Thierry Moinot saluted. He was wearing straight-leg jeans, a fresh pair of black Nike Air Force 1 sneakers, and a gray bomber jacket. His ponytail stuck out of the back of his plain black cap. At thirty-seven, and a very slight man, he didn’t want the balding part to show. Thierry kept the hat on all day every day when the sun and lights tended to highlight the thinning hair on top. He wasn’t too successful with the ladies. Anything to help.
Once Eddie had demolished his croque monsieur and inhaled the chips he maintained he didn’t want, Véronique cleared the table. Thierry got the signal and crossed the street slowly, like a fighter readying to duel. He was the son of one of the greatest polo players ever to play in Europe. Certainly, the greatest to die in debt.
When Thierry sat down, Eddie asked, “What’s with the attitude? I’m paying you.”
“Given everything, you have no right to discuss my mood,” Thierry stared flatly. “I’ve done everything you and Philippe asked me to do. I play ball, and I deliver.”
Eddie nodded. “Well, you got everything?”
“It’s Philippe who got everything for you. I believe it is as you wish. Fifty-three prized animals in your new stables in Bridgehampton.”
“And all the equipment? The bridles? Every fuckin’ fake Hermès saddle I ordered from his bullshit replica people who charge me close to full fare?”
“No one will know the difference; he promised you that. All the equipment is out there. I’ve been working all week. It looks like the fanciest vineyard in the world, not a stable for horses. Just like you planned. And ready for the Memorial Day weekend.” Thierry was thinking it was a pretty shitty thing to sell clients fake Hermès who could afford the real deal anyway. Nothing made sense to Thierry about Philippe and Eddie’s arrangements on the whole horse complex. He was only doing his best for little Rosie.
Back in his Maybach, Marcus McCree snuck a sideways glance. Something was up today with Clarkson. He wished he could read lips as well as his deaf little sister. Next time they drove down here, he’d tell Justine to rush and sit discreetly again in the bistro. While Eddie Clarkson ate his two-thousand-calorie French sandwich, Justine had translated all his crazy shit twice now. By the look on Thierry Moinot’s face, he could tell there was much more he needed to understand to protect that Caroline Clarkson. She was always too nice to everyone, including her husband. Marcus vowed to stick behind this wheel, for this client only, until he had it all under control.
Chapter 4
Strange Stroll
“Let’s go get your work stuff done,” Annabelle said as she and Caroline left the pier. “One more thing, though: Why did you keep saying you felt strange on that bench? Don’t think I didn’t notice you evaded my question.”
“You’re going to think I’ve lost my mind,” Caroline answered cautiously. “But I’m a little off today because I honestly thought I saw Joey Whitten.” Her heart plunged into the depths as she admitted this out loud; she kept picturing Joey’s stubbly beard and his firm, square jaw. And then, imagining the waves overtaking him, that beautiful face sinking.
To this day, she’d sense Joey’s presence in the room sometimes, and would hold her arms tight to her body, feeling him. She whispered to him when she walked on their beach off Atlantic Avenue. Many times during a random hour on any day, she still felt an urge to tell Joey about something funny or stupid someone had said. But, as her grandmother on the Henderson side told her at his funeral: We don’t end up with the one we love the most.
That was the saddest thing she ever heard.
After an emotional year of walking around in a virtual zombie state after Joey’s death, Caroline finally fell into Eddie Clarkson’s arms. Eddie had pursued her relentlessly since they were in the ninth grade. When their algebra teacher kicked him out of class for a rude, rebellious comment, as she did pretty much every few days, he’d smile at Caroline on the way out. No one her age had ever shown off for her, winked at her and meant it. Eddie’s insurrections had made her ache to know him better. Finally, one afternoon in his attic, they made out so hard her lips stung for days.
Since that one kiss, that one Algebra class, Eddie had never once fallen for anyone else, even during the six years she was with Joey. Eddie had told her that about five thousand times ever since. When he teased that he was her rebound man, the joke always made Caroline uncomfortable. A year after the tragic drowning, it felt good to be held so tightly, to succumb to a strong man she’d known for a decade, who loved her fiercely. And no man would top his marriage proposal, on his knee in that insane medieval costume.
