The Princess Bride

by Diana Palmer

  King’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Does Lettie know she’s going traveling?”

  “Of course,” she said, playing her part to the hilt.

  “Of course.” He drew in a heavy breath and slowly let it out. His body was still giving him hell, but he wasn’t going to let her know it. Ultimately she was better off out of his life.

  “See you,” she said lightly.

  He nodded. “See you.”

  And he left.

  Late that autumn, Tiffany was walking down a runway in New York wearing the latest creation of one David Marron, a young designer whose Spanish-inspired fashions were a sensation among buyers. The two had met through a mutual friend of Lettie’s and David had seen incredible possibilities in Tiffany’s long black hair and elegance. He dressed her in a gown that was reminiscent of lacy Spanish noblewomen of days long past, and she brought the house down at his first showing of his new spring line. She made the cover of a major fashion magazine and jumped from an unknown to a familiar face in less than six months.

  Lettie, with her delicately tinted red hair and twinkling brown eyes, was elated at her accomplishment. It had hurt her deeply to see Tiffany in such an agony of pain when she’d approached her godmother and all but begged to be taken out of Texas. Lettie doted on the younger woman and whisked her away with a minimum of fuss.

  They shared a luxurious Park Avenue apartment and were seen in all the most fashionable places. In those few months, Tiffany had grown more sophisticated, more mature—and incredibly more withdrawn. She was ice-cold with men, despite the enhancement of her beauty and her elegant figure. Learning to forget King was a full-time job. She was still working on it.

  Just when she was aching to go home to her father where her chances of seeing King every week were excellent, a lingerie company offered her a lucrative contract and a two-week holiday filming commercials in Jamaica.

  “I couldn’t turn it down,” she told Lettie with a groan. “What’s Dad going to say? I was going to help him with his Christmas party. I won’t get home until Christmas Eve. After we get back from Jamaica, I have to do a photo layout for a magazine ad campaign due to hit the stands next spring.”

  “You did the right thing,” Lettie assured her. “My dear, at your age, you should be having fun, meeting people, learning to stand alone.” She sighed gently. “Marriage and children are for later, when you’re established in a career.”

  Tiffany turned and stared at the older woman. “You never married.”

  Lettie smiled sadly. “No. I lost my fiancé in Vietnam. I wasn’t able to want anyone else in that way.”

  “Lettie, that’s so sad!”

  “One learns to live with the unbearable, eventually. I had my charities to keep me busy. And, of course, I had you,” she added, giving her goddaughter a quick hug. “I haven’t had a bad life.”

  “Someday you have to tell me about him.”

  “Someday, I will. But for now, you go ahead to Jamaica and have a wonderful time filming your commercial.”

  “You’ll come with me?” she asked quickly, faintly worried at the thought of being so far away without any familiar faces.

  Lettie patted her hand. “Of course I will. I love Jamaica!”

  “I have to call Dad and tell him.”

  “That might be a good idea. He was complaining earlier in the week that your letters were very far apart.”

  “I’ll do it right now.”

  She picked up the receiver and dialed her father’s office number, twisting the cord nervously while she waited to be put through.

  “Hi, Dad!” she said.

  “Don’t tell me,” he muttered. “You’ve met some dethroned prince and you’re getting married in the morning.”

  She chuckled. “No. I’ve just signed a contract to do lingerie commercials and we’re flying to Jamaica to start shooting.”

  There was a strange hesitation. “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Well, when will you be back?” he asked.

  “In two weeks. But I’ve got modeling assignments in New York until Christmas Eve,” she said in a subdued tone.

  “What about my Christmas party?” He sounded resigned and depressed. “I was counting on you to arrange it for me.”

  “You can have a New Year’s Eve party for your clients,” she improvised with laughter in her voice. “I’ll have plenty of time to put that together before I have to start my next assignment. In fact,” she added, “I’m not sure when it will be. The lingerie contract was only for the spring line. They’re doing different models for different seasons. I was spring.”

