Authors: Danielle Steel
“Bloody Mary, anyone?” Charlie inquired with feigned innocence, as he signaled to the steward that they'd be leaving. The purser, who'd been standing by, a handsome young man from New Zealand, nodded, then disappeared to tell the captain, and make the lunch reservation. He didn't need to ask anything more. He knew Charlie would want to go ashore for lunch at two-thirty. Most of the time he preferred eating on board, but the scene in St. Tropez was too tempting. And everyone who was anyone went to Club 55 for lunch, just as they went to Spoon these days for dinner.
“Make mine a virgin Bloody Mary,” Gray said as he smiled at the steward. “I thought I'd postpone my trip to rehab for a few days.”
“Make mine hot and spicy, and come to think of it, make mine with tequila,” Adam said with a broad grin as Charlie laughed.
“I'll have a Bellini,” Charlie said—they were peach juice and champagne, and an easy way to start a day of decadence. Charlie had a fondness for Cuban cigars and good champagne. They had a lot of both on board.
All three men sat drinking and relaxing on deck as they motored carefully away from the port, avoiding the many smaller boats and the daily tour boats filled with gawkers who snapped their picture as they drove by. The usual flock of paparazzi were huddled together at the end of the
quai
, waiting for big yachts to come into port, so they could see who was on board. They followed celebrities on motorbikes, hounding them every step of the way, and they took a last picture of
Blue Moon
as she sailed away, assuming correctly that the superyacht would be back that night. Most of the time they took photographs of Charlie as he strolled through town, but he rarely if ever gave them fodder for the tabloids. Aside from the immense opulence and size of his yacht, Charlie led a relatively quiet life, and avoided scandal at all costs. He was just a very rich man, traveling with two friends, whom no one reading the tabloids had ever heard about. Even with the stars Adam knew and represented, he always stayed in the background. And Gray Hawk was just a starving artist. They were three bachelors, and devoted friends, out to have some fun for the month of August.
They swam for half an hour before lunch. Afterward, Adam took out one of the Jet Skis to take a tour around the other boats, and work off some of his energy, while Gray slept on the deck, and Charlie smoked one of his Cuban cigars. It was the perfect life. At two-thirty they took the tender to lunch at Club 55. Alain Delon was there, as he often was, Gerard Dépardieu, and Catherine Deneuve, which caused the three friends to discuss her at length. They all agreed that she was still beautiful, despite her age. She was very much Charlie's type, although considerably older than the women he went out with, who more often than not were somewhere in their thirties, or even slightly younger. He rarely went out with women his own age. He left the women in their forties to men in their sixties, or older. And Adam liked them much, much younger.
Gray said he would have been happy with Catherine Deneuve, at any age. He liked women closer to his own age, or even slightly older, although Ms. Deneuve was disqualified in his case, because she looked completely normal and relaxed as she laughed and talked to friends. The woman Gray was looking for, or would have noticed anywhere, would have been crying softly in a corner, or talking between sobs on her cell phone while appearing distraught. The girl Adam had in mind would have been ten years older than his teenage daughter. And he would have had to buy her breast implants and a nose job. The girl of Charlie's dreams would have been wearing a halo and glass slippers. But this time, in his fairy tale, when midnight came, she wouldn't run away, or disappear, she would stay at the ball, promise never to leave him, and dance in his arms forever. He just hoped that one day he'd find her.
2
T
HE CAPTAIN DOCKED
THE
B
LUE
M
OON
AT THE END OF
the
quai
in St. Tropez that afternoon. It was a major feat since dock space wasn't easy to come by in high season. Because of her size, they had to have the first spot, but as soon as they tied her up, Charlie was sorry they had gone in, instead of coming into port in the tender, as he usually preferred to do. The paparazzi were out in full force, and instantly drawn by the sheer size of the boat. They snapped a lot of photographs of all three men as they slipped into a car waiting for them. Charlie ignored them, as did Adam, and Gray waved.
“Poor bastards, what a shit way to make a living,” he said sympathetically, as Adam growled. He hated the press.
