Too Damn Rich

by Gould, Judith

  Their departure had not gone unnoticed.

  Behind the unmarked police car's arthritic, ineffectual wipers, Charley Ferraro sat rigidly erect, clammy, shivering hands gripping the steering wheel with such ferocity that his knuckles shone white. He felt wounded, stung, betrayed. Like the child who'd been warned about never hearing good things said behind its back, but who'd gone ahead and eavesdropped anyway.

  He supposed the same went for spying on people.

  Only it hadn't been his intention to spy upon Kenzie. The sole reason he'd come and suffered more than a half hour of the stifling, humid confines of this car had been to offer her a lift home, prove he bore no grudge for having been eighty-sixed from her apartment earlier in the evening.

  He laughed mirthlessly, a harsh, grating rasp like that of sandpaper on iron.

  And how had the Good Samaritan been rewarded? Why, by getting to witness her departure—her umbrella-less dash down the steps while pursued by—well, whoever the guy was! And watching him twirling her around in the rain—the two of them acting like lovers in a god

  damn Broadway musical!—before climbing into the back of that garish white superstretch.

  His chest felt tight, ready to explode.

  "Shit!" He clenched his right hand in a fist and slammed it down on the steering wheel. Too late, he wished he'd stayed the hell home. He sure could have saved himself a ton of heartache if he had.

  But the fact of the matter was, he hadn't stayed home! Like an idiot, he'd had to come and try to patch things up.

  Despite himself, Charley leaned in close to the fogged windshield and wiped a spot clear with his cuff. He stared, as though narcotized, through the streaks and runnels left by the wipers as the limousine, emitting a burst of warning beeps and red taillight flashes, backed out of its slot. He watched as all but the tip of its low-slung hood swerved slowly out of sight. Then the alarm and flashes ceased.

  A moment later, the big car rolled majestically forward, the driver having to cramp the wheel hard to the left before reversing again in another tight arc, the automatic son-et-lumiere shrilling and flashing.

  Finally the noise and flashes abated.

  The limo, now undocked, came gliding forward; approached head-on.

  Charley threw up an arm to shield his eyes against multiple headlamps. For an instant, the wide grille seemed to line him up in its sights, like some deadly, interstellar gunship assessing whether or not to beam him to oblivion.

  Then, as though scorning his vehicle as beneath contempt, the hood turned disdainfully to the left and the blinding wash of headlights swung away, followed by the long white one hundred thirteen-inch ghost of a body, the whole skimming serenely across wet pavement like an enormous cruise ship: haughty, insolent, scornful.

  Charley let his arm drop.

  "Let the bad times roll," he muttered, and turned the ignition. He waited until the limo had a twenty-yard head start. Then he tailed it—a piece of cake.

  On Seventy-second, it hung a left and continued on east until Second Avenue, where it did a slow, tight right before accelerating and racing downtown. At Thirty-fourth, it slowed again, swung another left, then yet another, and for three blocks cruised sedately up First Avenue in the left lane.

  Between Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth streets, it pulled over in front of a monstrosity of a high rise.

  Charley cut the ignition, killed the headlights, and let the battered old maroon Plymouth coast to a halt. Steeling himself for the inevitable, his grip on the wheel tightened.

  Everything before him seemed to unfold in exaggerated slow motion: the chauffeur's door creeping open; the building's doorman, gradually

  mushrooming umbrella in hand, forsaking the bright dry comfort of the lobby and heading sluggishly, as if struggling through invisible molasses, to the dripping end of the awning; the slow-gaited chauffeur reaching for the rear doorhandle—

  Charley moaned aloud, realizing, belatedly, that he hadn't steeled himself for the inevitable. Hadn't watching their departure from the Met been trauma enough?

  Once they were inside, Charley drew in his breath as he watched them, hands held, hurriedly crossing the gleaming marble on their way to the elevators—

  —like lovers unable to wait to get upstairs!

  Suddenly the scene sped up. Ferocious storms, full of sound and fury, shrieked and raged within him.

  They're behaving like goddamn newlyweds!

  Then, mercifully, they finally disappeared from view.

