“I’ll bet you’ve never seen anything quite like that,” she boasted, beaming from ear to ear.
“No, no, I haven’t,” said Scarlett truthfully. “Never.”
“I designed that myself, with the most stunning stones the boys bought me for my sixtieth. Just imagine how many Africans they must have helped with that piece alone.”
“I’m afraid it doesn’t work quite like that,” began Scarlett tentatively, but Minty waved away her objections, steamrollering her way through the conversation with the same unstoppable good humor she used to silence Jake and his father, waxing lyrical about how her sixtieth birthday had been the best she’d ever had, and how it was all thanks to her darling, thoughtful boys.
“You look tired, my dear,” she said, changing the subject at last after a full five-minute monologue. “Is everything all right?”
“Scarlett’s had a bit of a shock recently,” said Jake, explaining about the break-in and arson attack at Bijoux. “Because of her charity work…”
“With the Africans?” asked Minty.
“Yeah, because of all that, she’s upset some of the big mine owners. So now they’re trying to get back at her.”
Scarlett looked surprised. Cameron and the police had been so dismissive of her suspicions of Brogan she hadn’t expected Jake to take them seriously either.
“You really think it could have been O’Donnell?” she asked him hopefully.
“After what you told me in the car about the threats you’ve been getting, I’d say it was odds on. Not that you’ll ever pin it on him. That bastard’s more slippery than a used condom.”
“Jake, language.” It was the first time Scarlett had heard his father speak—after forty years of marriage to Minty, he must be sorely out of practice—and even then he didn’t look up from his roast chicken.
“Yes, Jacob, really,” his mother agreed. “I’m sure Scarlett doesn’t want to hear that sort of talk, not after all she’s been through. I hope you were insured, my dear.”
“Oh, yes, yes, thank goodness,” said Scarlett. “It really wasn’t that bad. I can rebuild the business.” She felt unaccountably embarrassed discussing what had happened. Even her skin had started tingling with a very British urge to play down the situation, and she was pretty sure she was blushing.
“Jake’s had some business trouble of his own out in America,” said Minty. “More applesauce?”
“Er, no, thanks, I’m fine,” said Scarlett, intrigued. “What sort of trouble?”
“It’s nothing,” said Jake, shooting his mother a “for God’s sake put a sock in it” look. “A couple of down months, that’s all. Solomon Stones is doing fine.”
“Yes, dear, but Daniel’s numbers were more than twice yours in September, weren’t they?” said Minty. “That’s not normal.” Having missed the first dirty look he’d given her, she caught this second one but misinterpreted it as brotherly jealousy. “My boys are very competitive with each other,” she whispered conspiratorially to Scarlett. “Jake especially is used to being the best. He doesn’t like to be beaten by Danny, do you, sweetheart?”
Now it was Jake’s turn to blush. Scarlett, who couldn’t remember ever having seen him look unsure, couldn’t help but smile. It was tough to keep up one’s suave, Casanova image with a mother like Minty. It occurred to her how surprising it was that he’d invited her to his family home and allowed her to see his carefully constructed public persona being debunked so remorselessly. For a passing moment, he went up in her estimation.
By the time dinner was finally over and Scarlett had gorged herself still further on apple pie and fresh whipped cream, she’d started to have sympathy for those poor fat people on Jerry Springer who had to be wedged out of their houses by a crane. It was late, but when Jake suggested a moonlit stroll to “walk things off,” she jumped at the chance, desperate for some cool night air and an opportunity to see if her limbs still functioned.
“If I die of a clogged artery in the night, I’m blaming you,” she said, following him out onto the street as they set out up the hill toward St. John’s Wood.
“Mum was right; you needed a good meal,” said Jake, taking off his coat and draping it over her shoulders. “You’ll sleep like a rock tonight.”
“I feel like a rock,” grumbled Scarlett. “I feel like Mount bloody Blanc.” But in fact the inner warming sensation of a full stomach and the gentle caress of the evening breeze on her cheeks was making her deeply content in a way that she hadn’t been since making love to Magnus. Christ, she really must stop thinking about Magnus.
