The Jewels of Tessa Kent (14 page)

“Is that what makes you feel happy with me, my all-too-much-discussed state of virginity?” Tessa asked with wry curiosity.

“I felt that way almost before I knew damn-all about you except that you were freezing. It started right after I put my coat around you. It’s something about your eyes and your smile and your voice—if I’m not careful I’m going to sound like lyrics to a Gershwin song, minus the wit and invention.”

“All those women you’ve had, did they make you happy?”

“Not one, not truly, or I’d have married her.”

“You don’t frighten me, either,” Tessa said as lightly as she could, suppressing a tremor with her actress’s skill. She had to change the subject or the surprising, inexplicable tears of joy that menaced her might rise to the surface. She felt atoms of happiness swirling and churning and slowly turning into a solid pillar somewhere in her chest. “What sort of things do you like to do?”

“Sail a small boat and fly a small plane,” he said, thinking of priorities, “and marinate a rack of homegrown lamb in my homemade sauce, and dance a samba in Brazil and eat a Peking duck at Mr. Chow’s in London and read until three a.m. and go to auctions and ski the fall line and, oh, I almost forgot, kiss pretty girls. And take care of my business. What about you?”

“Me? Not fair!” Tessa said indignantly, instantly jealous of his easily produced list of delights that included so much enviable experience that had nothing to do with her. “I haven’t had time to choose what I’d like to do because I’ve been so busy taking the lessons Roddy and Aaron decided I should take. I can dance, but not a samba, whatever that is. I love to read, but I don’t even know what a Peking duck looks like. You’re overprivileged, Luke Blake. Where do you live?”

“Here and there, more or less. I have a place in Melbourne and another in Cap-Ferrat, near Monaco, but I rarely spend more than a few weeks in Australia and a few weeks in the South of France every year. That’s where I go to sail and unwind. I have business all over the world, so I roam about, living in hotel suites most of the time.”

“What sort of business?”

“Mining, milling, brewing, finding new ways to dig things out of the earth.”

“Why can’t you just leave the earth alone?” she said, provokingly.

“I often wonder. My great-grandfather started it and I’m trapped in the family business. Now too many people depend on me to even think of stopping.”

“Under the circumstances, with all this rape of the planet you’re hopelessly involved in, in spite of certain philosophic reservations, for which I give you very little credit, don’t you think we might have something to eat?”

“Did I forget to order?” he asked in wonder.

“Not even a drink.”

“Lord, I’m sorry. What will you have?”

“I’ll try a Blake’s, see what all the fuss is about.”

“You’ve never had a Blake’s?”

“Never had a beer, actually.”

“Why the hell not? You’re hurting my feelings.”

“I used to experiment with real liquor when I was a kid, a day student at a convent, and I was being naughty with my friend Mimi, but then … we stopped … and I haven’t had a drink since, except for sips of champagne at family weddings. I’ve lived at home, you see, until I left for location on this picture, and my parents never keep liquor around, so I didn’t drink on dates—well they weren’t date dates, just publicity things.”

“Lucky David didn’t know about all this. He’d have locked you in your room, and me in mine.”

“Don’t tell him anything! My reputation’s too good as it is.”

“Waiter, two Blake’s, please.”

“I’ll try, sir,” answered the waiter in the most authentically French restaurant in the aristocratic, sophisticated old city. “But I’m not sure we have that particular brand of beer.” Amazing, he thought, why don’t they ask for Coca-Cola while they’re at it?

“Shocking. Well then, bring us a bottle of champagne. I’m sure you have Dom Pérignon. What shall we drink to, Tessa?”

“My first real grown-up date,” she said with decision.

“You don’t mean—you can’t mean—me?”

“You. And about time, I think.”

“Good God in Heaven!”

“Yes, indeed.”

T
he next morning Tessa was pulling on her jeans and sweaters for her early-morning wardrobe call when Fiona came in with a note and a bunch of pallid daffodils. Tessa tore open the note, read it twice, turned quickly, and hurled the daffodils into a wastepaper basket.

