Priceless (16 page)

Carrie also cultivated her own relationships with the big London dealers. She knew that they were important
clients, buying speculatively or for collectors who were too nervous to buy at auction themselves. She made it her mission to get to know every middleman in town.

Every mealtime was an opportunity to schmooze a potential new client or work on her professional connections. Carrie never took a coffee break without wondering if she could use the time to get to know one of her staff better. She was very pleased with the way her team seemed to be gelling.

Carrie certainly didn’t have time to get lonely. Night after night she got home from the office far too late to call anyone in Europe and too tired to catch up with friends in the States. That included Jed. At first he called her religiously every two days. But a month later, the calls were coming every four nights. And two months after Carrie had arrived in London, Jed stopped calling at all.

In fact, he sent an email telling her that he would not be coming to London as promised. He said it was clear to him that Carrie was not invested in keeping anything going. A long-distance relationship was impossible if she couldn’t even return a phone call. Carrie felt a mixture of regret and relief. But far more relief than regret.

“I don’t have time for this,” she told herself.

Carrie’s career was the most important thing in her life. Though these days she was considered a beauty by anyone’s standards, as a young girl she had quickly learned that she wasn’t going to get anywhere on looks alone. Her older sister, Bella, was the beauty of the family, born with all the best elements of her mother and her father arranged in perfect harmony. When she’d looked at herself in the mirror, Carrie had decided she must have been fashioned out of the leftovers. Bella had been the archetypal blond
bombshell; Carrie had been a mouse. As the girls were growing up, their parents had reinforced the differences, referring to Bella as “the beautiful one” and Carrie as “the clever one.”

So Carrie had done the only thing she could do. She’d played up to her stereotype. She spent long hours in the library, signing up for anything that would keep her from having to be out on the playing fields. She excelled in all her academic subjects. She was the first person in her family to go to college, and she aced that, getting scholarship offers from the very best schools. She chose Princeton.

Years later, Bella admitted to her younger sister that she had spent her entire childhood envying her. Bella had struggled at school and had worried—since it had been drummed into her every day that her face was her fortune—what would happen when she started to age.

At the time, Carrie looked at Bella’s life and couldn’t see why she was worried. She had a great husband, a successful wealthy man who seemed to adore her. She had two beautiful children who had inherited Bella’s looks and would inherit the earth when their father passed on. Bella seemed set for life. But perhaps Bella already knew what was around the corner. Of course the perfect husband was fucking one of her friends.

Bella’s divorce was bad enough, but the family was dealt another blow less than a year later when Carrie’s father walked out on their mother after forty-five years of marriage, leaving her for the housekeeper. Her mother was an emotional wreck and discovered soon afterward that she was poverty-stricken too. Ed Klein had taken out a secret mortgage on the family home to fund his affair. After that, Carrie vowed she would never allow herself to rely on a man.

•          •          •

However, while Carrie knew that looks weren’t everything and certainly couldn’t protect you from heartache, she soon came to realize that appearances were important. As a single woman, it was vital she take care of her health. That was a given. The side effect of working hard to take care of her body was that she started to look better in her clothes. Looking better in her clothes gave her more confidence. It was a virtuous circle. She soon became more adventurous with the way she looked, swapping glasses for contacts, brown hair for blond. Just over two years before she left for London the transformation was complete. Carrie was virtually unrecognizable.

The day she went blond, she walked into a bar to meet a girlfriend for cocktails and met Jed while she was waiting for her friend to arrive.

“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked.

Carrie did a double take. She had never been offered a drink by a stranger before. Her immediate reaction was to refuse his kind offer.

“I shouldn’t,” she said.

“Shouldn’t?” said the guy. “Well, at least it’s not a ‘won’t.’ Please, let me buy you a cocktail. You are an exceptionally beautiful woman, and such beauty must be appreciated.”

Carrie rolled her eyes. She had never been called beautiful in her life. The old Carrie, buried deep inside, expected to find out that this was some kind of joke. This man had been dared to approach her by one of his friends. Some of the guys Carrie had known at college had made a game of bedding ugly chicks. They even had a scoreboard in their fraternity house. Carrie had heard that her name was on the board, though thankfully she had never given any of the assholes a reason to score any points out of her.

And so, faced with a guy who was so good-looking he could have had any woman in that bar, if not any woman in Manhattan, Carrie was immediately suspicious.

“Hey, Jed!” Both Carrie and Jed turned to see who was calling him, and to Carrie’s surprise, she discovered it was the friend she was due to be meeting.

“I see you guys have already met,” said Laney as she kissed first Carrie and then Jed hello. “I met Jed in my yoga class,” Laney explained.

“I’m very bendy,” Jed elaborated.

Carrie granted him a smile. All at once he had become much less threatening. He knew Laney. He did yoga.

Laney was obviously enamored of Jed. She insisted that he join them for dinner. But unfortunately for Laney, it was clear that Jed’s interests lay elsewhere. He had eyes for only Carrie. He peppered her with questions about her work. Many of them stupid, she thought. Her low opinion of his intelligence was compounded by the news that he was a model and a part-time masseur. Carrie’s attention began to drift. She was used to men who spent their days in offices or laboratories, finding cures for cancer or solutions for world peace.

“I’m going to Paris in a couple of days,” said Jed. “Fashion week.”

Before Carrie could stop her, Laney jumped in. “Carrie is going to Paris next week too. You guys should meet up.”

Carrie shot Laney a look, but Jed didn’t notice and was already making plans. He picked up Carrie’s cell phone from where it lay on the table and used it to call his own, so that he had her number.

“I’m going to be working,” said Carrie. “I’m attending a conference on techniques for dating Renaissance work at the Louvre.”