“So what is your plan?” asked Jake, slowing his pace to give her time to catch up. “Are you going to reopen the shop?”
Scarlett’s face fell. “I honestly don’t know. I don’t think I can afford to, not immediately. Plus, I have so many commitments with the campaign—”
“Ah, of course. The campaign.” Jake rolled his eyes.
“I’m not giving it up, you know,” said Scarlett hotly. “Not on your life.”
“Has anyone ever told you you sound like a hall monitor when you get angry? From one of those posh schools?” said Jake. “Not on your life,” he mimicked her cut-glass accent brilliantly. “Give me a break.”
Scarlett took the teasing in good part. “Your parents are lovely,” she said after a while.
“Thanks.” He gave her a broad, genuine smile. “Mum can be a bit much.”
“Oh, but I adore that; she’s so bubbly and warm. And she obviously dotes on you,” added Scarlett knowingly.
Jake shrugged. “She’s a Jewish mother; what can I say? She really liked you, by the way. She normally gives a major cold front to women she suspects of being interested in me or Danny. Especially shiksas.”
Scarlett stopped in her tracks. “I am not interested in you!” she said, horrified. “My God. The arrogance!”
“Calm down,” said Jake, walking on ahead. “I never said you were. I said Mum might have assumed you were, that’s all.”
“Why would she assume that?” spluttered Scarlett. “On what possible basis—”
“She thinks all women are after me,” said Jake matter-of-factly. “In fairness to her, most of them are.”
Not sure whether he was joking or not, Scarlett said nothing. He was almost at the top of the hill now and hadn’t looked back, leaving her little option but to run panting after him.
“Hold on,” she gasped, when she reached the top. “I need to catch my breath.” Sinking down onto a bench, she sat slumped forward, waiting for her lungs to recover. Jake, who seemed irritatingly amused by her exhaustion, came and sat beside her.
“I actually came by your shop today to make you a proposition,” he said.
Slowly, Scarlett sat up, fixing him with a deeply suspicious look.
“Oh, so now we get to it,” she said. “Somehow I thought tonight’s coziness must be too good to be true.”
Jake frowned. “Do you ever get down from that high horse of yours?”
The jab hit home, and for a moment Scarlett was silent.
“All right then,” she said eventually. “Prove me wrong. What’s your proposition?”
“You think O’Donnell’s out to get you,” said Jake. Scarlett nodded. “I agree. If we’re both right, this won’t be the last time he tries to pull something. He obviously has…people…in London he can use. People who don’t much care whom they hurt.”
“You’re depressing me,” said Scarlett. Under the lamplight her pale skin looked golden, bathed in an eerie, electric glow. “The proposition?”
“You want to rebuild your business, but you’re worried about money.”
She nodded again.
“You don’t want to wind down your Trade Fair campaign.”
“Absolutely not. If anything, this shows how much we’re rattling the big players like Brogan.”
“I agree,” said Jake. Catching her astonished look, he added, “Look, it’s not rocket science. I’m not saying I support what you’re d
oing. I think it’s all a load of old crap, if you want the truth. But if you didn’t matter to these guys, they’d leave you alone.”
Silence fell again. Jake was staring straight ahead, looking out over the treetops of Regent’s Park. Studying his profile, the strong jaw, perfectly straight nose, and slightly jutting chin, Scarlett was forced grudgingly to admit that he was quite revoltingly handsome, even if all he cared about was making a fast buck.
“So what’s your proposition?” she asked again. “If you don’t want me to drop Trade Fair?”
Jake turned and looked at her. “Come out to LA.”
“I’m sorry?” said Scarlett.
“London’s too dangerous and too expensive,” he said. “Your insurance money won’t go far here. In LA it’d buy you a fantastic space in a prime area.”
“Yes, but my business is here,” said Scarlett, stating the obvious. “My suppliers, my clients, all my contacts.”
