The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Read online

  On this date the care I’d taken didn’t seem to have any effect on Charles, who was focusing on cultivating two possible new clients. He’d given me a quick glance at the door and only said, “This won’t be something you’ll need the hat and gloves for.” I left them behind. There were only four other women at the party, and they were, as he’d somehow known they would be, hatless and gloveless. I asked him who they were. Two were wives, he said; two were models, hired to make the event more glamorous. He excused himself, said he was sure I’d do fine, and strode purposefully to the other side of the room, where a tight circle of men was jabbing the air with the drinks in their hands. As I watched, he inserted himself into the conversation and then, with a deft turn, he cut one of the men out of the herd and drew him to two comfortable chairs in an area apart from the thick of the party.

  “Got him,” he said with satisfaction when he rejoined me. “That’s twenty thousand in billing for next year.”

  That night we had our first serious, serious kiss. It left me breathless and hollowed out, but not, to my surprise, more enamored with or attached to Charles Helbrun. I closed the door on him that night, both satisfied and not.

  LILLY

  My First Husband

  The dog didn’t criticize everybody when he was an actual mongrel, but now that he’s a military man, and dead, he spends some time making judgments from the high moral ground. This is an unattractive feature, and it occurs to me that one of the reasons we all like dogs is that they’re a totally judgment-free species.

  “You used to be nicer,” I said to him. “You used to like everybody.”

  “I was a dog. And I’m nice now. And I’ll tell you that even as a dog it bothered me that humans didn’t learn from experience. It’s very frustrating to watch you people. Alarms should have been going off in all directions.”

  This is true. I’d married Peter Winthrop in 1950. Neave and I had turned the apartment into something that looked like a home. I was twenty-six and Be Your Best was getting real traction. Twenty-six was an old maid in the world I lived in but I wasn’t worried about that. I’d just woken up one morning thinking that marriage was an interesting idea. Peter Winthrop was a dream on paper: an Ivy-educated doctor, a good looker. And unlike a lot of guys who thought that a working wife was an embarrassment—a clear sign that they didn’t make enough money to support the family—Peter Winthrop was not going to get in my way in that department. He said he thought money was sexy. If I wanted to make it, he said he’d be happy to spend it. So when he pulled out a diamond one night, I said yes. He wore a tux. I wore a white suit. Neave was my maid of honor. Mommy cried. I moved out of the Be Your Best studio and into a suburban house. Annie was born nine months later.

  “First husbands aren’t like training wheels that teach you how to steer a husband.”

  “They should be. How could you have been married to Peter Winthrop and not come out of it knowing that people lie?”

  “Look, Boppit, the man was a dream: the way all the nurses at St. Elizabeth’s treated him like a god, the Harvard diploma, the great teeth. And what person doesn’t lie? Really.”

  “Neave does not lie. Jane does not lie.”

  “And that’s not always been a very attractive or useful thing for them.”

  “Neave would never have looked twice at Peter Winthrop.”

  “That poses no problem. He would never have looked twice at her. But I sure caught his eye.”

  Boppit sniffed. “You didn’t even know him when you married him.”

  “What wife does? Here’s some irony for you—Neave’s responsible for me meeting him. I stepped on a nail and she dragged me off to get a tetanus shot. There he was, running St. Elizabeth’s emergency room that night, cool as a cucumber. I took one look at him and I felt like a man in a desert who’s just spotted a watering hole.”

  “Or a mirage.”

  “Maybe. But think how pretty those mirages are.”

  “A little skepticism when he started working eighty-hour weeks would have come in handy.”

  “I wasn’t going to be one of those pathetic, insecure women who go through their husbands’ pockets and call him at work every hour to make sure they’re there. Doctors’ wives expect them to have long hours. How would I know he was at the track?”

  “If you’d looked in those pockets you would have eventually found a stray betting ticket or an IOU from the poker games. You wouldn’t have been so surprised when the bank called and told you that you were losing your house because he’d taken out three more mortgages without mentioning them to you.”

