“Lacy, dear,” Alex van Renssalaer said as he wiped a smear of vanilla ice cream from his sleeve, “trust me in these matters, will you?”
“I don’t know,” Lacy moaned. “I’m having severe second thoughts. I never knew what you told me to say, that Michael was breaking the law with all those Friday-night dates, was going to lead to all this.” She shuddered. “Settlements. Money. Meetings. Federal court. The penitentiary!”
“Lacy, I’m going to make you a rich woman, please try to understand.” Alex showed his handsome white teeth in a happy smile. “Good God, you’ll be eminently marriageable, don’t you see? Didn’t you say your father was a lawyer, too? Why, there isn’t a fine old family in the country that wouldn’t fall all over itself to have you, beautiful as you are, and with, say, four or five million in your bank account.”
“Well, actually,” Lacy murmured, “I haven’t had all that many problems getting proposals, Alex. Last year—”
But he went on quickly. “Perhaps this isn’t the moment to broach the subject, but surely you have some small conception now of the way I feel about you.” He reached for her hand. “Darling Lacy,” he said rather hoarsely, “I want you to meet my mother. The trip to our family estate at Rynderkill-on-the-Hudson is very pleasant, and I know you’ll adore her. We could drive up just as soon as we know the ballpark figure Echevarria is going to settle for.”
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” Lacy asked, because she hadn’t been paying attention.
“I said, beautiful child,” Alexander van Renssalaer smiled at her a trifle indulgently, “I want to take you home to the family estate at Rynderkill-on-the-Hudson to meet my mother. Don’t you know what that means?”
“She likes company?” Lacy said blankly.
He sighed. “Of course she likes company. Dear heart, a trip to see Mommy means I’d like her to consider you as her future daughter-in-law. I’m sure you’ll get her stamp of approval.” His eyes kindled appreciatively. “You’re so beautiful, my love—all the van Renssalaer men have married exceptionally tall, fine-boned blond women. It’s rather a family tradition. Your unique, giddy charm will delight her.”
Giddy charm? Lacy stared at him. Was that how he saw her?
Then she thought: One of New York City’s most successful lawyers was proposing to her in the middle of the Yale Club.
Well, at least somebody wanted to marry her. And any woman in her right mind would be ecstatically happy to have a marriage proposal from Alexander van Renssalaer—would, in fact, jump at the chance to say yes. She would certainly like to see the look on Michael Echevarria’s face when she showed up in his executive offices and casually let him know that she was engaged to his archrival, the prominent New York attorney who hated him almost as much as she did! For a moment it almost took her breath away. It was certainly neater, better than any threat to take Michael into federal court.
“You mean, marry you?” Lacy said breathlessly, wanting to be sure.
Alex van Renssalaer beamed at her. “Of course.”
Going down in the Yale Club elevator, Lacy allowed the tall lawyer with his short-cropped reddish hair and intense, handsome features to draw her into his arms and place his mouth over hers. Unfortunately the kiss was a strange experience.
For the few moments that Alex van Renssalaer’s lips were pressed against Lacy’s, it was as though she had a total out-of-body experience. As though she floated, in fact, somewhere at the top of the Yale Club, above the swimming pool and gym, like a disembodied spirit, pleasantly viewing what was going on, but aloof from it all. When Alex van Renssalaer kissed her, there were no spirals, no stars, not the faintest echo of anything that remotely resembled an electrically charged zap! bam! or powie!
But that, she supposed, disconsolately, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that was doomed not to repeat itself.
“Well, we could try it,” Lacy said resignedly.
“Darling, we’ll go to Tiffany’s tomorrow and pick out a ring,” he told her, giving her a hug. “After we find out, approximately, what Echevarria’s going to fork over.”
Later that evening Lacy received a telephone call from her father out in East Hampton, Long Island.
“Lacy,” her father said in the stern tone of voice he used when addressing juries or his three headstrong, beautiful daughters, “what the hell’s going on down there in New York?”
“Oh, Daddy,” Lacy said, thinking fast, but filled with subliminal dread, “what do you mean, what’s going on down here?” Lacy gulped, knowing her father had almost a sixth sense about trouble learned the hard way. “Everything’s just fine, Daddy—I’m just between jobs again, that’s all.
