“Don’t believe a word of it,” Danny said dryly. “It’s all a lie.”
She laughed as though he’d made a splendid joke. She reached for a second piece of shrimp, peeled away the shell, and held it up in front of Rob. “Robert,” she said, giving his name the French pronunciation.
Flushing, Rob ate the piece of seafood from her fingers. She patted his knee as though he were a particularly obedient child and said to Danny, “Tell me, Mr. Fiore, have you ever considered a career in the movies?”
“Right now,” he said, “I’m concentrating on my singing career. I suppose movies might be a possibility for the future.”
“Mais oui! Such a face as yours would certainly make the young ladies flock to see your pictures. You would be an overnight sensation. You could perhaps make musicals. With my Robert, of course, writing the score.”
Rob cleared his throat. “Casey and I,” he said, “generally write together. We’ve been working together for years.”
“Yes, of course. Casey, chere, I must have your stuffed mushroom recipe to take home to Cook. She’s really a horrible little woman, but her cooking is magnifique. Sometimes—” Those limpid blue eyes took on a faraway look. “Sometimes I wish I’d been born with some domestic talent, but unfortunately, it has bypassed me completely. How fortunate you are to be able to do your own cooking and cleaning.” Those elegant shoulders heaved in a thoroughly Gallic shrug. “Good help is so difficult to find these days.”
Heat rose slowly from Casey’s chest, up her neck to her face, and she clamped her jaw, hard. Then Danny spilled his drink, and she ran for a wet cloth to clean up the mess. By the time she returned, the conversation had drifted to other topics. On her knees in front of Danny, she glared at him. “Sorry,” he said, bending until they were at eye level. He took the cloth from her hand and dabbed clumsily at the carpet. And winked at her.
He joined her in the kitchen as she finished last-minute dinner preparations. “I can’t believe him!” she fumed. “Has he lost his mind? The woman is a monster!”
Danny took the salads from the refrigerator. Balancing one on his arm, he said, “I told you before, he’s not thinking with what’s between his ears, he’s thinking with—”
“Please,” she said. “Don’t make me throw up.”
He flashed her the infamous Fiore grin.
“And you!” she accused. “How could you deliberately drop that drink on the carpet?”
“It worked, didn’t it? I had to do something. You were about to start breathing fire.”
“Oh, Danny, what can he possibly see in her? She treats him like he’s her pet poodle.”
“Do I really have to spell it out for you?”
Dinner was a disaster. Monique dominated the conversation with stories about her leading men, pausing only long enough to fork food into her mouth or issue orders to Rob. She spoke only to the men, pointedly ignoring Casey, as though she were a servant, to be seen but not acknowledged. It was during dessert that she delivered the coup de grace. “Perhaps,” she said, “Robert would like to tell you our news.”
Danny stirred sugar into his coffee cup. “Pray tell, Robert,” he said wryly, “what news might this be?”
Rob looked slightly embarrassed, then he grinned sheepishly. He gazed at Monique with obvious adoration. And cleared his throat. “Monique and I,” he said, “are getting married.”
chapter eighteen
Rob MacKenzie spent his wedding night drinking alone at the hotel bar.
The flight to Palm Springs was smooth, and the flight attendants fawned over Monique. As did the skycaps, the limo driver, and the hotel staff. Everything was going along fine until Rob made the mistake of opening his mouth as they crossed the hotel lobby. “The way everybody’s acting,” he said, “if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were some visiting dignitary.”
The rigid set of her chin told him the comment hadn’t gone over well. Monique was what his mother had always called high-strung: brimming with nervous energy, and ready to take offense at the slightest injustice.
