What the hell was Kim Hamilton doing here?
He vaguely remembered that back in July, just before they’d left for St. Thomas, she had arranged for her company to buy an entire table for the dinner. The table seated ten. Surely she hadn’t had to be among the ten.
Yet here she was.
The good news was, she’d brought a date. At least, Ethan hoped the man whose elbow she’d hooked her hand around was an actual date and not a colleague from the company, doing his part to fill the table they’d sponsored. He hoped the man was passionately in love with Kim, and Kim—well, he couldn’t imagine her passionately in love with anybody, but she could be deeply in like with him. Maybe she was engaged to him. He hoped she was wearing a big, fat diamond ring on her left hand, and her life had developed exactly the way she’d wanted it to. He hoped she was happy.
He also hoped he could find Gina before Kim did, just to alert her. Gina could handle Kim—she’d handled her better than Ethan himself had when they were all together in St. Thomas. But still…a little warning wouldn’t hurt.
OKAY, GINA THOUGHT. TWO glasses aren’t enough. Three could be too many, but since she’d already had that many, she figured she might as well go on to four.
In the bathroom, she’d come upon two extremely prissy women applying powder to their noses with precise dabs while they gossiped about someone’s au pair, who came from the Hebrides and swore she was speaking English although no one could understand a word she said. “Aren’t people from the Hebrides Scottish or something?” one of the women asked as she fussed with her blindingly bejeweled earrings.
“Well, you know Scottish accents. They’re even thicker than New York accents.”
Gina had considered opening her mouth at that point, and really amping her Bronx accent, but she’d opted for discretion and dried her hands without speaking a word. Poor, benighted souls, she thought as she sauntered out of the rest room. If they couldn’t handle New York accents, they were obviously too provincial.
Ethan was barely visible when she returned to the banquet room. She glimpsed him surrounded by a knot of people, all of them blathering at him, and she grabbed a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and observed him from afar. He was so debonair in his tuxedo. A lot of guys looked goofy in formal attire, but the tux suited him. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, but given the situation, she saw no reason not to ogle him.
At one point, the cluster of people around him loosened slightly, and he glanced her way. Even from all the way across the room, she detected a glimmer of concern in his eyes.
She smiled and raised her champagne flute in a toast, then sipped. She didn’t want to interfere. Let him make nice with his guests. Playing the proper host was his job, his purpose for being here. She could take care of herself and pretend she knew what the hell she was doing.
Her gaze broke from his and she drank a little more champagne. The multiple conversations around her blurred into a pleasant, indecipherable hum, underlined by the wistful strains of the musicians plucking and tooting on their instruments in their corner of the room. People promenaded elegantly back and forth, looking patrician and confident. She wondered whether they were all pretending, too, or whether they actually had a better idea than she did of how to behave correctly at a party like this.
Anyone having any doubts about proper behavior ought to drink some champagne, she thought. The tart bubbles refreshed her palate, and the alcohol acted like a muffler, softening the world’s edges. She spotted that Yale professor in the beaded dress, Something Eldridge, who was chattering with a man in a pretentious green brocade dinner jacket, and the woman who’d hiked the Appalachian Trail, who was pondering the canapé pinched between her fingers. Gina ought to grab something to eat, but the waiters who ventured near her were all serving only drinks, no food.
She spotted a vivid splash of blond hair contrasting with all the dark outfits in another small knot of people. That blond was a great color; Gina tried to guess if it was natural. This probably wasn’t the sort of gathering where she could ask the woman what hair products she used—although Professor Eldridge hadn’t seemed to mind Gina’s comments about her dress, all of which Gina had intended as compliments. Maybe the blond woman standing with all those folks in classic black would be flattered if Gina complimented her hair color.
She moved around a table, approaching the blond woman, who abruptly turned around. Gina nearly dropped her glass.
“Kim?” she asked the beautiful woman in the black silk.
“Gina?” Kim asked back.
They stood several feet apart, staring at each other. Gina supposed she shouldn’t have been shocked, and maybe if she’d stopped at three champagnes she would have been able to process more efficiently the information that Kim Hamilton, Ethan’s former lover, was at this party. Kim lived in Connecticut; apparently, she supported the work of the Gage Foundation; ergo, she’d chosen to attend the fund-raiser.
Or else she’d attended because she’d known Ethan would be there, and she’d wanted to see him again. Not that Gina felt jealous or in any way threatened by Kim’s presence. If Ethan had wanted to have Kim with him at this dinner party, he wouldn’t have invited Gina to take the train up to Connecticut. He wouldn’t have made love to her on the floor of his den, and he wouldn’t have brought her here tonight.
Still, the situation was kind of strange.
Kim pursed her perfect little lips. “What a surprise,” she finally said.
“How’ve you been?” Gina inquired, relying on good manners to see her through.
“How have I been?” Kim clutched a sequined silver minaudière before her. “I’ve been absolutely fine. And you? Are you a benefactor?”
Good manners didn’t require lying. “No,” she said. “I’m here as a guest.”
“I didn’t know you had friends traveling in this circle,” Kim remarked, her impeccable eyebrows flexing energetically in contrast to her deliberately cool voice.
