can probably follow La Bohème with a score. You two should have a profitable evening.”

  “Well,” Lacy said, glowering as she watched him select a Countess Mara from the tie rac
k and toss it around his neck, “I hate to bring this up, Michael, but here I am in a red velvet dress that looks like I’m going to play Lady Macbeth and some sort of antique gold necklace and earrings worth a fortune—”

  “Venetian,” he said, throwing his head back and lifting his chin to loop his tie in a knot. “Eighteenth century. I bought it through an agent at Sotheby’s in London last week.”

  “—all this jewelry worth a fortune,” Lacy repeated carefully, “and you’re going to send me to the opera with an Italian private eye for an escort? Is that correct?”

  He cocked a dark eyebrow at her. “Yes, but you’d better get Moretti to check that damned trench coat before he goes in.” He threw open a series of doors at the top of the mammoth clothes closet. “I need a hat—where in the hell,” he muttered to himself, “are my homburgs?”

  “Michael, are you listening to me?” Lacy trailed him to the desk as he called down for his Rolls Royce. “You’re making a mistake again,” she warned. “I’m not some sort of parcel-post package you can send across town to hear Puccini. With a watchdog you’ve hired because you think I’m some sort of tramp you can’t let out of your sight.”

  She was a thing to him, Lacy told herself. In spite of all the magic when he held her, in spite of all the gowns and jewels, she was really only a body, something to decorate, an exceptionally fine piece for his collections!

  As he began to speak into the telephone, Lacy watched him with narrowed eyes. She said in a perfectly conversational tone, “I’m going to cut my hair and have my forehead tattooed with the words U.S. Navy.” When he kept on talking, she gritted her teeth. “I’d like to have a Ferrari before I report here next Friday night. Say one that’s sort of a smoky-blond color, to match my hair. And since I don’t really care for mink, I’ll settle for a full-length coat in Russian sable.”

  “What else do I need to do?” the chairman of the board muttered, hanging up the telephone. “Where’s my briefcase?”

  Very deliberately, Lacy took it from the floor where it was propped against the desk, and handed it to him. “And I’d also like to have a microwave oven and a new blender,” she continued sweetly, “because my old blender is worn out. I’m flying to Bermuda on Thursday. I’d like to have one of those gorgeous Australian white cockatoos. They’re expensive, but everybody who is anybody has one. And I’m going to buy a tape of Pavarotti singing La Bohème on my way home tonight at a Broadway all-night record store, and invite my private eye up to my apartment to have a drink and be cosy and listen to it with me. I even have some left-over spaghetti in the freezer.”

  He looked around the bedroom with a slight frown between his black brows. “Looks like that’s it,” he told himself. Then, still absently, “Have I forgotten anything?”

  “I want to kiss you goodbye before I ransack your condominium and take she loot and leave the country with it,” Lacy murmured as she helped him into his black Chesterfield overcoat.

  “Yes,” he said. “That.”

  He put down his briefcase swiftly, folded his Marks and Spencer black leather gloves carefully and stuck them in the overcoat pocket. He laid his homburg on a nearby chair. Then, very deliberately, he reached out for her.

  “Urk!” Lacy breathed as the black panther swept her into his arms.

  His warm mouth closed over hers and all the lightning flashes and rolling thunder hit her in spite of his being in a hurry. All the zap! bam! powie! with a few spirals and comets thrown in. His arms crushed her so that she couldn’t move. He pressed against her, and if it hadn’t been for the tailored bulk of the Chesterfield overcoat, she wouldn’t have been surprised to find him aroused and ready for her, even as his tongue thrust hotly, deeply into her mouth.

  Lacy was still clinging to him, her eyes half-closed in ecstasy, her fingers digging into the soft melton cloth, when he pulled back and looked down at her.

  Something in Michael Echevarria’s eyes glimmered like silver fire. “A Ferrari with a custom paint job to match your hair,” he murmured softly. The ironical indentations at the corners of his lips that would have been dimples on anyone else flickered entrancingly as he spoke. “Full-length sable coat, cockatoo, microwave oven, Waring blender, yes.” His head bent, and his mouth brushed the tip of her ear, then nibbled gently on the lobe. “No, you can’t cut your hair, tattoo your forehead or go to Bermuda.” He lowered his lips to her neck and nuzzled the smooth skin there, making her shudder and press against him with a little moan. “And no tapes of Pavarotti singing La Bohème, because Moretti’s not allowed past the front door of your apartment house.” His mouth returned to hers for the briefest of sizzling kisses. “I’ll call you.”