“Why,” she said with false gaiety, “do you want to know?”
“I got a telephone call this afternoon,” her father went on ominously, “from some corporate counsel who says he works for Echevarria Enterprises, Incorporated, your employers. And that you’re bringing some pretty nasty federal charges against them.”
“Urk,” Lacy moaned, sliding down on the kitchen stool and bracing herself for what she knew was coming.
“What they’re asking me to do,” her father’s stern lawyer voice continued, “is come into the city tomorrow for a meeting with the president and chairman of the board called—I have the name somewhere here on my desk—”
“Echevarria,” Lacy moaned again. “It’s a Basque name. But his mother was Irish.”
“Yes, that’s the one. They say you’re charging somebody in their organization with sexual harassment on the job. Lacy, are you listening to me?” G. Frederick Kingston’s voice boomed from the easternmost reaches of Long Island. “Do you remember how much money it cost both of us to get things straightened out with that damned photographer a few years ago?”
Lacy sank down on the kitchen stool and clutched the telephone receiver in a suddenly sweaty hand. She was being framed! Michael Echevarria was reaching out not only to her but, to her family in a predictably ruthless maneuver! She might know he wouldn’t stand still for what she was doing, getting a famous lawyer like Alex van Renssalaer, someone he hated, to represent her. Now he was striking her vulnerable areas, bringing her father into this. Michael knew that all he had to do was mention one word—Tulsa—and it would take years for Lacy to get it straightened out with her family.
Fight it, her inner voice told her. You’re not a coward, Lacy Kingston. If Michael Echevarria wants to make this another lesson in humiliation because he can’t force you to accept his sleazy proposition, all that’s left to do is stand up and fight.
“First of all, Daddy,” she began indignantly, “this is a setup. And I’m not going to let Michael Echevarria do this to me.
“And second of all,” Lacy said, taking a deep breath, “I’m going to be an entirely different person from now on. I can’t explain it right now, but I am. I’m probably never going back into modeling, and I certainly am giving up being a fashion writer. It didn’t work out at all.
“Finally,” she rushed on, “I’m engaged to a very wonderful man from one of New York’s finest families. He’s a lawyer by the name of Alexander van Renssalaer, and if you’ll give me about fifteen minutes I can explain all this, believe me.”
It wasn’t fifteen minutes but an hour and a half later when Lacy finally hung up the telephone and ended her conversation with her father. She was still fuming as she dug into her closet looking for something to wear at the meeting with Michael Echevarria, his lawyer, Alexander van Renssalaer and her father, who was coming in from East Hampton at noon the following day.
She hadn’t been kidding when she’d told her father she was going to change her life completely. A new Lacy Kingston, eventually to be Lacy van Rennssalaer, would appear at the executive offices of Echevarria Enterprises, Inc. As promised. When her doorbell rang, Lacy greeted Candy O’Neill with grim determination.
The tall, redheaded model was in old jeans and a Nautilus sweat shirt and wore her hair up in pink foam-rubber curlers, since sh
e was meeting Walter Moretti for a date later that evening. But Candy’s face was full of concern.
“Gee, Lacy,” her friend told her, “are you sure you want to do this? I mean, practically nobody changes her image until she’s over thirty. And has to go into something like fashion consulting because she can’t get modeling jobs anymore. Don’t you remember what hap—”
“Never mind,” Lacy said, grabbing her friend by the wrist and dragging her inside. “I’m having a whole lifestyle crisis, and I need help.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Candy said doubtfully. She handed her a Halston dress on a hanger that was of the softest French-silk gauze in taupe and gold tones, with a high neck, long tight sleeves that ended in demure roll-back cuffs and a full skirt of midcalf length. “Gosh, Lacy, I haven’t worn this since I did the Tupperware Easter ad for House and Garden and they let me have it at cost because the account executive said it reminded him of Eleanor Roosevelt.”
“It’s perfect,” Lacy assured her. “Just let me try it on and see how it looks.”