“He’s gone, honey,” Annabelle reminded her as she tapped on a restaurant window beside her on the sidewalk. “Once we get your work done, let’s have lunch here, then to Eddie’s stables to check on the ponies.” She hoped Caroline wouldn’t detect that she really wanted to check up on that new polo playing trainer, Philippe de Montaigne. What a delicious name. The body was beyond. She went on, “And, sorry, what’s possibly going through your mind that would make you believe you saw Joey Whitten?”
Caroline’s face turned more serious, as if honoring something precious. “I saw a little boat like his, a Boston Whaler in the harbor. The guy had his exact profile. And I’m remembering everything . . . even the feel of his face.”
“The feel of his face? What are you talking about?” Annabelle asked, never a big romantic. “I mean, I get it, he was dreamy, but why would you think you saw him? Kind of ghoulish, no?” She knew Caroline was always more emotionally affected by things big and small. One memory could launch her friend into a completely different mood.
Caroline thought about the old bed in his grandfather’s beach shack, how the lights never worked, and how the ocean breeze wafted through the windows and always blew out the candles. How that annoyed Joey because he couldn’t see her nude any longer, beneath him, beside him, over him. Afterward, they’d laugh about how the wind was always strongest right when they were in the height of it, not the time to stop and relight candles.
Caroline huffed. All of it, too sad. And so fresh in her mind, even the smell of the blown-out candlewicks.
“Are you going to answer me, or are you going to walk into this piece of metal?” Annabelle asked, as she yanked Caroline closer to her, saving her from the sharp edge of a street sign that nearly cut her head. “Just because you saw a Boston Whaler, literally the most common boat in any marina on the Eastern Seaboard, and some guy with a handsome profile driving it, doesn’t mean Joey’s come back from the depths of the sea to screw you.”
“Stop.” Caroline laughed. “It’s been thirteen years, and I still remember everything about him: his voice, what made him laugh, every second of being naked with him.” Even the scent of sex seemed to be heavy in the humid air around Caroline today. “He used to make me smile just by walking in the room, and that guy on the boat, just like Joey, had these kind of sculpted arms, curved in, slumped shoulders, that . . . I don’t know; there are men that just linger in us, forever.”
“C’mon, you’re never going to get over that one,” Annabelle replied. “He’s gonna linger, Caroline.”
The deckhands holding brushes and rags stopped working as the two beautiful women walked down the pier. Caroline, at a young-looking thirty-eight, was round all over her short, tight body, with balloon breasts and a full behind. She could sense men and women alike watching her piercing blue eyes and her curvy build when she walked down the sidewalk or into any restaurant. Even when Caroline was little, her mother used to say she stopped traffic on Main Street with her fair skin against her Snow White, jet-black bob.
Meanwhile, Annabelle, at forty, walked like a ballerina, even though she never took one dance class in her life. At a lean five foot ten, her straight, Nordic blond hair fell down her back and ended in a manicured line that swayed side to side as she moved, like a freshly cut hedgerow. The muscles in her thighs were outlined through her tight, white jeans, especially when she knelt in that way she knew highlighted her body.
“You’re thinking about Joey because summer is starting, and you both loved the beach, and then when I pressed you about our affair plan, it got worse,” Annabelle reminded her, wrapping her rose cashmere sweater around her shoulders like a true American aristocrat.
“Your affair plan.”
“Okay, mine, but possibly yours too. That got you thinking about the crazy sex you said you always had with Joey. And besides, if you’re going to sit on a bench for a long time and get all insane and depressed, then you can easily imagine some shadow out on the water is something it isn’t.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Caroline said.
And now, way out of the women’s sight on the other side of the Sag Harbor town bridge, that Boston Whaler idled offshore, Joey Whitten at the wheel. With his Yankees baseball cap tightly pulled down over his face, he drove that boat in a similar daze. He had seen Caroline too, and he knew she was no ghost, but his raven-haired love. Those twenty worn photos he’d touched and caressed every day, now curled at the edges, white scratches crinkling the surface, didn’t show the real story. In the last thirteen unlucky years, Caroline had become even more beautiful than he ever remembered.
