Dazzle The Complete Unabridged Trilogy (142 page)

Catching sight of her, Clyde jumped out of his vehicle and
went around to the passenger side. It was an old army-surplus
jeep, and even several new coats of olive-drab paint could not
completely hide where the white stars and military markings
had been. They hadn't been sanded off, and showed slightly
in relief.

She twirled around once in the gravel. 'How do I look?'

He grinned. 'Gorgeous,' he said. Then he let out a whistle.
'Those real rubies?'

Daliah flashed him one of her 'get real
'
looks as she jumped
up and swung herself expertly into the jeep.

'You did that like you've spent a lifetime in a jeep.'

'Well, not a lifetime, exactly. Just my tour of duty in the
Israeli army.' She waited for him to climb in. 'So where're we
going?'

'Depends what you're in the mood for.' He fiddled with the
gear lever. 'How's steak and lobster sound to you?' He looked
at her questioningly.

She smiled. 'It sounds fine.'

'Good.' He stepped down on the accelerator and turned the
jeep around, practically on a penny. 'I bought two fillets, two
jumbo lobsters, and stole a magnum of champagne. I also
collected some driftwood. Since it's an unusually balmy
evening, what do you say to a picnic on the beach?'

She grinned at him. 'I say that sounds just fine.'

Chapter 6

The jangling of the telephone reached down through the layers
of her sleep and startled her awake. Eyes closed, she felt
blindly for the receiver, finally located it after knocking the
alarm clock over, and mumbled,' 'Lo?'

'Lunch is ready in half an hour!' It was Inge, and her voice
sounded so loud and cheerful that it would have awakened
Dracula in broad daylight.

Daliah cringed and held the receiver away from her ear.
Then she frowned. 'You mean breakfast, don't you?' she
grumbled.

'I mean lunch,' Inge said definitely. 'We generally eat lunch
at one-thirty in the afternoon, not breakfast. And it is one
o'clock now.'

'One in the . . .' Daliah's eyes snapped suddenly open and
she sat up wide-awake. She righted the alarm clock and stared
at it closely. Inge wasn't kidding. It was one o'clock, all right, right on the button. And behind the drawn curtains the sun
pulsated like floodlights.

'All I want to know,' Inge said, 'is should I bring your lunch
over on a tray, or do you want it here?'

'I'll have it there,' Daliah said, swinging her legs out of bed.
'Just give me five.' She hung up and got up too suddenly.
She groaned and touched her forehead gingerly. It felt like
someone was stabbing it with a handful of ice picks. What
Clyde hadn't told her was that he had
two
magnums of Tait
tinger—
and
a thermos of ready-made margaritas on ice. And
somehow, between them both, they'd managed to put away
every last drop.

She stumbled into the little bathroom, stared into the mirror
with disbelief, and quickly gulped four aspirin. After slapping
handfuls of cold water on her face and gargling furiously with Listerine, she managed to slip into some clothes and staggered
outside. The sunlight was so blinding that she had to shield
her eyes with her arm.

Inge was bustling around her kitchen, cheerful as a dwarf
in a Disney cartoon. 'I put on a fresh pot of coffee for you,
but you can have tea instead, if you like. Lunch isn't quite
ready.'

'I'll wait.'

Inge slid a cup of steaming coffee in front of her. One hand
on a hip, she stood there for a moment, waiting, looking down
at Daliah, but Daliah pointedly ignored her and poured a scant
teaspoon of cream into the coffee. She knew Inge was waiting
to hear all about her date, and she wasn't in any mood to talk,
at least not until the pounding in her head abated.

'By the way, you had a phone call,' Inge said conversation
ally as she went back to the sink. 'It was Jerome, and he
insisted on talking to you. I told him not to bother, but he said
he would call back.'

Daliah gritted her teeth. 'Why doesn't he just give up and
leave me be!'

'If you want, I can put him off,' Inge said, 'but maybe it would be best for you to tell him that you don't want to talk
to him. He won't listen to me; maybe he will listen to you.'

'I doubt it.' Daliah blew on her coffee, but before she could
take the first sip, the telephone shrilled again. The sound went
straight through her head.

Inge went to answer it. 'Daliah, it is Jerome,' she said,
holding her hand over the receiver.

Daliah twisted around, her face quivering with anger. 'Oh,
all
right!'
she said truculently.

Inge brought the phone over to her, and she lifted the
receiver slowly. 'Yes,' she said warily.

