Ballet Shoes and Engine Grease (23 page)

****

Crimson tried to concentrate on the
proofs for the print ads that
would appear in car magazines, but it was almost impossible with
Nick sitting beside her. Outside, crisp autumn sunshine had
replaced the rain, and the world sparkled through the glass panels
of the office.

Just as her mind sparkled. She couldn’t
remember ever being so happy. Nothing could
bother her today, not even the worry over
the damaged cars, or the insurance company, or meeting the profit
target and holding on to Constantine Motors.

Anna called from the doorway, glossy dark
hair swinging across her shoulders as she peeked in. “Your mothers
are on their way. Both of them.”

Oh my God
. Crimson stifled a groan. She and Nick
had sneaked out early that morning, to avoid two pairs of curious
maternal eyes. She sent him a pleading look. “Can I hide in the
filing cabinet?” she begged. “I can’t face them…I mean, they
know…they’ll never believe I screamed because you were tickling
me.”

His lips twitched.
“You screamed for plenty of other
reasons.”

“
I…oh my God...here they are…”

“
Relax,” Nick told her. “I have a way of
getting rid of them.”

“
Not murder, I hope,” Crimson said under
her breath as Myrna and Esmeralda barged in, wearing identical
beige chinos, as bouncy on their feet as a pair of
toddlers.

Nick glanced at his watch.
“Thanks for coming in. Right on
time.”

“
You invited them?” Crimson muttered,
disbelief in her voice.

Ignoring her, Nick
waved the two women to the conference
table. Crimson breathed in familiar scents. The only thing that had
survived her mother’s makeover was her Oscar de la Renta perfume,
which had gained Myrna Constantine’s seal of approval.

“
I’m sure you’re aware of the company’s
financial difficulties,” Nick said with a formal air. “We all need
to pitch in and do whatever we can to help.”

Esmeralda
reached for the candy dish on the table and took
one of the Lindor pralines in a red wrapper. “Hank’s wife said the
insurance company is not going to pay.”

Myrna
confiscated the chocolate and put it back in the dish. “Ray
mentioned it too. We talk sometimes. I helped one of his daughters
to find an apartment in the city.”
Talk sometimes
, Crimson thought.
You use him to keep tabs on us, you
mean
.

“
I’m sure you’ll be glad to do your part,”
Nick said. “We can save a lot of money by getting rid of the
catering company and running the cafeteria ourselves. Esmie, you’ve
got the experience. Will a couple of people working for you be
enough?”

Crimson watched
her mother’s jaws fall open.

Nick turned to Myrna. “And we could really
do with a receptionist in the lobby. I know you don’t have any
qualifications, but your polished manner will compensate. And you
already own suitable clothes.” He sent the pair a congratulatory
smile. “When can you start? Will Monday morning be too
soon?”

The women looked at each other, two sets of
shocked blue eyes.

Esmeralda spoke first. “I…eh...the
cafeteria
?”

“
Receptionist?”
Myrna shivered with icy
disdain.

“
That’s it.” Nick beamed at the pair. “I
knew you’d jump at the chance to contribute.”

“
Actually,” Myrna said, a little stiffly.
“We’re flying out to Paris on Sunday. And then on to London and
Milan. It’s to do with our project. A terrible shame,” she added
with a false air of sincerity. “We would have loved to do our
bit.”

“
But Mom.” Crimson stared at Esmeralda, who
had used Myrna’s preoccupation to sneak a chocolate. “You don’t
even have a passport.”

“
Sure I do, honey.” Her mother pushed the
ball of candy into her mouth and dipped one hand into her trendy
cross-body handbag. Jaws masticating, she pulled out a small, navy
blue booklet with
PASSPORT
in gold
letters stamped above the eagle emblem and
United States of America
beneath it.

“
Shame indeed,” Nick said. “But have a good
trip to Europe.”

“
But Mom.” Crimson’s brain buzzed. “You’ve
never been abroad.”

The two women exchanged
a
nother look. Esmeralda
nodded. Myrna took a deep breath, so deep that the pearl necklace
at her throat jumped. “Now that you’ve brought up the subject…we
must take decisive action to save Constantine Motors. Don’t you
agree, Nicholas?”

The pen Nick had been twirling in his
fingers
clattered to the
table. “No,” he said in a blunt voice. “And I’m warning you,
mother—”

“
It’s the ideal solution,” Myrna argued.
“Now that you two seem to have found each other.” She stole an odd
look at Crimson, a cagey, apologetic look. There appeared to be
more to her hesitation than just the usual parental worry about
interfering in the romantic tangles of their offspring

“
What do you mean?” Crimson
asked.

Mother and son glared at each other across
the table. When Myrna spoke, she kept her eyes on Nick, as if
afraid that he might leap up and use violent means to silence her.
“Do you remember,” she asked, clearly meaning the question for
Crimson, “when I told you that Nick could inherit the business but
he had turned it down?”

“
Mother.” The single word from Nick cut the
air like a rapier.

“
Honey,” Esmeralda butted in. “It’s real
simple. All Nick has to do is to marry you, and then the business
will be his. None of this silly task of having to sell lots of cars
and make enough profit. Stephan set it up like that. He thinks Nick
should settle down, and he thought you might like to be his
wife.”

Marry you. You might like to be
his wife.
The words
buzzed about her brain, gradually falling into slots where she
could relate to them, interpret their meaning. Beside her, Nick sat
in silence, muscles taut, face rigid, tension rolling off him in
waves.

