Insatiable (5 page)

11:00
P.M
. GMT, Tuesday, April 13
Somewhere above the Atlantic

L
ucien Antonescu did not like to fly commercially, but not, perhaps, for the same reasons other people might dislike it. He had no control issues—other than his concerns about controlling his own rage—and of course no fear of death. The idea of a fiery or otherwise painful end did not trouble him in any way.

He was, however, disturbed by the way the airlines packed their customers into the metal tubes they were currently calling “planes,” then expected them to sit in those impossibly small, cramped excuses for “seats” for so many hours on end, with no exercise or fresh air.

So it had been some time since Lucien Antonescu had been on an airplane he himself did not own (his personal Learjet was ideal for most trips but not powerful enough for nonstop transatlantic flight). When asked to speak at an overseas conference or tour for one of his books, Lucien tended simply to decline. He wasn’t fond of publicity in any case…

But today Lucien was flying first class. The seats there were designed as individual compartments, so that other passengers seated in front of, behind, or beside him were not visible.

At a certain point during the flight, the attractive and very pleasant stewardess—they were called flight attendants now, he reminded himself—presented him with a menu from which he was asked to choose
from a dizzying selection of food choices and wines, including some quite decent Italian Barolos….

Later, after the pilot turned out the lights, the flight attendant asked him if he’d like her to make his bed for him. He accepted, purely out of curiosity. What bed? His wide and spacious seat, it transpired, automatically folded out into a reasonably sized (though not for him, being several inches over six feet tall) bed, all at the touch of a button.

The lovely flight attendant then produced a padded mattress from yet another hidden recess, real sheets that she “tucked in,” a duvet, and a pillow, which she fluffed.

She then handed him a cloth bag containing a large pair of designer pajamas, a toothbrush and paste, and an eye mask.

Finally, she wished him good night with a smile. He smiled back, not because he had any intention of changing into the pajamas or of going to sleep, but because he found the entire procedure—and her—so utterly charming.

His smile made her blush. She was divorced from an unscrupulous man who had been cheating on her throughout their eight-year marriage and was supporting their toddler on her own. She wished only that her ex-husband would pay his child support on time and visit their daughter once in a while. She did not tell Lucien these things…but then, she did not have to. He knew them because he could not be around people without their secret thoughts intruding upon his own. It was something to which he’d grown accustomed over the years, something that he occasionally enjoyed. It made him feel human again.

Almost.

She excused herself to see to another passenger, a corpulent businessman seated across the spacious aisle, in 6J. The passenger in seat 6J could not seem to stop complaining: His pillow was not soft enough, his pajamas were not large enough, his toothbrush bristles were too stiff, and his champagne glass was not filled quickly enough.

Based on Lucien’s observations, the man in 6J was pressing the call button approximately every four to five minutes, annoying both the flight attendant and the lady in the seat in front of him, who raised her sleeping mask and peeked out from her darkened compartment to see
what all the commotion was about. She had an important meeting in the morning and needed to get her rest.

Lucien rose while the flight attendant slipped back to the galley to fetch the businessman another pillow. Then he stepped across the aisle to pay a visit to 6J.

“What do
you
want?” The man—whose mind was as shallow as a thimble—looked up to sneer at Lucien.

When the flight attendant came back, she was surprised to find the passenger in 6J appearing alarmingly pale and in such a deep sleep, he seemed almost to be comatose. She threw a quick, questioning glance around the cabin, meeting Lucien’s gaze, for he was standing, reaching for a book he’d left in the overhead bin.

“Tired out from all that champagne, I expect,” Lucien said to her. “Not used to so much alcohol at such a high altitude.” He gave her a wink.

The flight attendant hesitated, then, as if transfixed by Lucien’s grin, smiled shyly back and offered him the extra pillow.

“Why, thank you,” he said.

Later, as he strolled along the darkened aisles while the jet hurtled through the night sky toward New York, listening to the breathing of the unconscious passengers and sampling their dreams, Lucien looked down at their bare, vulnerable throats as they dozed and thought that really, someone should do something to make airline travel more enjoyable for everyone, not just the privileged few in first class.

6:30
P.M
. EST, Tuesday, April 13
910 Park Avenue
New York, New York

M
eena stabbed the Up button, then looked around furtively. She was tired after her long day and hoped one thing—just this one little thing—would go her way.

And that was slipping onto the elevator of the building in which she lived without running into her neighbor Mary Lou, so that she could take the eleven-story ride to their floor in restful silence.

