I never should have agreed to this, Eve told herself as she listened to Margo order the shrimp with carrot and Thai spices. Eve glanced around Jo Jo at the other diners, engaged in animated chatter and oblivious of the melodrama being played out at her table in the Upper East Side bistro. Maybe they’re playing out their own melodramas. Maybe that’s all life is.
She put a hand to her swollen belly. The baby was due in a month and had chosen this moment to launch into another attack of uncontrollable hiccups.
But you, my little one, don’t you worry. I intend to see to it that we have our share of comedy. I’ll give you laughter along with love—no matter how much life tries to make us cry.
She stared across the table at the silver-blond stranger opposite her and felt only sadness and loathing and hatred. What was the point of meeting with Margo? Nico was dead, and as far as she was concerned, her relationship with Margo had strangled long ago—long before she’d discovered her sister’s ultimate betrayal.
This was merely the funeral. The corpse has been cold a long time.
“Well, at least you’re not wearing widow’s weeds. I’ll give you credit for that,” Margo said, turning her attention again to Eve as the waiter bobbed away. “But for God’s sake, grow up, Eve. You can’t even bring yourself to look at me, can you?”
“I wonder how you can bear to look at yourself in the mirror.”
Margo lifted her chin. “There’s no point in blaming this all on me. It take two... and all that. Personally, I think I did you a favor. Let you see the real man Nico was instead of the fantasy lover you had created for yourself.”
Eve grabbed the napkin from her lap and started to rise from the table, twin spots of color staining her cheeks. “I refuse to listen to this. Don’t try to justify what you did. There’s no excuse for it, no rationale, and no logic. You were never much of a sister to me, Margo, but this whole thing is incomprehensible, even for you.” She shook her head, fighting back sobs of pain, sobs so bitter they stung her throat. “The same blood runs through both our veins, and at least for me, that meant something.”
Margo jumped up to block Eve’s path. “Sit down and face me for once in your life. You’re such a baby. Always have been. Running down the hall to Mom’s bedroom, crying over a few ghost stories. Running to Mom now? Going to tell on big sister?”
“Get out of my way, Margo.” Eve spat out.
“Not until we’re finished here. Sit down, and let’s get this over with.”
Eve took a deep breath. There was so much she wanted to get off her chest. So much that had been pent up these past months. Do it before the baby is born. Say what you have so say and get rid of the anger, she told herself. Once and for all, let it go before it does you more harm than they ever could. She dropped heavily back into her seat as the waiter reappeared with their meals. The nearby diners had stopped eating to stare at them, and Eve toyed with her roasted chicken, waiting until their attention and her own emotions cooled down.
Margo tore with relish into the fried carrot basket cradling her shrimp as the waiter refilled their water goblets. Eve ignored the icy opal eyes studying her. At last she took a bite of the cilantro-flecked ginger chicken and forced herself to chew.
“Well, are you planning to tell Mother?”
“What would be the point? It would only hurt her, and I doubt it would matter to you.” She added coolly, “But Dad might be a little disillusioned with his golden girl—I think that’s what’s really on your agenda, isn’t it?”
The shot hit home. Margo actually flushed. She reached into her silver cigarette case, extracted a long cigarette, and lit it in one fluid motion.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To upset Dad. To cause trouble between him and me.” She blew a thin stream of smoke into the air and narrowed her eyes. “You always have been jealous of my relationship with him. It was laughable watching you running yourself silly, rolling around in the backyard mud with the boys, climbing the tallest trees—anything—just to get his attention away from me. As if he really cared about all those track trophies...”
“Shut up, damn you.” Eve leaned forward, her hands clenching the tablecloth so tightly that her knuckles shone whiter than the linen. “This isn’t about Dad. We’re not kids anymore. What you did was a very grown-up, thought-out act of treachery. The only reason I agreed to meet you is to find out why.”
Margo gave her head a tiny toss, sending her pale hair flipping over her shoulders. “Sorry to disappoint you yet again, baby sister. I don’t have any deep Freudian reasons. The man was available. I was available. Nothing more. As a matter of fact, until you dangled a baby in front of his macho nose, he seemed quite unattached—official engagement to the contrary. You didn’t know Nico very well, did you? He was a passionate man, a thinker, a lover of life...”
“He was a liar and a cheat.”
“Maybe he just got bored with your small-town girl-next-door puritanism. European men are different, baby sister. They don’t stick with the apple pie. They need to sample everything on the dessert cart.”