“Well, I do.” Professor Eldridge might count as a friend. That would allow Gina to claim friends, plural.
“What a small world.”
“New York…Connecticut—not a huge distance,” Gina noted.
Kim studied her for a long moment. “Your shoes look like fish.”
“That was the idea. What do you think?” She extended one leg, lifting her foot off the carpet so Kim could get a better look.
“What odd shoes!” a man standing near Kim remarked. “They change color, don’t they?”
“Not really.” Gina tried not to boast, but she couldn’t help swelling with pride as more people gathered around to scrutinize her feet. “They seem to because of the way the light hits them. It’s a material we’re still experimenting with. Luminescent, we call it. Silver is the most obvious color, but we’re going to see what we can do with some other shades.”
“They’re certainly…unique,” a woman in the crowd murmured.
“I designed them,” Gina said. “I’m a shoe designer.”
“You designed those?”
She explained that she worked with Bruno Castiglio. Evidently, several of the women had heard of him. “He’s famous for very peculiar shoes,” one of them commented, and it dawned on Gina that maybe these people weren’t complimenting her. They were calling her shoes peculiar, which really couldn’t pass for a compliment. She tried to explain the way snorkeling among tropical fish in the Virgin Islands had inspired her, but the people around her simply smiled and murmured and drifted away, Kim along with the rest of them.
She felt a strong hand on her elbow, and Ethan’s hushed whisper. “It’s time for dinner.”
“I’d like another glass of champagne,” she whispered back, uneasiness overtaking her.
Ethan led her among the tables to one near a lectern at the side of the room across from the musicians. “I think we’re done with champagne for now.”
“What do you mean, we’re done?” That was the way Ramona chided Alicia when she wanted
more cookies: I think we’ve had enough cookies. Go brush your teeth.
Gina was not going to brush her teeth. Nor was she going to let Ethan tell her what to drink. She was at his damn party, wasn’t she? She was socializing, wasn’t she? She’d talked about her shoes, and if the snobs and fat cats Ethan counted among his friends didn’t like it, tough.
“The champagne disappears after eight,” he explained. “They’ll be serving wine for a while.”
“Oh.” So he wasn’t chastising her. Just explaining the liquor schedule for the evening. She hadn’t realized champagne after 8:00 p.m. was a no-no.
Mere seconds after she’d taken her seat next to Ethan, a waiter asked her if she preferred red or white wine. The champagne had been white, so she stuck with that. Ethan introduced her to some of the other people at their table—a bank president and his wife, the head of cardiology at Arlington Memorial Hospital and her husband, a haze of names and fancy titles she was unable to memorize. She wished Ethan had thought to offer those stick-um labels that said, “Hello, my name is…” that people could have filled out and glued to their chests. At the parties she’d taken him to, downtown, names weren’t important. But here, when her tablemates addressed her, they called her Gina, and she felt guilty that she couldn’t reciprocate by using their names.
Remembering her name was easy for them, she realized. She was the only unfamiliar face at this party. The rest knew one another. They were a circle, as Kim had mentioned, all attending the same events, contributing to the same causes. They were the suburban elite. She was the outsider—just one new name to learn.
At least they included her in their conversation. They asked her how she and Ethan had become acquainted, and she regaled them with the story. “We both wound up in the same time-share at the same time,” she explained. “Ethan wasn’t supposed to be there, but—”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” Ethan gently teased.
“Well, his friend messed up, but—”
“I believe it was your friend who messed up.”
She sent him a gritted-teeth smile. “Someone messed up.”
“I recall your talking about that trip last spring,” the lady from the hospital said. “At the Leukemia Society dinner, remember? Weren’t you going with a group of people?”
“Not a group of people,” Gina clarified with a smile. “His almost-fiancée.”
“Gina,” Ethan said quietly, then smiled at the rest of the table. “I went with a friend, Gina went with her niece and we all wound up sharing a condo for the week.”
“Did you know Kim is here?” Gina asked him.
“Yes.” His jaw was tense, his eyes telegraphing some sort of message she couldn’t quite decipher.
“Did you get to say hello to her?”
“Not yet.”
Dinner was served, course after course. The clam chowder was so thick with starch she almost needed a fork and knife to eat it. The salad was pedestrian, mostly iceberg lettuce and out-of-season tomatoes that tasted mealy. The prime rib wasn’t bad, if you liked prime rib. Gina wasn’t crazy about it. She sipped her wine and picked at the food, wondering how much people had paid for their meals. A hundred dollars a plate? Five hundred? They ought to have gotten better food for their money. This food was…suburban. Appropriate. Safe for people who had no taste in shoes.
As soon as his plate was cleared, Ethan touched her shoulder, then stood. “I’m on,” he said to the rest of the diners at their table, then turned and strode to the lectern. He tapped on the microphone to make sure it was working and said, “Welcome, everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed your dinner. Dessert is on its way, but I know you’re all dying to have me bore you to tears with my speech, so try not to scrape your plates too loudly while I’m up here.”
Friendly laughter greeted him.