  “I can see why,” he murmured dryly. “My daughter, the model.” He sighed again. “I should never have let you get on the plane with Lettie. It’s her fault. I know she’s at the back of it.”

  “Now, Dad…”

  “I’m having her stuffed and hung on my wall when she comes back. You tell her that!”

  “You know you’re fond of Lettie,” she chided, with a wink at her blatantly eavesdropping godmother.

  “I’ll have her shot!”

  She grimaced and Lettie, reading her expression, chuckled, unabashed by Harrison Blair’s fury.

  “She’s laughing,” she told him.

  “Tell her to laugh while she can.” He hesitated and spoke to someone nearby. “King said to tell you he misses you.”

  Her heart jumped, but she wasn’t leaving herself open to any further humiliation at his hands. “Tell him to pull the other one,” she chuckled. “Listen, Dad, I have to go. I’ll phone you when we’re back from Jamaica.”

  “Wait a minute. Where in Jamaica, and is Lettie going along?”

  “Of course she is! We’ll have a ball. Take care, Dad. Bye!”

  He was still trying to find out where she was going when she hung up on him. He glanced at King with a grimace.

  The younger man had an odd expression on his face. It was one Harrison couldn’t remember ever seeing there before.

  “She’s signed a contract,” Harrison said, shoving his hands into his pockets as he glared at the telephone, as if the whole thing had been its fault.

  “For what?” King asked.

  “Lingerie commercials,” his partner said heavily. “Just think, my sheltered daughter will be parading around in sheer nighties for the whole damned world to see!”

  “Like hell she will. Where is she?” King demanded.

  “On her way to Jamaica first thing in the morning. King,” he added when the other man started to leave. “She’s of age,” he said gently. “She’s a woman. I don’t have the right to tell her how to live her own life. And neither do you.”

  “I don’t want other men ogling her!”

  Harrison just nodded. “I know. I don’t, either. But it’s her decision.”

  “I won’t let her do it,” King said doggedly.

  “How do you propose to stop her? You can’t do it legally. I don’t think you can do it any other way, either.”

  “Did you tell her what I said?”

  Harrison nodded again. “She said to pull the other one.”

  Pale blue eyes widened with sheer shock. It had never occured to him that he could lose Tiffany, that she wouldn’t always be in Harrison’s house waiting for him to be ready to settle down. Now she’d flown the coop and the shoe was on the other foot. She’d discovered the pleasure of personal freedom and she didn’t want to settle down.

  He glanced at Harrison. “Is she serious about this job? Or is it just another ploy to get my attention?”

  The other man chuckled. “I have no idea. But you have to admit, she’s a pretty thing. It isn’t surprising that she’s attracted a modeling agency.”

  King stared out the window with narrowed, thoughtful eyes. “Then she’s thinking about making a career of it.”

  Harrison didn’t tell him that her modeling contract might not last very long. He averted his eyes. “She might as well have a career. If nothing else, it will help he
r mature.”

  The other man didn’t look at him. “She hasn’t grown up yet.”

  “I know that. It isn’t her fault. I’ve sheltered her from life—perhaps too much. But now she wants to try her wings. This is the best time, before she has a reason to fold them away. She’s young and she thinks she has the world at her feet. Let her enjoy it while she can.”

  King stared down at the carpet. “I suppose that’s the wise choice.”

  “It’s the only choice,” came the reply. “She’ll come home when she’s ready.”

  King didn’t say another word about it. He changed the subject to business and pursued it solemnly.

  Meanwhile, Tiffany went to Jamaica and had a grand time. Modeling, she discovered, was hard work. It wasn’t just a matter of standing in front of a camera and smiling. It involved wardrobe changes, pauses for the proper lighting and equipment setup, minor irritations like an unexpected burst of wind and artistic temperament on the part of the cameraman.

  Lettie watched from a distance, enjoying Tiffany’s enthusiasm for the shoot. The two weeks passed all too quickly, with very little time for sight-seeing.

