Fire and Ice (19 page)

“There is corruption in Europe
too, you know,” he replied to be polite, thinking of the series of scandals
that were rocking the big Swiss banks. “It’s universal in the end. People get
greedy and ambitious and will do anything to get what they want.”

Although part of him still
couldn’t believe it. He had been blinded by Genevieve, presenting himself as easy
prey to a calculating woman. With Michelle – Kate – it had felt different, a
mutual connection that was so much deeper than anything he had felt with Genevieve.
With Michelle he had fallen in love, he realised with a start, and he thought
it had been a shared feeling.

Well, welcome back to reality, he
told himself bitterly, watching the gritty world of modern India remind him of
the harshness of it all. Behind the glamour of Bollywood lurked these slums.
And behind Kate’s winsome ways lurked another calculating woman, using his naïveté
to her advantage again.

He hadn’t even confronted her
before he left. He didn’t want to see her cynical response if he presented her
with proof of her treachery, didn’t want her to see how utterly and willingly
he had fallen for her ruse. He hadn’t fired her either, and now it would mean
telling his family what an idiot he had been. No smarter than Stefan when it
came to women. Worse, maybe, because at least Stefan’s affair with Rashmi had
been based on a mutual attraction and respect.

Of course his family might have
figured it out already, might have seen the article and put the pieces
together. Or perhaps one of them had taken advantage of the free chalet for a
weekend and spoken with Kate or else noticed her absence.

 In any case, she would have to
act fast or her big charade would be for nothing. She hadn’t yet published
anything scandalous or he would have heard about it. Maybe she had been waiting
for something big and now would settle for a story about Axelle. Or maybe she
would use her own experience to write a piece about how easy it was to seduce
your way into the old money of Geneva. A piece about going under cover,
literally under the covers, to get a piece. How incredibly manipulative.

He made a grimace, thinking of the
unpleasant phone call he would soon have to make to his family. The driver
mistook his expression for discomfort and turned a tiny dashboard fan in his
direction from its position between a postcard of Ganesh and a plastic Krishna
playing a flute.

“I am sorry not to be having air
conditioning,” he apologised with his lovely accent. “But soon we will be
through this traffic and fairly flying along.”

Sebastien found himself chuckling.
He doubted that anybody flew along on this stretch of road during working hours
any more, or that the dilapidated taxi was even capable of flying along
anything without losing wheels and doors. “I am fine,” he assured him, wiping
at his sticky brow. “Just thinking of work I need to do.”

“That is the curse of being poor,”
the driver agreed. “You must pray to Lakshmi, goddess of wealth. Then one day
you will not need to work so hard. Or else have many children and let them be
supporting you. Do you have any issue?”

Again Sebastien made a face, although
of the various Indian idioms he enjoyed, the use of “issue” for offspring was
one of his favourites. “No issue. No wife.”

“That is bad,” the driver said,
shaking his head with a frown. “I will take you to my temple to make an
offering if you like. Or I can find you pretty Indian girl and you can make
many fair babies.”

“No, thank you,” Sebastien said
quickly. “I have bad luck with women. I prefer my work.”

The driver looked sorrowfully at
him in the rear view mirror and nearly ran into the bumper of a diesel-belching
Peugot that looked like it had been new in the fifties. “You Europeans make the
mistake of believing in marriage for love. You cannot trust such an important
matter to your heart. You must trust your family to choose wisely for you and you
can learn to love your wife over time. It is much better to see marriage as a
sort of business arrangement, but you in the west do not like this.”

“Oh, some do,” Sebastien said
darkly. “Some do.”

A strong evening wind rattled one
of the shutters of Chalet Gentiane. Kate wandered listlessly toward the window
in question and opened it, leaning out into the cold night to reach for the
wooden shutter. She took a moment to gaze up at the stars, clear in the
freezing Verbier night, and let the bitter wind wake her. Then she pulled both
shutters closed, fastening them snugly with a hook, and shut the window.