Sometimes, he had to admit that he saw unbecoming signs of pettiness in her. Her priorities were screwy because she’d been brought up as the pampered only child of a French diplomat. It wasn’t her fault that she’d grown up spoiled and pandered to, and had come to accept it as her due. It wasn’t her fault that they fought more than most couples. Or that the fights could get nasty. When she wasn’t on her high horse about some imagined slight, Monique could be warm and cuddly as a kitten. And making up was heaven, for Monique was nothing like his first wife. Nancy had been a frightened child, but Monique was a woman, one who knew exactly what a man needed, and who provided it with fervent expertise.
Her sour mood dissipated once they reached the honeymoon suite. He tipped the bellboy a twenty before carrying his bride across the threshold and locking the door behind them. On a heart-shaped bed in a room that was costing him a thousand bucks a night, the kitten became a tigress as they enthusiastically proceeded to consummate the marriage. He poured them both a glass of Dom Perignon, and then, just in case for some reason the first time didn’t count, they consummated the marriage a second time.
The trouble began when they went downstairs to dinner. They ordered Oysters Rockefeller, spinach salad, and prime rib au jus. While he sat there in abject mortification, his little love muffin complained to everyone within hearing distance that the beef was overdone, the oysters were tough, and the spinach was gritty. By the time she was done verbally shredding the place, the manager himself had come out to grovel at the feet of America’s Sweetheart. He refused to allow Rob to pay for the meal, and followed them all the way to the door, red-faced and apologizing profusely.
It was in the elevator that he made mistake number two. “Monique,” he said once the doors had closed behind them, “that behavior was absolutely uncalled for.”
She froze in front of the mirror where she’d been primping. When she turned those huge blue eyes on him, they were glistening with tears. “Tell me the truth, Robert. You married me for my money, non? Because if you loved me, you would never, ever speak to me that way.”
It wasn’t the first time she had pulled this routine on him. If you really loved me, you would. It was her favorite tool for getting what she wanted. He’d seen her use it on her father, the ambassador, and the aging gentleman always melted the instant those huge blue eyes shed crocodile tears. But Rob had no intention of letting her manipulate him that way.
His third mistake was telling her so.
He’d forgotten the cardinal rule governing baseball and interpersonal relationships: three strikes and you’re out. The fight was loud, violent, and embarrassingly public. In the corridor outside their suite, in front of a horrified maid, Monique slapped him, hard. Then, wailing like a pretty French air horn, she fled to the suite and locked him out with nothing but his American Express card and the clothes on his back.
It was not an auspicious start to the marriage.
***
The Malibu house had been built three years earlier as a love nest for film director Nikolai Vronsky and his bride, model Kelly Adams. During the course of their brief but fiery union, it had been the site of numerous battles, including one legendary occasion when Adams had thrown a $30,000 bronze statue through one of the enormous tinted plate glass windows. After a lengthy and bitter courtroom battle, the house had been put on the market as part of the divorce settlement. Vronsky was anxious to sell, and Danny got the house for a fraction of its market value.
When Casey said it was a shame that their good fortune should be bought with someone else’s bad fortune, Danny told her it was a wonderful house and she was being ridiculous. And it was a wonderful house: a master bedroom half the size of Rhode Island, three smaller bedrooms, a Jacuzzi in the master bath. A sunken living room that boasted an enormous fieldstone fireplace offset by one wall of tinted glass, and carpeting thick enough, in Rob’s words, “to lose a Chihuahua in.” French doors off th
e formal dining room led to a redwood deck that looked out over the beach, and the kitchen’s gleaming ebony appliances were a gourmet’s dream.
They moved in the day after Christmas. Danny and Rob and a few musician friends moved furniture while Casey, in bare feet and jeans and Danny’s old B.U. sweatshirt, supervised. At noon, they broke for tacos and warm beer. After lunch, the men went back to moving boxes, and Casey began the enormous task of setting up housekeeping.
Three thousand miles from home, she’d found a piece of New England to offset her homesickness: in a Rodeo Drive gallery she’d bought a framed Andrew Wyeth print that would look perfect on the south wall of the living room. She held it in both hands, admiring Wyeth’s delicate brush strokes, then looked dubiously at the bare white wall that swept twelve feet upward to meet the cathedral ceiling. “Danny,” she shouted, “come here a minute. I need you.”