  Charley drew an anguished breath and slumped back in his seat. At least now that he no longer had to see those two lovebirds, the sharpest jolts of pain subsided, became a constant, dull, but almost tolerable ache.

  He knew there was nothing to be gained by waiting around. He'd seen plenty. Pulling himself together, he fired the ignition, threw the car in gear, and savagely floored the accelerator—taking off like a squealing, rubber-burning rocket.

  He knew what he would do. Head uptown and wait in front of her place. He'd confront Kenzie there.

  Becky V's departure created as much of a sensation as her arrival. This was entirely due to her pathological obsession for privacy. She never overexposed herself, and thus kept the hungry multitudes—even the highest and the mightiest—yearning to see more.

  A case in point: this party.

  Except for the scant minutes she'd spent circulating with Karl-Heinz during cocktails, smile frozen in place, and then the dinner itself, during which she'd erected invisible walls around Karl-Heinz's table, she'd honored her host with the first dance and thereafter had immediately sequestered herself in the seclusion of the Patrons' Lounge on the top floor of the Wallace Wing.

  There, in one of the plush, Regency-furnished sitting rooms, she had held court for the duration of the evening, but only to a handful of highly select close friends.

  Now, at eleven o'clock, she was ready to return to the Olympian heights of her penthouse across Fifth Avenue. Lord Rosenkrantz, summoned from downstairs, jumped to with alacrity and took the elevator straight up.

  Five minutes later, flanked by Becky's ever-vigilant Secret Service de

  tail, they made a single circumference of the Temple of Dendur where, without breaking her regal pace, Becky nevertheless slowed to bid good night to certain friends and acquaintances.

  Dina was overcome to find herself singled out for one of these queenly farewells.

  "It was a pleasure to meet you," Becky told her.

  "Oh, no, the pleasure was all mine!" returned Dina with star- struck effusiveness.

  Becky smiled her enigmatic smile and, as she moved on, suddenly remembered that Robert A. Goldsmith had just purchased the controlling interest in Burghley's, and since she herself sat on the advisory board of the parent company, Burghley's Holdings, Inc., future interaction with the Goldsmiths would be inevitable.

  Moreover, Rebecca Cornille Wakefield Lantzouni de la Vila was nothing if not practical. Sole mistress of an empire worth in excess of six and a half billion dollars—an otherwise daunting responsibility which, thanks to Lord Rosenkrantz, who was to high finance what Picasso was to art, virtually ran itself—she could devote her entire energies to cultivating the world's very, very rich and truly famous for one express purpose: to pick their pockets for the scores of charitable causes she championed.

  Thus, it was with this ulterior motive that she stopped, turned back to Dina, and graciously said, "Perhaps we can meet for lunch one of these days?"

  Dina was so overcome that, for the first time in her life, she was rendered absolutely speechless.

  "Also," Becky continued smoothly, "I'd love to invite you and your husband to my house in the country for a weekend. That is, of course, if you're interested."

  If we're interested? Dina wore the bleary expression of a woman who was holding a winning lottery ticket but was still finding it difficult to believe her eyes—or in this particular case, her ears.

  "I . . . we ... we'd love to come!" she blurted as soon a
s she found her voice.

  "Good! You shall be hearing from me."

  And with that, Becky and her retinue moved on.

  Dina stood there, transfixed in ecstasy. Then, elbowing her husband sharply in the ribs, she gloated: "Did you hear that, Robert? Imagine! Us invited to Becky V's!"

  Robert breathed an imperceptible sigh of relief. His wife was so agog and sparkly eyed that—God willing—she might forget his minor transgression on the dance floor.

  He needn't have worried.

  Bambi Parker was the last thing on Dina's mind, for what could com

  pare with one of the single most exclusive social doors on earth opening to her?

  Why, nothing under the sun!

  Oh, yes. Little Dina Van Vliet, late of Gouda, was in like Flynn—and higher than a junkie on speed!

  Chapter 19

  Dante's Inferno was jammed. The orgiastic pounding of techno-rock blasted the eardrums. Yellow and red streamers, powered by fans set beneath grilles around the perimeter of the dance floor, leapt and shimmered and licked the air like devouring flames.