“I’ll supply you in LA,” said Jake.
“You?” Scarlett looked suitably thunderstruck.
“Yes, me,” said Jake, visibly put out. “Fair prices, no funny business. You need a supplier, and I could do with a steady retail outlet to supplement my private sales.”
“Come on,” said Scarlett, her old skepticism returning. “I only buy clean stones, stones that I can verify. You and Danny still source from Angola, for God’s sake!”
“Everything I sell you will be clean as a nun’s ass,” said Jake. “That’s a promise. I’ll also feed you clients, for a cut obviously.”
“Obviously,” said Scarlett.
“Hey, don’t knock it. I’ve got a little black book of contacts on the West Coast going back fifteen years.”
“Yes, I can just imagine the contents of your little black book.” Scarlett looked disapproving. “I really don’t think this would work, Jake.”
“That’s because you’re being narrow-minded and letting your feelings for me cloud your judgment,” he shot back, undeterred. “If you’re rattling Brogan now, just imagine how much more impact Trade Fair could have in the States. You’re talking about the biggest diamond-buying market in the world. Think about it.”
Scarlett thought about it. The idea did have a certain appeal.
“You could still do private commissions for your London clients. All I’m talking about is setting up a physical presence in LA, a new store. You want a fresh start, right?”
“Well, yes,” she admitted. “But I never envisioned leaving London. What if Brogan thinks I’m running away? That he’s driven me out of town?”
“Who cares what he thinks?” said Jake. “You can prove him wrong soon enough when you get out there and Trade Fair’s on the cover of Vanity fucking Fair. Come on, Scarlett. Think big!”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m really an LA sort of a person,” she said lamely. “Isn’t it rather shallow?”
“It’s a fucking paddling pool!” laughed Jake. “But they’ll love you. Honestly. You have no idea how much a posh British accent, never mind a castle and a title, means to them over there. Class is the one thing these people can’t buy, and you’ve got it in spades. I’m telling you, I know this market. We’ll rake it in.”
If anyone had told her yesterday that by midnight tonight she’d be seriously contemplating picking up and moving to Los Angeles, of all places—and not just moving there, but moving there to go into business with Jake Meyer!—she’d have looked at them as if they’d lost their mind. But maybe now she was losing hers. Because whichever way she turned it, it did seem like a good idea, or at least like a possibility. If Trade Fair cracked the States—if she cracked the States—there’d be no stopping her.
“I know it’s a big decision,” said Jake, who was a good enough salesman to know when to stop pushing. “All I’m asking is that you think about it. All right?”
He mustn’t sound desperate. He’d come up with the idea himself only a few days ago, after he heard what had happened at Bijoux, but already he’d come to see partnership with Scarlett as the answer to his prayers. He hadn’t wanted his mum to scare her off at dinner, but the truth was his business was suffering more than he cared to admit and had been for some time. Scarlett might be irritating, and her bear-baiting campaign would no doubt bring him a whole new set of problems to contend with. But a joint venture in LA—a new store, fronted by this beautiful, aristocratic, talented girl—would take the city by storm, he just knew it. Finally he’d have the rocket he needed to blow Tyler Brett out of the water.
“All right,” said Scarlett, trying to conceal her own excitement and not sound like a drowning woman who’d just been thrown an unexpected lifeline. “I’ll think about it.”
CHAPTER NINE
DIANA O’DONNELL TURNED up the volume on the stereo and kicked off her shoes.
Ella Fitzgerald’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” boomed out of Brogan’s new state-of-the-art Japanese speaker system as she twirled happily around the chalet, wiggling her bare toes in the luxurious softness of the carpet. All around her, white, oblong place cards, bearing names carefully crafted in festive red and green calligraphy, lay scattered on the floor like so much stiff confetti. Two Filipino maids were busy polishing the antique dining table and setting out the best silver candelabra. And behind Diana, in the bespoke Nordic pine kitchen, another two were preparing this evening’s appetizers—miniature Swiss cheese soufflés with a light white truffle sauce—and privately wondering what on earth had got into their usually restrained and often downright miserable mistress.
