Authors: Danielle Steel
“I’m sorry.”
“So was I. And then, stupidly, it was a sort of blow when Pilar was born. In French families baby girls are not greeted with applause.”
“You wanted applause?” He looked amused.
“At least.” She smiled back at last. “And a brass band. And a parade.”
“One can hardly blame you. She was the third?” he asked. Deanna nodded. “Are you very close?” He imagined they would be and was surprised to hear they were not.
“Not just now, but we will be again. For the moment she is terribly torn between being American and French. That kind of thing can be hard.”
“So can being fifteen.” He remembered with horror his sister at the same age. “Does she look like you?” He hadn’t been able to tell from the distant glimpses in Deanna’s paintings.
“Not at all. She is the image of her father. She’s a very pretty girl.”
“So is her mother.”
For a moment Deanna said nothing, then she smiled. “Thank you, sir.”
The conversation drifted back then to art. He stayed away from painful and personal subjects, but sometimes she wondered if he was even listening. He seemed to be watching her all the time and saying other things with his eyes. It was midnight when at last they were encouraged to leave.
“I had a marvelous evening.” She smiled at him happily as he drew up alongside the parked Jaguar.
“So did I.” He said nothing more. As she started her car, he backed away with a wave. She saw him in her rearview mirror, walking back to his own car, his hands in his pockets and his head pensively bowed.
* * *
She was already in bed, with the lights out, when the telephone rang. But the rapid whir of the lines told her it was long distance.
“Deanna?” It was Marc.
“Hello, darling. Where are you?”
“In Rome. At the Hassler, if you need me. Are you all right?” But the connection was poor. It was very hard to hear.
“I’m fine. Why are you in Rome?”
“What? I can’t hear you….”
“I said why are you in Rome?”
“I’m here on business. For Salco. But I’ll see Pilar this weekend.”
“Give her my love.” She was sitting up in the dark and shouting to make herself heard.
“I can’t hear you!”
“I said give her my love.”
“Good. Fine. I will. Do you need money?”
“No, I’m fine.” For a moment all she heard was static and gibberish again. “I love you.” For some reason she needed to tell him that and to hear him say the same. She needed a bond to him, but he seemed an interminable distance away.
“I love you, Marc!” And for no reason she could understand, she found that there were tears in her eyes. She wanted him to hear her, she wanted to hear herself. “I love you!”
“What?”
And then they were cut off.
She quickly dialed the overseas operator and asked her for Rome. But it took another twenty-five minutes to put through her call. The operator at the Hassler answered with a rapid,
“Pronto,”
and Deanna asked for Signore Duras. They rang his room. No answer. In Rome, it was already ten o’clock in the morning. “We are sorry. Signore Duras has gone out.”
She lay back in the dark and thought of her evening with Ben.
7
Marc-Edouard Duras walked along the Via Vèneto in Rome, glancing into shop windows and occasionally casting an admiring glance at a pretty girl wandering past. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and the women were wearing T-shirts with narrow straps, white skirts that clung to shapely legs, and sandals that bared red enameled toes. He smiled to himself as he walked, the briefcase under his arm. It didn’t make sense really, this brief sojourn in Italy, but after all, why not? And he had promised….
Promised.
Sometimes he wondered how he could promise so easily. But he did.
He paused for a moment, an aristocratic figure in an impeccably tailored gray suit, waiting for the machine-gun spurt of Roman traffic to hurtle past him, casting itself hurly-burly in all directions, sending pedestrians scurrying in flight. He smiled as he watched an old woman wave a parasol and then make an obscene gesture.
Écco, signora.
He bowed slightly to her from the opposite side of the street, and she made the same gesture to him. He laughed, glanced at his watch, and hurried to a table in a café. Beneath a brightly striped umbrella he could take refuge from the sun and continue to admire the energy and ecstasy that were the very essence of Rome.
Roma
—it was a magical city. Perhaps the promise had been worth keeping after all. For an instant, but only that, the abortive conversation with Deanna crept into his mind. It had been almost impossible to hear her, and he was relieved. There were times when he simply couldn’t deal with her, couldn’t reach out to her, couldn’t bear to imagine the pain in those eyes or hear the loneliness in her voice. He knew it was there, but it was sometimes more than he could handle. He could cope with it in San Francisco, in the context of his ordinary routine, but not when he was in the throes of a professional crisis abroad, or when he was at home in France, or … here, in Rome. He shook his head slowly, as though to brush away the memory of her voice, and found himself gazing longingly up the street. He couldn’t think of Deanna now. Couldn’t. No. Not now. His mind was already a thousand miles away from her as his eyes sifted through the crowd: a pretty blonde, a tall brunette, two very Roman-looking men in light linen suits with thick dark hair, a tall Florentine-looking woman, like something in a Renaissance painting, and then he saw her. Striding gaily down the street with her own inimitable gait, the endless legs seeming to dance across the sidewalk as a brilliant turquoise skirt caressed her thighs. She wore the palest mauve silk shirt, delicate sandals, and a huge straw hat that almost hid her eyes. Almost. But not quite. Nothing could hide those eyes, or the sapphire lights that seemed to change with her every mood. They changed from the brilliance of fire to the mystery of the deep blue sea. A rich chestnut mane swept her shoulders.
“Alors, chéri.”
She stopped only inches from him, and sensuous lips offered a smile for his eyes alone. “I’m sorry I’m late. I stopped to look at those silly bracelets again.” He stood to greet her, and for once the chill reserve of Marc-Edouard Duras was clearly shattered. He wore the face of a boy, and one who was very much in love. Her name was Chantal Martin, and she had been a model at Dior. Their top model, in fact, for six and a half years.