  “Legally, my signature on that first loan might as well have been made by a chicken. Then he made the mistake of saying what he did with our money was none of my business. I said it was so my business but I was going to make it not my business as soon as I could. I was going to divorce him. Annie wasn’t even three years old but that was not going to change my mind. If I’d been able to dump him on the grounds of being a liar and a thief I wouldn’t have had to invent some proof of infidelity. He cooperated with the girl and the photographer because I threatened to go to his chief of staff to discuss the hours he’d signed in but was really at the track or in the basement at a poker game. He knew I’d do it.”

  “Still. He could have given you a lot more trouble.”

  “Maybe. But he knew that if he gave me trouble, it could cost him his job. Maybe his medical license. He gave me the divorce. Annie and I moved back in with Neave for a while. The whole Peter Winthrop adventure lasted three years, diamond to divvying up the furniture. I agreed not to ask for alimony. He agreed to leave his mitts off Be Your Best. Besides Annie, the best thing to come out of it was that it made Neave hire a lawyer who knew how to incorporate Be Your Best so that no future husband could get his hands on it. For my little sister, me and Annie living there was like one long pajama party full of Monopoly and popcorn. We came up with some of our best ideas for the company during that time. She was like a dog who’d been handed the biggest ham bone on Earth.”

  “She was lonely,” Bop said.

  “She was lonely,” I repeated, and suddenly I could see her sitting in front of me with a popcorn bowl on the table and Annie on her lap, both of them so happy. I saw how bereft she was when I told her it was time for me and Annie to get our own place. “I hadn’t been paying her much attention. I wasn’t thinking of her.”

  “True,” Boppit said.

  Suddenly I felt very small, very selfish. “Neave loved us. I moved us out anyhow so I could do what I wanted without having her looking over my shoulder. I dragged Annie after me. I told myself she was too little to be upset by all the changes.”

  “You did.” He nodded. “You were a solid C-plus mother.”

  “Take me back in time. Let me be alive again. I’ll do it different.”

  “Lilly, if you played it all out again you’d still be you, so you’d still do the same things. Let’s be realistic.”

  I looked at this dead dog in navy whites and high heels and I snorted. “Realistic. That’s rich.”

  “You can’t do everything, Lilly, and you were doing a lot more than most women ever dream about doing. You created and ran a successful business. Not everybody’s born with this maternal engine driving them around all day, chuffing them off to PTA meetings and coffee klatches and sledding hills. You loved Annie and you did your best.”

  “I loved her according to my nature. Which was shallow.” It was the first time I’d seen this as the kind of serious deficiency that can ruin a life, ruin somebody else’s life. I’d generally thought that my nature was simply light and carefree, traits that most people value over sober self-awareness.

  “Maybe a little shallow, but very beautiful,” Boppit said.

  “I don’t like how things look from here, Boppit. It’s…”

  “Broader?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know, sweetie,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  THE PIRATE LOVER

  Captu
re

  A barge from the black ship bearing Judge Henri Le Cherche splashed down, rowed over, and carried the two captives to their fate. And so Electra Gates found herself once again facing Judge Henri Le Cherche, this time on the deck of his flagship with his brother at her side.

  “The lovely Miss Gates and my troublesome brother,” Judge Le Cherche greeted them. “How convenient for you to have run away, mademoiselle, since it made it easy for me to describe you to the world as a fool who placed herself in the hands of the vermin that hang about the Calais docks. So sad, and so easy to convince them that you were probably taken by slave-traders, probably dead.” He smiled. “No one need search for you now. How unfortunate for you to have so few powerful connections and friends on shore. You see, I have always known how vulnerable you were … how alone in the world. Only that desperate mother to push you one way and another, a woman without a single powerful friend.” He smiled. “And now I needn’t even bother with a wedding ceremony or any public scrutiny of our relationship. So much better than my former situation. I thank you for delivering yourself into complete anonymity. I will use it well. And dear brother,” he continued, still smiling, “how satisfying to put you in chains in the hold. You never appreciated the charms of chains. Pity. They do have charms.” Their captor lifted an eyebrow and three brawny members of his lower deck dragged Basil Le Cherche off. “Come, my pet,” Henri Le Cherche said, taking Electra’s arm so firmly that it was ringed with bruises within the hour. “You must be made ready for me.”