As usual, the O’Donnells were spending Christmas in Colorado at Brogan’s sprawling chalet-cum-mansion in Telluride. He had bought the property six years ago, since when he had spent less than sixty days here—five days every Christmas, plus one long skiing weekend in March each year—but a skeleton staff was kept on payroll all year round in case he loaned the house to friends or business associates or slipped up here for a snatched night away with one of his mistresses. Diana, who wasn’t a skier and often passed on the March trip, was an even shadowier presence in the chalet than her husband, appearing each Christmas like one of Dickens’s ghosts before flitting back to New York. The staff at Telluride, as at all her houses, had grown used to seeing her sad and listless, fulfilling her wifely hostess duties with the forced enthusiasm of a newly drafted recruit setting off for war.
But this year she was different. Smiling, chatty, animated. Dancing to cheesy Christmas songs. Spending hours perched on top of a ladder, decorating the thirty-foot tree that dominated the open-plan entrance hall in a riot of gaudy, clashing colors, a radical departure from the subdued silver-and-white-themed trees of previous years.
“I’ll have what she’s having,” whispered one cook to the other, watching Diana pirouetting around the living room like a five-year-old.
“That’ll be sex,” her friend whispered back. “Either that woman has a new lover or I’m the next Julia Roberts.”
“I hope so,” said the first cook, slicing truffle shavings onto a silver tray. “God knows she deserves a bit of fun, poor woman. His majesty gets enough.”
Sex, in fact, was the one thing Diana was missing. Danny had left for England two weeks ago, bringing their thrice-weekly lovemaking sessions to an agonizingly abrupt end, and wouldn’t be back until January. And Brogan, who usually demanded his conjugal rights at least every other night, had become mysteriously tired this vacation and barely touched her all week. He blamed a troublesome cough he’d developed recently that he seemed unable to shake, but Diana suspected his lower libido had more to do with Natalia, Premiere’s latest star model and one of their guests for tonight’s Christmas Eve dinner. Apparently in Telluride by coincidence, with friends, the girl seemed to be spending an awful lot of time in “meetings” with Brogan. This time last year, Diana reflected, a mistress’s presence at such a special family time of year would have wounded her deeply. Now, she was almost grateful for the distraction—anything to keep Brogan off her bac
k, literally and metaphorically, and throw him off the scent of her blossoming affair with Danny.
She wasn’t sure when her feelings for Danny had shifted from desire and affection to genuine love. Maybe it was the day after her birthday in November when he’d taken her dancing at a tiny, throbbing little salsa place in the Bronx that reminded her of her happy, carefree student days, and on the subway home had given her her present—a first edition of Wind in the Willows, her favorite book as a child. The night before, Brogan had taken her to the Four Seasons, dropped two thousand dollars on dinner and champagne, and presented her with an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar diamond choker. And she’d felt nothing but sadness. The sadness of knowing that the communication gap between the two of them was too wide now to ever be bridged, with or without Danny.
When Brogan asked her later where she’d gotten the book, she told him a girlfriend had given it to her.
“Damn stupid present,” he growled dismissively. “What the fuck do you need with a children’s book? Lisa knows we don’t have kids.”
Of course, everyone knew the O’Donnells didn’t have kids. Sometimes Diana felt like the most famous childless woman in Manhattan. Somewhere along the line, her failure to conceive a child with Brogan had become what defined her as a person. But slowly, thanks to Danny’s love, the layers of disappointment and grief were being peeled away. The fun, free-spirited girl who had once existed was clawing her way up out of the grave and back into the land of the living.
Of course, there were still plenty of problems to be faced. Her time with Danny was still snatched and furtive, and they often had to cancel rendezvouses at the last minute if Brogan’s travel or dinner plans changed. Danny’s impatience with these restrictions was growing. The night before he left for England they’d had a titanic fight about her marriage and why she didn’t “just end it.”
Flawless Page 16