From somewhere in the house, Danny answered, his voice muffled. “It’ll have to wait. I’m busy.”
Rob loped down the six carpeted stairs to the living room, carrying a half-empty bottle of Heineken. “Last time I saw him,” he said, “he was holding one end of your bedroom dresser over his head. Will I do?”
“You certainly will.” Handing him the hammer, she said, “Men do occasionally have their uses.”
“Watch your tongue and hold my beer. Where are we hanging this thing, Fiore?”
“It’s not a thing, MacKenzie, it’s a Wyeth. And it’s going on that wall, high enough so it doesn’t look too lonely.”
They spent a few minutes arguing over where to hang the print, then Rob hammered two nails into the wall. He hung the print, adjusted one corner of the frame, then stood back to admire his handiwork. “Not bad,” he said, reaching for his beer. “I should have been a carpenter.”
“Two nails doth not a carpenter make.”
He flashed her a grin before walking to the wall of windows and looking out at the endless blue of sky and sea. “Some view,” he said.
She stood beside him. “At sunset, the whole room turns sky-blue pink.”
Still looking out the window, he sipped his beer. “Danny tells me you’re trying to have a baby.”
She folded her arms. Quietly, she said, “We decided it’s time.”
“You and Danny will make terrific parents.” He held out a hand, and she gripped it hard with her own.
“Rob,” she said softly, “do you really think he’s ready?”
“He loves you, sweetheart. He’ll do fine.”
“I know he does. And I love him. I love him so much.”
“Hang onto it. You two are lucky. Your marriage is the eighth wonder of the world.”
She dropped his hand. “If I didn’t know better,” she said lightly, “I’d swear I detect a hint of jealousy. Don’t tell me there’s trouble in paradise?”
“Don’t ask.”
Her humor fled instantly. “You and Monique aren’t getting along?”
“Out of bed? No.”
She patted his arm. “The first year is always the hardest. You both have to make so many adjustments. It’ll get better.”
Rob shrugged and drained his beer. “We’ll see,” he said. “Got any more pictures you want hung?”
That first night in the house, with the waterbed still too cold to sleep on, she and Danny arranged pillows and blankets on the living room floor, where they toasted marshmallows and drank a hundred-dollar bottle of champagne bought especially for the occasion. As Robert Plant’s raspy tenor rhapsodized about stairways to heaven, there beneath the eyes of God and the gulls who swooped and soared above them, they relearned the fire and the tenderness that had drawn them together so many years ago. Later, as they lay naked in the darting shadows of the firelight, Casey pressed her cheek to the damp warmth of Danny’s chest and thought about how it was all coming together at last, the life they’d worked years to achieve. There was just one thing missing to complete the picture: a baby.
“Danny?” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
“Hmm?” His sounded drowsy, satisfied.
“Do you suppose it happened tonight?”
He didn’t have to ask what she meant. “Honey,” he said, “it may take some time. Don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t happen right away.”
But she was impatient, ripe and ready for motherhood, and she’d waited so long. She’d already begun decorating the nursery. Now all she needed was a child to put in it. “Maybe we need to keep practicing until we get it right,” she said.
“Christ, Casey, I’m dead. I moved furniture all day.”
She raised an eyebrow. “What happened to that hot-blooded stud I married?”
“Old age.”
“You, old? Hah! You won’t be old when you’re ninety.”
“Shut up and go to sleep.” He folded her into his arms and turned them both on their sides. “Tomorrow morning,” he promised. “Tomorrow morning, baby doll, I’ll give you loving until you beg for mercy.”