'Daliah!' He sounded cheerful and relieved both. 'It's nice
to hear your voice.'

'I wish I could say the same,' she said.

There was a pause, and when he spoke again there was
reproach in his voice. 'I wish you didn't try to avoid me so
obviously. I tried calling all over town to get your new number,
but no one would give it to me. I'm still in France, and you
don't know how much trouble that put me through. If I hadn't
figured you'd gone to Inge's, I'd never have found you. You
didn't have to go in hiding, you know.'

'Who said I'm in hiding? You found me, didn't you?'

'There you go again! I really don't know what's gotten into
you. You're behaving very strangely, you know that?'

'How do you expect me to behave?' she said with a touch of asperity. 'Do you want me to tell you everything is okay,
and act kissy-kissy?'

'I wish you wouldn't be this way, that's all.' Exasperation
crept into his voice. 'I don't know you like this, Daliah.'

'I don't know myself like this either,' Daliah replied. 'Leav
ing myself open to get hurt is entirely new to me. I haven't
quite got the hang of coping with it just yet.' Her voice turned
suddenly brisk. 'Now, the sun's shining here and the dog wants
to go for a walk along the beach. Why don't you just get
whatever it is on your chest off it? That way we won't have to
argue about it all day long.'

He didn't seem to have heard her. 'You know, you put me
in an embarrassing situation, running back to the States the
way you did. I didn't know what to tell people. It wouldn't
have been half so bad if
Red Satin
hadn't walked away with the Palme d'Or, but since it did, your absence was only that
much more obvious. But I guess you know that already.'

'As a matter of fact, I was out of touch. I didn't know
Red
Satin
won.' She added dryly, 'Congratulations are in order, I
suppose.'

'No, you should be the one being congratulated. It was your performance that did it. I wasn't at all surprised that you won
for best actress too. Since you weren't here, I accepted your prize for you, but now I don't even know where to bring it.'

'Sending it would be the easiest. Airmail has become quite
reliable.'

'Daliah.' He paused and added gently, 'We have to talk.'

'We're talking now,' she pointed out.

'You know what I mean.'

'No, I don't. I thought I'd made myself perfectly clear. You
use Arab money, you lose me. Period. It's cut-and-dried.'

He couldn't keep the ugly edge out of his voice. 'You're a
tough bitch, you know that?'

'Thank you very much. I'll take that as a compliment.'

'Look, I really need to see you so we can talk. In person.'
He paused to emphasize that point. 'I'm sure if we sat down
together, we could work this thing out like adults.'

'I've made my position crystal clear, Jerome.'

His voice rose three octaves. 'Will you listen to me, god
damn it? I haven't accepted a dime or even signed a single
contract yet. I had the backers eating out of the palm of my
hand, but after you split, I put them on hold while I scrambled
to find alternative financing.'

She raised her eyebrows and blinked. This was news indeed.
For the first time, she could feel herself thawing a bit. 'But
you haven't turned them down, either,' she said cautiously.
'Have you?'

'Oh, for God's sake, Daliah,' he retorted. 'Do you have to
be so smug and sanctimonious?'

'I'm not being either of those things.' She was silent for a
moment. 'And calling me names isn't going to get either of us
anywhere.'

'All right, all right,' he said finally, and from the testy resig
nation in his voice she could tell he was fighting to keep himself
under control. Jerome was worse than most people when he
was backed into a corner. 'Look, you rushed off so fast you
never gave me a chance to explain who the backers were.'

'Does it make any difference? You told me it was Arabs.
That tells me all I need to know.'

'Daliah, it's the Almoayyed brothers,' he said, aggrieved
and struggling to be patient.

'So?'

'So? They're accepted everywhere! I mean, they even race
their horses at Ascot, and they are always welcome in the Royal Enclosure! Queen Elizabeth even invited them to
Windsor Castle.'

'I know who they are,' she said wearily.

And who didn't? she asked herself gloomily. The flamboy
ant Almoayyed brothers—Ali, Mohammed, Abdlatif, and
Saeed—had appeared practically out of nowhere during the
oil boom of 1973, and had taken the world by storm. It was
said that their family, the ruling family of one of the six United
Arab Emirates, was among the most powerful in the Persian
Gulf. Lately, the four brothers, who were inseparable, had
become as famous for their impressive string of thoroughbred
horses as for their multibillions. Recently, Desert Star, their
prize horse, had won both the Kentucky Derby and the Ascot
Group 1 Gold Cup.