Flawless (23 page)

“London’s too dangerous and too expensive,” he said. “Your insurance money won’t go far here. In LA it’d buy you a fantastic space in a prime area.”

“Yes, but my business is here,” said Scarlett, stating the obvious. “My suppliers, my clients, all my contacts.”

“I’ll supply you in LA,” said Jake.

“You?” Scarlett looked suitably thunderstruck.

“Yes, me,” said Jake, visibly put out. “Fair prices, no funny business. You need a supplier, and I could do with a steady retail outlet to supplement my private sales.”

“Come on,” said Scarlett, her old skepticism returning. “I only buy clean stones, stones that I can verify. You and Danny still source from Angola, for God’s sake!”

“Everything I sell you will be clean as a nun’s ass,” said Jake. “That’s a promise. I’ll also feed you clients, for a cut obviously.”

“Obviously,” said Scarlett.

“Hey, don’t knock it. I’ve got a little black book of contacts on the West Coast going back fifteen years.”

“Yes, I can just imagine the contents of your little black book.” Scarlett looked disapproving. “I really don’t think this would work, Jake.”

“That’s because you’re being narrow-minded and letting your feelings for me cloud your judgment,” he shot back, undeterred. “If you’re rattling Brogan now, just imagine how much more impact Trade Fair could have in the States. You’re talking about the biggest diamond-buying market in the world. Think about it.”

Scarlett thought about it. The idea did have a certain appeal.

“You could still do private commissions for your London clients. All I’m talking about is setting up a physical presence in LA, a new store. You want a fresh start, right?”

“Well, yes,” she admitted. “But I never envisioned leaving London. What if Brogan thinks I’m running away? That he’s driven me out of town?”

“Who cares what he thinks?” said Jake. “You can prove him wrong soon enough when you get out there and Trade Fair’s on the cover of
Vanity
fucking
Fair
. Come on, Scarlett. Think big!”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m really an LA sort of a person,” she said lamely. “Isn’t it rather shallow?”

“It’s a fucking paddling pool!” laughed Jake. “But they’ll love you. Honestly. You have no idea how much a posh British accent, never mind a castle and a title, means to them over there. Class is the one thing these people
can’t
buy, and you’ve got it in spades. I’m telling you, I know this market. We’ll rake it in.”

If anyone had told her yesterday that by midnight tonight she’d be seriously contemplating picking up and moving to Los Angeles, of all places—and not just moving there, but moving there to go into business with
Jake Meyer
!—she’d have looked at them as if they’d lost their mind. But maybe now she was losing hers. Because whichever way she turned it, it
did
seem like a good idea, or at least like a possibility. If Trade Fair cracked the States—if she cracked the States—there’d be no stopping her.

“I know it’s a big decision,” said Jake, who was a good enough salesman to know when to stop pushing. “All I’m asking is that you think about it. All right?”

He mustn’t sound desperate. He’d come up with the idea himself only a few days ago, after he heard what had happened at Bijoux, but already he’d come to see partnership with Scarlett as the answer to his prayers. He hadn’t wanted his mum to scare her off at dinner, but the truth was his business was suffering more than he cared to admit and had been for some time. Scarlett might be irritating, and her bear-baiting campaign would no doubt bring him a whole new set of problems to contend with. But a joint venture in LA—a new store, fronted by this beautiful, aristocratic, talented girl—would take the city by storm, he just knew it. Finally he’d have the rocket he needed to blow Tyler Brett out of the water.

“All right,” said Scarlett, trying to conceal her own excitement and not sound like a drowning woman who’d just been thrown an unexpected lifeline. “I’ll think about it.”

D
IANA
O’D
ONNELL TURNED
up the volume on the stereo and kicked off her shoes.

Ella Fitzgerald’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” boomed out of Brogan’s new state-of-the-art Japanese speaker system as she twirled happily around the chalet, wiggling her bare toes in the luxurious softness of the carpet. All around her, white, oblong place cards, bearing names carefully crafted in festive red and green calligraphy, lay scattered on the floor like so much stiff confetti. Two Filipino maids were busy polishing the antique dining table and setting out the best silver candelabra. And behind Diana, in the bespoke Nordic pine kitchen, another two were preparing this evening’s appetizers—miniature Swiss cheese soufflés with a light white truffle sauce—and privately wondering what on earth had got into their usually restrained and often downright miserable mistress.

As usual, the O’Donnells were spending Christmas in Colorado at Brogan’s sprawling chalet-cum-mansion in Telluride. He had bought the property six years ago, since when he had spent less than sixty days here—five days every Christmas, plus one long skiing weekend in March each year—but a skeleton staff was kept on payroll all year round in case he loaned the house to friends or business associates or slipped up here for a snatched
night away with one of his mistresses. Diana, who wasn’t a skier and often passed on the March trip, was an even shadowier presence in the chalet than her husband, appearing each Christmas like one of Dickens’s ghosts before flitting back to New York. The staff at Telluride, as at all her houses, had grown used to seeing her sad and listless, fulfilling her wifely hostess duties with the forced enthusiasm of a newly drafted recruit setting off for war.

But this year she was different. Smiling, chatty, animated. Dancing to cheesy Christmas songs. Spending hours perched on top of a ladder, decorating the thirty-foot tree that dominated the open-plan entrance hall in a riot of gaudy, clashing colors, a radical departure from the subdued silver-and-white-themed trees of previous years.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” whispered one cook to the other, watching Diana pirouetting around the living room like a five-year-old.