  “Just my luck,” Tiffany groaned when they were back in New York, “I saw the beach and the hotel and the airport. I didn’t realize that every free minute was going to be spent working or resting up for the next day’s shoot!”

  “Welcome to the world of modeling.” Lettie chuckled. “Here, darling, have another celery stick.”

  Tiffany grimaced, but she ate the veggie platter she was offered without protest.

  At night, she lay awake and thought about King. She hadn’t believed his teasing assertion that he’d missed her. King didn’t miss people. He was entirely self-sufficient. But how wonderful if it had been true.

  That daydream only lasted until she saw a tabloid at the drugstore where she was buying hair-care products. There was a glorious color photo of King and Carla right on the front page of one, with the legend, “Do wedding bells figure in future for tycoon and secretary?”

  She didn’t even pick it up, to her credit. She passed over it as if she hadn’t seen it. But she went to bed that evening, she cried all night, almost ruining her face for the next day’s modeling session.

  Unrequited love took its toll on her in the weeks that followed. The one good thing about misery was that it attracted other miserable people. She annexed one Mark Allenby, a male model who’d just broken up with his long-time girlfriend and wanted a shoulder to cry on. He was incredibly handsome and sensitive, and just what Tiffany needed for her shattered ego.

  The fact that he was a wild man was certainly a bonus.

  He was the sort of person who’d phone her on the spur of the moment and suggest an evening at a retro beatnik coffeehouse where the patrons read bad poetry. He loved practical jokes, like putting whoopee cushions under a couple posing for a romantic ad.

  “I can see why you’re single,” Tiffany suggested breathlessly when she’d helped him outrun the furious photographer. “And I’ll bet you never get to work for him again,” she indicated the heavyset madman chasing them.

  “Yes, I will.” He chuckled. “When you make it to my income bracket, you don’t have to call photographers to get work. They call you.” Mark turned and blew the man a kiss, grabbed Tiffany’s hand, and pulled her along to the subway entrance nearby.

  “You need a makeover,” he remarked on their way back to her apartment.

  She stopped and looked up at him. “Why?”

  “You look too girlish,” he said simply, and smiled. “You need a more haute couture image if you want to grow into modeling.”

  She grimaced. “I’m not sure I really do, though. I like it all right. But I don’t need the money.”

  “Darling, of course you need the money!”

  “Not really. Money isn’t worth much when you can’t buy what you want with it,” she said pointedly.

  He pushed back his curly black hair and gave her his famous inscrutable he-man stare. “What do you want that you can’t buy?”

  “King.”

  “Of which country?”

  She grinned. “Not royalty. That’s his name. Kingman. Kingman Marshall.”

  “The tycoon of the tabloids?” he asked, pursing his chiseled lips. “Well, well, you do aim high, don’t you? Mr. Marshall has all the women he wants, thank you. And if you have anything more serious in mind, forget it. His father taught him that marriage is only for fools. Rumor has it that his mother took his old man for every cent he had when she divorced him, and that it drove his father to suicide.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said dully.

  “Not that Marshall didn’t get even. You probably heard about that, too.”

  “Often,” she replied. “He actually took his mother to court and charged her with culpability in his father’s suicide in a civil case. He won.” She shivered, remembering how King had looked after the verdict—and, more importantly, how his mother had looked. She lost two-thirds of her assets and the handsome gigolo that she’d been living with. It was no wonder that King had such a low opinion of marriage, and women.

  “Whatever became of the ex-Mrs. Marshall?” he asked aloud.

  “She overdosed on drugs and died four years ago,” she said.

  “A sad end.”

  “Indeed it was.”

  “You can’t blame Marshall for treating women like individually wrapped candies,” he expounded. “I don’t imagine he trusts anything in skirts.”

  “You were talking about a makeover?” she interrupted, anxious to get him off the subject of King before she started screaming.

  “I was. I’ll take you to my hairdresser. He’ll make a new woman of you. Then we’ll go shopping for a proper wardrobe.”