Eve stared at the arrogant, cold eyed woman opposite her, disgust rising like bile in her throat. It was hard to believe that fifteen years earlier they had slept in the same bedroom, sat at the same dinner table, opened Christmas presents around the same tree. Blood was supposed to be thicker than water. But in this case, she doubted Margo had anything but vinegar running through her veins.
“The night he first met you,” Eve said slowly, “Nico called you an ice princess with nicotine breath.” Her lips twisted in a tight, bitter smile. “Guess you found some mouthwash. But you know what?” she asked, setting her fork down with a tiny clink. “If this was your idea of a contest, we both lost. We lost Nico. And we lost any chance to ever be friends.” Eve folded her napkin with an air of finality and placed it on the table. She felt sad inside, infinitely sad and old and drained.
“But, Margo, I want you to remember one thing.”
The waiter hadn’t brought the check yet, but Eve was finished. She threw down a $100 bill and pushed back her chair.
“You may have had a brief, meaningless fling with him,” she said with quiet contempt, “because no matter what you think, that’s all it was.” She took a deep breath. “You may have destroyed my life with him, and destroyed Nico in the bargain, but I’m the one carrying Nico’s child. I want you to remember that. I will always have a part of him with me.” A cold, triumphant smile quivered about her lips as she started to walk away. Suddenly, she paused. “And something else—I’ll always have my dignity. No matter what you do, how much you lower yourself, big sister, those are two things you can’t ever take away.”
Eve strode out of Jo Jo into the noise of the city. Bright May sunshine spilled between the buildings along East 64th Street. She didn’t bother hailing a taxi. Amid the noise of the city, she slung her purse over her shoulder, popped her sunglasses on her nose, and walked away through the mass of pedestrians without once looking back.
* * *
“I’ve got her, the bitch,” Shanna gloated as she watched the numbers on the elevator panel flicker by one by one. “The only royal treatment she’ll get from this point on is a red carpet out the door to the unemployment line.”
She clutched her briefcase containing the documents with delicious excitement. Richard would see them later today and she could only imagine his rage. Richard hated being made a fool of. Almost as much as he hated losing money.
Her call to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City had paid off in a major way. The Mormons had the largest collection of genealogical documents in the world, and the researcher she’d hired there had hit pay dirt. When Monique D’Arcy saw what was locked inside this briefcase, the bitch would have to eat crow instead of pheasant under glass.
Comtesse. Shanna threw back her head and gave a contemptuous laugh as the elevator doors whooshed open at the twenty-second floor.
Finally, after months of vague, nagging memories, it had come back to her—where she’d first met that pushy, dark-haired manipulator. Of course. D’Arcy... Mireille D’Arcy and her brazen little daughter, the girl who’d come begging for her mother’s job in a stolen dress.
What colossal gall, to pass herself off as nobility. What a joke. Well, Shanna thought with satisfaction as she marched toward the marble and brass reception area, we’ll see who has the last laugh.
* * *
Shanna’s perfume arrived three seconds before she stormed into Monique’s office, hardly able to contain her glee.
Her perfume intensified the sinus headache throbbing to excruciating proportions across Monique’s forehead.
“Did we have an appointment?” Monique asked coldly, glancing up from her desk and from the just-published June issue she’d been pretending to peruse.
“Your only appointment should be with Impostors Anonymous,” Shanna replied evenly, closing the door and advancing with quick strides. She sank gracefully into a chair and leaned back with a smug half-smile. “We’ve come a long way from Bonwit’s, you and I, my darling. But maybe not quite so far as we’d have others believe?” She raised one eyebrow, waiting for a reaction. Monique’s face remained impassive.
“I was wondering how long it would take you to remember.” Don’t let her smell blood, Monique warned herself, trying to ignore her throbbing temples. The rain beat at the windows like tapping fingernails. “You made a dangerous enemy that day, but you were too impressed with yourself to realize it.”
“Dangerous enemy? Oh, you think you’ve won, don’t you?” Shanna came out of the chair in one smooth movement and hefted the briefcase on to the clutter of Monique’s desk. “Your infantile revenge games are over, you stupid bitch. And so is your charade. You played with my life and with Richard’s. He’ll be very interested to find out that you deliberately broke up our marriage and conned your way into this job over the dismissal of a lying, inept seamstress who pilfered from her employers. It stands to reason you’d turn out to be just us sneaky and incompetent as she was.”
Monique’s calm facade burst like a punctured balloon. Rage suffused her and she rounded the desk in a flash. “Get the hell out of here,” she spat out, seizing Shanna’s arm and yanking her toward the door. An image of Maman on that awful birthday so many years earlier flashed through her mind—Maman, beaten, worried, her pride as ruined as the uneaten ice cream melted on the plates, her precious dignity wounded by this self-centered bitch.