“That’ll be sex,” her friend whispered back. “Either that woman has a new lover or I’m the next Julia Roberts.”

“I hope so,” said the first cook, slicing truffle shavings onto a silver tray. “God knows she deserves a bit of fun, poor woman. His majesty gets enough.”

Sex, in fact, was the one thing Diana was missing. Danny had left for England two weeks ago, bringing their thrice-weekly lovemaking sessions to an agonizingly abrupt end, and wouldn’t be back until January. And Brogan, who usually demanded his conjugal rights at least every other night, had become mysteriously tired this vacation and barely touched her all week. He blamed a troublesome cough he’d developed recently that he seemed unable to shake, but Diana suspected his lower libido had more to do with Natalia, Premiere’s latest star model and one of their guests for tonight’s Christmas Eve dinner. Apparently in Telluride by coincidence, with friends, the girl seemed to be spending an awful lot of time in “meetings” with Brogan. This time last year, Diana reflected, a mistress’s presence at such a
special family time of year would have wounded her deeply. Now, she was almost grateful for the distraction—anything to keep Brogan off her back, literally and metaphorically, and throw him off the scent of her blossoming affair with Danny.

She wasn’t sure when her feelings for Danny had shifted from desire and affection to genuine love. Maybe it was the day after her birthday in November when he’d taken her dancing at a tiny, throbbing little salsa place in the Bronx that reminded her of her happy, carefree student days, and on the subway home had given her her present—a first edition of
Wind in the Willows
, her favorite book as a child. The night before, Brogan had taken her to the Four Seasons, dropped two thousand dollars on dinner and champagne, and presented her with an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar diamond choker. And she’d felt nothing but sadness. The sadness of knowing that the communication gap between the two of them was too wide now to ever be bridged, with or without Danny.

When Brogan asked her later where she’d gotten the book, she told him a girlfriend had given it to her.

“Damn stupid present,” he growled dismissively. “What the fuck do you need with a children’s book? Lisa knows we don’t have kids.”

Of course, everyone knew the O’Donnells didn’t have kids. Sometimes Diana felt like the most famous childless woman in Manhattan. Somewhere along the line, her failure to conceive a child with Brogan had become what defined her as a person. But slowly, thanks to Danny’s love, the layers of disappointment and grief were being peeled away. The fun, free-spirited girl who had once existed was clawing her way up out of the grave and back into the land of the living.

Of course, there were still plenty of problems to be faced. Her time with Danny was still snatched and furtive, and they often had to cancel rendezvouses at the last minute if Brogan’s travel or dinner plans changed. Danny’s impatience with these
restrictions was growing. The night before he left for England they’d had a titanic fight about her marriage and why she didn’t “just end it.”

“You talk about it as if it were like selling a car!” she yelled back at him. “Ten years of marriage isn’t something you ‘just end.’ We have a life together. There was so much love there once.”

“And what about the love here, now?” said Danny, exasperated. “Doesn’t that count for anything? What about the way he treats you, spying on you, caging you up like some fucking trapped animal? How can he love you if he doesn’t trust you?”

“Well, he’s right not to trust me, isn’t he?” said Diana, fighting back tears. Danny had never understood her guilt over their affair, but it ran deep. The way he saw it, if she knew Brogan had been fucking every twenty-one-year-old with a pulse for years, why the hell should she care about his feelings? He didn’t want to consider the possibility that, despite all the pain he’d put her through, the love bond between husband and wife might still be intact.

Thankfully, they’d made things up before he left, and all his phone calls from London had been so full of love and longing that Diana felt reassured they were back on track. Contrary to his fears, she didn’t “get off” on the illicit, secret nature of the relationship at all. She had the same fantasies he did about marriage and children and happily ever after—about starting again. But for her, a new start would demand a painful ending to something that, for better or worse, she had striven to save and nurture for most of her adult life.

Despite these tensions, falling in love with Danny had given her a new lease on life. When they had spoken this morning—she’d slipped out early to Main Street on the pretense of doing some last-minute Christmas shopping and taken his call in a quiet corner of Gucci—he’d promised to engineer some sort of romantic getaway when Brogan flew to Antwerp in February,
and it was the prospect of this that had her twirling around the chalet now like a love-struck teenager.

“Mrs. Diana?” One of the maids broke her reverie. “You want to do those placements now? Or should we go ahead and make up the table first?”

Bending down, Diana scooped up a handful of cards and began plonking them at random around the table. She wasn’t even reading the names.

“There you go,” she said, beaming. “I always say it’s better not to overthink these things. Don’t you agree, Joyce?”

“If you say so, ma’am,” giggled the maid. No doubt about it, whoever the mystery man was, her mistress had it bad.

Meanwhile, in London, Christmas Eve at the Meyer household was already well under way.

Minty, who’d rather saw off her fingers with a rusty penknife than see either of her sons marry a non-Jewish girl, was nevertheless enthusiastic about Christmas and all its rituals, especially those that involved eating, drinking, and generally making merry. It was the one time of year when both her boys came home, and that alone was excuse enough for celebration and for the giant fake Christmas tree (“I can’t be doing with all those dropped needles! At my age?”) that towered over the space that Minty liked to call the foyer like a vast silver rocket.