“He’s gone!”

“What? Let me see that.” Fiona grabbed the slip of paper and muttered, “Have to leave for London suddenly, hotel florist not open, hope you like daffodils, keep warm, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Do you believe that?” Tessa raved.

“I still don’t know how last night ended,” Fiona said, reaching for a pragmatic tone.

“He brought me back to the hotel, escorted me up to the door to our suite, looked into my eyes for a very long time, as if he were memorizing them, kissed me gently on the top of my head, and abruptly left, leaving me standing there stupidly waiting—I don’t know what I expected but it was definitely not that after we’d both said things … things that I thought meant … obviously I was wrong … meant that we liked each other
very much. More than very much. Oh, Fiona, we
weren’t
flirting, I was so sure of that. We were speaking from our hearts.”

Tessa’s eyes were full of incredulous disappointment, deception, and disbelief. She felt utterly abandoned in a way so basic that she could barely comprehend what had happened. How could she ever reconcile last night’s long dinner, and the intimate, serious, revealing conversation that had lasted until late in the evening, with the note she’d just received? Until she’d read it, she’d been plunged into a pool of tremulous emotion, so new in her experience of life that she’d been up all night long, alternately examining everything she had said to Luke and Luke had said to her, reliving every detail, abandoned to her happiness, her heart so full that she’d wept for joy and laughed at herself and wept again.

“But Tessa, he doesn’t say he isn’t coming back,” Fiona said, as briskly as she could, but still sounding only a hollow note of hope.

“When? The very next time he has business in Scotland. Between trains in five years.” Tessa abandoned her attempt at brittle scorn and cried out, “What kind of man could do a thing like this?
What kind
, Fiona? Can you explain it? You’ve been around, you know men. Is it typical, is it something I should have expected? He ‘
had
to leave for London’? Why didn’t he even mention that detail last night when he was so busy telling me how blazingly happy—yes, those were the words he used—I made him? Can you think of a single reason, even one, that makes any sense? I know that Mr. Lean expected him to stick around for a while. He mentioned that yesterday.”

“Damn, I was afraid of this,” Fiona said viciously. “A bloody hit-and-run driver.”

“You were so right. And you can say ‘I told you so’ as much as you want to—I deserve it. Oh, what a fool I was!”

“At least he didn’t get the pearl of precious price.”

“That’s probably
why
he left, it’s the only thing that I can think of to explain his running away. He has a virgin fixation. I believe that in his crazy, mixed-up mind I’m too pure, I’m
taboo
, somebody he shouldn’t possibly have anything to do with. Not even a kiss on the lips. Messing with a virgin is against whatever religion he has left, he said it as flatly as that.”

“Tessa darling, I’m sick that you’ve been so badly hurt, but Luke Blake wasn’t for you and you knew it all along. Come on, admit it. My God, the guy’s middle-aged and more than lived-in. You’re ten thousand times too good for him, too young, too fresh, too talented, with too many wonderful things that are going to happen to you. Your life’s just beginning. What did you see in him, anyway? It’s just one of those location things, happens all the time. And what’s this virgin fixation all about. It’s utterly ridiculous!”

“He’d heard, as apparently everybody in the whole of show business has, that I’m a virgin, and he’s a lapsed Catholic, thirty years lapsed, which is plenty lapsed, believe me, but it’s still left him with a major complex about the marvel of virginity. Sick, that’s what it is, sick!
Oh, I hate him!
”

“The bastard’s not worth hating. Don’t waste your energy. You’re going to be late as it is and you have a long day’s work. Come on, let’s go. They’ll feed us in wardrobe and that’s what we need, both of us. Daffodils! Those grimy little things. It would have been better to have sent nothing. It’s odd, but I feel
personally
insulted.”

“You know what’s really and truly the worst thing about all this,” Tessa asked Fiona in a flood of fresh misery as they were driven up to the castle. “I can’t trust my instincts ever again.”