“Parasites. They're all bottom-feeders,” he said. The press constantly created problems in his clients' lives. He had gotten a call from his office just that afternoon. One of his clients had been caught coming out of a hotel with a woman other than his wife, and the shit had hit the fan. The irate wife had called the office ten times and was threatening divorce. It wasn't the first time he'd done it, and she either wanted a huge settlement in a divorce, or five million dollars to stay married to him. Nice. Nothing surprised Adam anymore. All he wanted right now was to find those Brazilian girls again, and dance the samba until the wee hours. He could deal with the rest of the crap when he got back to New York. Right now he had no interest in dealing with the tabloids, or the infidelities of his clients. They'd done it before, and would do the same things many times again. This was his time now, not theirs. Time out. He had turned his meter off.
They went into town to shop that afternoon, took naps, and had dinner at Spoon at the Hotel Byblos, where a spectacular-looking Russian supermodel had come in wearing white silk pants, and a little white leather bolero, wide open, with nothing underneath. The entire restaurant got a full view of her breasts, and seemed to enjoy it. Charlie looked amused, while Adam laughed.
“She has amazing breasts,” Gray commented as they ordered dinner, and an excellent bottle of wine.
“Yeah, but they're not real,” Adam said clinically, unimpressed but also amused. It took a lot of guts to sit down to dinner in a nice restaurant with your tits hanging out, although they had seen it done before. A German girl had walked into a restaurant the year before with a see-through net blouse you couldn't even see, and no one skipped a beat. She had sat there eating dinner all night, naked from the waist up, talking, laughing, smoking, and obviously enjoying the sensation she had caused.
“How do you know they're not real?” Gray asked with interest. Her breasts were large and firm, and the nipples pointed up. He would have loved to draw them, and was already slightly drunk. They'd been drinking margaritas on the boat before they went out. Another night of decadence and debauchery had begun.
“Take my word for it,” Adam said with confidence. “I've paid for about a hundred pair by now. Actually, a hundred and a half. A couple of years ago some girl I went out with only wanted one done. She said the other one was fine, she just wanted to match up the smaller one.”
“That sounds interesting,” Charlie said, looking amused, as he tasted the wine and nodded to the sommelier. It was fine. Better than fine. It was superb. It was a very old vintage of Lynch-Bages. “Instead of taking them out to dinner and a movie, do you send them out for new breasts first?”
“No, every time I go out with some budding actress, she hits me up for a new pair on the way out. It's easier than arguing about it. They go quietly after that, as long as they like what they got.”
“Men used to buy women pearls or diamond bracelets as consolation prizes. I guess now they buy them implants instead,” Charlie commented drily. The women he went out with would never have asked him for new breasts, or any of the other things Adam paid for. If Charlie's dates had cosmetic work done, they paid for it themselves, from their trusts, and it was never discussed. He couldn't think of a single woman he'd gone out with who'd had plastic surgery, at least not that he knew about. Adam's girls, as he and Gray called them, had been entirely remodeled for the most part. And Gray's women needed lobotomies, or heavy sedation, more than anything else. He had paid for a number of therapists, rehab programs, shrinks, and attorneys' fees for court orders to restrain the previous men in their lives who were either stalking them or threatening to kill them, or him. Whatever worked. Maybe paying for the implants was simpler in the end. After the surgery, Adam's women thanked him and disappeared. Gray's always lingered for a while, or called when the new men in their lives began abusing them. They rarely stayed with Gray for longer than a year. He treated them too well. Charlie's women always became friends, and invited him to their weddings, to someone else, after he had left them, once their fatal flaw had been unearthed. “Maybe I should try that sometime,” Charlie said, laughing over his wine.
“Try what?” Gray asked, looking confused. He was dazzled by the Russian woman and her breasts.
“Paying for implants. It might make a nice Christmas present, or a wedding gift.”
“That's sick,” Adam said, shaking his head. “It's bad enough that I do it. The girls you go out with have too much class to want you to buy them tits.” The women Adam went out with needed them to get ahead, as actresses or models. Adam wasn't interested in class. It would have been a handicap for him. Women like the ones Charlie went out with would have been a headache for Adam. He didn't want to stick around. Charlie claimed he did. Gray just let things drift. He had no firm plans, about anything. He just lived life as it came. Adam had a schedule for everything, and a plan.