  Karl-Heinz looked around him as strobes freeze-framed the dancers like flashes of a stop-motion camera. There were girls who looked like boys, boys who looked like girls, curiously androgynous creatures who looked like neither, and some who even looked like what they really were.

  Zandra, for instance. In a place chock full of fashion statements, she more than held her own and caught every eye, blooming like that rarest and most fragile of orchids, but for a single night.

  Karl-Heinz could swear that his younger cousin, whose vibrating physical presence he had never noticed before, was more than a little enchanting. There was, in fact, no way he could ignore her impact, or keep from feasting his eyes upon her.

  She didn't rave or vogue or indulge in trendy, unstructured aerobics like everyone else on the dance floor. On the contrary: she moved with a felicitously natural, unstudied, and entirely fluid grace all her own, half the time with her eyes shut, as if she were cloistered in some world only she could see.

  Forget it! he told himself. She's too young for me. She must think I'm an old man.

  As if to prove the point, he abruptly stumbled, elbow colliding with another dancer's. He felt a threatening grip on his arm, heard a post- adolescent challenge: "Yo! You dissin' me, Pops?"

  His head snapped sideways, resenting the implication of infirmity, his awareness of the generation gap—of all this youth!—heightened by the hardness of the kid's pimply young face.

  Karl-Heinz responded by staring him down.

  As if threatened by superior powers, the acned youth backed off. But Karl-Heinz felt no triumph. Irrationally, he chafed at this crowd of grunge chameleons and banjee kids with their multiple-piercings and boundless energy. For the most part, they were years younger even than Zandra.

  Yet somehow she seemed to belong, managing to slip into a down town persona with the effortless ease with which she'd change clothes, something he would forever be incapable of doing.

  For God's sake, he wondered, what in the hell am I doing in this punked-out kindergarten? I don't belong here. I should be uptown, foxtrotting with blue-rinsed heiresses in some stodgy, socially acceptable establishment!

  "Heinzie!" Zandra yelled to make herself heard over the amplified techno-rock. Then she moved fluidly over to him and grabbed his arm, rescuing him from his grim self-absorption. "Let's cut a rug, cousin!"

  Karl-Heinz was hesitant at first, but ultimately Zandra could not be ignored. He heard the urging in her voice and saw the gleeful smile in her eyes. She was irresistible, and despite his concerns about not fitting in, he found himself being led farther onto the crushing dance floor. With Zandra's coaxing, he finally overcame his inhibitions and gave himself up to the music, swinging, swaying, stamping, and jerking orgiastically, as if in pagan worship, all in time with his seductive cousin. Together they writhed to the bludgeoning beat, watching each other in the painfully flashing strobes and synchronizing their movements to the concussive noise. Together they laughed at their blatantly sexual movements, first Zandra's, then his, one trying to outdo the other, dancing with the indefatigable youths packed sardinelike around them.

  Finally, they'd both had enough and collapsed, hot and sweaty, onto each other.

  "It is getting late," Karl-Heinz mouthed.

  "Yes." She nodded vigorously.

  Karl-Heinz reached out and took her arm, and they cleaved their way through the sea of dancers to the coat check.

  Outside, the rain was blasting down with renewed fury, and flotsam rode the swift currents, bypassing overflowing storm drains. But they were oblivious to it, laughing as they dashed arm and arm to the waiting Bentley.

  Sitting side by side on the drive uptown, Zandra recalled how charming Karl-Heinz had been all evening, and began to see him in a new, beguiling light. He no longer seemed just an older, far-removed cousin ... but something more, something much more indeed.

  The bedchamber was dark.

  Hallowed silence here, high above the city where time itself seemed suspended and of no consequence. Through the vertical blinds of the curving bay window, the indigo night was suffused with shimmering, rain- blurred lights from the millions of windows glittering in the darkness.

  Bending forward, Hannes deposited her gently on the bed, on sheets soft and white and inviting as flesh itself; pale shadows thrown by the blinds rippled snakelike across both of them.

  Kenzie let her arms slip from around his neck and stared up at him, her eyes wide and luminous.

