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“You looked almost as good up there as that Korean dress designer,” Holly Grace told her. “Did you know he had on pink socks with rhinestone butterflies?” Francesca appreciated Holly Grace's attempt at good humor, especially since she knew it was mostly pretense. Too much of Holly Grace's sparkle had faded over the past few months.
“Over here, Miss Day,” one of the photographers called out.
She smiled into the camera and talked to everyone who came up to greet her. Her former runaways lined up to meet Dallie. They flirted with him outrageously, and he flirted right back until he had them all giggling. The photographers wanted pictures of Holly Grace, and each of the networks asked to film a brief interview with Francesca. After she had finished the last one, Dallie pressed a cup of punch into her hands. “Have you seen Teddy?”
Francesca glanced around. “Not for a while.” She turned to Holly Grace who had just come up next to them. “Have you seen Teddy?”
Holly Grace shook her head. Dallie looked worried and Francesca smiled at him. “We're on an island,” she said. “He can't get into too much trouble.”
Dallie didn't seem convinced. “Francie, he's your son, too. With a gene pool like that to draw from, it seems to me he could manage to get into trouble just about anywhere.”
“Let's go look for him.” She offered the suggestion more from a desire to be alone with Dallie than from any concern about Teddy. The island was closed to tourists for another hour. What harm could come to him?
As she set down her punch cup, she noticed that Naomi was clutching Ben Perlman's hand and looking up into the sky. Shielding her eyes, Francesca looked up, too, but all she saw was a small plane circling overhead. And then she noticed that something seemed to have dropped from the plane. As she watched, a square-canopy parachute opened. One by one, the people around her gazed up into the sky and observed the descent of the parachutist toward Liberty Island.
As he fell, a long white banner gradually unfurled behind him. It had letters printed on it in black, but they were impossible to read as the wind whipped the banner in one direction and then the other, threatening to tangle in the parachutist's rig. Suddenly the banner straightened.
Francesca felt a set of sharp fingernails digging into the sleeve of her silk shantung jacket. “Oh, my God,” Holly Grace whispered.
The eyes of every onlooker—as well as those of the network television cameras—were glued to the banner and the message it carried:
MARRY ME, HOLLY GRACE
Although he was concealed inside a helmet and a white jumpsuit, the parachutist could only be Gerry Jaffe.
“I'm going to kill him,” Holly Grace said, venom dripping from every syllable. “This time he's gone too far.” And then the wind shifted and the banner's other side was visible.
It held a drawing of a barbell.
Naomi came up next to Holly Grace. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I tried to talk him out of it, but he loves you so much, and he refuses to do anything the easy way.”
Holly Grace didn't reply. She kept her eyes glued on the descent. The parachutist dropped closer to the island and then began to drift. Naomi let out a small squeak of alarm, and Holly Grace's fingers dug deeper into Francesca's arm. “He's going into the water,” Holly Grace cried. “Oh, God, he'll drown. He'll get tangled in his parachute or that stupid banner—” She broke away from Francesca and began running toward the seawall, shrieking for all she was worth. “You stupid commie! You dumb, stupid—”
Dallie draped his arm over Francesca's shoulder. “You got any idea why he has a picture of two doorknobs on that banner?”
“It's a barbell,” she replied, holding her breath as Gerry just cleared the seawall and landed on the lawn about fifty yards away.
“Holly Grace is really going to give him hell for this,” he commented, thoroughly enjoying himself. “Damn, she's mad.”
“Mad” wasn't the word for it. Holly Grace was furious. She was so enraged she could barely contain herself. While Gerry struggled to gather up the parachute, she screamed every foul word at him that she could think of.
He balled the parachute and the banner together and threw them down on the grass so that he finally had two hands free to deal with her. When he saw her flushed face and felt the heat of her fury, he realized he was going to need both of them.
“I'll never forgive you for this,” she cried, taking a punch at his arm, to the delight of the network cameramen. “You don't have enough experience to make a jump like that. You could have been killed. I wish you had been!”
He pulled off his helmet, and his curly hair was as disheveled as a dark angel's. “I've been trying to talk to you for weeks, but you wouldn't see me. Besides, I thought you'd like it.”
“Like it!” She nearly spit at him. “I've never been so humiliated in my life! You've made a spectacle out of me. You don't have an ounce of common sense. Not one single ounce.”
“Gerry!” He heard Naomi call out and from the corner of his eye, he saw the statue's security people running toward him.
He knew he didn't have much time. What he had done was definitely illegal, and he didn't doubt for a moment that they were going to arrest him. “I just publicly committed myself to you, Holly Grace. What more do you want from me?”
“You publicly made a fool of yourself. Jumping out of an airplane and almost drowning with that stupid banner. And why did you put a dog bone on it? Do you mind telling me what you meant by that?”
“Dog bone?” Gerry threw up his arms in frustration. No matter what he did, he couldn't seem to please this woman, and if he lost her this time, he would never get her back. Just the thought of losing her gave him a cold chill. Holly Grace Beaudine was the one woman he'd never been able to bring to heel, the one woman who made him feel that he could conquer the world, and he needed her the same way he needed oxygen.
The security people had almost reached him. “Are you blind, Holly Grace? That wasn't a dog bone. Jesus, I just made the most terrifying commitment of my entire life, and you missed the whole point.”