  He led her to an airy chamber with windows overlooking the sea, a room as beautiful as Basil’s quarters on the Cat but without a single book or instrument. Instead of Basil’s cool teak floor and walls, here every surface gleamed black except for one wall which held an enormous mirror. There he left her in the care of three frightened young women, each holding boxes. “Sit still for us, mademoiselle, or he will make us all so sorry. Please.” Electra looked into their terrified eyes and nodded, submitting while they washed and perfumed her, laced her breasts into a bodice, drew silk stockings up to a filmy garter, swept her hair first up and then down in a mass of curls (Would he prefer curls or a bound mass? Curls? We will try curls…) and finally, for what seemed like an eternity, they painted her lips and eyes, brushed blush and color between her bound breasts, hung glittering jewels from her ears, and finally stepped back to critically assess their work.

  “Will he be pleased?” one asked the others nervously.

  “He will be impatient.” With this they turned away as if Electra herself had been a doll or mannequin and bustled out, leaving her alone before the mirror. She regarded herself. The image reflected there glittered. Her eyes traveled over the smoothed, scented, blushed, bound breasts. She drew herself to her full height and glared at her own reflection fiercely. She would allow no one to touch her, least of all the monster Judge Henri Le Cherche! Then, in part to banish thoughts of the judge, in part because she could not control the direction her mind took when she turned it away from this room and that man, she imagined his brother. She imagined Basil Le Cherche’s gray gaze, his cool authority, his hands touching her. Heat pulsed down to the world between her legs and she drew her own hands up and around her breasts. The touch sent a thick surge of feeling downward from her belly. The door opened. Before she could resume her indifferent perch on the locker Judge Le Cherche caught the last of her self-inspection.

  “Yes, you are quite lovely. You will be even lovelier when I rip away all that careful work done by my young handmaidens. I hope you will be lovelier then. If not, there are other uses for you.”

  “You disgust me! I know how you made your fortune, sir!”

  “A person must make his way in the world, my pet. We all must make our way. Selling something that others want—that is all I do. I am a merchant of sorts. It is the buyers who make the market. Not the sellers. It is business. There is nothing personal involved.”

  “Nothing personal perhaps for the buyers. Very personal for the sold.”

  “Well then the trick is not to be one of the sold.” He approached her, lifted a hand and grasped her chin. She ducked her entire head quickly to break his hold and when he tightened his grip she sank her teeth in the palm of his hand deeply enough to draw blood.

  “Unmannerly bitch!” he spat. “You perform such an act when you are told to perform it—not in response to any impulse of your own!” He wrapped the hand briskly in a linen handkerchief and the swift-flowing blood pulsed through, red field on white. “You should be more careful of your own safety, Electra Gates. Perhaps a night in the same conditions as my brother will make your position here clearer to you.”

  Within moments she found herself dragged roughly to the hold and shoved into what seemed to be an animal stall, an enclosure full of stale hay and the smell of pig. The door slammed shut and the clank of a lock followed. She struggled to see in what seemed to be total darkness.

  “Electra?”

  The voice came from the wall to her right. She pressed herself against it in the darkness and found rough boards, many of them loose. “Basil?”