  Did he seem to tower above her because she was prone and he was standing? Or had she already forgotten how incredibly tall he was? And what about the chiseled masculine beauty of his face, the marblelike lucency of his skin, the shimmer of his whitish-blond hair?

  As her eyes adjusted to the dim nocturnal glow emitted by the city that never sleeps, she was struck by how his lashes were the exact same whitish blond. And those eyes, those eyes! How easy it was to lose herself in the bottomless depths of those great shining pale pools!

  Feeling the mattress shift as he lay down beside her, she turned her head and looked at him. He was half-propped on an elbow, staring so intently as though to commit her every feature to memory.

  She found herself paralyzed with longing, hypnotized by his intensity. Everything about him added up to just the right kind of chemistry.

  "Ah, Kenzie," he murmured, reaching out and caressing the soft creamy taut skin of her face with feathery fingertips. "Beautiful, beautiful Kenzie ..."

  Deliberately, teasingly, Hannes traced first the ridge of one cheekbone, then the other; slowly felt the curvature of her forehead, the pert sweep of her nose. So ethereally did his fingers drift, so languid and controlled was his touch, that a warbled sigh, composed of equal parts anguish and delight, involuntarily escaped her. Already, she could feel the torrent of moistness welling up between her thighs.

  When his fingertips grazed her lips, the agony of protracted foreplay grew unbearable. Greedily she opened her mouth, closed her lips around his fingertips, and sucked them in.

  Swearing softly, he pulled his hand free, seized her by the wrists in an iron grip, and forced her arms apart, splaying them across the bed as though in crucifixion.

  Her pupils dilated wildly and she lifted her head. Fighting to free herself, she writhed, arched her spine, and jackknifed—all to no avail. She was no match for his strength. Beneath his dress shirt, his arms were corded sinews.

  "Relax, Kenzie," he soothed. "There is no need to fear me. None at all ... "

  Something about his voice did it. Abruptly the fight left her and her body went slack. She let her head drop back on the pillow.

  "There," he said. "That's better ..."

  Instead of fear, she was suddenly filled with a peculiar kind of excitement. "Oh, God!" she whispered. "Undress me, Hans!" Her eyes were rapt. "If I can't have you inside me, I'm going to go crazy!"

  "Patience, Kenzie," he said softly
. Releasing her wrists, he took her face in his hands and locked eyes with her. "You are very beautiful and passionate. Yes, very much so," he nodded, stroking the hollows of her cheeks with the soft pads of his thumbs. "But there is still one thing you must learn."

  Her voice was soft and throaty. "And what is that?"

  He began to unwrap the capelike scarf from around her throat. "That love is an art. And true art can never be rushed."

  The fires in his eyes seemed to reach out and go right into hers. "Then teach me!" she said in a raspy whisper. "Let me be your willing pupil!"

  Arousal, raw and primitive, made further words unnecessary. He lowered his head and covered her soft, full lips with his, plundering their pliant sweetness.

  Kenzie gasped. His mouth seemed to scorch, and she thrilled to the intoxicating maleness of his scent, the heady rapture of his touch. His tongue stroked her lips lightly, then demanded entrance and explored deeper; darted about like fiery quicksilver.

  Clutching hold of his arms, she met his tongue with her own, and they danced an oral duet to music only they could hear.

  She wanted it to go on forever.

  "Don't stop!" she whispered, pressing herself tightly against him when he came up for air. "Hans—"

  "Sssh." He placed a finger across her lips. "Do you know what it is I want, Kenzie?" His eyes seemed to glow in the dark.

  She stared up at him and slowly shook her head. "What do you want, Hans?"

  "You," he said simply, reaching down and deftly loosening her rhinestone-studded bodice.

  Each touch of his fingers sent electric currents, like tingling shock waves, rushing up and down her spine. Enthralled, she leaned forward on her elbows and watched as he eased the damp, heavily encrusted silk down over her shoulders.

  The sudden rush of cool air pebbled her flesh and her breasts leapt free. They were full and strong, with erect nipples jutting proudly forth like the stems of luscious fruits.

  He skimmed them with his fingertips and lifted them admiringly, running his tongue across their silken flesh. Then, when he captured her left nipple in his mouth, the pleasure was almost too much for her to bear.