“You know I’m not good enough for that yet,” I told him. “I don’t want some gallery to show my work just because I’m Nico Rathburn’s girlfriend. I need to go back to school. And don’t think about offering to pay my tuition. I’m saving up my salary, and I’ll put myself through school.”
“Salary?” he said. “Have you forgotten
I
pay your salary?”
“Not for a minute.”
“Are you trying to tell me you still plan to work for me? As my nanny?”
“As
Maddy
’s nanny,” I corrected him. “It’s not you I’ll be driving back and forth to preschool and pushing on the swings. And I don’t think you need me to keep you out of trouble.”
“You could give me baths and tuck me into bed at night,” Nico said playfully. “I’d like that.” His hand crept up my leg again. I removed it. “You mean you want to stay at Thornfield Park watching Maddy while I’m on tour, all by myself?”
“You’ll hardly be by yourself,” I said. “You’ll have the band, and all your fans, and, I imagine, plenty of groupies.”
“You want to give me back to the groupies?” He sounded petulant.
“Maddy and I could come on tour with you.”
He looked surprised — apparently the idea hadn’t occurred to him. I kissed him on the cheek, and he put his arm around me and held me close. “I bet she’ll like traveling even more than I will,” I told him.
“We’ll be a family.” He sounded pleased with the idea. We rode on awhile in silence. When we were halfway across the Triborough Bridge, he turned to me and said, “Let’s make it official.”
At first I wasn’t sure what he meant.
“Let’s get married.” He grabbed both my hands, then hesitated. “Dammit, I’d get down on one knee if there were room. Will you marry me, Jane?”
For a moment I forgot to breathe.
“Don’t torture me,” Nico demanded.
“Torture you?” I asked. “How can I do that? If you really mean it, how could I say no?”
“If I really mean it?” Now he looked totally exasperated. “Jane, say yes quickly. Say ‘Yes, Nico; I will marry you.’”
“Yes, Nico,” I repeated. “I will marry you.” And I let him envelop me in his arms and kiss me again and again, not worrying about what Benjamin must be thinking as he watched us in the rearview mirror.
“I’ll buy you an engagement ring,” Nico said finally. He pressed my left hand to his lips. “Before you say another single word, I promise not to go overboard. It will be modest and flawless, just like you.”
“I’m hardly flawless.”
“You see?” he said with a grin. “Modest.”
I shook my head but couldn’t keep from smiling.
“There’s something I’ve been wondering about,” I told him. “Will you answer one question for me?”
“Depends on what it is,” he said — a bit warily, I thought.
“Are you planning on keeping secrets from me? That’s no way to begin a marriage.”
“I promise I’ll tell you anything worth knowing,” he said. “You’ll have to let me be the judge of what concerns you and what doesn’t.”
“That hardly seems fair. I’ll only marry you if you consider me your equal.”
“Of course I do.”
“Then promise you’ll be completely honest with me. That’s not too much to ask.”
He hesitated a moment, the furrow between his brows deepening. “I’ll answer whatever question you ask,” he said. “I promise.”
“Well then, why did you pretend to be in love with Bianca Ingram?”
“Is that all? To make you jealous, of course. How else was I going to get you to fall in love with me?”
“Subterfuge was hardly necessary. I loved you almost from the moment I met you.”
“You did not. I’ve never met a woman so hard to impress. So unwilling to flirt.”
“Not unwilling. Just incompetent. Nobody ever taught me how. Besides, it wasn’t a very nice thing to do to Bianca.”
“Bianca?” He laughed. “By now she’s set her sights on her next victim. I can guarantee she was playing the same game with me. Your sympathy is wasted on Bianca Ingram. Instead, feel sorry for me.”
“For you? Why should I?”
He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Because I’m dying to get my hands on you right now. I don’t think I can wait till we get back to the house.”
But, of course, he did wait. When we got home to Thornfield Park, we found Lucia in the breakfast room, piles of paper spread around her, trying to make phone calls while keeping an eye on Maddy, who was at the table cutting paper snowflakes and chatting a mile a minute. At the sight of me, Maddy leaped up and threw her arms around me.
“You go,” I prodded Nico. “Make yourself busy. I need to help Lucia.”
He gave me a wounded look but left the room.
