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Her first two hires were Will O’Keefe, a cheerful redhead from North Dakota, who was an experienced publicist and talent agent, and David Bennis, gray-haired and professorial, who’d take charge of business and financial management, as well as give her agency an air of stability. She also hired a single mother named Riata Lawrence as office manager. For now, she didn’t have enough clients to keep them all busy, but they were part of the facade of success she had to create, right along with her beautifully decorated office and couture wardrobe.
A week before the open house, Will stepped over the last of the drop cloths outside her office. Since they weren’t officially open for business until after the open house, she wore jeans and an orange Mickey Mouse sweatshirt instead of the executive wardrobe Michel had designed for her.
“You’ve made Abrams’s column again,” Will said. “Unfortunately this isn’t one of our plants.”
Fleur took the paper and read.
Belinda Savagar spent yesterday afternoon in Yves Saint Laurent’s men’s boutique helping thirty-year-old heartthrob Shawn Howell pick out a new set of YSL silk sheets. Wonder what French industrialist hubby Alexi Savagar has to say about all that laundry?
Fleur hadn’t seen Belinda since the Orlani Gallery two weeks ago, but she was still getting the middle-of-the-night phone calls.
The next day, Will handed over Adelaide’s newest column:
Shawn Howell nuzzled with Belinda Savagar in the Elm Room at Tavern on the Green. Who says May/December romances don’t work? Shawn and Belinda seem to be getting it just right. No comment from Glitter Baby Fleur Savagar, even though she and Shawn used to be an item.
Some item. Fleur had detested Shawn Howell from their first arranged date.
Adelaide went on to write:
Old feuds die hard. Maybe Mom and the Glitter Baby will patch it up for Christmas. Peace on earth, girls.
Fleur pitched the column into the wastebasket.
She’d just gotten off the phone with another actor she didn’t want to represent when Will O’Keefe stuck his head into her office, his lightly freckled face pale. “We have a big problem. Yesterday Olivia Creighton called to chew me out because she hadn’t received her open house invitation. I sent her another one and didn’t think anything more about it until an hour ago when Adelaide Abrams called with the same complaint. Fleur, I’ve checked around. No one’s received their invitation.”
“That’s impossible. We mailed them ages ago.”
“That’s what I thought.” His expression grew graver. “I just spoke with Riata. She had them sitting in an open box on her desk. The day she planned to mail them, she came back from lunch and they were gone. She assumed I’d mailed them. Unfortunately she didn’t bother to check.”
Fleur sank into her new desk chair and tried to think.
“Do you want me to call everyone?” he asked. “Explain what happened and issue the invitation over the phone? Or should we change the date? We only have four days.”
Fleur made up her mind. “No phone calls and no explanations. Have new invitations hand-delivered this afternoon with flowers from Ronaldo Maia.” It would cost a fortune, but trying to explain would only make her look incompetent. “Put my mind at ease and double-check the rest of the arrangements. Let’s make sure there haven’t been any other slip-ups.”
He was back ten minutes later, and even before he spoke, she could see he had bad news. “Someone canceled the caterer last week. They’ve booked another party for our date.”
“Great,” Fleur muttered. “This is just great.” She rubbed her eyes and spent the rest of the afternoon shopping for a new caterer.
For the next four days she worked until she was exhausted and waited for another disaster. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, but she couldn’t make herself relax, and by the afternoon of the open house, she felt as if her nerves had been scraped raw. She ran out for a quick meeting with a new casting agent. When she came back, a soot-streaked Will met her at the entrance.
“We’ve had a fire.”
Her stomach pitched. “Is anybody hurt? How bad was it?”
“It could have been worse. David and I were in the hallway, and we smelled smoke coming from the basement. We grabbed a fire extinguisher and put the flames out before they could do much damage.”
“Are you all right? Where’s David?”
“We’re both fine. He’s cleaning up.”
“Thank God. How did it start? What happened?”
He wiped the back of his hand over his smudged cheek. “You’d better see for yourself.”
As she followed him to the basement, she shuddered to think what would have happened if the fire had broken out tonight when the house was full of people. He pointed toward the broken window directly above some charred lumber the contractor hadn’t gotten around to clearing out. Fleur walked closer and pushed at the
glass shards on the floor with the toe of her sneaker. “It was broken from the outside.”