“I don’t see why. You can’t trust your reactions to this particular man, I agree, but instincts in general, why not?”

“I had a feeling, an overpowering feeling about him, as soon as I met him. He made me feel, don’t laugh
Fiona, but he made me feel completely, wonderfully … 
safe
 … safe in a way that changed my whole life. That sounds impossible now, but it happened. I thought I couldn’t be wrong. You can’t imagine how intimately we talked. I told him so many things, things I thought, things I hoped, things I believed in. In fact, I even told him about how he made me feel in considerable detail … I probably should never …” Tessa faltered and stopped.

“If you ask me—” Fiona bit her lip in dismay and wished she’d never indicated that she had an opinion. Tessa was so young, so inexperienced, so protected, such a child in so many ways, God knows what she’d said to that hardened charmer, words that any other woman would have learned not to voice long ago.

“What? Go on, you’re older and wiser,
what?
”

“You’re right, you shouldn’t have told him. It wasn’t just the untouchable virgin thing that sent him flying away, it was the idea of responsibility. You made him responsible for your emotions, and what kind of guy can accept such a heavy trip from someone he hardly knows, no matter how he feels? He just couldn’t take it. The proof is his history, not even a divorce to his credit. I hate to use that awful word ‘commitment,’ but I’ll bet this is a man who’s frightened to even have a dog, much less a woman, in his heart. Listen, Tessa, you’re still in one piece, that’s the important thing. Men aren’t as courageous about emotions as women, remember that.”

“Or as smart or as sweet,” Tessa said, hugging Fiona.

“Too true, love. I just wish we didn’t have those crazy moments when we forget that.”

Three days later, on a Saturday afternoon, Tessa found herself alone in her suite. Fiona had just left for the orgy she’d promised herself all week, a cashmere shopping trip in the heart of cashmere country, but Tessa was too deeply plunged into depression to feel any temptation to
go with her. She’d slept only fitfully and eaten almost nothing, unable to stop going over the fatal dinner in her mind. Only sheer discipline had enabled her to get out of bed each morning and go to the set. All her energy had bled away, except what she had to summon for the camera. Worried, Fiona had threatened not to leave her alone this afternoon, until Tessa had convinced her that she’d feel guilty for life if Fiona missed this opportunity.

She didn’t want a single sweater or scarf that reminded her of Edinburgh, Tessa thought apathetically. She couldn’t wait to leave Scotland next week after the film wrapped and she was free to return to gloriously warm Los Angeles. What she needed was a good book. She all but dragged herself over to look through the large, tempting stock of paperbacks she’d brought with her. Nothing seemed remotely readable, although she’d chosen the books carefully before leaving California. Like many actresses, Tessa had learned early the advantage of having a good book always on hand for the inevitable waiting around that takes place on even the busiest film set.

“You should learn to play solitaire,” she said out loud to her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes, in the clear northern light, seemed more distinctly green than ever, although they never lost their faint overlay of gray, like the most illusive wisp of smoke through a tropical rain forest. “Eye sockets,” she said mournfully, “a hell of a lot of difference they made.”

The phone rang. “Mr. Blake would like to know if he may come up, Miss Kent,” the concierge said.

“
No!
” Tessa slammed down the phone, her depression turned into a lightning strike of pure rage. What was he doing here? Come back to feast his eyes on a virgin, like some sort of vampire? Come up to say good-bye forever, I’m off to fly my plane around the world, come up to tell her about the delights of the latest Peking duck he’d gorged himself on in London? Or the dozen pretty girls he’d kissed? She wouldn’t bother to spit on his shadow.

The phone rang again. “What is it this time?” Tessa asked furiously.

“Mr. Blake would like to know when it would be convenient for you to see him.”

“Never! Never, tell him that, tell him I said never, and I mean never! And don’t call me again. I’ve been working all week, I’m trying to rest and you keep interrupting me, don’t you understand that?”