He was so dear and sweet, once you got to know him, Lacy sighed. In a way, it was a good thing he was going to find out that she loved him. It might be a little difficult at first, but she had so much to offer him, and they agreed about the important things, even if they did argue a lot.
“I want you, Lacy,” a rusty, early-morning voice said into her shoulder.
“That’s impossible,” she said, startled. He was undoubtedly the most potent lover a woman could find, too.
“You’re irresistible,” Michael said, biting the silky flesh of her upper arm softly. “You have an amazing effect on me. You’re sexy and wild and the most beautiful damned woman in the world, even at this hour.” He looked up at her, his gaze smoky. “Even looking like you’ve spent the night in the subway. Let’s make love.”
He looked so happy, she thought, looking down at him tenderly as his large brown hand held her breast, his thumb lazily stroking her nipple.
Now was the time, Lacy told herself.
“I have to talk to you,” she said, gently prying herself away from him. She lifted his arms, and he let them fall back on her, watching her with a lazy smile. She moved his legs to one side with an effort.
“We talked last night—all night,” he reminded her. “It’s good to talk to you, sweetheart, you’re a very interesting and intelligent woman, as well as fantastically beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Lacy said modestly. She managed to get his big body rolled to one side far enough to slip out from under him.
“Now is not the time for conversation, though,” he said, making a grab for her leg. “Lacy, where are you going?”
She couldn’t help feeling a twinge of apprehension as she scooted across the room to her black velvet jacket lying on the floor. There was so much to try to explain, like how to get his fifteen hundred dollars back to him, and this warm, intimate moment needed a light touch. Pass it off like the joke it was.
She pulled out the roll of bills held with a rubber band from the pocket.
The big man on the bed stretched his whole muscular length, putting his hands over his head. “Yummmmmh,” he growled, looking at her with a smoldering expression. “Lacy, come to bed.”
Lacy bounced back and knelt down beside him, her long legs tucked under her. She could tell from the way his eyes traveled down her slender body that she didn’t have his full attention.
“Michael,” Lacy said, “look at me. I’m going to give you something.”
“Right,” he said, reaching out to stroke her thigh caressingly. “I can’t wait, honey.”
“La-di-da!” Lacy cried. She struck the frivolous, provocative Lacy Kingston pose that had almost made her famous. She opened her hand and let a shower of bills drift down into his face. “Michael,” she crowed, “what happened in Tulsa was all a stupid joke, really, because I love you too much to let this thing go on any further.
“You’ve got to believe me—Michael?” she said quickly. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Michael Echevarria wasn’t exactly being swept away by her provocative charm. The gray eyes that had been smiling at her seconds ago changed to hard granite stones.
“Stop it,” the president and chairman of the board ordered.
“I didn’t spend any of your money,” Lucy blurted. “It’s all there. You’ve known all along it was a dumb joke, haven’t you?”
“What the hell are you doing?” he snarled. “Put on a robe. You’re stark naked.”
Robe? What was he talking about? Lacy thought, giving a confused look down at her perfectly lovely bare body. All he talked about was looking at her and how much it turned him on. “Michael, I’ve never been in love with anybody in my whole life,” she wailed. “This is a totally new experience! Good grief, don’t you have a sense of humor about anything?”
“I refuse to discuss this damned subject of your idea of what’s a joke. I thought it was settled.”
“You must love me,” Lacy cried. “You couldn’t make love to me the way you do if you didn’t!”
“I don’t want to go through this scene again,” he said, sitting up in bed and reaching for his underwear, “with some ... ex-model employee who thinks she’s in love with me!”
“Employee?” Lacy exploded, jumping off the bed to stand in front of him. “You haven’t said that one before!”
“I should never have brought you up here,” he said with deadly calm. He kicked a few stray one-hundred-dollar bills out of his way. “I knew it was a damned big mistake. Give a woman an inch and she thinks she’s in love with you!”
“Michael, will you look at me, please?” Lacy demanded, putting herself in his way every time he turned. “When did I get to be just an ‘employee,’ instead of a magazine wrecker with an insatiable body? Why are you so sorry you brought me up to your Connecticut house?”