Chapter 5
It’s Très Chaud in the Hamptons
As a delivery truck exited Eddie Clarkson’s equine complex, Philippe de Montaigne drove his clementine-orange convertible Porsche toward its rear gate. The fresh air blew back his floppy French hair, and he wondered if the rushing wind might flatten his natural waves a tad too much. The former polo champion pushed his new Persol sunglasses down his nose a bit and stared at his penetrating bedroom eyes in the rearview mirror. Was it possible these glasses made him even more handsome than the vintage Ray-Bans he’d worn for decades?
As this megalomaniac stared at himself instead of the road, his car veered across the center line, while a delivery truck roared down Spring Farm Lane toward him. The truck driver honked loudly, just in time to avoid a head-on collision. “Merde alors!” Philippe screamed out the window, blaming yet another American who couldn’t drive. He would not recognize the delivery driver, nor know that the man had no business being anywhere near Sea Crest Stables.
Philippe punched in the code to the back entrance. This gate was constructed of plain steel rails, far inferior to the white basket-weave woodwork entrance that welcomed clients out front. Philippe was the head trainer of Sea Crest Stables after all, not a junior employee. He imagined his grandmother watching him now, trying to fathom a world where her grandson, Philippe de Montaigne, had been formally relegated to the service entrance.
Eddie Clarkson insisted anyone making an actual salary at his new equine complex not sully the front area with cars and their resultant dust. When Philippe complained about parking his vintage sports car in the back near the hay bales and porta potties, Eddie answered, “Yep. The back. It’ll set an example for the rest of the staff. You know, that you’re on their team.”
Since his infamous polo accident had put an end to his modeling and sponsorships days, Philippe was exceedingly low on funds. He needed this job, but he didn’t remember Eddie explaining that he would be treated like the guys who raked up the horse shit. He had, after all, introduced those polo playing investors to Eddie in the first place. Upon hearing the entrance rules, Philippe had raised his right eyebrow in that way that made women weak with desire. He asked, “The back, I see. If you park in the front, does that then mean you are not on their team?”
“I own shit, I run shit, and I drive where I want,” Eddie replied.
Philippe had considered telling Eddie to suck his huge French dick right then and there. Americans were like that, always categorizing people by how much money they had. Philippe’s ancestors were barons and counts, and inside the circles of refined people on the other side of the Atlantic, breeding, not one’s financial assets, mattered most.
Philippe parked beside a stinking manure pile and slammed the door of his Porsche shut, rattling the car with a tinny bang. The door handle was a bit loose, but he didn’t have the money to spend on an overpriced mechanic. It had been three years of hell with his endorsements gone and income dribbling in. No company wanted a forty-five-year-old with a leg limp as the face and body of their products. He walked through the dirt, the pain from the iron rod in his left leg constant. His right arm was so mangled from the collision of seven horses that it still hung awkwardly from his shoulder. Thank the good Lord his fingers still worked on the crucial lady parts. That light, butterfly fluttering touch of his caused women’s eyes to roll into their heads, and to moan like wounded donkeys.
Philippe’s polo accident, replayed on YouTube 493,238 times so far, was known in elite horse circles as “the big one.” In the smash-up two years before, all the riders were jettisoned from their saddles, and several horses tumbled onto their sides. Philippe was thrown as if he’d been flung from a giant medieval slingshot. He lay in the dirt for minutes, his limbs splayed like a starfish’s, before anyone, including the EMTs, dared to move him.
His polo days over, this trainer job made sense on numerous counts. The French partners that basically owned Eddie Clarkson had told Philippe to leave everything to the Americans, that the deal would flush him with cash. It was Maryanne who would keep everything running smooth and on the down-low. Eddie Clarkson was a diverting sideshow. Everyone knew that.
As for Eddie’s side, when the French investors pushed their man Philippe as a watchdog employee, he agreed right away. Eddie knew his clientele well, the main key to his success in real estate. Philippe’s bad boy brown hair and doe-like eyes would not only provide the right cover, but lure clients in—especially the fortysomething moms heading full throttle toward adultery and divorce. He’d told Maryanne early on, “That’s the kind of polo-playing playboy I want as the head trainer: catnip to all those unhappily married felines.”