When Lucia had hung up the phone, I caught her eye. “I’ll take over with Maddy now,” I told her. “I can see how badly you need to do your own work.”
She thanked me, looking sincerely grateful, and I thought of our encounter that morning. “Lucia, I feel like I need to explain.”
She waved me off. “Nothing to explain. I can see for myself.”
“But you looked so disappointed in me this morning.”
“Not disappointed. Just, I don’t know, surprised.”
“Surprised that Nico could be interested in someone like me?” I tried not to sound as hurt as I felt. “Am I really that unlovable?”
“Sweetie” — Lucia jumped up and gave me a hug — “no, that’s
not it. It’s just that you seem so… so sensible. So self-contained. Of course, I could tell that you’d become a sort of pet of Nico’s, but I didn’t think much of it. He’s always been very careful to distance himself from the women on his staff.” She motioned me out into the hallway, away from Maddy. “Stacy — two nannies ago — had a huge thing for him, and when it began to get in the way of her work, he had me find her another position. Said he wanted to keep things professional. So, you see, I just didn’t see this coming.”
I thought about telling her that Nico and I were engaged but then decided to let him make the announcement himself, when he saw fit. He was her boss, and I was still her subordinate. “Well, it won’t make as big a difference as you might think,” I said. “I’ll be looking after Maddy, as usual.”
Lucia glanced around, checking to be sure that Nico wasn’t nearby. “One thing, Jane. I wouldn’t say this if I weren’t fond of you. I just hope you’ll be careful.”
“Careful of what?”
“Men like Nico, when they take up with their employees — well, they don’t usually, but if they do — it generally doesn’t work out well for the woman.”
I felt impatience take hold of me and don’t know what I would have said if Maddy hadn’t come out into the hallway and tugged my hand just then. “Are you taking me to the show tonight, Miss Jane?” she asked. “Lucia bought me a new dress. Come see.”
I let her lead me off, and the two of us spent an afternoon so like the many others we’d shared together that I found myself forgetting the enormous changes of the past twenty-four hours for as long as half an hour at a time. Then I’d notice the warm glow of
happiness in the pit of my stomach or the faint tingling on my face from Nico’s stubble, and I’d remember — and feel a sudden lurch of vertigo, as if an elevator had shot me to the top of the Empire State Building and I was suddenly staring down at the hundred-story drop.
The rehearsal show was everything Nico could have hoped for. The local newspapers raved, and a number of magazines picked up the story of Nico’s comeback. “Rathburn’s Back and Better than Ever” announced a headline in
Entertainment Weekly
. The day after the show, Mitch swung by the house with feedback from people he’d hired to monitor the Internet: Nico’s fan base was wildly enthusiastic about the show. The general run of opinions was that the coming tour stood a good chance of being Nico’s best ever. When tickets for the U.S. leg went on sale a couple of days later, most venues sold out in fifteen minutes.
From where I had stood — a roped-off area stage left — with Maddy, Kitty, Yvonne, and assorted family, friends, and acquaintances of the band, the show at the XL Center was absolutely thrilling. Not that I had much to compare it with. I had never been
in an arena full of screaming fans before. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting. In the hour before the show, the crowd sat tamely in their seats, but as time passed and the anticipation grew, the tension in the cavernous room became something I could actually feel, like static electricity. Then the houselights flicked off, and the crowd sent up a dull roar, like the sound a retreating wave makes against a pebbly beach but multiplied and echoing. Next the band took the stage — first Tom and Lonnie, then Mike and Dennis, and finally, after a long pause, Nico, dressed all in black, with bracelets of thick silver chain around both wrists. The crowd went wild. The fans were louder than I had thought possible. Nico looked up solemnly to survey the crowd, then a smile stole across his face. It was the smile of someone who had thought he might never make it home again but who has, unaccountably and against all odds, arrived. My heart flipped in my chest. “Good evening, friends,” he said into the microphone, then pulled his guitar strap over his head and counted off.
What followed was a revelation. How had I felt I’d known Nico without seeing his face bathed in the spotlight, his ability to command the entire audience’s attention by lifting a hand, that compact but muscled frame I loved so well set in motion by the music he himself had composed? Watching Nico play his guitar, exhort the crowd to sing along, and whip the whole arena into a frenzy, made me long for him even more than I had before.