“My mother was the most honest, upstanding, hard-working employee that store ever had, and you threw her away like torn stockings. Say anything about me that you like, but if you say one more word about her, I’ll knock you on your ass.”
Shanna jerked her arm from Monique’s grasp and hurried back to the desk. She opened the briefcase with shaking fingers and pulled out a manila envelope. “If your mother’s so damned honest, why are you such a conniving liar? Comtesse? Has a nice ring to it, but it’s hollow as bell. Take a look at these, ‘Comtesse,’ and tell me what Richard will say when he learns that your illustrious pedigree is more mongrel than show dog.”
Monique went pale as candle wax when she saw the official French seal on the immigration documents. She already knew the names that would appear on the line that listed parentage.
Mireille D’Arcy née Lovette, seamstress, and Jacques D’Arcy, head groomsman.
“Read it and weep, my dear. This ought to knock that phony crown off your head. When I show this to Richard and the press, everyone will know you’re nothing but a cheap fraud. You’re not the daughter of the Comte de Chevalier—you’re not a D’Arcy at all—you’re an illegitimate nobody.”
Monique was about to thrust the papers back into Shanna’s smarmy face but at this she snatched them back. And stared.
Giraud?
She peered at the document more closely. Jacques D’Arcy’s name was nowhere to be found.
There had to be some mistake. Her father’s name was listed as Pierre Giraud, landowner.
It hit her like the cork popping off a bottle of champagne.
Landowner... the comte. Pierre Giraud had been the Comte de Chevalier. How...? What...?
Maman, why didn’t you ever tell me? All these years, you let me go on with this masquerade, and it was the truth all along... the Comte de Chevalier was my father.
If that doesn’t make me a comtesse, it’s pretty damn close.
A million unanswered questions swirled through her head, but all she could do was whoop.
“Merci, Ms. Mulgrew.” Monique grinned, hugging the papers to her chest. “If you weren’t so inept, you would have done a more thorough job of snooping and discovered that Pierre Giraud was in fact the name of the Comte de Chevalier—my father. Being illegitimate is no disgrace these days, darling, but being an asshole is. You qualify hands down. Guaranteed. Now, will you get the hell out of here, or do I have to call security?”
Shanna gaped at her as though she’d gone mad.
Linda stuck her head in the door. “Staff meeting starts in five, Ms. D’Arcy. Can I get you more coffee?”
“Screw the coffee. Pop the Taittinger—a magnum—we’re celebrating today.” She locked the papers in her desk and pocketed the key, ignoring Shanna, frozen in dumbfounded silence in the center of the room. Monique grabbed the June issue, suddenly overcome by a feeling of soul-touching satisfaction.
She’d done it. She’d pulled it off. And she’d bested Shanna yet again.
She gazed with pride at the magazine, with the princess-like Teri Michaelson beaming from the cover—and a feature article inside detailing her dream wedding, made perfect courtesy of Perfect Bride.
Below the masthead, the issue’s revised lead feature jumped out in big blue letters: Fifty Wedding Tips from the Stars!
And therein was Monique’s coup. Bolstering the original concept, and filling in for the loss of Eve and Nico, she had recruited a galaxy of Hollywood’s brightest to offer their suggestions for the perfect wedding, complete with never-before-published photos of their own nuptials and honeymoons.
Also inside was a knockout Hawaiian spread featuring Ana and John, Teri and Brian, and her and Richard—all traces of Eve and Nico had been airbrushed out. And with the fifty celebrity tips and unique photos, and all the advance publicity the fiasco in Maui had garnered, Monique had delivered a walloping good issue with advance sales catapulting past all expectations.
Miraculously, her headache was gone. But Shanna lingered, looking as if she were searching for ammunition for a gun that was clean out of bullets, even as Monique sailed toward the door.
“You know, darling”—Monique paused, one hand on the brass-handled knob—“there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for years. Makeup and lighting have done wonders for your looks, but all the perfume in Paris can’t camouflage a piece of shit.”
She left before Shanna could frame a coherent reply. Linda waited at the doorway of the office and regarded Shanna warily. “If there’s nothing else, Ms. Mulgrew...”
Shanna snapped her briefcase shut. She swung out the door like a Doberman, bristling through the reception lobby without a glance at any of her former staff.
Afterward, several members of the typing pool swore they’d heard the sound of grinding teeth.