As Philippe entered the center hallway of the main stables, his proximity to Earth’s noblest creatures started to repair his sour mood. He reminded himself that an entry gate did not count in life, only manners and penile girth did, and to put his ego aside.
Watching the moms’ asses bouncing in their tight horse breeches would make Eddie’s idiotic rules easier to bear as well. He liked to complain, but the reality was this: as he strolled by the prized animals he trained, he could hardly wait for summer to begin.
The stables building, made in the shape of an X, housed forty stalls in each of four long halls that met in a middle, circular room. A fountain punctuated the center with navy and white mosaic tiled walls that rose to a cathedral ceiling with flying buttresses. Eddie had picked a deep blue to match first-place ribbons, his lucky, winning color.
Philippe stopped at the third stall on the right, Seaside engraved on a brass nameplate on the door. A prima donna worthy of his fame, Seaside’s balletic stride earned national championships in the prestigious amateur-owner hunter divisions. The animal, belonging to that American delight, Annabelle von Tattenbach, stood imperiously in his housing, playing hard to get.
Philippe grabbed a huge, deformed carrot out of a bucket and snapped it in two. The gelding turned quickly for the treat, suddenly finding his trainer worthy of attention. Philippe fed a piece on his outstretched palm and patted the distinctive seahorse-shaped spot on Seaside’s face. He then grabbed both sides of the bridle and planted a kiss squarely on his nose. “You snob,” he said. “You only talk to me if I feed you. I love you anyway.”
Philippe heard the wooden barn doors at the far stable hallway slide open. That very Annabelle von Tattenbach strolled toward him, her slender legs slicing through beams of sun and clouds of dust. Eddie’s beautiful wife walked beside her. Grading Caroline’s physique, he decided she was too fleshy in the hindquarters, too roundly American for him—a good thing since she was married to his boss. A bit disgusted by her full thighs, he thought, yes, resisting Caroline Clarkson would be easy. He fancied women with coltish legs, long necks, and a more aristocratic way about them. Women
should be tightly formed, but with muscles that weren’t too defined.
“Philippe!” Annabelle said, as she removed her sunglasses and approached him. She pulled her blond, shiny hair from a clip. It was thick and straight like a horse’s tail, as it fell suggestively around her face.
Philippe delicately touched her hair and guided her toward him with his left hand on her upper arm. Annabelle pulled back, feigning surprise at his boldness. He held on tight and forced a soft hello kiss near her ear anyway, burying his nose in her hair. “You smell so lovely, like spring,” he whispered, raising his left eyebrow. “When is our lesson?”
“Seaside looks so happy in his new stall, don’t you think?” Annabelle motor-mouthed. “How could he not? He’s such a beauty. And One Hot Pepper, Mouse, Cappa, and Parker are ready for my daughters, I see! Will the rings be available for my girls on Sunday after the party? Or, because it’s a holiday weekend, will they be in group lessons with everyone else?”
“We can work out anything you like,” Philippe said. “The plan is yours to decide.” He smiled. “Before the party, after the party, the next day. I’ll cancel everyone but you and your girls.”
Caroline, speechless again at this man’s constant audacity, put her hands on her hips. This was no good. She tried to act stern, but she had to bite her lip not to laugh at him.
“I’m happy we’re done with the old, crowded rings and that nasty trainer from the barn where we used to ride. I won’t even mention his name,” Annabelle answered, referring to her four equestrian-obsessed daughters—Lily, Liza, Louisa, and Laetitia (aged eight to fourteen, two years apart)—and the other stables they’d used for years. “And, yes, I’d love to set on a training regimen for the girls. The danger of all the horses jumping in two small rings was terrifying, and the reason why we moved the ponies and horses to the more spacious Sea Crest to begin with. I thought the girls were going to have terrible accidents.” She looked down. “I mean, not a major collision like yours, Philippe, but still. It looked dangerous to a mother.”
It's Hot in the Hamptons Page 3