  Her pale eyes glittered with excitement. “This sounds like fun.”

  “Believe me, it will be,” he said with a wicked grin. “Come along, darling.”

  They spent the rest of the day remaking Tiffany. When he took her out that night to one of the more fashionable nightspots, one of the models she’d worked with didn’t even recognize her. It was a compliment of the highest order.

  Lettie was stunned speechless.

  “It’s me,” Tiffany murmured impishly, whirling in her black cocktail dress with diamond earrings dripping from her lobes. Her hair was cut very short and feathered toward her gamine face. She had just a hint of makeup, just enough to enhance her high cheekbones and perfect bone structure. She looked expensive, elegant, and six years older than she was.

  “I’m absolutely shocked,” Lettie said after a minute. “My dear, you are the image of your mother.”

  Tiffany’s face softened. “Am I, really?”

  Lettie nodded. “She was so beautiful. I always envied her.”

  “I wish I’d known her,” she replied. “All I have are photographs and vague memories of her singing to me at night.”

  “You were very young when she died. Harrison never stopped mourning her.” Her eyes were sad. “I don’t think he ever will.”

  “You never know about Dad,” Tiffany remarked, because she knew how Lettie felt about Harrison. Not that she was gauche enough to mention it. “Why don’t you go out with us tonight?”

  “Three’s a crowd, dear. Mark will want you to himself.”

  “It isn’t like that at all,” Tiffany said gently. “He’s mourning his girlfriend and I’m mourning King. We have broken hearts and our work in common, but not much else. He’s a friend—and I mean that quite sincerely.”

  Lettie smiled. “I’m rather glad. He’s very nice. But he’ll end up in Europe one day in a villa, and that wouldn’t suit you at all.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Lettie nodded. “And so are you, in your heart.”

  Tiffany glanced at herself in the mirror with a quiet sigh. “Fine feathers make fine birds, but King isn’t the sort to be impressed by sophistication or beauty. Besides, the tabloids are already predicting that he’s going to marry C
arla.”

  “I noticed. Surely you don’t believe it?”

  “I don’t believe he’ll ever marry anyone unless he’s trapped into it,” Tiffany said honestly, and her eyes were suddenly very old. “He’s seen nothing of marriage but the worst side.”

  “It’s a pity about that. It’s warped his outlook.”

  “Nothing will ever change it.” She smiled at Lettie. “Sure you won’t come with us? You won’t be a crowd.”

  “I won’t come tonight. But ask me again.”

  “You can count on it.”

  Mark was broody as he picked at his mint ice cream.

  “You’re worried,” Tiffany murmured.

  He glanced at her wryly. “No. I’m distraught. My girl is being seen around town with a minor movie star. She seems smitten.”

  “She may be doing the same thing you’re doing,” she chided. “Seeing someone just to numb the ache.”

  He chuckled. “Is that what I’m doing?”

  “It’s what we’re both doing.”

  He reached his hand across the table and held hers. “I’m sorry we didn’t meet three years ago, while I was still heart-whole. You’re unique. I enjoy having you around.”

  “Same here. But friendship is all it can ever be.”

  “Believe it or not, I know that.” He put down his spoon. “What are you doing for Christmas?”

  “I’ll be trying to get back from a location shoot and praying that none of the airline pilots go on strike,” she murmured facetiously.

  “New Year’s?”

  “I have to go home and arrange a business party for my father.” She glanced at him and her eyes began to sparkle. “I’ve had an idea. How would you like to visit Texas?”

  His eyebrows arched. “Do I have to ride a horse?”

  “Not everyone in Texas rides. We live in Jacobsville. It’s not too far from San Antonio. Dad’s in business there.”

  “Jacobsville.” He fingered his wineglass with elegant dark fingers that looked very sexy in the ads he modeled for. “Why not? It’s a long way from Manhattan.”

  “Yes, it is, and I can’t bear to go home alone.”