“Put some clothes on,” he said, firmly pushing her aside.
“Is it because I look like I belong here?” she yelled. “Is it because I fit in so well? Because you picked me up in a bar!” She dogged his steps as he strode to a walnut Chippendale highboy, yanked open a drawer and dragged out a clean shirt. “You’re a prejudiced chauvinist rat, Michael Echevarria—you’re afraid somebody will find out you mistook me for a hooker! And you picked me up!
“Boy,” she hooted scornfully, “what a dumb thing that was!”
“I can’t blame you for being ambitious,” he said grimly, “it was a good try. You overplayed your hand with the protestations of love, however.”
“Never mind, Michael, you blew it,” Lacy taunted him, matching him step for step to the clothes closet. “But you thought about me as your wife, didn’t you? You haven’t been able to get me out of your mind!”
“Get dressed,” he grated, taking her by the arm and steering her toward the door. “We’re going back to New York.”
“You thought about what a good wife I’d make,” Lacy yelled, struggling to keep him from pushing her out into the hall.
“It hit you hard when I said I loved you,” she insisted as he picked her up bodily and deposited her outside the door.
“Wife—wife, Michael—I could do that even better than being your mistress in some nifty apartment on the East Side,” she shouted triumphantly as he slammed the door and locked it. “Like some broad you couldn’t take to Lutece or the opera or horseback riding, right?”
“We’re going back to New York,” his voice came from inside the bedroom, “in an hour.”
Eighteen
It was probably the worst limousine ride of her life, Lacy thought dejectedly, as she sat up in the front seat of the Rolls Royce next to Edward, the chauffeur, holding Sicky-Poo partly in her lap to protect the dove-gray upholstery. The tall, darkly good-looking chairman of the board of Echevarria Enterprises, Inc., sat in back in stony silence with several boxes of assorted blenders and microwave ovens and the covered cage that held El Magnifico, the sulphur-crested cockatoo.
When they reached the West Side and Lacy’s apartment on Eightieth Street an hour and a half later, Lacy accepted El Magnifico and his bird cage because there was, after all, no one to take care of him unless he was returned to Morton’s Birds in Westport. But she told Michael Echevarria what he could do with all his Waring and Sunbeam blenders and the half dozen or so microwave ovens still in their crates, standing on the sidewalk and delivering her message through the closed window glass of the Roll’s back seat while he smoked a large cigar and stared at her imperturbably. In the end, Edward carried everything up to her apartment, including her washed and dried laundry, and stacked it in a big pile in the middle of the living room.
“Miss Kingston, is this, ah, breakup for real?” the tall, blond, attractive chauffeur said, taking off his gray uniform cap and holding it in front of him politely. “Because if you’re not going to see the boss anymore, I’d like to say that I have two tickets to championship wrestling at Madison Square Garden this Thursday night.”
“Go away,” Lacy cried, push
ing him away. “I hate wrestling.”
“You’re the most beautiful woman Mr. Echevarria has ever, ah, taken out, Miss Kingston,” the chauffeur said diplomatically, “and more fun, too. How about Chinese food Friday night?
“At least I could call you,” he said as Lacy shoved him out and slammed the door.
Lacy flung herself into her prized bentwood rocker and stared at the neatly stacked mountain of appliances in the middle of her living room. On top of an unopened Tappan-microwave carton in a beautiful art deco brushed aluminum cage El Magnifico, the cockatoo, tilted an eye at her quizzically and cried, “Awrk?” in a plaintive voice. Squeezed under the table in the dining alcove where he was hiding, Sicky-Poo alternately moaned and slathered disconsolately. Lacy put her head in her hands and moaned, too.
This time you’ve done it, her inner voice chided her. Zany and irrepressible, OK, Lacy Kingston. But this time you went too far. You’ll never learn when and when not to clown around. Just telling a man you’re madly in love with him isn’t enough. Dropping his money all over his head was not exactly the most enticing gambit, either. You just proved that.