“I’m going to be working too,” said Jed. “But if I just keep calling you, there’s bound to be a moment when we’re both free to play.”

To play? Carrie winced at his choice of words. She wasn’t the kind of girl who “played” even when she did have downtime, which wasn’t often since she’d been promoted to head of her department.

“Well, I hope you won’t be disappointed if we don’t manage to find that time,” she said.

Laney rolled her eyes this time. “Carrie,” she said later, “go for it. If only so you can report back to me.”

Carrie flew to Paris two days later, and sure enough, Jed began bombarding her with phone calls as soon as her plane touched down in Europe. He was persistent. And in the end it worked. Carrie had just one night off, and somehow, much as she resisted, Jed claimed it.

They met at her hotel, the Hyatt Vendôme. They drank champagne in the incredibly dark bar. It being the fashion show season, the bar was full of beautiful people who might otherwise have made Carrie feel dowdy, but Jed kept laying on the compliments until she had to believe that he meant them.

Jed had booked a table in a small restaurant in the fifth arrondissement called Itineraires. The minimalist bistro was buzzing with locals. Carrie was impressed that Jed had researched the restaurant scene rather than take her somewhere obvious, like a brasserie on the Champs-Elysées. She’d spent all week eating croque monsieur.

Dinner over, Jed told Carrie that he would take her back to her hotel. They intended to take a taxi, but there were none to be seen. After a while they gave up looking and simply wandered in the direction they thought they
should be taking, crossing over the Pont des Arts, pausing in the middle to admire the Seine in the moonlight.

“The perfect place for a first kiss,” Jed suggested. Carrie didn’t bite.

But as they got closer to her hotel, Carrie’s opinion of Jed began to mellow. Or perhaps it was just that his puppyish adoration of her was beginning to wear her down.

Because she didn’t take Jed seriously from the start, Carrie didn’t have to bother with all the usual maneuvering she employed to make sure that a man didn’t get the wrong idea. Ordinarily, she would wait as long as possible before going to bed with a new guy. But since she didn’t expect to ever see Jed again, the rule book could be thrown away. Why shouldn’t she just go for it? What happened in Paris could stay in Paris, right?

Jed was like a dog with two tails when Carrie invited him up to her room for a nightcap.

Once inside her room, 417, Carrie asked Jed to find something for them to drink in the minibar. He brought out a bottle of champagne. Carrie balked momentarily, imagining the champagne appearing on the receipt she would have to submit to the Ehrenpreis accounts department. But Jed had already peeled off the foil and was unwinding the muselet. Soon he was popping the cork, sending it flying across the room. Carrie held out two glasses to catch what remained in the bottle after most of it landed frothing and fizzing on the carpet. It was still fizzing wildly and escaped the glass to coat one of Carrie’s hands. Taking the glasses from her and setting them down on a little table by the window, Jed took Carrie’s hand and licked it clean.

“Oh, God,” she said as she felt that telltale pull deep in her abdomen. Jed licking her hand like that was the
sexiest thing that had ever happened to Carrie Klein. But that was just the start of it.

Without saying anything, Jed started to take off his clothes. He pulled his T-shirt off over his head, revealing the kind of body that Carrie had only ever seen in magazines and movies. Before Jed, her boyfriends had been nerdy types. She had never fucked a man with a six-pack. A man with a selection of hard degrees, yes, but a hard body? Never. Having spent years telling herself that personality was the most important thing in a man, she was surprised at just how excited the sight of Jed’s body made her feel, as he stood there in his underpants like he’d just stepped off a Calvin Klein shoot.

Fully naked, Jed knelt on the ground and slipped Carrie’s feet out of her shoes. With gentle care he ran his hands up her legs to find the tops of her stockings and rolled them down. It wasn’t long before he was helping her out of her dress, an easy-access number by Vanessa Bruno. He murmured his approval as he got his first look at the body beneath.

He couldn’t seem to get enough of her. He kissed her harder than she had ever been kissed. There was no timidity there. He was not ashamed of how much he wanted her. His enthusiasm was infectious. Far from feeling more self-conscious about her physical flaws in the presence of such a beautiful body, Carrie felt released by Jed’s obvious delight in her.

Parting Carrie’s thighs, Jed moved so that he was lying between them, his head hovering over her pelvis and the neat landing strip of her pubic hair. Murmuring his appreciation of her form, Jed carefully spread Carrie’s labia and dipped his head toward her clitoris.

“Oh, please!”

She felt a shudder of delight before his tongue even touched her. She reached out and held his head in her
hands as though trying to delay the moment because she knew the sensation would be just too much. But she couldn’t hold him off. He was determined to pleasure her. Nothing would stop him.

With his smooth, long tongue he flicked at her clitoris until the tiny bud became swollen and each movement of his tongue made Carrie cry out in delight. She tried to stop him a couple of times, as if she feared a loss of control, but he wouldn’t let her escape his attentions. He continued to caress her with his warm wet mouth. Sucking and licking and driving her wild. At the same time he slipped a finger into her in search of the elusive G-spot. His flickering tongue and his finger stroking deep inside made her feel so aroused she thought she would faint.

Carrie gasped as Jed worked faster. She begged him to stop, but he overrode all her objections. He was going to take her to the edge. And at last she stopped protesting. She lay back on the bed, her body arching toward Jed’s mouth. Like a hang glider walking to the edge of the cliff, one more step and she was airborne.

“Oh, oh, oh!”

Carrie had her first orgasm at the age of thirty-seven.

“You are awesome,” Jed said afterward. “I hope you are going to let me do that again. And again and again.”

Carrie’s conclusion that evening was that blonds definitely have more fun.

CHAPTER 21