Nikki (6 page)

“You are.”

“Let’s not get girly-girly sentimental, Dolores. Face it. It’s so. Your obligations are to your children and your husband first, not to me. That’s undeniable. It’s my belief and yours that I would not fit into your world without causing trouble.”

“Nikki, you
could
”

“Do you think I could, Dolores?” Nikki looked deeply into her eyes, then nodded slowly. “Yes, you do. And if you think so, maybe I can.”

Dolores looked at her affectionately. “The way you light up and bounce back—Storm Front, you’re a real pleasure.”

“You too, Taffy Head.” She grinned and sighed. “Ah, you feel like home!”

A moment later she saw Dolores’s husband, Jim Thelton, making his way between tables toward them. He had transferred to the California branch of his insurance firm a year after marrying Dolores and had risen to Pacific States supervisor, with a vice presidency and a regional directorship in the offing. Dolores was always at pains to convince Nikki that his success wasn’t altogether due to the fact his family owned seventy percent of the company. Not that Nikki doubted it.

A dark-haired, well-built, fairly tall man with a squarish, virile face, wide-set intelligent eyes, Jim had a look of purpose and will. She had always considered him ideal for Dolores, and liked him on that account.

Dolores felt sheltered by his unmistakable sinewy air of dominance, but it touched on Nikki like an abrasive. He’d never mentioned that stunt she’d pulled at the wedding, and worse, almost as though she sensed something, neither had Dolores. Nikki’s only motive had been to resist the occasion’s soft dangerous swamp of emotionalism with something brashly funny, but Jim had responded to the friction and warmth of her excited body against his, and for her part she had become terribly stimulated. There were moments when each of them was acutely aware of that awful secret between them … and this was one of those moments.

His usual expression when looking at her was cool amusement, as at a pretty but silly toy, mingled with disapproval. Coming toward her now, the amusement and disapproval vanished and he looked at her naked shoulders and upper breasts and wanted her. From a corner of her eye Nikki saw Dolores’s eyes alert.

A tight instant later Dolores gave Nikki a nervous little smile and said to Jim, “Guess what? You’ll never guess the good news.”

“Hello, Nikki. It’s good to see you. You’re looking deadly.”

“Hi, Jim. I saw you eyeing this,” she said, lifting an arm prettily, dancing her fingers along her diamond tiara, “and estimating the annual premium, and hating me. But I’m helpless. An uncle of mine has an insurance firm and … I’m sorry.”

He laughed. “What’s the good news? Is it about her?” he said to Dolores.

“She’s moved here. She’s going to make her home here, near us. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Talk about loaded questions! Let the poor man answer for himself.”

“If I know what’s good for me, I’ll come up with the same answer. Maybe you didn’t know it, Nikki, but this motherhood bit Dolores has been playing has given her a tendency to bossiness.”

“She had it long ago, she was always trying to boss me around. I tried it on her, too. It was a draw, till now.” Nikki lowered her gaze briefly. “She has the final victory. I’ve been all wrong—all this frenzied bouncing around and charging off in all directions at once.”

“I’m glad to hear you talking that way, Nikki,” Jim said soberly. “And I’m going to be glad to introduce you to an old friend of mine. Dolores, it’s not too late to rearrange the seating, is it?”

“No need,” Dolores said gaily, looking at her husband impishly. “She’s seated across from John.”

“Good, good,” Jim said, after a moment’s glance of surprise at his wife. “If you want to get back to the reception line, I’ll take Nikki over to meet John.”

When she was walking toward the bar with Jim Nikki said, “Please don’t be annoyed with Dolores on my account.”

“Was I so obvious?”

“Either that, or I’m hypersensitive. She thinks I’m good enough for him; you’re not so sure.”

“It wasn’t a matter of good or bad. I know you think I’m stuffy and self-righteous and smug, but I don’t hand down pious judgments. It’s that I’m John’s friend and I’m concerned. In a way he’s a dim bulb … socially, at least But he’s a fine person; an excellent engineer and a gentleman, and—”

“Ooof!” Nikki hunched her shoulders. “That word!”

Jim frowned at her. “Gentleman? Oh, yes, I remember Dolores saying you had some sort of grudge against gentlemen. So, now you see my point. He is just that, a gentle man. A good one, but not a flamboyant strutting cock. I judge Dolores is the type of woman he should have. You’re another type—not worse, not better, just another. I think it won’t work, unless it’s true that you’re sobering down.”