Meena’s building—910 Park Avenue—was elegant, with a doorman guarding its shiny brass doors, a marble lobby, a crystal chandelier, and an underground garage with parking spaces for which residents could pay an additional $500 per month (though Meena would have preferred to put that money toward a certain Marc Jacobs jewel-encrusted dragon tote…if she could have afforded an extra $500 a month, which she couldn’t).

But her apartment didn’t exactly live up to the building’s elegance: it needed repainting badly; the moldings along the ceilings were crumbling; the parquet floor needed sanding; the antique fireplaces didn’t work; and the French doors leading to the minuscule balcony that looked out over her neighbor Mary Lou’s terrace (which was practically the size of Meena’s whole apartment) stuck. And she was running out of closet space.

The important thing was, it was hers—or at least it would be, when she finally paid David back for his share of the down payment. They’d been fortunate to have bought when the market was at rock bottom and the previous owners had been divorcing and desperate to sell…and just as a small inheritance from Meena’s great-aunt Wilhelmina, for whom she’d been named (her mother had spelled it Meena for fear that her teachers and classmates might forever mispronounce her name “Myna”), finally came through.

Though David was long gone, Meena never pictured her apartment as a place to which she could bring back a date. But when she’d seen Shoshona leaving the office with a good-looking guy (whom she now realized had to have been the infamous Stefan Dominic; Meena had only managed to catch a glimpse of the back of his dark head before the two of them had disappeared onto the elevator for after-work drinks), she’d felt a twinge of envy.

Meena couldn’t even remember the last time she’d been on a date…unless she counted the first—and last—time she’d let Mary Lou set her up with a guy, someone from her husband’s office…the one whom Meena had felt compelled to inform over calamari when they’d met at a trendy restaurant downtown that he needed to have his cholesterol checked, or he was going to have a heart attack before the age of thirty-five.

Needless to say, he’d never called for a second date.

But hopefully he
had
called his doctor and gotten on Lipitor.

And yet she persevered in praying for the one thing that never, ever seemed to come true.

With the frequency of their encounters, Meena might as well have been dating her neighbor.

Every morning, poof! Mary Lou appeared, just as Meena pushed the Down button. Same thing each evening.

It was uncanny.

And every single time, any hope of having a civilized commute was shot.

Because then Meena was forced to listen to Mary Lou wax enthusiastic about whatever new guy she’d met whom she was convinced would
be just perfect for Meena or whatever incredible story line idea she’d thought up the night before for
Insatiable
.

Oh, really?
Meena would be forced to reply politely.
Thank you, Mary Lou. Actually, I’m seeing someone. Someone from my office.

Or,
No, really, I’ll definitely run your idea that Victoria Worthington Stone should become foreign ambassador to Brazil by Fran and Stan. I’m sure they’ll love that.

Except that there was no guy from Meena’s office whom she was seeing (except Paul, platonically; he’d been happily married with three kids for twenty-five years), and the countess had never, not even once, come up with a single usable story line for her favorite character, Victoria Worthington Stone.

It was too bad, because Meena genuinely liked warm, if somewhat over-the-top Mary Lou and her unassuming, slightly harassed-looking husband, Emil.

It was just that Meena was beginning to feel a little how Ned must have felt the day of his nervous breakdown in the ABN dining room…especially since David had left, and Mary Lou had become obsessed with Meena’s love life. How was Meena going to bring a date home if her older brother was always hanging around the apartment, making fettuccine Alfredo? Someone just needed to give Meena a little push in the right direction.

And Mary Lou had obviously appointed herself that person.

This became especially obvious that day, when Meena was once again unable to meet her goal of avoiding the countess at the elevator….

Poof!

There she was.

“Meena!” the countess cried. “I’m so glad I ran into you! Did you get my e-mail? Emil’s cousin, the prince, is coming to town. You’re going to love him; he’s a writer, just like you. Only he writes books, not for a soap opera. A professor of ancient Romanian history, actually. You got my e-mail about the dinner party I’m having in his honor this Thursday, right? Do you think you’ll be able to make it?”

“Oh,” Meena said. “I don’t know. Things are crazy at work—”

“Oh, your
job
!” Meena realized she should have kept her mouth shut, since Mary Lou warmed to the subject immediately. “You work way too hard at that job of yours. Not that I don’t love every minute of it. Last week when Victoria made out with Father Juan Carlos in the vestibule after she went to confession over her guilt about sleeping with her daughter’s riding instructor, I had to stuff a napkin in my mouth to keep from screaming my head off and startling the maid while she was vacuuming, I was
that
excited. That was so brilliant! That story line was one of yours, wasn’t it?”