  He released her, bent and picked up his briefcase and retrieved the homburg hat from the chair.

  “Call me?” Lacy whispered, stunned. “You’ll call me?”

  “I have your home telephone number somewhere,” he said, adjusting the homburg brim with a flick of his thumb.

  She’d never given him her home telephone number. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have it. She was surrounded, spied on, investigated. It was outrageous!

  “Michael,” she cried as he strode past her, “I’m not going to be your mistress, do you hear? You can’t treat me like this!”

  “Probably from Boston tomorrow,” the tall figure in the homburg and Chesterfield said, going through the bedroom door.

  Then she heard the front door of the condominium slam.

  Fifteen

  Saturdays, Lacy thought as she pushed the vacuum cleaner across the living-room rug of her west Eightieth Street apartment, were the pits. No matter what unbelievable and sometimes fantastic things happened with Michael Echevarria on Friday nights, there was no escaping the fact that Saturdays were a return to earth. So much so that she was finding it increasingly hard to cope. How could you be in love with the president and chairman of the board of Echevarria Enterprises, Inc., and know at the same time that your personality was splitting right down the middle?

  Last night she, Lacy Kingston, had been standing in a Sutton Place condominium wearing a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ worth of antique jewelry and a couturier-made ruby velvet evening gown, on her way to the Metropolitan Opera with her very own private eye, who was wearing a brown suit, foam-rubber-soled shoes and a trench coat. Now, on Saturday afternoon, she was pushing a vacuum cleaner in her own modest apartment, dressed in the bottom half of a jogging suit, frayed basketball high tops that had once belonged to her older sister Felice, and her own ancient Junior Miss America sweat shirt. She was watching a very boring football game between Georgia and FSU on television while trying to get through her housework fast enough so that she could get to a Broadway Laundromat with her wash before it turned dark.

  It wasn’t just the unpredictable events of Friday nights that were tearing a big hole in her life, Lacy recognized, pausing to hold the vacuum cleaner in place with her foot while she adjusted the old Diane von Furstenberg scarf that covered her hair. It was the whole chain of events that had happened since that fateful evening in the penthouse in Tulsa.

  How had she managed to live before Michael Echevarria made his appearance in her thoughts and dreams? She had asked herself this more than once in the past few weeks. The answer was simple. Happier. More peacefully. Almost never, ever feeling badgered, outmaneuvered and humiliated. Almost never being provoked to lose her temper and do wild, inexplicable things.

  Now, for a whole list of reasons she didn’t want to go into, Lacy found herself in love with a man who was the worst possible choice for any woman. Good heavens, just the way they had met, in a hotel bar in Tulsa, proved that!

  Sure, he was gorgeous, sexy, powerful, successful, fabulously rich, and his lovemaking was fantastic. He was also miserably domineering, ruthlessly insensitive and dealt with people as though they were objects, not thinking and feeling human beings. He’d bought everything he ever wanted in life, just as he had bought—or thought he had bought—her, Lacy Kingston. He wan
ted her. He hadn’t said a word about love, had he? She was the only one who had been ready to blurt out that terrible word last night in his Sutton Place condominium before the telephone rang.

  When you came right down to it, Lacy told herself as she turned off the vacuum, pulled out the disposable bag and carried it to the kitchen and the garbage, it was plain that being in love, at least with the president and chairman of the board of Echevarria Enterprises, Inc., wasn’t going to work out. Some more experienced, beautiful woman, who was worldly wise, stronger and more confident than she, would probably be able to handle it. Lacy Kingston, who looked so good from the outside, was a loser where it counted most.

  If being in love was a time to live joyously, drown in heady sensations and fantastic experiences with a fabulous partner, then her track record was a mess. Her first Friday night meeting with Michael Echevarria, she’d drunk too much wine at Lutece, was exhausted after a hard day’s work and had fallen asleep in his arms. The next morning, she admitted, had been a disaster. There had been tender, unforgettable moments that looked as though things might be really wonderful—very quickly followed by what she was beginning to see was their usual misunderstandings and arguments. She had to admit she’d made things worse by taunting him. What in the world had gotten into her to make her say what she did about underwear that morning? When he was always ready to believe the worst of her, anyway?

  Last night, when she’d had her big opportunity to tell him she loved him, she’d let him fly off to Boston. Good grief, she’d even helped him pack!

  I’ve been doing everything wrong, Lacy told herself, squirting large amounts of dish-washing detergent into a stack of breakfast dishes in the sink and turning on the hot water.