Fragile Crystal: Rubies and Rivalries (The Crystal Fragments Trilogy) (22 page)

They were greeted by the maître d’ and led to their table. On a gallery above their heads, a pianist was playing Gershwin and as Daniel held her seat for her Kris felt as though she was indeed a movie star.

“It’s wonderful,” she gushed as Daniel sat down across from her.

Even he could not hide his enthusiasm, looking around their table at the other diners and the locale with a happy look on his face. “Yes,” he said, smiling openly as his eyes came back to rest on her face. “It is something special. And so are you.”

They ordered non-alcoholic cocktails and water to drink—the appeal of wine and spirits had diminished for Kris—and she took Daniel’s recommendations to try the steaks. “No one does them quite like Americans do, and you won’t taste a better one than here.”

While they were waiting, she told him excitedly all the things she had done, and how much she was loving New York. “I can’t believe I left it this long to visit with you.”

“Well, next time you can stay longer with me. I suspect I’ll be spending more and more time shuttling between here and London again. I suppose we could look for an apartment in the new year.”

She reached across and held his hand and he smiled as he looked back at her. There was, however, a sad look in his eyes. “Hey,” she said softly, gesturing towards his face with her free hand. “What’s that for?”

“I fucked up, didn’t I?” he said, very softly.

She shrugged. “We all do, from time to time.”

“But this was a bad one. There’s no excuse for it. With everyone—and I mean everyone—Daniel Stone is a cool customer. Collected, assured of himself, never out of control.”

“Was it the first time you drank since...?” She left the question hanging in the air.

He shook his head. “No, I haven’t been completely teetotal since... Karen’s death, but the few times I have drunk it’s always ended badly. Terrible really. I think I’m a master of everything I do, but scratch the surface and there’s just chaos churning away.”

“Perhaps you need to let that chaos come to the surface from time to time.”

He looked thoughtful at this. “No,” he decided at last. “There’s too much to lose.”

“Swimming with sharks, eh? You have to keep swimming.”

This made him laugh. “Yes, I like that. And recently there have been some pretty big sharks coming close to Stone Enterprises.”

She sat back and let him speak, not willing to interrupt and wanting to listen. “Things have been getting tough recently. Don’t worry, I’m not about to go under, but there are a lot of people who would like to see me fail—including a few that I thought were friends.”

“I don’t want to see you fail, but I don’t care if you do either. I’ve done it enough.” She squeezed his hand as she spoke.

This made him raise an eyebrow. “You say that now, but how well would you like me if I had nothing?”

She scowled at this, genuinely annoyed for a moment. “How can you say that? Okay, you didn’t exactly have nothing when I first met you, but Comrie and a beat-up Land Rover is hardly the stuff of fairy tales, is it?”

Now he laughed and rubbed his chin, still holding onto her with the other hand. “No, I guess you’re right. Still... I’ve been trying to keep people around me I can trust recently. It’s getting vicious out there.”

This made Kris feel a little guilty for a moment, and she was glad when the waiter arrived with her steaks and the famous salad. Tucking in, she raised a fork with a luscious piece of meat on the end and said: “This is great!”

Smiling, he agreed, and they ate in silence for a few moments. “You know, I could feel like Ginger Rogers in a place like this.”

“Why don’t we ask the pianist to play a little louder so that we can dance.”

Kris blushed at this and giggled. “Oh, you’re much too big to be Fred Astaire.”

This made him smirk. “I was thinking more Errol Flynn, which is why you can’t walk sometimes and I can’t dance.”

She snorted at his innuendo and slapped his arm. “Don’t!” she hissed at him. “There are people watching!”

He simply smiled and looked around. “No,” he said at last. “They’re all enjoying Christmas with each other, with their loved ones.”

“And what shall we do for Christmas?”

He paused and for a moment looked genuinely surprised. “I haven’t thought about it in years,” he remarked, “but this year I do want to do something special. Normally I work. How about Hawaii, or one of those ice hotels in Sweden?”