“Did you buy the bracelets?” His eyes caressed her neck, and as she shook her head, the chestnut hair danced beneath the hat he had bought her only that morning. It was frivolous, but delightful. And so was she. “Well?”
Her eyes laughed into his. She shook her head again. “No, again I didn’t buy them.” Unexpectedly, she tossed a small package into his lap. “I bought you that instead.” She sat back, waiting for him to open it.
“Tu me gâtes, petite sotte.”
You spoil me, silly little one.
“And you don’t spoil me?” Without waiting for an answer, she signaled for a waiter.
“Sental … Cameriere!
…” He approached instantly, with a look of pleasure, and she ordered a Campari and soda. “And you?”
“Inviting me to drinks, too?” She never waited for him to take matters in hand. Chantal liked to run her own show.
“Oh, shut up. What’ll you have?”
“Scotch.” She ordered it the way he liked it, and he watched her eyes for a long moment as they sat beneath the umbrella. The beginnings of the lunchtime crowd swirled colorfully around them. “Will you always be this independent, my love?”
“Always. Now open your gift.”
“You’re impossible.” But that was precisely what had always fascinated him about her. She was impossible. And he loved it. Like a wild mare running free on the plains of Camargue. They had gone there together once, the land of the French cowboys and the beautiful, wild, white horses. He had always thought of her that way after that. Untamed, just a fraction out of reach, yet more or less his. More or less. He liked to think it was more rather than less. And it had been that way between them for five years.
She was twenty-nine now. She had been twenty-four when they met. It was the first summer that Deanna had refused to join him in France. He had felt odd to spend a summer without her; it had been awkward to explain to his family, insisting that she hadn’t felt well enough to travel that year. No one believed it, but they had only said so behind his back, wondering if she were leaving Marc-Edouard or merely had a lover in the States. They would never have understood the truth—that she hated them, that she felt ill at ease, that she had wanted to stay at home, to be alone, to paint, because she detested sharing Marc with them, detested the way he was when he was with them, and detested even more watching the way Pilar became like them. It had been a shock for Marc-Edouard when she refused to come, a shock that left him wondering what it would mean now that she would no longer spend the summers with his family in France. He had decided to send her something beautiful, along with a letter asking her to change her mind. Remembering the eighteen-year-old wistful beauty who had sat in his office that day so long ago, he had gone to Dior.
He sat through the entire collection, making notes, watching the models, carefully studying the clothes, trying to decide which ones were most her style, but his attention had incessantly wandered from the outfits to the models, and in particular, one spectacular girl. She had been dazzling, and she had moved in a way that spoke only to him. She was a genius at what she did, whirling, turning, beckoning—to him alone, it seemed—and he had sat breathless in his seat. At the end of the show he had asked to see her, feeling uncomfortable for a moment, but barely longer. When she walked out to meet him in a starkly narrow, black jersey dress, her auburn hair swept up on her lovely head, those remarkable blue eyes alternately clawing and caressing, he had wanted to seize her and watch her melt in his embrace. He was a rational man, a man of power and control, and he had never felt that way before. It frightened him and fascinated him, and Chantal seemed very much aware of the power she had. She wielded it gracefully, but with crushing force.
And instead of buying Deanna a dress, Marc had bought Chantal a drink, and another, and another. They had finished with champagne at the bar of the hotel George V, and then much to his own astonishment, he heard himself ask her if she would let him take a room. But she had only giggled and gently touched his face with one long, delicate hand.
“Ah, non, mon amour, pas encore.”
Not yet.
Then when? He had wanted to shout the words at her, but he hadn’t. Instead he had courted her, cajoled her, showered her with gifts, until at last she acquiesced, demurely, shyly, in just the way that turned his heart and soul and flesh to fire beneath her touch. They had spent the weekend in an apartment he had borrowed from a friend, in the posh surroundings of the Avenue Foch, with a miraculously romantic bedroom, and a balcony looking out on gently whispering trees.
He would remember for a lifetime every sound and smell and moment of that weekend. He had known then that he would never have enough of Mademoiselle Chantal Martin. She had woven herself like thread beneath his skin, and he would never be quite comfortable again except with her. She drained him and enchanted him, and made him almost mad with a desire he had never felt before. Elusive, exotic, exquisite Chantal. It had gone on for five years. In Paris, and Athens, and Rome. Wherever he went in Europe, he took her and of course presented her in hotels and restaurants and shops as “Madame Duras.” They had both grown used to it over the years. It was simply a part of his life now, and hers. A part of which his partner, Jim Sullivan, was acutely aware, and his wife, thank heaven, was not. Deanna would never know. There was no reason to tell her. It took nothing away from her, he told himself. She had San Francisco and her own little world. He had Chantal, and a much wider one. He had everything he wanted. As long as he had Chantal. He only prayed that it would go on for a lifetime. But that was a promise Chantal would never make.
“Alors, mon amour
, your present, your present, open it!” Her eyes teased and his heart soared. He pulled open the box. It was the diver’s watch he had admired that morning, saying it would be fun to have for their trips to the beach and his stays in Cap d’Antibes.
“My God, you’re mad! Chantal!” It had been monstrously expensive, but she waved his objections away with a disinterested hand. She could afford it now that she was no longer at Dior. Three years before she had retired from the runway and opened her own modeling agency. She wouldn’t let him set her up in an apartment in Paris to do nothing except her hair and nails and wait for him. She refused to be dependent on anyone, least of all him. It irritated him sometimes, and frightened him as well. She didn’t need him, she only loved him, but at least of that he was sure. No matter what she did when he was in the States, she loved him. He was certain of it. And the perfection of their time together cemented that belief.
“Do you like it?” She eyed him coyly over her Campari.