“I
said
it was true.”

“Fine, Nikki. I’m going to be happy to present you to him … or, rather, present
him
to you. He’ll probably fall in love with you instantly.”

“You don’t have to get that damned nice, Jim,” she said, laughing.

Jim looked down at her, amused. “Nice? I
told
you he was a man. How else would a man respond to Nikki Duquesne? That is,” he added hastily, “assuming he wasn’t already in love with someone. And John isn’t. Ah, there he is.”

“A Truck Wyzowski with brains,” Nikki thought, the instant she saw big, solid-looking, sandy-haired John Barket.

John’s face had something of the same thrust and crudity of feature as Truck’s, but without its harshness, and there was a sober maturity about his eyes and mouth and a pleasing height and width to his forehead. Jim came steering him toward her, talking to him earnestly, while John nodded gravely and kept flicking glances toward her as if Jim were sending him out to deactivate a bomb.

“Well, here she is in person, John. Miss Nikki Duquesne. Nikki, my good friend John Barket.”

She offered her hand. Tilting her head winsomely to one side, she gave him her most enchanting smile and said sweetly, “This is a real pleasure, John.”

He held her slender hand gingerly, as if his big paw might bruise it, and said, gazing at her solemnly, “I’ve waited a long time to meet you.” He paused. “All my life, in fact.”

She reached up and teased her forefinger across his lips. “Smile when you say that!”

She laughed and he grinned, then chuckled aloud, his eyes feasting delightedly on her.

“You’ve made a liar out of me, Johnny,” Jim protested laughingly. “I told her you were tongue-tied at parties.”

“Ever hear the story of the farmer’s—” he paused whimsically, “the farmer’s
son
who never made a sound or said a word in his whole life? Then one day when he was twenty-one the bull started to make a run at his father’s back. ‘Look out, Pa!’ he shouted. Afterward the father said, ‘It’s a miracle. You can talk!’ ‘Shucks. Always could! Just had nothin’ important to say before!’.”

Theoretically John told the story to both Jim and her, but the naked craving with which his glance repeatedly touched her seemed to put them in a tense private atmosphere which excluded Jim.

“What this story has to do with me …” John said.

Jim broke in, “The parallel is that you’ve been saving yourself for an event like Nikki.”

Nikki plucked at her skirt, rustling and lifting it, and aimed a dainty kick at Jim’s shins. “That’s for stepping on Johnny’s lines!” She flirted her eyes up at John and swayed her shoulders provocatively. “We’ll show him, huh?”

“See you both later,” Jim said, laughing.

“You know, Nikki,” John began when Jim was gone, “I showed up here tonight because of you. Dolores said she couldn’t promise, but she thought and hoped you might be here.”

“She really hoped I would?” Nikki said, pleased.

John nodded, distractedly, continued: “And I’ve been very anxious to meet you for a long time. I’ve heard so many wonderful things, seen so many pictures, read so many stories about you. Still, I was terrified; how the devil could I amuse a girl like you when I have trouble enough with the local glamor? I kept wondering what I could say, what I could do, and in my imagination I never got anywhere.”

“I’ll bet!” she said tartly, disrupting his line of thought. He stopped talking, blinked, then laughed.

“No, but really. What I was going to say …” he began to grin again in spite of himself. He shook his head. “Conversationally, I got as far as, ‘Miss Duquesne, I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you. But, then, well, tonight the truth came out, and my saying it was as much a surprise to me as it was to Jim. But it wasn’t just a fast line.” His voice dropped a half-octave and became huskily intense. “I’ve been waiting all my life for you. You’re like a dream …”

“Nonsense.”

He recoiled as if she’d sloshed him with cold water. He looked hurt, then irritated. “Nonsense?”

“I prefer the honest pitch you’ve been giving me with the eyes,” she told him, looking coolly up into his face. “Although you’ve been pitching too fast for my tastes. I won’t be pushed.”

“Perhaps we should be starting for our table,” he said, with a stiff, polite smile. “I’m sorry, Miss Duquesne. I
have
been staring. Crudely.”

“Not crude at all.” She slipped her arm in his and patted his hand affectionately, as they started for their table. “You make an art of it, Mr. Barket.”

