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Belinda’s forehead creased and her shoulders drooped. She stared at the white rose, then turned toward the door and fled from the gallery.
Adelaide poked in the box. “There’s no card.”
“I know who they’re from.” Fleur took in the empty doorway.
“His initials wouldn’t happen to be J.K., would they?” Adelaide asked.
Fleur fixed a bright smile on her face. “Secret admirers are meant to be secret. Especially ones who’ve made a career out of protecting their privacy.”
Adelaide gave her a sly wink. “You’re a good girl, Fleur, despite your occasional lapses.”
As Adelaide disappeared, Fleur shoved the rose back into the box. The cloying smell stuck in her nostrils and clung to her throat. Fleur had been expecting something like this ever since Alexi’s phone call. He was letting her know he hadn’t forgotten anything.
She pushed the lid back on and set the box on a bench. She wanted to stuff it in the nearest trash can, but she couldn’t afford to with Adelaide Abrams looking on. Let her think they came from Jake. He was a big boy, and he could take care of himself. She also needed the publicity, and she didn’t have a single qualm about using him as he’d once used her.
She saw Michel and Kissy standing in the doorway. Michel wore a white tuxedo with a black nylon T-shirt. He’d dressed Kissy in a tiny pink and silver version of a prom dress, perfectly proportioned for her size. She clung to his arm, feminine, helpless, lips slightly pursed as if she were ready to expel a breathless boop-boopy-doop.
Fleur took the long way through the crowd, giving everyone time to watch where she was going. When she reached the doorway, she brushed cheeks with them both and whispered in Michel’s ear that Belinda had just left. He gazed at her searchingly. She had no idea what to tell him.
Kissy and Michel’s entrance coupled with Fleur’s greeting had attracted attention, just as she’d planned. Women’s Wear Daily got to them first, and Fleur made the introductions. Both Michel and Kissy performed like champs, bored sophistication on his part, a frothy cloud of pink and silver exuberance on hers. When they had finished with WWD, Harper’s, and Adelaide Abrams, the three of them circulated through the gallery, stopping to chat with everyone they met. She introduced her brother as Michel Savagar instead of Michael Anton. Not long after they’d been reunited, he’d decided to stop hiding under an assumed name. Michel remained aloof and mysterious while Kissy chattered like a magpie, and Fleur directed the conversation exactly where she wanted it.
“Isn’t my brother the most magnificent designer…? My brother designed my gown. I’m glad you like it…My brother is obscenely talented. I’m trying to get him to share his gift, but he’s so stubborn…”
She responded to questions about Kissy’s identity with a smile. “Isn’t she outrageous? So adorable. One of the Charleston Christies. Michel designed
her dress, too.”
When they asked what Kissy did for a living, Fleur waved an airy hand. “A little acting, but that’s more a hobby than anything else.”
The women’s envious gazes flickered between Fleur’s incredible bronze satin and Kissy’s reimagined prom dress. “My brother has so many women begging him to design for them,” she confided, “but right now he’s only designing for Kissy and me. Confidentially I’m hoping to change that.”
Several people commented on Belinda’s appearance. Fleur answered as briefly as possible and then changed the subject. She told everyone about her new agency—Fleur Savagar and Associates, Celebrity Management—and issued early invitations to the big open house she planned to throw in a few weeks. A good-looking celebrity heart surgeon invited her to dinner the next evening. She accepted. He was charming, and she needed a chance to show off Michel’s iris and blue silk sheath.
By the time they got into the limousine after the party, Fleur was fighting off a headache, and Michel picked up her hand. “You’re exhausted. You don’t have to put yourself through this, you know.”
“Yes, I do. We couldn’t buy this kind of publicity. Besides, it’s long past time I figure out how to live with who I am, and that includes the Glitter Baby.”
She thought of the roses she’d abandoned at the gallery, and suddenly she understood their message as clearly as if Alexi had sent her a letter. He’d kept Belinda out of her life for all these years. Now he’d sent her back.
A week later, the phone calls began. They usually came around two in the morning. When Fleur answered, she heard music turned low in the background—Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Simon and Garfunkel—but the caller never spoke. Fleur had no hard evidence that the calls were coming from Belinda. No scent of Shalimar magically wafted through the telephone lines. But she was certain all the same.
She hung up without saying a word, but the calls began to wear on her, and whenever she turned a corner, she found herself waiting for Belinda to appear.
Fleur made Michel shut down his store and bring in the people who’d done the Kamali boutique to refashion the space with better display areas, a more elegant storefront, and the name Michel Savagar embossed over the doorway in bold red script on a deep purple background.
She and Kissy immediately made themselves an integral part of New York’s social scene. Wherever they went, they wore Michel’s wonderful designs. They lunched at Orsini’s then popped into David Webb to pick up an eighteen-karat bauble, which one of them later returned because “It wasn’t quite right.” They stopped at Helene Arpels for a new pair of evening pumps, then danced at Club A or Regine’s. As they lunched, shopped, and danced, they modeled silk dresses that floated like sea foam around their hips, a slim skimp of blue jersey with a gathered side seam, an evening gown that shimmered with tomato-red sequined panels. Within a week, every fashion-forward social butterfly in New York began asking about Michel Savagar’s dresses. Just as Fleur had hoped, they wanted them even more when they discovered the garments weren’t available.
Fleur and Kissy publicly gossiped about Michel. “My grandmother ruined him with all the money she left him,” Fleur confided to Adelaide Abrams from a banquette at Chez Pascal where she also showed off a silk wrap dress printed with gossamer water lilies. “People who don’t have to work for a living get lazy.”
The next day she confided in the gossipy wife of a department store heir. “Michel’s afraid commercialism will stifle his creativity. But he is working on something, and I do have some plans…Oh, never mind.”
Kissy was less subtle. “I’m almost positive he’s secretly putting together a collection,” she told everyone. And then her candy apple mouth formed a little pout, and she patted the skirt of whatever sugarplum confection she was showing off that day. “I don’t think it’s right that he won’t confide in me. Except for his sister, I’m his very dearest friend, and I can keep a secret as well as anyone.”
While Fleur and Kissy spread the word about Michel’s idealism and indifference to commercial success, Michel was working eighteen-hour days overseeing every detail of a collection he was financing with the last of Solange Savagar’s money.
Fleur was surviving on four hours of sleep. Every minute she didn’t spent playing the social butterfly she was in her office interviewing for staff, planning her open house, and dodging the last of the workmen. Several actors approached her about representation, but none of them had the special qualities she was looking for.
Fleur loved the way the townhouse renovations had turned out, despite the challenges the structure had presented. Her offices occupied the larger front section of the house and her living quarters the smaller rear portion. She’d decorated the office spaces in black and white with shots of gray and indigo. Her private office and the reception area occupied the front of the main floor, while the other offices were set off a balcony above. She’d added tubular ocean liner railing and black art deco columns with chrome collars to border the balcony, along with an open curved staircase that looked as if Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers would be dancing the Continental down it at any moment.