“Oh, I don’t know, honey,” the model said, following her into the bedroom. “This might not be a good idea. You were always the queen of all that sexy pizazz and you know, glamourous, giddy—”
“Don’t say ‘giddy,’“ Lacy cried. “Really, Candy.”
“Well, zany, then,” Candy said quickly, “and that great, mind-blowing sparkle. Like the Virginia Slims ad that never—”
“Don’t remind me of my wasted life,” Lacy groaned. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I’ve got to change my image, grow more—severely mature.”
She went on bravely: “Michael Echevarria has really taught me about ruthlessness and power moves. Tomorrow when I go to that meeting in his office, I’m aiming for something totally, fantastically regal, serious and unapproachable. Like dignity and conservative sockaroo. Like—like the front cover of the Ladies’ Home Journal.”
“Oh, wow,” her friend said. She opened her makeup box. “What are we going for—the old Grace Kelly look? Meryl Streep? Linda Evans?”
Lacy opened her model’s makeup box, too. “The best of all of them,” she said glumly. “I’m going to win this time. I’m out to blow Michael Echevarria’s mind.”
Twenty
When Lacy stepped into the glass-enclosed Manhattan tower offices of the president and chairman of the board of Echevarria Enterprises, Inc., shock waves swept through the room.
If an admiring pause in the conversation, Lacy knew from her years of runway modeling, meant that she was looking her loveliest, then this stunned silence certainly indicated that on a scale from 1 to 10, she’d probably scored about a 20. The Lacy Kingston New Image transformation she and Candy O’Neill had worked over for long hours the night before was an eye-popping success, to judge from the faces turned to her. Including, Lacy saw, her own father. For a moment, G. Frederick Kingston failed to recognize his beloved youngest daughter. Then, unaccountably, he smiled.
A glistening coronet of braided fake hair that perfectly matched her own smoky-silver tresses rode the crown of Lacy’s elegant head, supporting an enchanting Princess of Wales cap of alternate twists of gold and brown faille, complete with a daring little nose veil, behind which her emerald eyes gleamed aloofly. Candy O’Neill’s Halston dress in tones of taupe-brown and palest gold silk chiffon swathed Lacy’s regally slender figure. An ever-drifting full skirt swirled around her long legs, and on her feet were a borrowed pair of Andrea Pfister classic pumps in the same taupe-brown shade of polished kid. Lacy’s face wore an expression that was serenely imperial, as though she were listening to heralds announcing her arrival to examine the credentials of not terribly presentable foreign ambassadors.
The imperial serenity faltered a little when Lacy entered. She could see her gray-haired, distinguished lawyer father had apparently been having an absorbing, if not actually downright friendly conversation with the president and chairman of the board and a small man in the familiar wolfish black clothes of the conglomerate who was evidently the corporation lawyer.
“Daddy,” Lacy cried, temporarily dropping her imperial detachment, “what are you doing in here? You were supposed to meet us outside!”
“Hello, puss,” G. Frederick Kingston said, giving his daughter an affectionate peck on the cheek. “I thought I’d come early and look over, um, statements Michael’s already made concerning the charges.”
Michael? Lacy was unpleasantly surprised. What had they been talking about? Alex van Renssalaer shifted his briefcase to his left hand to shake hands with her father and the corporation’s attorney. She had wanted her father and her fiancé by her side as sort of troops surrounding her. Not consorting with the enemy.
As for the enemy, Lacy could hardly ignore him.
Michael Echevarria, she saw with a very unmonarchial pounding of her heart, was on his feet behind an ebony desk the size of an Olympic hockey field, wrapped sleekly in an all-black business suit with pale-gray button-down shirt and dark-gray silk tie. His hard, good-looking face seemed more than usually taut; his silver eyes glittered. Were those fine lines of strain around his narrowed eyelids? The president and chairman of the board of one of the country’s largest and most powerful conglomerates held a cigar clamped in his strong white teeth so tightly it angled ceilingward. It was strain, Lacy decided, with a shiver.
It had to come sometime—she had to meet that bone-chilling glare; she couldn’t put it off, since they were both in the same room. But as Lacy steeled herself for the inevitable eye contact, she was considerably disappointed to find that Michael Echevarria’s attention was fixed on Alex van Renssalaer.
