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“I knew.”
She couldn’t stand there with him any longer. “I have to go.” She gave Kissy a quick peck on the cheek and left the dressing room without so much as a nod in his direction.
Kissy caught up with her on the street. “Fleur! Wait! I had no idea.”
She faked a smile. “Don’t worry about it. It was just a shock, that’s all.”
“Michael is…He’s really a terrific guy.”
“That’s…great.” She spotted a cab and stepped out from the curb to hail it. “Go to your cast party, Magnolia, and make them all bow when you come in the room.”
“I think I’d better go home with you.”
“Not on your life. This is your big night, and you’re going to enjoy every minute.” She climbed into the cab, waved, and shut the door. As the taxi pulled away, she sagged back into the seat and let the old bitterness swamp her.
In the weeks that followed, Fleur tried to forget about Michel, but one evening she found herself walking along West Fifty-fifth Street studying the numbers painted above the shop doors, now closed for the night. She found the address she was looking for. The location was good, but the unimposing storefront had badly lit windows…and the most beautiful garments she’d ever seen.
Michel had bucked the tide of current fashion trends where women were dressing up in evening tuxedos and neckties so they could look like men. The small window held a quartet of outrageously feminine dresses that conjured up lavish Renaissance paintings. As she gazed at the silks, jerseys, and gracefully draped crepe de chine, she couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d spent money on decent clothes. These exquisite garments rebuked her.
Spring drifted into summer and then into fall. Kissy’s theater company folded, so she joined another group that performed almost exclusively in New Jersey. Fleur celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday by making Parker give her another raise. She bought cocoa beans with it.
She lost more often than she won, but when the wins came, they came big. She studied hard to learn from her mistakes, and her initial five thousand quadrupled, then quadrupled again. The more money she made, the harder it became for her to sink it back into risky speculations, but she forced herself to keep writing out the checks. Forty thousand dollars was as useless to her as five thousand had been.
Winter settled in. She developed an enchantment with copper and made almost thirty thousand dollars in six weeks, but the stress was giving her stomach pains. Beef went up, pork fell. She kept going—investing, reinvesting, and biting her fingernails to the quick.
By the first day of June, a year and a half after she’d jumped on her financial roller-coaster, she stared at her balance sheets, hardly able to believe what she saw. She’d done it. With nothing more than sheer nerve, she’d accumulated enough to start her business. The next day, she put everything into nice, safe, thirty-day certificates of deposit at Chase Manhattan.
A few evenings later as she was letting herself into the apartment, she heard the phone ring. She stepped over a pair of Kissy’s heels, crossed the room, and picked up the receiver.
“Hello, enfant.”
It had been more than five years since she’d heard that familiar endearment. She tightened her grip on the telephone and made herself take a slow, steadying breath. “What do you want, Alexi?”
“No social amenities?”
“You have exactly one minute, and then I’m hanging up.”
He sighed, as if she’d wounded him. “Very well, chérie. I called to congratulate you on your recent financial gains. Rather foolhardy, but then one doesn’t argue with success. I understand you started looking for office space today.”
She felt a chill. “How do you know that?”
“I’ve told you, chérie. I make it my business to know everything that affects those I care about.”
“You don’t care about me,” she said, her throat tight. “Stop playing games.”
“On the contrary, I care very much about you. I’ve waited a long time for this, chérie. I hope you don’t disappoint me.”
“A long time for what? What are you talking about?”
“Guard your dream, chérie. Guard it better than I guarded mine.”
Chapter 19
Fleur rested her elbows on the deck rail and watched the tawny dune grass bend against the breeze in the last of the evening light. The Long Island beach house, an angular structure of glass and weathered clapboard, blended with the sand and water. She was glad she’d been invited here for the Fourth of July weekend. She needed to get away from the city for a while, and she also needed a distraction from that mental tape recorder that wouldn’t stop replaying Alexi’s words. Guard your dream. Alexi hadn’t forgotten what she’d done to the Royale—not that she’d expected him to—and he still wanted his revenge. But other than keeping her eyes open, she didn’t know what she could do about it.
She pushed aside her worries and thought about the four-story Upper East Side townhouse she’d leased for her new offices. The renovations were under way, and she hoped to be able to move in by mid-August, but before then she had to hire a staff. If a few breaks came her way and she had no big emergencies, she had enough money to keep the agency afloat until spring. Unfortunately a business like hers needed at least a year to get established, so she was at risk from the start, but that just meant she’d have to work harder, something she’d discovered she was good at.
She’d hoped to keep her salary from Parker coming in a little longer, but when he found out what she was up to, he’d fired her. They’d had an acrimonious parting. Lynx had broken up, and Parker had delegated too much of his business to Fleur. Now he was blaming her for the desperate game of catch-up he had to play with resentful clients.
