A Novel Seduction (30 page)

“I think,” Dr. Albrecht said, “I may have something to help.”

She scurried out of the room, and after a moment or two of distant door creaking and hanger squeaking she reappeared with a white angora sweater with three-quarter sleeves whose placket was embroidered with pearls resembling tiny flowers on vines. It had gorgeous loop-de-loop frog clasps. It looked like it had just stepped out of a fifties prom.

“Oh my God, it’s beautiful,” Ellery said, feeling the silky smooth yarn.

“It vuz my mother’s. Try it on. She was about your size.”

“With the dress?”

“Yes.”

Ellery slipped into the bathroom and emerged a moment
later. When she stepped back to view herself in the room’s mirror, she saw she’d been transformed from a
hurenhaft
strumpet to a Grace Kelly debutante.

“It’s lovely!”

“Vee need a bit more, yes?” Dr. Albrecht disappeared a second time, returning with a box, a pair of scissors and an ancient tulle slip. “My vedding petticoat,” she said, holding up the last item.

“It’s beautiful,” Ellery said after she’d pulled it on, “and I’m honored you’d lend it, but it reaches almost to the floor.”

The older woman grinned, held up the scissors, then dropped to a knee and reached for the excess.

“No!” Ellery cried. “Not your wedding skirt.”

“Bah. First vedding.”

In a moment the emerald skirt was aloft, floating on several inches of bouncy tulle.

“Omigod, look at what it does when I turn,” Ellery said. She felt like a princess. “I have a pair of pearl studs. I’m going to pull my hair into a knot. It will be perfect.”

“Vun more thing.”

Dr. Albrecht pulled back the top of the box, revealing a breathtaking pair of silk flats in navy and green plaid with a rosette atop each toe.

Ellery gasped. They were perfect. They brought everything in the outfit together, and they had the added benefits of being both comfortable and beautiful. Then her spirits fell. “Oh, but I’ll never fit into them.” Dr. Albrecht had to be six inches shorter than Ellery. Surely her feet had to be smaller too.

“Vee are lucky,” the sociologist said, slipping her feet
out from under her pant legs. “My father always called them my little battleships.”

She placed the shoes on the floor, and Ellery slipped her feet in. The fit was damned near perfect.

“I can’t thank you enough,” Ellery said, giving the woman a hug. “I would have hated to be…”

“Hurenhaft.”

“
Hurenhaft,
exactly.”

“Vell, I think a little of
die Hurenhaftigkeit
is always recommended.”

Ellery laughed. “I’ll do my best.”

“And vhat, then, are vee going to do about the article?”

That was code for Axel. Ellery’s shoulders sagged. She looked beautiful, but what was the point? Axel and she would never see eye to eye.

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll keep working on it.”

“That’s my girl.”

Ellery checked the clock. “Ooh, we’re getting close. Can I give you a hand with party prep?”

“Do you mean instead of vurking on the article?”

“Yes,” Ellery said, chagrinned. “I suppose that’s what I do mean.”

“I do not need you for another half an hour or so.”

You tenacious Teutonic matchmaker, you. No wonder the Germans were able to roll through Paris.

“I may just nap.”

“Vhatever suits, dear. I’m sure the article is fine as it is.”

Grrrr.

“Actually, there
is
something you could do for me,” Dr. Albrecht said, stopping at the door. “There’s a large
powder room at the bottom of the stairs. It’s the public one, as it vur. Everything should be in order there, but if you could make sure the soaps are out, the hand towels are neatly folded, that sort of thing…”

“Sure. Anything at all.” Anything that meant not working on the “article.” As for the actual article, she hoped Black liked it, because she had already sent him the draft.

Upper East Side, Manhattan

Black stood on the balcony of his co-op apartment, shivering. He had snuck away from work, thinking Margey would be at her tennis lesson, only to discover Margey had a migraine and was lying on their bed with an ice pack, a sleeping mask and a serving-bowl-sized glass of pinot grigio at her side, which of course meant he had to feign a gallbladder attack to explain his appearance in the middle of the day. So now, instead of relaxing in his custom-made lambskin Eames lounger with his trousers around his knees, enjoying a nice long, relaxed phone call with Bettina, he was looking over the tops of the denuded Central Park trees, praying his neighbor’s damned Yorkshire terrier wouldn’t catch him standing outside and go off like an upper-register fire alarm.

He pulled his BlackBerry out of his pocket, willing Bettina to call. No missed calls. No new texts. Goddammit, he was going to freeze his considerable ass off if she didn’t call soon. With all the friggin’ apps out there, they couldn’t invent one that made the phone into a hand warmer?

He had brought his glasses in case she sent a picture. She was known to do that—horribly filthy ones that made his heart leap into his throat and his creaky prostrate ring with the vigor of St. Patrick’s bells, and the last thing he wanted if that happened was to wake Margey while digging for reading glasses in the table next to the bed.

He checked his e-mail in case Bettina had contacted him to cancel. She used the name Lloyd Pribbenow and subject lines that depended on the message she wished to convey. There was “Issues with the Franzen piece” (Are you free to talk?), “Did you see this in Publishers Weekly?” (Just checked into the hotel), and “PR Follow Up” (I’m naked on Skype).

Unfortunately, there was nothing from Lloyd or Bettina in his in-box, but there was an e-mail from Ellery Sharpe with the draft of the romance article, which he was glad to see. He’d been pissed with Mackenzie for not answering his e-mails, but from Ellery’s cover note, it looked like he’d gotten a damn-near-finished piece. Perhaps Mackenzie had more power of persuasion than Black had been willing to give him credit for.