She couldn’t go on doing these stupid things; there was too much at stake. She’d messed up a weekend that should have turned out gloriously. As she reached for the telephone, Lacy took a deep breath. Somewhere there was a friend who knew more about these things than she did. Someone to confide in, someone who would give good advice.
But the voice that answered Jamie Hatworth’s home telephone in Brooklyn Heights was not the assistant editor’s. A man was shouting over the racket of Sunday-afternoon television and children’s loud voices.
“Mike?” Lacy said, uncertainly. She wasn’t having any luck at all. Of all times to pick. Jamie Hatworth had Mike, the layout artist at her house. “This is Lacy Kingston. What are you doing there?” she blurted before she could stop herself.
“Hey, Lacy, honey,” the layout artist’s voice greeted her, “how’s the most beautiful blond in New York?”
And why not Mike? Lacy thought with a sinking feeling. Even Jamie, with all her problems, her unruly kids and her impossible job, had a love life. Everybody did. Except ex-models who were now Echevarria, Inc., employees in love with their president. Tall, willowy smoky-blonds with emerald eyes who picked the wrong time to be funny. Who had just won the prize for this year’s total bomb in the romance department.
“Hi, angel,” the brisk voice of the assistant editor came over the wire. “Good heavens, Lacy, what are all the waterworks about? Is that you I hear crying? Is anything wrong?”
“No,” Lacy said, squaring her shoulders bravely. “I’m just watching a sad movie on TV.” She was not about to ruin Jamie’s Sunday afternoon with her lover, even if it was only Mike from the magazine art department. As Sicky-Poo began to howl broken-heartedly from his hide-out under the dinette table and El Magnifico added his sympathetic squawks, she wept, “Actually I was just calling to see if your kids would like to have a really fantastic sulphur-crested cockatoo I picked up in Connecticut this weekend.”
But the worst was yet to come.
On Monday, Lacy drew nothing but bad assignments, including a tedious article on the proposed standardization of women’s suit and dress sizes and spent most of the day in the library of the New York Dress Institute doing research. The only good thing about the standard-dress-size story was that it kept her away from her assistant-editor training sessions and the probing if sympathetic questions of Jamie Hatworth. But at six-thirty that evening the packages began arriving by United Parcel Service, which, Lacy found, ripping the first open, contained the couturier-made gown in which she’d dined at Lutece, her matching underwear and the green silk shoes.
“This is a nice apartment you have here,” the UPS delivery man said as Lacy signed for the box. He gave her last year’s Liz Claiborne pant suit a particularly appreciative look. “You ever have a friend over for a drink now and then?”
“Go away,” Lacy cried, kicking him out, too.
On Tuesday evening the red velvet Renaissance evening costume arrived, but the UPS delivery man prudently left the box resting outside her apartment door after getting the super to sign for it. On Wednesday, though, the Revillon Freres full-length sable coat in a size 8, with Lacy’s name embroidered on its satin lining, arrived by the fur salon’s special messenger, who apologized for the delay on the order placed last week, which was due to necessary alterations. Lacy burst into tears.
Michael Echevarria was dumping her, she realized, sitting down on her living-room couch with the sumptuous soft folds of the sable fur in her lap and wetting its beautifully crafted lapels with her tears. He was sending everything back to her except, apparently, the fabulous jewelry. He was closing out his account, dispersing the inventory, clearing the books! In spite of the fact that her misery was so deep that she could hardly face a day’s work on Fad magazine anymore, Lacy knew there was only one way that she could respond and salvage her dignity and what was left of her pride.
On her way to work each day she mailed everything back to him from the post office: the delicate green chiffon gown with matching underwear and shoes, the dramatic red velvet costume and accessories, then the fabulous Revillon Freres sable still in its original gold-embossed box.
But so much weeping, both sorrowful and angry, had taken its toll. Thursday morning Lacy wore dark glasses to work to cover her noticeably red and swollen eyes, even though it made it difficult to see the computer terminal on her desk to try to write. She wasn’t surprised to find managing editor Gloria Farnham standing at the door of her office just before lunch time, regarding her with an unusually thoughtful expression.