Gina rotated her chair so she could see him without straining her neck. He launched into a speech about the work the Gage Foundation had funded in the past year, the projects it was hoping to support in the upcoming year, the importance of its work in protecting the nation’s resources and the necessity for people like all these benefactors to keep the fund financially healthy so it could continue its worthy work. He used no notes, not even scribbles on index cards, but simply spoke, in complete command of the room. She observed his posture, his easy smile, the way he moved his hands, the way glow of the fake candles in the chandeliers brought out the fiery highlights in his hair. She observed the way his strong shoulders filled the jacket of his tux, the way the narrow black bow made his chin look even more chiseled, the way the trousers emphasized the length of his legs.
He was at home here. This was his milieu, and these were his people. All the champagne and wine in the world couldn’t muddle her brain enough to lose track of that obvious truth. She was playing “let’s pretend” in her fancy dress and her gold-stud earrings, and Ethan was being Ethan.
She shouldn’t have come. She didn’t belong. Somewhere in the room, Kim Hamilton was sitting beside some other person instead of next to Ethan. Kim was at home here, too. She’d grown up in this rarefied world, a world of clean air and silence and houses surrounded by grassy yards. Her shoes were demure. She would know what to say about a nanny from the Hebrides. She would also know how much champagne was too much.
Gina’s head hurt. She should have stopped after that third glass—after the second. She’d made a fool of herself at the table, talking indiscreetly about how she and Ethan had met. Surely she’d embarrassed him. She couldn’t help it. He was so poised up at the lectern, so articulate, so impassioned about the work the Gage Foundation did.
She loved him. How could she not, when he was so smart, so self-assured, so considerate? Even when they made love, when he wasn’t surrounded by his social caste, when he wasn’t buttoned up inside a tuxedo, he was smart and self-assured and considerate, letting her lead as much as follow, letting her take chances with him. Loving him was the biggest chance she’d ever taken—and tonight she felt like a fraud. She’d managed to fake her way through this evening, but in her heart she knew she didn’t belong here.
He finished his speech to thunderous applause. Gina clapped along with everyone else, but she felt tears gathering along her eyelids. She struggled to blink them away before he noticed.
He took his seat next to her, glanced at the melting ice-cream cake that had been left for him while he’d been speaking—and her untouched puddle of vanilla and crumbled cake beside it, and then studied her face. “That was wonderful,” she said, meaning it.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she lied.
He didn’t seem convinced. “I wish we could leave now, but we can’t.”
“I know.” Maybe there was some way she could leave without him, so she wouldn’t embarrass him further. “Ethan—”
She couldn’t finish her thought, not when so many guests were swooping down on him, praising his speech, promising more donations, commenting on some of the projects he’d mentioned. Rising to his feet, he accepted their congratulations and thanked them for their generosity. “The Gage family gave us a great start,” he said, “but the growth of the fund has really enabled us to take our work to the next level.”
More handshakes, more congratulations. At one point, Ethan managed to grab her hand and give it a squeeze—a sweet acknowledgment of her, although his attention had to remain with the dinner guests. Then his fingers slipped from hers as someone edged between them, insistent on hyping some new research he was pursuing on prairie dogs.
In the crowd swarming around Ethan, Gina spotted that magnificent blond hair again, and the equally magnificent face framed by it. God, Kim looked glorious. As confident as Ethan, as appropriate. As right.
No wonder he’d considered marrying her. She and her simple black pumps belonged in his world in a way Gina never would. When she rose on tiptoe to kiss Ethan’s cheek, Gina felt the truth rush at her like a tidal wave, strong enough to knock her over. It wasn’t jealousy. It was
n’t resentment.
It was the understanding that she was all wrong for Ethan.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
PEOPLE WERE STILL milling around the hotel’s lobby, schmoozing, networking and lingering over farewells, when Ethan tried to track Gina down. He’d been so busy networking and schmoozing and lingering himself that he couldn’t be sure exactly when she’d disappeared. After his speech, she’d been right next to him, and then he’d gotten mobbed, and the next time he tried to check for her, she’d vanished.
He was furious.
Anxious, too, of course. Worried about her safety. But for God’s sake, it was midnight, he was exhausted and he wanted to go home. With her. This was not a good time to pull a diva act—if that, indeed, was what she’d done.
He tugged his bow tie loose as he wandered through the lobby, his footsteps silent on the plush carpeting. The Neilsons called to him from the coat-check counter, and he detoured to thank them for coming. Playing the courteous host with them wasn’t easy when all he wanted to do was survey every chair and couch in the lobby, every table in the cocktail lounge, every possible nook or niche where Gina might be hiding.
A few polite words with the Neilsons, and he was able to break away and resume his search. She wasn’t in the cocktail lounge. Nor was she in the restaurant, although he would hardly have expected her to duck in there for a snack after having been served a four-course dinner in the banquet room. He inched the ladies’ room door open and received an appalled glare from a woman edging past him to use the facilities. “I’m sorry,” he said, backing away. “I’m looking for someone. I thought she might be in there.”
Mollified, the woman entered the ladies’ room and then returned to the door to report that no one was inside. Ethan thanked her and continued his search.
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