“At least it would be an unusual gift. I get so tired of buying them china.” Charlie smiled through his cigar smoke.
“Just be happy you're not paying them alimony and child support. Believe me, china is a lot cheaper,” Adam said tartly. He had stopped paying Rachel alimony when she remarried, but she had taken half of everything he had, and he was still paying hefty child support, which he didn't begrudge his kids. But he hated what he had given her in the settlement. She had really put it to him ten years before when they divorced, and he had already been a partner in his firm. She got a lot more than he felt she deserved. Her parents had hired her a terrific lawyer. And he still resented it bitterly ten years later. He had never gotten over the damage she'd done, and probably never would. In his mind, buying breast implants was fine, alimony wasn't. Ever again.
“I think it's too bad you have to buy them anything, along those lines,” Gray commented. “I'd rather just buy a woman something because I want to. Not pay for her lawyer, therapist, or a nose job,” he said innocently. Considering how little he had, whenever he got involved with someone, he wound up getting stuck for a fortune, in proportion to what he earned. But he always wanted to help them. Gray was the Red Cross of dating. Adam was the wheeler and dealer, setting clear limits and making trade-offs. Charlie was the ever polite and romantic Prince Charming. Although Gray said he was romantic too. It was just the women he got involved with who weren't, they were too desperate and needy to pay much attention to romance. But he would have liked to have some in his life, if he ever managed to get mixed up with someone sane, which seemed ever more unlikely. Adam claimed to no longer have a romantic bone in his body, and was proud of it. He said he'd rather have great sex than bad romance.
“What's wrong with having all of it?” Gray asked, starting on his third glass of the great wine. “Why not sex
and
romance, and even someone who loves you? And that you love in return.”
“Sounds good to me,” Charlie agreed. And of course in his case, he wanted blue blood in the mix as well. He admitted readily that when it came to women, he was a snob. Adam always teased him and said he didn't want his bloodlines sullied by some peasant girl. Charlie objected to the way he put it, but they both knew it was true.
“I think you're both living in fantasyland,” Adam said cynically. “Romance is what screws up everything, everyone gets disappointed and pissed off, and that's when the shit hits the proverbial fan. If everyone knows it's just about sex and some fun, no one gets hurt.”
“Then how come all your girlfriends get so pissed off on the way out?” Gray asked simply. He had a point.
“Because women never believe what you tell them. The minute you tell them you'll never get married, you become a challenge, and they start shopping for a wedding dress. But at least I'm honest. If they don't believe me, that's their problem. I say the words. If they don't want to hear them, that's up to them. But God knows I say them.” That was also one of the advantages of dating very young women. Twenty-two-year-olds generally weren't looking for marriage, just a good time. It was only when they started creeping up on thirty that they looked around and got panicked about where things were going. The younger ones wanted to go to clubs and bars, buy a few dresses and charge them to him, and go to concerts and expensive restaurants. If he took them to Las Vegas for a weekend, when he had to see one of his clients, they thought they'd died and gone to Heaven.
His family, however, had a different attitude. His mother always accused him of dating hookers, especially when she saw him in the tabloids. He always corrected her and said they were actresses and models, which she assured him was the same thing. His sister just looked embarrassed when the subject came up at family dinners. His brother thought it was funny, but for the past few years had told him it was time for him to settle down. Adam could not have cared less what they thought. He thought their lives were painfully boring.
His wasn't. And he assured himself regularly that they were just jealous, because he was having fun and they weren't. His parents weren't jealous, they just disapproved of him on principle. And predictably, given her disapproval of Adam, or maybe just to annoy him, he thought sometimes, his mother had stayed close to Rachel. She liked her and her new husband, and always reminded Adam that she saw Rachel and stayed close to her because she was her grandchildren's mother. Whatever the issue or argument, Adam's mother always chose to be on the opposite side from him. She couldn't help herself. She had a contrary nature and a need for conflict. He suspected that beneath it all, his mother loved him. But she seemed to feel compelled to criticize him and make his life difficult. She appeared to disapprove of everything he did.