“I think I’m being dragged left, right and centre,” she told him. “How about you spending time in Cascais, with me for a few days? Not London or New York, though. Much as I would love to stay here for longer, I know you—you’ll end up working day after day.”

Again he laughed. “Okay, let me think about it. I still fancy somewhere exotic. Don’t you get bored of staying in the same place?”

“I’m not as rootless as you.”

He looked up at her as she said that. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was rude of me.”

He shook his head, laying his fork next to his plate and placing a hand beneath his chin thoughtfully. “No,” he replied in a quiet voice. “I suppose it’s true.”

“Did you... drift as much with her?” She did not need to explain what she meant.

“No,” he replied, still meditating on memories. “I wanted to be rich, yes—but, well, more just well off than rolling in wealth. I wanted a family—
we
wanted a family. A home. To be together, but it wasn’t meant to be.”

Both of them ate in silence for a moment after that. “I’m sorry to bring up those memories,” she said at last.

He smiled again. “No. No, it’s good to remember them. For a long time it wasn’t—damn! It hurt. After she died... I just wanted to fuck death in the eye, to say, ‘Fuck you, Death!’ It was very... melodramatic. I can think of her much more calmly these days, especially since...” He suddenly realised what he was saying and, to Kris’s surprise, blushed.

She reached across and held his hand again. “It’s okay,” she told him. He could not reply, so after a while she began to speak again.

“Remember when we were in Sintra, the day I damaged my ankle?”

He smiled ruefully. “I’ll not forget that in a hurry. I thought I was going to have a heart attack panicking over you.”

She bowed her head a little to hide her smile and her embarrassment. Then, raising it again, she said: “You told me on the walls how you felt like James Stewart.”

“I remember—in
Vertigo
. Stupid comment.”

“Maybe, maybe not. I thought about that film a lot after that.” She lifted her hair between two fingers. “I nearly cut this off, you know, recently.”

“Why would you do that? I love your hair!”

“I know, but why do you love it Daniel?”

He was about to protest when a realisation of what she was talking about crossed his face. He nodded, a little grimly.

“I felt a bit like Kim Novak,” she grimaced slightly as she said the name—a reminder of someone else who she did not wish to haunt their meal, not tonight, “being made to take on the form of another woman.”

He looked at her thoughtfully, and his eyes were so sad that she felt her heart would break. She squeezed his hand. “Hey! Come back! It’s okay—I didn’t cut it in the end.”

This made him smile, but he still had a beautiful, melancholy air about him.

“No, you’re not like her. You look like her, but in every other way... I’ve told you before, truthfully, I loved Karen with all my heart. But I’m not the man she married and she... well, I have no idea what she would have been like.” He shrugged and turned towards his meal once more.

“And the others?”

He lifted his head and looked at her, more sharply this time.

“What others?”

“The others who... were more like me, after Karen died.”

He stared at her for a moment, chewing slowly, deliberately. “There’s been no one like you.” As he reached across for a glass of water, she noted for the first time that he did not look directly into her eyes as he spoke, and inside her chest her heart began to beat faster, a fragile engine throbbing inside the empty space. She just nodded, however, and returned to her meal. She could not explain it, but somehow the meat that just moments before had burst upon her tongue, inciting and exciting her with its magical qualities, somehow tasted just a little less tender, a little less magical.

And outside the snow continued to fall.

Chapter Nineteen

Snow falling covered everything, and the thick white blanket that greeted her as she left the hotel was the promise of new beginnings. What lay below, Kris told herself, no longer mattered. This
was
a magical winterland.

Frank was waiting to drive her to the airport. Daniel had a few loose ends that he wished to tie up in New York, but Kris was eager to prepare for their first Christmas together. With only a week to go, she would return to Lisbon and Cascais to add her own personal touch to their celebrations together.

The flight itself was uneventful, but certainly the anxieties that had plagued her on the trip out to New York were much abated on the way back. Not that she could forget everything, however, much as she tried. Up here in the sky, the blanket of cloud shared many similarities with the snow that had covered Central Park, but when the great white banks parted to show the Atlantic far below it was even more clear that the world remained, with all its history and all its traces.

