Overseas (39 page)

“What I understand,” Geoff said, replacing his hat, calming his voice, “is that you believe yourself to be saving Captain Ashford from
me
. From
me, of all people, when I’d defend him with my last breath. I ought to kick you to the gutter, where you belong…”

“He’d never forgive you.”

His eyes drilled into mine. “Women like you…”

“Okay, enough. There’s only so much of this I can take, even for
his
sake. So fine. Let’s agree not to like each other; I don’t see any way out of that. But can we please,
please
set that aside, and put Julian’s interests first?”

“Captain Ashford’s best interests lie in your immediate withdrawal from his life.”

“No!”
I pointed my finger at his chest. “Julian’s interests lie in your hands. Because
you’re
the one who’s going to betray him.
You
.”

He started backward, agape, his hard leather shoes slipping against the still-damp paving stones.

“Yes, I’ve got your attention now, haven’t I? This ridiculous hatred you bear me, Geoffrey Warwick, this bigoted
jealousy
of yours, will mean Julian’s death and your own. So you’d better get over it, before you ruin us all.” I picked up the basket and settled it back into my elbow and gave him a last hard look. “Just let him be
happy
, for God’s sake.”

I turned around and marched back down the street, toward rue des Augustins.

21.

Blue. A blue line. Sharp, vivid, unequivocal.
Here I am,
Mommy!

The wand dropped from my shaking fingers. I stared at it, there on the bathroom floor, an earthquake compressed into white plastic.

“Darling,” Julian called from the bedroom, “are you almost ready? The car’s waiting.”

“Um, yeah,” I called back. “Just putting on my lipstick.” I leaned down and grabbed the damning evidence and shook it back and forth. As if that would change the result. Make it less…
blue
.

“Can I help?” he asked, his voice coming nearer.

“No! Just finishing up. Hold on.” I grabbed a tissue and wrapped it around the wand and stuck it in the back of my drawer.

I checked my face in the mirror. The hairdresser had departed ten minutes ago, leaving my hair pinned atop my head in a pert cascade. I’d done my makeup myself, as always: a bit heavier than I liked, but I’d seen the results from my first effort in the Sunday Pulse section of the
Post
, and quickly grasped that if the camera added ten pounds of fat, it also took away the equivalent amount of makeup. I’d looked like a college student. And not in a good way.

“Darling,” Julian prodded, right on the other side of the door.

I turned at once and yanked it open. “Sorry. Too much, do you think?”

“Yes. But you look stunning anyway.” He wasn’t much of a makeup man, Julian.

“Sorry,” I repeated. “Have to look the part.”

“What do you think?” He lifted both hands. “Diamonds or rubies?”

“You pick.”

He held each one carefully up to my neck. “Rubies,” he decided.

“Nothing says
notice me
like a fortune in sparkly red jewels,” I sighed, turning around for him to fasten them around my neck.

“When we return home tonight,” he said, his fingers cool and dexterous against my nape, “I want you to wear these, and nothing else.”

It had taken Julian a day of pleading and seduction and completely bogus threats to get me to wear any of the jewelry he’d had brought down from the safe in Connecticut; in the end, he’d called in Michelle and Samantha one weekend as reinforcements. Traitors. He’d won them over in no time, with his damned relentless charisma and his private planes and his funding of a shopping spree to end all shopping sprees. They’d transformed into his willing accomplices, sneaking things past me to the sales staff, coming home with armloads of shoes in my size, making me try on gown after gown. Their eyes had glazed over with perpetual glee, as if every pleasure center in their respective brains were being pummeled by an outsized hammer.

I turned around. His face was so close I could smell his freshly brushed teeth. “Mmm, minty,” I said, without thinking, and leaned forward to kiss him.

“Stop that,” he murmured, bringing his hands up to the back of my neck. “We haven’t time,” and his mouth curved lingeringly around mine. “Seductress,” he said at last, pulling away. “Now I’ve ruined your lipstick.”