He was just opening the document when his phone buzzed with a blocked call.

“Hello?” he said, carefully neutral.

“God, Buhl, you’re so cautious. Just once I’d like you to answer with ‘I’ve got my dick in my hand thinking about you.’ ”

“Which, of course, would be the time the head of Human Resources would be calling.” Though Black considered he might have to put his dick in his hand soon if it got any colder. “How are you, my love?”

“Bored. The conference was a complete snore. Plus, there were the usual barbs about
Vamp
.”

And while Bettina whined about being both lauded and decried in the industry for her success—a situation she had related to Black several dozen times at least—he surreptitiously withdrew the phone from his ear to open the attachment in Ellery’s e-mail.

“The Postmodern Reader: Feminism and the Transformational World of Romance”?
“What the
fuck
?”

“‘What the fuck’?” came a confused squawk through the speaker. “What the fuck—
what
?”

Black frantically slung the phone back to his ear. “Nothing. I mean, I can’t believe they would treat you like that.”
That title better pay off with a story so glowingly passionate about romance novels that Teamsters will cry.
He moved the phone in front of him again.

For the next sixty seconds he heard absolutely nothing Bettina said, only the radiator-clanging of his blood as fury hissed through his veins.

Then she said the word “Sharpe.”

“What?” he demanded, nearly fumbling the phone. “What did you say?”

“I said Barry Steinberg told me Ellery Sharpe is in line to run the new rag at Lark & Ives.”

“She’s
what
?” he roared. This was the last straw. “Lark & fucking
Ives
?”

He heard a clunk one balcony over as Misty, the “Terror from Yorkshire,” threw herself into the glass of the patio door, leaping six feet in the air and unleashing a barrage of barking shrill enough to curdle brain jelly.

Margey would be up in an instant. “I’ve gotta go.”

“What?” Bettina said, “I can’t hear you.”

“I said,” he repeated louder, “I’ve gotta go.”

“What? What’s that noise?”

“It’s the goddamned dog!”

Misty was flying back and forth between the kitchen window and the French door to the patio, emitting a drumroll of earsplitting barks whenever she appeared.

“Goddammit,” Black said. “Shut the fuck up!”

“I beg your pardon!” Bettina said.

Margey appeared in the living room, sleep mask on her forehead, glaring at him through the patio doors.

“I have to go!” Black cried.

“Don’t you hang up on me!” Bettina said.

Misty leapt against the screen, until it finally opened and she landed on the patio, where she swung in a full circle on the Carrara marble before finding her footing and charging directly at him, stopping only when the width of her head kept her from flying through the rails into his neck. He hung up in the middle of a stream of vulgarity from Bettina, just as Margey opened the door and glowered at him.

“Jesus Christ, Buhl, you are the rudest person I know.”

She slammed the door.

Black considered his lover, his wife and the employee who had woefully shortchanged him on an assignment and was now trying to steal away to Lark & Ives.

“Bitches,” he said.

Misty bared her teeth and growled.

Thistle Bed & Breakfast, Bathgate, Scotland

Axel examined the kilt in the dry-cleaning bag and the accompanying parcel of accessories without really seeing any of it. Ellery’s “compromise” position on the article was ridiculous. She was a far better journalist than that. He hated the way the magazine world worked. And he was still the sole possessor of Jill’s secret, a possessor who would soon have to break his confidante’s trust by telling it to the one person he never wanted to talk to again.

He grabbed the collar of his shirt, pulled it over his head and tossed it.
Women.

Bending, he pulled the Dopp kit out of his duffel bag and unzipped it. Then he looked at the contents and scratched his head. With the time change, late lunch and uncertain dinner, he had to figure out if he needed to take any insulin. He pricked his finger and tested it. Two twenty-seven. Yikes. He tore open a syringe and lifted the small glass vial from its special holder. He cleaned the top of the bottle with an alcohol wipe and pinched a piece of stomach between his thumb and forefinger, wiping the
flesh too. Tapping the vial, he lifted it into the air and drew out the appropriate amount of insulin. Then he inserted the needle into his flesh and, when the syringe was empty, withdrew it and put everything away.

He turned his attention once more to the kilt. He had worn one more times than he’d care to remember, every April sixth, the anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath, when his dad would drag them out to the backyard for a picture, his sisters and mother free to wear whatever spring dresses they had at hand, while he and his father would trot out the Mackenzie tartan, complete with brogues, knee-high socks, dirk and sporran. His father would set the self-timer on the camera and hurry to insert himself behind the family. Once the picture had been captured, he would read out the entire Declaration, followed in due course by a broad sampling of Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott and, if he’d dipped into the Canadian Club early enough, Robert Burns.

Axel smiled. He missed his father.

Still, the old man would not have approved of a Black Watch tartan, which was the standard of the abhorred Clan Campbell, but Axel did not hold to the old battle lines. He kicked off his hiking boots, removed his belt and slipped out of his jeans and boxers. Then he wrapped the heavy wool around him, rethreading the belt at his waist. Digging through the bag once more, he pulled out the sporran and fastened it around his hips. The fit was good, though he’d never been a fan of the horsehair. He looked inside, hoping he didn’t discover condoms or a phone number or something. Finding nothing, he debated what he should carry and decided on his cell phone
and a ten-pound note so that he could buy a couple of beers. Then he dropped the wallet in the duffel and followed that with his discarded clothes.