Crimson
’s mind whirled. She recalled the hours she’d spent talking
to Uncle Stephan about his wonderful son. Recalled the laughter,
the camaraderie, the affection of those lazy afternoons. Recalled
the dreams her romantic heart had spun, dreams that must have been
transparent to the old man. Finally, she understood Stephan
Constantine’s joke.

It was on her. A gift wrapped husband.

She turned to Nick. “Is it
true?”

He nodded.
“It’s in the will. You never saw the full
text.”

“
And is it true that you…refused to…accept
the terms?”

“
Crimson.” He lifted a hand, reached toward
her but halted the motion, as if he understood that she didn’t want
him to touch her. “I didn’t know you then…had never met you…had no
idea what you’d be like…” His voice was quiet, strained, and
Crimson understood as well as he did what neither of them wanted to
say out loud.

I’d never met you. But I knew
you were a girl from the wrong sid
e of the tracks. Daughter of a drunkard
and a dinner lady
.
Crimson remembered how Nick had assumed that she was a stripper.
Someone so far beneath him that he hadn’t even wanted to meet her,
but had rejected the very idea of her without any
hesitation.

And now…Nausea lurched inside her. Had he
planned it? Now that there was little chance of holding on to the
business by helping her to meet the profit target, had Nick decided
to accept the idea of marriage to her as the last resort? Had her
been
priming
her, for
God’s sake? Had all his kisses, all his passion, all his
tenderness, been nothing but an act to make sure that she would
agree to go ahead with the marriage when he finally got around to
proposing it?

“
You should have told me.” Crimson spoke
trough gritted teeth. She would hold on to her dignity. That’s what
she had strived for all her life. To fit in, to be accepted, to be
as good as anyone else, to show poise and good manners. “It was all
pretense, wasn’t it?” she said, not a question but a statement.
“Every word a lie, every touch a lie?”

“
No, Crimson, I—” Nick threw an awkward
glance at the audience of their respective mothers, who remained
sitting around the table, listening as if spellbound, and then he
fell silent, unable or unwilling to talk in front of
them.

“
Get out,” she told him.

“
Crimson, you’re wrong about—”

She raised her voice.
“Get out. I don’t want to see you again
until this is over. Until we know if I’ve lost or won, failed or
succeeded. For there is no way in hell I’m marrying you to save
your inheritance, however many millions it might be.”

“
Crimson, calm down, your
breathing...”

Her chest was growi
ng tight, but she kept her calm. The
attacks were stress related, she told herself. She was not stressed
now, because she didn’t give a damn. She loved him, but she hated
him too. According to the laws of mathematics, the two opposing
emotions cancelled each other out and left her with no feelings for
him at all.

“
If you don’t leave now,” she told him
quietly, “I’m going to call security. You’ll put Charlie or Ray in
the difficult position of having to make a choice between escorting
you out of the building, or being disciplined for refusing to obey
my orders.”

Esmeralda stirred to life.
“Crimson, honey. It wasn’t
Nick’s idea to keep that part of Stephan’s will a secret from you.
It was Myrtie’s and mine. We thought it better you didn’t
know—”

F
inally, Crimson lost it. She jumped up from her chair and
stormed to take refuge behind the huge maple desk. “Get out of
here, all of you,” she yelled. Picking up the phone, she punched in
the number to the security desk in the lobby.

Charlie, the young guard who worked the
morning shift was still there.
“I have three visitors who need to be escorted out,” she
told him, with an angry glare at Nick and the two scheming
mothers.

Rage
and hurt and injured pride all mixed up inside her into a
volatile brew that made her want to weep, but she refuse to give in
to tears. “Make sure you have your gun,” she told the security
guard before she hung up and watched the man she had thought she
loved collect his things and quietly walk out of her
office.

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Chapter Thirteen

Nick
had feared that Crimson would never trust him again, and
he’d been right. She was refusing to see him, or even to talk to
him. He would have rammed through her resistance, if it hadn’t been
for the small doubt that niggled in his conscience. Could she be
right? Deep down, despite all his proud posturing, had he intended
to marry Crimson at the end of the year, if that was the only way
to hold on to Constantine Motors?

Clearly, she thought his
romantic pursuit had been based
on financial motives. Until she calmed down, it would be futile to
try to persuade her otherwise. But there was one thing he could do
for her. He could find out who was sabotaging the business, and put
an end to it. And then, perhaps, if he firmly rejected the idea of
marriage to her for the sake on inheriting the business, she it
might accept that he truly cared about her.

He flew to Detroit, took a cab downtown.
Normally, he disliked being a passenger in a motor vehicle, but
today he preferred to concentrate on the anger that simmered inside
him instead of wasting his energy on navigating around an
unfamiliar city.

Ballard Automotive had a large, modern
facility in the suburbs, but the headquarters were located in a
prewar skyscraper near the riverfront.
When the cab pulled over at the curb, Nick got out
into the blustery, overcast autumn afternoon, paid the driver, and
stormed through the revolving glass and metal doors into the lobby
of the art deco building.

He marched up to the
reception desk. “I’m here to see David
Ballard.”

A
slim brunette in her fifties greeted him. “Do you have an
appointment?”

“
No.”

The
receptionist’s smile cooled. “Let me see if he’s
busy.”

“
I’ll see for myself.” Nick strode past the
startled woman. At the back of the lobby, people were getting out
of the elevator that had just come down. He hurried inside a second
before the metal doors slid shut again.

Top floor. He took the chance. Bosses
always sat on the top floor. God knew why, because in a fire they’d
be the least likely to be rescued. The elevator traveled up without
a stop. He exited into the corridor with idle, casual steps. Three
women were waiting outside, their clothing and grooming immaculate,
executive secretary style.