The effect on the room was to make
it more sombre, which matched her mood. It had been over a week since her
ill-fated trip to Geneva and she had heard nothing from Sebastien, nothing from
anybody in the Pichard family. This left her trapped in an uncertain limbo,
assuming that she was fired but not daring to leave until it was official, just
in case he hadn’t told his family and they were expecting the chalet to be
tended.

Kate was completely miserable. She
had reached a low point after her London life had fallen apart but this was
worse. After Mickey she had felt lost and betrayed but also aware that she
hadn’t loved the real man, only the character he played. The realisation that
Sebastien now probably was feeling exactly the same thing was no comfort. This
time she had lost somebody that she truly loved and respected, and it was
through her own cowardice.

The music of South Pacific was
playing on repeat. “This Nearly Was Mine” came on yet again and she stomped
over to the stereo and yanked away her mp3 player with unnecessary violence.
Enough of this childish and silly belief that musicals could heal all. Real
life stories didn’t end with heroes and heroines singing harmonious duets while
the whole cast joined in. It was time to grow up and face reality. It was time
to start from zero again.

Chapter   Twenty

A blast of cold air greeted
Sebastien as a red-uniformed doorman opened the door of the chic Mumbai Moghul
restaurant. The large, nearly-empty room with its white table cloths and the
discrete murmur of voices was a welcome relief after the sticky heat of
pre-monsoon Bombay and the chaos and noise of the street outside.

At a table in the corner, wearing
a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over her face, he found the woman he was looking
for. Rashmi Tewari lifted her head warily at his approach and then her face
broke into a smile before she quickly lowered her gaze again.

“Just until those two gentlemen
near the door leave,” she murmured, pretending to study her menu. “One of them
works for the Star Gazer and pays the doorman to slip in and look for
celebrities. You can imagine the fun they would have if they found me lunching
with the other Pichard son.”

Sebastien nodded grimly and picked
up a menu. The affair with Stefan had hurt the Pichard watch business in Asia
and caused a bit of talk in Geneva but not more than that. The effect on
Rajna’s career had been far more pronounced, with all of India’s entertainment
media focusing on the scandal.

“It’s such hypocrisy, of course,”
she mouthed softly behind the menu. “They know that the upper classes here have
chosen a much more modern view on relationships and half of Bollywood is
sleeping with the other half. But I am the media’s favourite fallen woman, a
scapegoat for the others.”

“But managing to stay away from
the magazines somehow,” Sebastien said with a sigh. The entire Pichard family
felt guilty for the behaviour of last year’s chalet girl. “Normally that should
have been easier to manage in Switzerland than here.”

 “I suppose we’ve learned to be
more careful here,” she replied with a small shrug. “We are such heroes to our
fans, especially in the villages where things are a bit more conservative.
Heroes have to live up to their fans’ ideals.”

“And is the orphanage project
helping?” he asked hopefully. “Is it reassuring your public?”

Rashmi lifted her head carefully
again to glance toward the door and then threw back her head in relief. “Now I
can take off this awful hat,” she said happily, shaking out her long dark
tresses. “Yes, the orphanage is good publicity for me and more than that, I’m
getting quite involved. If I’m not careful, I’m going to end up adopting the
lot. Isn’t that what your Western movie stars do, to keep their figures?”

“Some do,” Sebastien acknowledged.
“Although I don’t know how much is for their physical figure and how much is
for business figures. Ambition might get in the way of maternity.”

A waiter arrived to take their
orders and Sebastien chose hastily, taking advantage of the interruption to
examine his companion discretely. Rashmi looked as lovely as ever in her simple
white blouse and a pair of jeans. Her almond-shaped eyes, set in smooth brown
skin, stared back frankly with a hint of amusement and none of the rancour that
he had been dreading to find.

“Stefan and I were adults,” she
reminded him, seeming to read his mind. “We both knew what we were doing.”

“The consequences for you were
longer-lived,” he insisted, thinking of her arranged marriage which had been
called off after the story broke.