“Get that society shyster out of here,” Michael Echevarria barked, glowering at the New York lawyer. “He’s not representing anybody here. Get him out!”
The forceful words jolted them all. Even the Echevarria corporate lawyer rather nervously began to rearrange stacks of Xeroxed papers he had laid out on a side table.
“Daddy, I need to tell you something,” Lacy said urgently to her father. She had expected a calm, intense group around a conference table, with high-level negotations bouncing from one legal brain to another like a ball of lightning. Not Michael Echevarria snarling orders to throw out Alex van Renssalaer from behind a desk that looked like an anti-tank barrier. “Could you just stand here,” Lacy hissed, “with Alex on my other side? For goodness’ sake, can we look united and—dignified?”
“I am representing Miss Kingston jointly with her father,” Alex van Renssalaer responded. “Sir,” he said, turning to G. Frederick Kingston, “I’d like to suggest a conference with you before we go any further, regarding the vile and untoward events which have taken place as a result of this man’s actions toward his employee, your daughter.”
“Vile and untoward, hell,” the chairman of the board snarled. He stubbed out his cheroot violently in a large silver ashtray. “This clown van Renssalaer isn’t representing anybody except the outfit he takes money from, Ransom Tri-Star Technologies! I want him out of here!”
Why wouldn’t he look at her? Lacy wondered. Her expression of queenly reserve was fading fast. The New Lacy Kingston was getting lost in the opening salvos of this macho blitz.
“Daddy,” Lacy murmured, lifting the delicate little Princess of Wales nose veil between thumb and forefinger in order to see, “what’s Tri-Star Technologies? Can we—?”
“You’re going to get creamed, Echevarria,” Alexander van Renssalaer was saying with a coldly aristocratic smile. “It’s a federal rap this time. You’ve taken advantage of a sweet, lovely girl. What we’re talking is an out-of-court settlement. Before you get in any deeper.”
“Regarding these allegations and others,” the corporation’s lawyer said quickly, holding the Xeroxed copies he’d gathered up from the table, “perhaps it would serve to clarify matters if the parties present referred to this statement by Mr. Echevarria as to what was actually involved in his relationship with Miss Kingston.”
“Christ, I’m going to have to do this myself,” the chairman of the board exploded, coming around the edge of his mammoth desk.
“No, you don’t,” Lacy cried, stepping in front of Alex, who was skimming the Xerox copies the corporation’s lawyer had just handed him. “He is representing me—you have nothing to do with it! Mr. van Renssalaer is a very prominent and successful lawyer from a fine old New York family.”
But the man behind her said, “We don’t want to give the impression we won’t listen to an offer, Echevarria. Isn’t that right, Mr. Kingston?”
“I’ll pass on that right now,” Lacy’s lawyer father murmured, “if you don’t mind.”
“Let’s get down to it,” Alex van Renssalaer went on as he hastily scanned the Xeroxes. “You’re hanging on the wall, Echevarria. What’s the opening figure?”
“He’s a damned gofer for Ches Ransom of Tri-Star, and he’s after my ass, not settlements,” Michael Echevarria growled, peeling off his suit jacket and displaying powerful shoulder muscles rippling under the gray Cardin shirt. “I want him out of here!”
“Honey,” G. Frederick Kingston said pleasantly, “I think you’re in the line of fire. Why don’t you step over here beside me?”
“What’s this about a hotel in Tulsa?” Alex van Renssalaer was muttering as he held his bundle of pages up to the light.
“I think the idea of holding a fact-finding conference at this time,” G. Frederick Kingston said, trying to move his daughter out of harm’s way, “might not be a bad idea.”
“Not under dispute,” the corporation’s lawyer was pointing out hurriedly to Alex van Renssalaer, “is the title to the Ferrari XKZ or the key to the safe-deposit box with the jewels which remain in the complainant’s name and which are inventoried under ‘Appendix A.’ My client waives all rights—he very generously wants Miss Kingston to have them.”
“I’m a changed person, Michael Echevarria,” Lacy cried, giving the skirt of the clinging Halston an impatient twitch. “You’re not going to make me lose my temper this time!”
Hustle Sweet Love Page 21