Meena inclined her head modestly. She
was
proud of the Victoria-and-the-hot-priest story line. It was different when it was a
priest
who was nobly restraining himself from sleeping with a woman. Father Juan Carlos didn’t also want to kill Victoria.

“Well, actually—” she started to say, but Mary Lou interrupted her.

“Still, you’re going to drive yourself into early menopause slaving away for that show. Anyway, listen…”

With a ding the elevator doors opened, and Meena and the countess stepped inside to begin what would, for Meena, anyway, be the eons-long ride up.

Mary Lou then proceeded to give Meena a long description of the castle in which the prince spent his summers in Romania. Mary Lou was intimately acquainted with it, because it was near the castle where she and her husband summered for two months every year—two blissful months during which Meena was able to ride the elevator countess-free.

By floor five, Meena was wondering why she’d never gotten a feeling about Mary Lou’s or her husband Emil’s impending demises. It was odd, really.

On the other hand, it was possible her power to predict death, which had shown up when she’d reached her tweens, was starting to wane now that she was approaching thirty (a girl could dream).

More likely, however, given Meena’s luck, it was morphing into something else…look at the strange feelings she got around Leisha and her baby.

By the tenth floor, Meena had heard all she could stand about Saxon architectural influences.

“Oh, would you look at that,” Meena said when the elevator doors finally, and mercifully, opened at their floor.

“Oh, Meena,” the countess said as the two of them strolled toward their respective doors. “I forgot to ask. How’s your brother doing?”

And there it was. The Head Tilt.

The Head Tilt was accompanied, of course, by the Sympathetic Look. The countess was no stranger to Botox, as Meena well knew, since the countess had to be well over forty, but her face was as unlined as if she were Meena’s age—perhaps because Mary Lou had such an extraordinary collection of picture hats, as well as gloves, which she wore with fierce resolution to keep out the sun. Today’s was a gargantuan maroon concoction.

So it was all there, the Head Tilt, the “eleven” between the eyebrows (two crinkled lines of concern), the purse of the lips as if to say,
I care. Deeply. Tell me: How’s your brother doing?

“Jon’s doing great,” Meena said with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, given how many times a week she was forced to repeat this phrase. “Really great. Working out, doing a lot of reading, even cooking. He tried a new recipe last night for dinner. He made a great Chinese orange beef for me that he got out of the
Times.
It was delicious!”

This was an outright lie. It had actually been terrible and Meena had been furious with Jon for even attempting it. He was no great chef. Steaks on Meena’s hibachi on the balcony were his forté, not something they could just as easily have ordered in. She’d had to throw it down the garbage chute. Meena hoped the countess and her husband Emil hadn’t smelled it when they’d come home from whatever benefit they’d been attending. They were always going to—when they weren’t hosting—charity events, all over the city, late into the night, and had their names mentioned on the society pages regularly, as much for their generous gifts as for their party-hopping.

“Oh!” Mary Lou flattened her hand against the front of her Chanel jacket. “That’s great. I so admire what you’re doing, letting him live with you until he gets back on his feet. So generous. The prince just loves generous people, and so he’ll just love you. Of course…” Mary Lou brought her hand away, and the seven-or eight-carat diamond that
she’d been wearing beneath the glove she’d stripped away flashed in the glow from the overhead light in the hallway. “Do bring Jon when you come over for dinner to meet the prince on Thursday night. He’s always welcome as well. Such a sweet young man.”

Meena kept a smile frozen on her face.

“Well, thanks,” Meena said with forced cheer. “But I’m not sure about our plans. I’ll let you know. Have a good night!”

“You, too,” Mary Lou said. “
Au revoir!
”

One thing,
Meena thought as she hurried toward her apartment. One good thing could still happen to her today. She was never going to give up hope. Without hope, what did you have?

Nothing. That’s what.

She could still find the ruby dragon tote. Maybe online, used somewhere.

Except that, even used, it would still be more expensive than she could afford. It would be selfish and horrible of her to buy something so frivolous that she clearly didn’t need, especially when so many people were out of work and could barely afford food and had horrible people like Yalena’s boyfriend preying on them.

She was never going to buy the bag, of course. Not even used. But it was important to have hope.