  “Are you all right?” His voice was so close! He was just on the other side of these ill-fitted boards—some quite thin. She struggled with more determination and power than she had imagined herself capable of, finally pushing two planks aside—just enough space for a slender woman if she weren’t wearing these voluminous skirts. She shed her outer garments, untying the long petticoats and struggling out of the yards of silk around her hips. Clad only in the bodice, the chemise, and sheer stockings that the frightened young women had forced upon her, she wriggled through the opening into the stall next to hers. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the interior and she could make out the form of a figure prone, chained to bolts driven into the hull itself: Basil Le Cherche. His face was swollen and bloodied, his clothes torn, his chest exposed and in the tiny shafts of light entering through cracks in the wall behind him his skin gleamed with sweat. In the narrow shattered rays she made out his expression—he was smiling.

  “Smiling! Are you mad?” she hissed.

  “You move like a cat,” he said. “So fierce and focused. You are a welcome sight, Mademoiselle Gates.” His expression became less amused, his eyes shone with something that once again sent sweet pulsing confusion through her. In his eyes, which were now full of desire, she could see something she had sought her entire life without even knowing. “You are beautiful,” he said softly. She reached him where he lay in the dim light and touched his face with a searching hand. It caressed the broad forehead, the cheek, the square jaw. She felt his hands find the silk garters and begin to move, exploring in the dark. She pulled back instinctively, then, slowly, pressed herself into the hand. He pulled away. They had both been startled by what he had done—both swept open.

  “Forgive me,” he whispered. But she did not want to forgive him. She took his hand and placed it at her waist, drew it downward just a small bit, then a small bit more.

  “Do not play at this game, Electra Gates,” he entreated thickly. “You do not know me.”

  Electra felt herself skimming along on the feelings that had begun the first time she had seen this man—feelings that had been intensified and focused as she saw his authority and power, the conflicted heated contradictions beneath the cool gray-eyed gaze. She remembered the feel of her own hands on the scented breasts she had seen in the mirror only moments before.

  “I am deadly serious, Basil Le Cherche.” She drew his hand upward again, across one breast, around its pebbling nipple.

  “This is unwise. We could be discovered any moment!”

  “All the more reason to act now … to be who we are now.”

  Who was this passionate creature saying these things? It was herself—a self she was only just discovering, and this self pulled closer to the man chained here in the darkness beside her, lay her thigh against him so it gave his own feelings away. She gasped at her own reaction to it.

  “You canno
t say you are not moved,” she whispered. “You cannot say you do not wish me to do this.” She took his face in her hands and even in the dim shadows of their prison she saw the intensity of his desire, the depth of her power over him at this moment. She drew his lips to hers and they fell into a deep kiss.

  “I do not intend to be turned aside, and I am not engaged in a game,” she moaned. She placed his hand over her heart, which beat hard and fast. “What is happening to me is beyond my ken,” she whispered, “but I do not fear it. I seek it. I seek you. You say a woman has never moved you. But I say you are a liar.”

  “Witch! Sorceress! I am not a liar—only a man whose mind has always controlled his impulses. But now…”

  “Now?”

  “Now I am controlled.” He placed her hand on his own chest, which pounded an answering cadence to her own, an insistent pulsing demand, and he pulled her against him. His chains draped across her back, her chest. He circled her with his arms, found the long laces at the back of her corset and loosened her bodice with the dexterity that only experience could give. The cloth fell away, the perfect breasts stunning in the low light, chains circling them, chains crossing her body and tangling it with his as he wound her more tightly in his arms. Basil Le Cherche had had many women but always before he had been distant, protected, cold. Now his body, the body that had always done his bidding, was entirely out of control, breathing hard, pushing aside linen and lace. When he realized that among his feelings at this moment there was fear, he was astounded. He had never experienced this before—neither the unbridled need nor the fear of that need. He rolled aside in an excruciatingly difficult act of discipline. “Stop! Electra, we will find a way to freedom and you will return to the world you have left. You will be sorry for this moment.”

  “I have lived in that world and I know exactly what residence there is worth,” she answered. “I have no use for it. And I will not be sorry.” She slipped the last of her clothing away.