***
Rob’s relationship with Monique ran on only two speeds: fast and faster. When they weren’t fighting, they occupied themselves with far more pleasurable pursuits. He’d thought himself quite knowledgeable regarding the erotic arts, but Monique did things to him in bed that he’d never even dreamed of. And then she taught him, with explicit and extensive instruction, exactly how a woman wanted to be pleased. How to move slowly, when all his instincts were rushing him toward the finish line. How to map out and pleasure a woman’s erogenous zones until she became putty in his hands. When to use finesse, and when to forgo it completely.
Monique was an exhibitionist. She had mirrors on the ceiling above her bed, and she took great pleasure in making love in unusual, semi-public locations, where the risk of getting caught intensified the excitement. They made love in the swimming pool at noon, in the elevator at the Ritz on a trip to New York, on the butcher-block table in the kitchen at midnight, while the maid watched The Tonight Show in the next room.
She was insanely jealous if he so much as looked at another woman. If he made the mistake of actually speaking to one, she would fly into a jealous rage. Yet the arrangement was not reciprocal. When they went out in public, she teased, cajoled, flirted, and made intimate eye contact with every man between the ages of eight and eighty. And expected him to tolerate it.
For reasons he failed to understand, she detested Casey, muttering insults in French every time Casey’s name came up in conversation. Rob’s knowledge of the French language was limited, but he thought the words “stupid cow” might have surfaced once or twice. At times, he walked around on eggshells, because Monique’s rages were so unpleasant that avoiding them became imperative.
Yet she wasn’t always unpleasant. Although her rages could erupt at unexpected moments, most of the time she was attentive, affectionate, and generous. She was forever buying him little gifts: a set of onyx cufflinks, a diamond pinkie ring, a gold cigarette lighter. The diamond was ostentatious, and he hated it, but he wore it because she’d given it to him. She replaced his funky wardrobe with stylish and expensive clothes that made him feel like he was dressed up for Halloween. And she dragged him, kicking and screaming all the way, to Monsieur Henri and had his hair cut and styled.
When she was finished with him, he looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize himself. He looked like a gigolo. But Monique was so impressed by the results that he only complained a little. She soothed his ruffled feathers by making love to him on the chaise longue- in the solarium. And on the piano bench in the library. And on the dew-sprinkled grass of the back lawn, beneath a ripe and heavy moon.
He told himself that he tolerated the jealousy and the tantrums because he was so desperately in love with her. He told himself that she showered him with gifts because she was so desperately in love with him. It was easier than admitting the truth, that something this hot was destined to eventually blow sky-high. Easier than admitting that Monique, like an unbroken filly, would eventually throw him and
he’d end up on his ass in the dust.
It was easier to just hold on for dear life and try to enjoy the ride.
***
Four months after she threw out her birth control pills, Casey got up one Sunday morning, looked at the calendar, and realized her period was two days late.
Elation and terror waged war within her. She’d waited so long for this moment that she was afraid to hope, afraid to know the truth, afraid of what Danny’s reaction would be. As each day passed with no sign of her period, the elation and the terror grew proportionately. Finally, on a Friday afternoon while Danny had a photo session downtown, she donned dark glasses, drove to a nearby drugstore, and purchased a home pregnancy test.
She spent the longest ten minutes of her life cleaning the kitchen stove while she waited for the results of her test. She pulled off all the burner plates and scrubbed them with Brillo, wiped down the oven that was already clean, and polished the porcelain until she could see her face in it. Suddenly reluctant to know the truth, she took her time returning to the bathroom and the tiny test tube of urine that sat on the shelf.
The code was simple: blue for pregnant, red for not pregnant. Casey took a deep breath and pushed open the bathroom door. She crossed the room on shaky legs and stared in disbelief at the blue liquid in the test tube. She sat down hard on the toilet seat, suddenly terrified of what Danny would say. He didn’t really want a baby. He was doing this because he knew it was what she wanted. Would that be enough? Would it be fair to the child, to have a father who had never really wanted him? Would she be strong enough to deal with it? Strong enough to be a proper mother to the child?
Coming Home (Jackson Falls Series) Page 20