“There’s an awful lot of space in here for just one person,” the managing editor said, “don’t you think, Stacy? And now that it’s almost winter, the air conditioning doesn’t get used much, does it?” She extracted a clipping from the slash pockets of the Dior jacket she was wearing and looked around vaguely before putting it on Lacy’s desk. “Here, sweetie,” she said, “I was just reading this morning’s WWD, and I thought you’d like to have this.”
Lacy waited until the managing editor had floated back out to the editorial room before she picked up the Women’s Wear Daily clipping to read it. After she’d read it, she wished she hadn’t.
“The on-again, off-again romance,” the bible of the rag trade reported, “between Michael Echevarria, New York’s most eligible millionaire and chairman of the board of venerable Fad magazine’s conglomerate owners, and Dulcie Ford-Manning, socialite designer, is on again. Dulcie, whose firm, Ford-Manning Associates, did Michael’s Sutton Place condominium for New York’s Design Showcase in 1983, will once again put her talents to work with a new contract for the décor of his new home in North Wilton, Connecticut. The happy couple were seen tête-à-tête at Dulcie’s cousin Trish Vanderbilt’s Tavern on the Green fund-raiser Monday night for local Republican candidates.”
Lacy crumpled the clipping and went into the employees’ lounge to burst into tears again, not caring who saw her among the women staffers gathered there to eat their brown-bag lunches.
Now she knew, Lacy told herself, flushing the toilet loudly to drown out the sound of her furious sobbing, who was responsible for the Sutton Place-contemporary horror that made Michael Echevarria’s condo the absolute pits. She wouldn’t have believed it possible to feel the knifelike pain of betrayal over the WWD’s “off-again, on-again” description of his romance with the interior decorator. So there had been other women! Women before, during and after he’d met her, she was positive. It put their whole relationship on such a shabby, demeaning level Lacy could hardly stand it.
When she finally wept herself dry and came out of the editorial department’s women’s lounge, putting her dark glasses back on, she could barely make out the figure of managing editor Gloria Farnham waiting for her.
“Oh, there you are, Stacy Kingsley,” the managing editor said, looking over Lacy’s head to a spot far away in
the publicity department. “Just take a quick lunch break, will you? We’re moving your things out of the office until we can find you a spot over in graphics with the rest of the junior fashion writers.”
Lacy couldn’t speak, her tears surging up again. She didn’t take a lunch break; instead, she took the elevator to the lobby of the Fad Publishing Group building and used a pay telephone there to call the New York executive offices of Echevarria Enterprises, Inc.
“May I ask who’s calling, please?” the secretary in the office of the chairman of the board said.
“It’s Lacy Kingston,” she replied, trying to keep her tearful voice steady.
But the cool, crisp voice on the other end of the line said, “Mr. Echevarria is in a meeting right now. If you’ll leave your name and telephone number, I’ll see if he can get back to you.”
There it was, Lacy thought. It had finally happened. He wasn’t taking her calls. He—they—were through. Somehow, even though Michael had returned the fabulous gowns to her, even had the magnificent sable coat forwarded because it had already been altered, even though there was a deep, profound silence that indicated there’d be no more Friday night dates, she really didn’t think he would reach into the levels of one of his newer acquisitions, Fad magazine, to take her desk away from her!
“How long will he be in the meeting?” Lacy persisted, resting her forehead against the cool marble wall of the lobby as she clasped the telephone receiver.
“Forever,” the cool voice said crisply, and hung up.
Lacy stared at the telephone, which had just switched to a soothing humming tone in her grip. He wasn’t taking her calls. He was seeing another woman. He’d gone from that disastrous scene in his bedroom in his country house in Connecticut Sunday morning to dating an old flame society decorator on Monday night in a fast switch that was unbelievable! His insensitive ruthlessness was incredible.
And you said you loved this monster? Lacy’s inner voice jeered.
Not any more, she told herself, dashing away the last of her tears with the back of her hand. She lifted her head and stared across the lobby of the Fad Publishing Building, biting her lips. A firm, proud resolve was finally replacing the soggy despair of the past few days. Lacy picked up her purse from the ledge under the public telephone. This whole thing had gone beyond the bounds of anything personal. Now it was a matter of principle.
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