She took a sly glance at his profile, guessed he was biting his cheek to keep from grinning.

At their table-for-six was a middle-aged matron who instantly disapproved of Nikki, and her husband who did not and could not show it; a good-looking younger man with his date, a girl in a new gown that seemed suddenly lustreless against Nikki’s. She turned herself on, and by the simple process of remembering and using their names, listening as if she heard, deprecating herself lightly in remarks about her own experiences, she had the matron feeling Nikki wasn’t really bad, the businessman feeling important, the young woman convinced she was no threat, and the curly-haired young man feeling sophisticated. By the time the entree arrived she’d fused them into a pleasant group and, with the exception of John Barket, who was already fevered, she warmed them all.

Dolores and Jim were at the committee table at the far end of the big banquet room, and now and then throughout the meal, one or the other, or sometimes both together, would reach out to her with warm smiles, and they truly felt like home.

She sought their eyes again, her mood sweet, and they didn’t see her. Once … twice … three times. She felt banished, like a bad child, and her head ached violently, and they seemed to fade slowly and vanish into a remote and hopeless distance. There was a sudden anguish and emptiness in her breast, a pain too intense to bear; then, with the speed of reflex, a hard, cold fury possessed her like shield and weapon against the pain.

With a reasonless sense of outrage she looked at John Barket and thought of him as the creature she was being forced to accept as a condition for being allowed into Dolores and Jim’s world. When his gaze caressed her breasts again she felt the savage impulse to drive the spike of her high heel into his kneecap.

One of the others at the table was saying something to her, and Nikki tightened her mouth, turned her head slowly and looked at the creature from this smug-respectable-fake-pretty world with icy unrecognition. The mood she had created she destroyed, spreading a chill over the whole table, forcing one person after another to withdraw, confused and distressed.

The smiles she’d had for John Barket became wan, then vanished; her interest became indifference, then boredom. He had been thrilling to her, he’d thought; clever, handsome … low he became, losing his confidence, his sense of adequacy. When he dared look at her breasts again, her eyes scathed him. She knew the allure of her breasts, separately defined by the cut of the gown, perfumed and artfully cupped in silk with the lush upper slopes whitely naked.

She sat more erectly, thrusting her breasts, tempting him, while her watchful green eyes warned him off. If, she thought with scorn, he couldn’t resist, he was contemptible. If he let himself be intimidated, he was despicable. If he evaded the issue, as he was doing by looking at his plate, he was a neuter, a zero. Nothing he could do would be right. She knew it was senseless, unjust, and she didn’t give a damn.

And yet … she relented slightly, giving him half a smile, half a hope. She hadn’t decided. Maybe she would give him a chance.

Maybe, Nikki thought again in a box at the Opera House. She sat watching the stage and listening to Tschai-kowsky’s sentimental, emotional music, feeling outside and above the performance. To enjoy tired old Swan Lake she would have to step back twenty years into the shoes of prissy-pretty Miss Nicolette Duquesne. She shifted on her chair. The motion and the intimate whisper of her skirt pulled John Barket’s eyes from the stage.

Nikki let her eyes rest, wide and wondering, on his face. He didn’t smile, but gazed at her in mute concentration. She could see the widening and tensing of his nostrils and the rise of his deep chest as the impact of her face in the misty half-light made him draw breath. The feel of his desire became so strong that Nikki turned away.

There was little doubt about his drive and male potency, Nikki thought, with a little quickening of excitement. His mere physical mass made her feel frail, but somehow safe, and for a few moments she permitted herself to surrender to the drug-sweet mood of the ballet.

The melodic surge of sound, the richly flowing and curving patterns, the ethereal mist of powder-blue light, the romantic tutus, combined to idealize and exalt beauty and sweetness, and there was a sudden lump in her throat and the threat of tears in her eyes. Nikki rose abruptly and went into the anteroom behind the box.

She sat bent forward on the cushioned lounge chair, her elbows on her tight-together knees, the heels of her hands pressed against her eyes.

When she heard John Barket part the curtains and come in, she whispered, “Please go away!”

That childish fairy tale! That impossibly remote beauty! She pressed her hands harder against her eyes and moved her shoulders forward and back so that the delicate, winglike contours of her shoulder blades rippled beneath the skin. At the touch of his fingers on her bare back she sat up and faced him, her green eyes staring and glisteningly near tears.