I rubbed the evidence from his lips with my fingers. “It’s your fault, walking in here with that face of yours. How’s my dress?’

“Like it should be ripped from your body.”

“So you like it?” I twirled. The pearl-gray layers floated around me, draping my figure with ridiculous suggestiveness. I had to admit, these couture designers knew what they were doing.

“I despise it. Every man in the building is going to be thinking the same thing I am.” He looked downward and frowned.

“It’s called a push-up bra, Julian,” I said helpfully.

“Bloody hell,” he muttered.

“Well, this was all your idea, remember? I’m just following orders.”

“Revenge is more like it. Very well, then.” He held out his arm. “Shall we, Mrs. Ashford?”

“Why, thank you, Captain Ashford.” I took his arm and snagged my bejeweled clutch from atop the chest of drawers. “If I may say so,” I added, allowing myself to be led from the room, “you look pretty delectable yourself.”

“Just the same old tuxedo,” he said.

“But you wear it so well.”

We made it to the bottom of the stairs, where Eric, my bulky new bodyguard, stood waiting for us like a two-legged Doberman pinscher. Julian let my arm slip away until he was holding my fingers. “Christ, Kate,” he exclaimed, “you’re like ice!”

“Nerves.”

Julian wrapped his hand around mine and gave Eric a nod, signaling him to lead on through the front door and down the steps to the black sedan perched by the curb.

It was like I had two brains: one was flirting happily with Julian, as if everything were perfectly normal, and the other one was busy calculating just how far along I must be. I’d waited an extra week or so, hoping against hope, before taking the test, and even then I’d still been bizarrely surprised at the sight of the blue line. I mean, I couldn’t be
pregnant
, for God’s sake. We weren’t
trying
to get pregnant. It was just one single stupid month. Other couples tried for years for a baby. And for us? Boom? Just like that? Knocked up? No way. Not possible.

I felt sweat break out, sudden and damning, all over my body. And was that
nausea
? Please not. Please, just
nervous
nausea, not
pregnant
nausea.

“Are you all right?” Julian asked suddenly, looking at my face.

“Just nervous.” I laughed. “I can’t seem to get used to this stuff.”

“It should be easier tonight, love. Even you’ve been looking forward to this one.” The car eased around the corner of Fifth Avenue and onto the Sixty-sixth Street park transept, heading for Lincoln Center.

“I know. I should feel lucky. And you, the opera lover! Right up your alley.”

“It’s not a proper opera on opening night anymore,” he said. “A bit of
Traviata
, a bit of
Manon
. Final scene of
Capriccio
. It’s become an event now.”

“Isn’t that the point? For us, I mean?”

“Yes.” He sighed dramatically. “But I grieve for the art.”

“We can go to others.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “When all this is over, when it’s all back to normal…”

I looked out the window at the stone walls of the transept blurring past us. “Can we really put the cat back in the bag, though? You’re the savior of Wall Street now, which pretty much counts as the entire known universe in this town. And there’s your ridiculously photogenic face.” I reached for his hand. “You’re like a perfect storm.”

He frowned and turned his own gaze out the window, as uncomfortable with that reality as I was. The past few weeks had taken on a surreal quality. I’d woken up the morning after Julian’s return from the Sterling Bates negotiations to find my lover was a hero. There, in that roomful of bankers, he’d stepped forward to keep the house of cards from tumbling down. With Southfield essentially dissolved, he’d committed almost the entirety of his personal equity capital to a new firm that would establish and operate auctions for the illiquid securities dragging the Sterling Bates balance sheet into bankruptcy; then he persuaded—browbeat, cajoled, whatever—others to do the same. In exchange, he’d demanded the resignation of key Sterling Bates executives, a selloff and reorganization of the bank’s various divisions to raise capital, and the implementation of new and rigorous risk-management protocols.

Of course, it had taken days for Julian’s role in the whole debacle to trickle out; it began as a whisper, from those who’d been in the meetings, and the legend had grown almost by itself, an open secret in the notoriously gossipy financial community. Even now, there had been no feature in
The Wall
Street Journal
, no interview on CNBC. But everyone knew.