It had been her fault, she told herself. No, that was unfair. Daniel’s excessive behaviour had thrown her off balance, but rather than take the experiences he was willing to give, she had to push, to find out more. On the face of it, Maria’s assertion that there had been five other mistresses alongside the two of them could have been an out-and-out lie, but something about Daniel’s evasion still nagged at her mind. Likewise, while she was growing used to the fact that she was both the same and not the same as Karen, it still undermined her security in herself to a degree.

But, she decided, there was little she could do about it now. Part of her wanted to dig, to sink into the ground of Daniel’s past and uncover everything she could, while another part realised that this was the surest way to discover things that he clearly did not want her to know—nor even to remember himself, perhaps. She had long known his desire for privacy, and perhaps this was a message to her, that she was not the only one in search of a blank canvas, a new beginning.

Despite her best efforts to get some rest, these and other thoughts circled in her brain as the plane landed in Heathrow. She had decided not to stay in London—aside from Anne there was very little for her in the city where she had been born and grown up now. Instead, she waited a couple of hours for the next flight to Lisbon and before too long had landed in the homeland of her choice.

Her plan was to spend a day or two in Alfama before going onto Cascais. She was aware that Anna, Joana and the rest would make an excellent job of maintaining the villa, but this time she wanted it to feel like more than an anonymous, if illustrious, hotel. While the appeal of the jet setting lifestyle that Daniel led was immensely appealing in many respects, she could already see how that appeal would be limited. Daniel, she realised, had no centre, no
home
. If she could provide anything for him, she could provide that.

Before then, she would return to
her
home. It was a little strange that Daniel had not stepped foot there yet, but this had been part of her agreement, at least to begin with. The intensity of their affair when it had started threatened to swallow her whole, to consume her and leave nothing behind. As such, Alfama was
her
centre for the moment, her room of her own, a place to create. She knew that she would have to move beyond that, or, rather, she would have to decentre that bright apartment overlooking the river, to find a home for both her
and
Daniel.

But for the moment at least it provided her with a security that, she realised, she had never really known before. Even the family home where she had lived with her father had always felt insecure, partly because of her father’s financial irregularities, but also because she had become a transient in that space as soon as she was old enough to assert her sometimes wayward will.

So it was always with a feeling of tranquillity that she opened the door to her apartment, sliding in the key and pushing open the door, struggling a little with her bags. She could have asked Jorge and Filipe to collect her from the airport, but at times she still liked to exercise some independence, even if it was more inconvenient for her.

It was the smell she noticed first of all. A lingering trace of perfume in the air. She had smelt that enough before—in a café in Paris, in a restaurant and hotel in Lisbon, the villa at Cascais—to know immediately what it was. Was this some perverse idea of a present from Daniel, to arrange for exactly the same sort of perfume worn by the Gosselin woman to be ready for her when she returned home? Did he actually prefer the smell of Maria to her own scents, and was dropping a less than subtle hint?

She was just as disconcerted by the fact that he must have a key to her apartment, which presumably Jorge or Filipe had used to enter while she was away. That thought alone made her furious. It was a breach of the trust that they had established between them. Alfama was
hers
. Soon enough they could make a home together, but for now this place was hers and hers alone.

The doors from the entrance hall were closed, and there was no sign of disturbance. It did occur to Kris momentarily that perhaps she should be afraid if someone was still in the apartment, but with a snort she considered the likelihood of a burglar wearing Hermès perfume to be very remote.

It was only when she opened the door to her studio that she realised who was there. Her heart stopped for a moment, and her entire body froze over as though a carapace of fragile ice had crystallised along her limbs and torso.

Maria was dressed in a two piece suit, pencil skirt emphasising the soft curves of her hips and thighs, the waist accentuated where the jacket was drawn in. The dark blue colour of the suit made her skin appear even paler than usual, and the ruby ring on her finger glittered more brilliantly. Her blonde-white hair was neat and meticulous, her lips dark red—a splash against her almost colourless skin—and she was not wearing sunglasses. She did not even look up when Kris entered the room, but instead her green eyes flickered across the surface of the canvas that she held in her hands.