“Maybe for the best in the end,”
she said with an enigmatic smile. “You know, Ashwan and I had already decided
not to get married when he was off studying in England and I was passing my
first screen test. We just kept postponing the date because neither of us
wanted to tell our families.”

“So you got to meet him in person
before your marriage.” Sebastien took a sip of the ice cold water that the
waiter had just placed in front of him. “Isn’t that unusual?”

“Oh, we practically grew up next
door to each other,” she said with a toss of her hair. “Our families are old
friends. But he met somebody in the UK and I wanted a proper Bollywood romance,
true love, a hero sweeping me off my feet. He took advantage of the scandal to
tell his family about the girl in England so that neither family could blame
the other and they could remain friends.”

“So it has all worked out?”
Sebastien asked uncertainly.

Rashmi laughed, flashing a set of
perfect white teeth. “Better than you can imagine. Ashwan changed his mind
about Amanda and now, after all this mess, he and I are planning a very quiet
secret wedding.”

Sebastien tugged at the hair
behind his ear, considering. “So you’ve both decided that arranged marriages
are the safer bet after all?”

Rashmi clapped her hands
delightedly. “That’s where this becomes like a movie. No, we are marrying for
love. It just took us years of long discussions to recognise what was under our
noses from the start.”

She laughed at Sebastien’s
astonished expression and leaned forward to clasp his hands. “And as every Bollywood
fan knows, love must always triumph in the end, no matter what adversity and
complications arise. So whoever you are fretting about now, go home and win her
back, fighting gangs of bandits or whatever it takes.”

“How did you...” Sebastien
faltered. Was he really wearing his heart so blatantly on his sleeve?

The actress shook her head with an
exaggerated sigh. “Men. You all think you are so strong when you’re as
soft-hearted as the rest of us. I know how busy you are with work. You would
never decide to come out here to check out our orphanage project like that
unless you were trying to run away from somebody you loved. Or did you come out
to inspect my work, doubting my business management abilities?”

He looked taken aback. “Never,” he
assured her hastily, before the twinkle in her eye showed him that she was
teasing. “You’re a magician to manage juggling all the bureaucratic hoops and
hassles.”

She fluttered her eyelids at him
theatrically. “Or do you doubt my skills at managing people?” she went on.

Sebastien allowed himself to be
charmed into playing along. “Never, Rashmi. You are far more adept at reading
people and managing all their eccentricities than I will ever be,” he said
expansively. “In the matter of that contractor and of the orphanage director,
you made the right decisions and we Pichards are very happy to defer to your
judgement in these matters.”

“Excellent,” she said triumphantly.
“Then I ask you to defer to my judgement in this matter as well. Go back to the
girl, whoever she is, and sort out your problems. Love doesn’t come around
every day, and if it survives the messes we make of it, it is worth keeping. If
you walk away from it without even trying, you will regret it forever.”

Sebastien sat transfixed. Coming
from Rashmi, it sounded so simple and obvious. He hadn’t even given Kate a
chance to explain herself, and although he couldn’t think of any reason for her
to lie about her identity, it was also true that she didn’t seem to have
published anything about the family.

Abruptly he pushed back his chair,
but Rashmi laughed and grabbed his wrists. “But first you have to stay for your
palak paneer before you fly off to rescue your true love. You mustn’t start
adventures with an empty stomach, and the cook here is fabulous. Besides, I’d
hate for people to think I’d been stood up. It makes me feel like I’m losing my
touch.”

His smile was genuine as he raised
his water glass to hers in a toast. “To true love, then.”

“Always happy endings,” she
responded with a trilling laugh. “And now you must tell me who she is, this
mystery woman who has managed to melt your icy heart. I’m thinking to write my
own script for my next film and I’m looking for good romantic material. And you
mustn’t refuse me,” she said warningly as he opened his mouth to object. “I’m a
star. We like to get our own way.” She pushed out her lower lip in a pout.