Why? I’d demanded. Why take command like that, bring attention to yourself? Your cover could be blown, just like that.

Because it had to be done, he’d answered simply.

Because, in Julian’s world, that was what people did. They stepped forward. They did their duty, without excuses. They made the necessary sacrifice.

I looked at him now, at his clean pensive profile, cast in blue shadow by the fading late-afternoon light, and all my tension dissolved. I reached out and placed my hand on his opposite cheek, and turned his face toward mine. “Julian,” I said, “darling,” and his eyes widened, because I hardly ever used endearments. “Forget what I said before. I’m
honored
to be your arm candy.”

His smile spread slowly, warm and intimate and mine alone. “Sweetheart, the honor is all mine.”

The car burst free of the park and crossed Central Park West onto Sixty-seventh Street. “By the by,” he said, his tone a bit forced, “you’ll see Geoff Warwick and his wife there tonight.”

“Oh,” I said. “Can’t we just avoid them?”

“I’m afraid not. We have seats in the same box.”

“We’re going to be sitting in the same
box
?”

“I’ve shared it for years with him. I know it’s awkward, darling, but I’m sure we can all manage to be civil. For Carla’s sake, if nothing else.”

“Since when have you been so careful of Carla’s feelings?” I said. Geoff I despised, of course, but Carla was even worse, in her way. She’d no doubt treat me with exactly the kind of falsely enthusiastic familiarity I hated most.

“Darling, be generous.” His hand worked its way into mine.

“I’m just not good at that kind of thing. Social niceties. Being friendly with someone you don’t like.”

“Think of it as a game,” he said. “I’ve told him to make himself civil.”

I returned the pressure of his fingers. “I don’t know why he never liked me. I mean, I’m a nice enough person, aren’t I?”

“It’s not you,” he said. “He’s a good man; he’s just protective of me. Always was. Considered me a credulous chap in school, always too willing to make new friends. More or less appointed himself my watchdog.” I glanced at him sharply; his voice had taken on a strained note.

“Look,” I said, “I know it’s unfair to you. I’ll try to be good, I promise. After all, it’s kind of bitten him back, hasn’t it?”

“How so?”

“Because.” I leaned over to kiss him. “Without that book, I might never have lured you in.”

He returned my kiss. “I daresay we would have managed eventually. But here we are.” He pulled his mouth away, brushed my lips with his thumb. “Are you ready?”

I glanced outside. Red carpet. Photographers. What had happened to my life? “Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath, “let’s get it done.”

“I’ll be right here beside you.”

The car door swung open, and a minor explosion of flashbulbs hit my eyes. I stepped out of the car as gracefully as I could, taking the driver’s hand for balance. Eric appeared imposingly at my left side, and Julian at the other an instant later. I felt his fingers slip around mine and smiled serenely. Back straight. Shoulders back.

We walked along slowly, striking an obliging pose when a photographer screamed at us, trying to look gracious and relaxed. No one asked us for an impromptu interview, thank goodness; that had happened at a movie premiere last week and I’d stood there like an idiot while Julian dazzled the reporter, some heavily made-up girl from E! who probably didn’t know a hedge fund from a hedge trimmer. Again, it was his good looks that had snagged her attention. She’d probably thought he was actually in the movie. Michelle, practically bouncing in her seat, had shown me the YouTube clip the next day:

And there I stood at Julian’s side, looking like a stunned deer (
What do you mean? You’re totally gorgeous!
exclaimed loyal Michelle), while he flashed his lady slayer into the cameras and kissed my hand, to an explosion of paparazzi flashbulbs. That picture had made it into an obscure corner of
Us
Weekly
a few days later.

We made it through Lincoln Plaza and into the lobby of the opera house, where Julian snagged me a glass of champagne from a passing waiter. I was about to take a long drink, and stopped myself just in time. “Thanks.” I wet my lips gingerly.