those miracle pills you gave me?”
“Not to keep you awake. Not tonight. Tonight, all I want you to do is sleep.” He gently drew Risa to her feet. “So what do you think? Is it okay if I take your mother home?”
“Sure — I’ll be fine. Besides, Dad and Scott are coming by. Dad said they’d be here at eight-thirty.”
“And they’ll be gone by nine,” Conrad instructed. Then, at the look on Alison’s face, he relented. “All right, nine-thirty. But no later, understand?”
“Okay,” Alison grumbled. She tried to hold up her arms but failed. Risa bent down to kiss her gently on the cheek, careful to put no pressure on her, but Alison pulled her close. “Love you, Mom,” she whispered.
“I love you, too,” Risa replied. “See you in the morning.”
“But not too early,” Alison said before Conrad could repeat the admonition.
Risa, though, didn’t need the admonition repeated.
If everything went according to her plan, neither Conrad nor she would want to be getting up early tomorrow morning.
“I’M GOING UPSTAIRS,” Risa said, putting a hand on top of Conrad’s and glancing at the clock. It was almost ten. “Finish your wine and then come join me?”
“Sure,” he replied. “I’ve got a stack of journals to get caught up on. Might as well do it in comfort.”
“Not tonight,” Risa said, sliding her chair back from the dining room table. “I have a surprise for you.”
Catching the faintly seductive note in her voice, Conrad eyed her speculatively. “Oh?” He picked up his wineglass, drained it, and started to move his own chair back.
“I need five minutes,” Risa said, smiling at him. “But don’t make me wait too long.”
“I’m liking where this is going,” Conrad said, taking her hand and kissing her fingers as she passed behind his chair.
“I’ll see you in bed,” she said, pulling her fingers free and disappearing through the dining room door.
As she hurried up the stairs, Risa felt much, much better. Tonight was going to be their real honeymoon night — the night she had imagined so often, the two of them alone, pleasing each other until they were exhausted, then falling asleep in each other’s arms just before sunrise. That it would happen here instead of in Paris was fine. In fact, the whole day was turning out fine; much finer, indeed, than she’d expected this morning. The surgery had gone every bit as well as Conrad had promised, and though Alison had gotten a little sleepy when she visited her at Le Chateau, she clearly was doing even better than he’d expected.
And since she wasn’t allowed to see Alison until nine, they could sleep in.
So she and Conrad deserved the night she was determined to give them, and though they might have had a little too much wine at dinner — Dom Perignon to begin, then a bottle of Montrachet, and a split of Chateau d’Yquem to finish — being a tiny bit tipsy never hurt when it came to making love.
Moving quickly, Risa lit all the candles she had carefully arranged in the bedroom, dimmed the lights, put a second bottle of Dom Perignon in an ice bucket, set two glasses on Conrad’s nightstand, then went into her dressing room and closed the door. The peignoir she had found hanging downstairs on one of the racks in Margot’s room fit her almost perfectly, and she dabbed on a touch of the perfume from Margot’s vanity at all her pulse points: behind her ears, behind her knees, and at her wrists.
She was just starting to brush her hair when she heard Conrad come into the bedroom. A moment later his bathroom door closed, and then she heard water running as he brushed his teeth.
She checked her makeup, brushed her own teeth, and heard the cork pop on the champagne.
Conrad — her husband — was in bed waiting for her.
With her heart pounding like a schoolgirl’s, Risa opened the door of her dressing room and made her entrance, posing seductively in front of the full-length mirror.
Then she began to move, the peignoir shimmering in the candlelight.
But instead of leaning back against the headboard to enjoy the show she was putting on, Conrad sat straight up in bed and snapped on the bedside light. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded. “Where did you get that lingerie?” He rubbed his hands over his face. “And that scent! Where did you get that perfume?”
The mood she had so carefully created shattered into a million irretrievable pieces, and she froze. Then, as Conrad gaped at her, a cold fury began to break through the veil of wine, and when she spoke, her voice was as icy as the bucket in which the champagne bottle still stood. “I thought if I wore one of Margot’s peignoirs, you might make love to me the way you did to her. Obviously, I was wrong.”
“Take it off,” Conrad said flatly. “I won’t even discuss this until you’ve changed into something else and washed off that perfume.”
Risa stood stock-still for a moment, then turned away, refusing to let him see the tears that were blinding her. Fleeing back to the dressing room, she stripped off the offending peignoir, crushed it into a wad, and hurled it in the corner. Maria could find it in the morning and throw it away for all she cared. Her fury still raging, she stepped into the shower to soap away the perfume, and scrubbed every inch of her skin a second time as if she could scour away the memory of how Conrad had been looking at her, along with the last vestiges of Margot’s scent. Stepping at last out of the shower, she dried herself, pulled on a nightgown Conrad had seen at least a dozen times before, and at last returned to the bedroom.
He had turned the light off again, and lay with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
Risa perched stiffly on the edge of the bed.
“Want to tell me what this is all about?” he asked, his eyes still fixed on the plaster overhead.
Risa stared down at the floor, her plan for a romantic evening in ruins. Once again she felt tears flooding her eyes, but this time there was no way of hiding her pain.
“Where did you get that stuff?” Conrad asked.
“You know damned well where,” she barked back. “It was in that
Conrad was silent for so long that Risa finally turned her head to make sure he’d heard her.
He was no longer looking at the ceiling.
Now he was looking at her.
And he was smiling.
Then, still smiling at her, he began to laugh. “
She stared at him. Why was he smiling? And what, exactly, did he think was even faintly funny?
“Darling,” Conrad said, “that’s not a shrine! It’s the Margot Museum. She built it herself,
Risa gazed uncertainly at him. “Someone goes down there,” she finally said. “There’s no dust. None at all.”
“Maria,” Conrad said, finally sitting up and pouring the champagne into the two glasses. He handed one to her, then shook his head. “Did you really think I spend time down there?”
Risa thought about the perfectly lighted vanity for applying makeup, and all the mirrors in front of which Margot could have tried on clothes and modeled them. None of that had been designed by a man — it couldn’t have been.
It had to have been the work of a woman.
A vain, self-obsessed woman.
Suddenly, she could see it perfectly in her mind’s eye. See Margot, alone in that strange chamber, trying to recapture her past, trying to cover her scars with layer after layer of makeup, putting on dress after dress and gazing at herself in the dozens of mirrors, seeing herself as she used to be rather than as she’d become.
Conrad was telling her the truth.
A solitary tear leaked out of her right eye and landed on the bedspread.
“Come here, darling,” Conrad said, taking the glass from her hand and drawing her down onto the bed. “Margot is gone and you don’t have to compete with her memory. I should have taken that room apart a long time