And how could I have imagined I understood him without hearing him sing the songs he’d written? His recorded voice was one thing; onstage it was more expressive, ranging from light and playful to the occasional howl that channeled a sadness I’d never
known was there. Hearing that loneliness in his voice made me wonder what else I didn’t know about the man I was about to marry. I felt a chill through my whole body, a feeling very close to fear, though if anyone asked about it I wouldn’t have been able to say what I was afraid of.
How strange it was to hear sixteen thousand people singing the words Nico had written, to hear their thunderous applause, and to see thousands of arms moving like a tidal wave threatening to sweep him away. In a silent moment between songs, a woman’s voice rose up drunkenly from the crowd. “I just want to touch you, Nico!” she screamed. Her cry made me notice what I hadn’t before — the crowd packed tight and straining forward just in front of the stage, and three burly men in black standing with their backs to the band, keeping watch. But what could they do to protect him if the entire crowd surged forward at once?
And then, just as my nerves threatened to overtake my pride and pleasure, Nico strolled midsong to the side of the stage where I stood, my hands on Maddy’s shoulders. He was singing “Down Romeo Street,” a love song from his third album, and now he stood before me with a teasing smile, looking down at me. “Hey there, angel,” he called between verses. “Don’t you go anywhere, okay?” — the private message made public by the microphone in his hands. I could see the crowd turn in my direction, trying to get a glimpse of whomever Nico had been speaking to, though from where most of them sat, I was invisible, obstructed by the stage and hidden in shadow. How to put a name to the excruciating pangs I felt at that moment — love, embarrassment, pride, fear, joy,
all mixed together in equal parts? I didn’t even stop to think that the words he sang had been written long ago, for another woman he used to love.
The night of Nico’s comeback concert was like a diamond necklace, a string of luminous events, each one dazzling in its own right, yet taken together, an excess of riches. There was the moment when Yvonne and Kitty took one look at me in the clothes I’d picked for that night — a simple black satin sheath with spaghetti straps and silver sandals — and gave each other a high five. “Looks like girlfriend took our advice,” Yvonne said to Kitty. And the drive to the XL Center, Nico feeling Maddy out on the topic of our engagement. “How would you like Miss Jane to live with us forever? What if you and I went into the city together and picked out a very special ring for Miss Jane so we can ask her to marry us?” Maddy’s wide-eyed look and squeals of happy surprise came as a tremendous relief. And there was the unforgettable moment right after the show when Nico gathered the band together backstage for an announcement. “I want you all to meet my fiancée,” he said, and nudged me forward to stunned silence and then applause and congratulations that seemed genuine. Each member of the band came up to congratulate and hug me. “Thank God it’s you and not that horrible Ingram bitch,” Dennis confided after downing most of a bottle of champagne. The biggest hug of all came from Yvonne. “Now you’ll be one of us,” she said into my ear. “We’ll have so much fun.” Kitty’s congratulations were more subdued. “Brace yourself,” she whispered, just before she kissed me on the cheek. “It isn’t always what you think it will be.”
To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure what Kitty’s warning meant, though I imagined it had something to do with being in the public eye. Then, two days later, Mitch brought us a copy of that day’s
New York Post
— the
New York Pest,
he called it — and handed it wordlessly to Nico. “Rock-and-Roll Prince Chooses Cinderella” the headline read below a blurry picture of Nico and me ducking into the Range Rover after our shopping spree. We had only been on the street for a few moments; who had taken our picture? The brief story accompanying the photo stunned me even more: “Looks like veteran rocker and ladies’ man Nico Rathburn is tumbling into matrimony once again. Rathburn and his fiancée, Jane Moore, 19, nanny to his daughter by French pop phenom Celine, dropped by the Big Apple to do a little impromptu shopping just before kicking off a world tour.”
Nico glowered. “Who leaked this?” he demanded of Mitch.
“Anyone with a cell-phone camera could have taken that picture,” Mitch replied. “As for your engagement, you weren’t exactly discreet the other night. It was bound to get out.”
“You’re trying to keep me a secret?” I asked lightly. As I read, Nico and Mitch watched me closely. I decided not to overreact. “If I were a cynic, I’d say you were marrying me for the publicity.” Then I handed Mitch the paper and went back to pouring blueberry syrup on Maddy’s waffles.