“Not likely,” he said.
She had prepared herself in advance for a night of closing her eyes tight and enduring, but she was pleasantly surprised. He was a gentle, considerate lover with an easy, appreciative disposition that made her feel less self- conscious. When they were not making love he was a cheerful, affectionate companion.
Late that evening after he fell asleep, she lay awake considering the best way to make use of him. She had been wise to resist the temptation to sell him a half interest in her imaginary magazine. She had been very close to yielding. He seemed accustomed to risky investments, and he would probably forgive her when she faked an attempt at a magazine and didn’t return any money. But she could afford to let her bet stay on the table. She was beginning to think that maybe the way to get her money was the way lots of other women had done it. Maybe she should marry it.
The next morning they said good-bye in the room. He called a cab to take him to the Prescott to check out and then to the airport. Rachel took a second cab back to her house. She put his business card on her refrigerator with a magnet and waited.
On the third day, a FedEx package arrived. Inside was a velvet box. She opened it, and found a white-gold pendant with a single large diamond. The velvet box said Van Cleef & Arpels, but that was only a box. She took off the shade of her reading lamp and held the diamond close to the bulb. She could tell it was a good stone, about three carats, and very bright. It must have cost him at least ten thousand dollars, and possibly much more.
Looking at the light sparkling in the facets of the diamond made her feel lucky. It had probably been dangerous to get involved with another man so soon after Dennis Poole, but there had seemed to be nobody looking for her, so she had begun to look for a new man.
Men were a difficult way to make a living. All any of them really wanted was sex. It made them easy to attract and easy to play for a little money, but not necessarily easy to control. They got jealous and watchful, and at times the sex could be troublesome, too. At least with David it wasn’t unpleasant or especially demanding. She took his card off her refrigerator, went to the telephone, and dialed the private number he had written on the back. When he answered, she said, “You certainly know how to keep a girl’s attention, don’t you?”
A week later David was in San Francisco again. He called her from the airport, then picked her up at her house and drove to a hotel in Carmel that consisted of a group of luxurious cabins on a wooded cliff above the ocean. They had dinner in the restaurant in the central building, watching the waves crash against the rocks below, then walked along the path through the pines to their cabin, and sat on the couch before the stone fireplace, listening to the crackling of the wood fire.
After a time, he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about you.”
“Good,” she said. She leaned close and kissed him softly.
“I’ve even been trying to find ways to help you get your magazine started.”
“You’re sweet.” She kissed him again.
“While I was doing it I found out a couple of things that made me curious.”
“What kind of things?” She turned her body on the couch to face him. She could feel the hairs on her scalp rising. It wasn’t exactly fear, but an intense anticipation.
“Well, you said you had never been married.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m wondering if you changed your name at some point.”
She kept her eyes on his face. “You’ve hired somebody to investigate me?”
He smiled. “Now, please don’t get mad at me. It’s a normal thing to do if you’re thinking of making an investment in a start-up. I have a standing account at the Averill Agency in Dallas. Whenever I’m about to make a seed-money investment, they routinely do a quick rundown on the principal players, just to be sure none of them has a tail and a pitchfork. It’s no different from asking your mechanic to take a look at a car you’re buying.”
Rachel leaned forward, her eyes searching his. “And?”
“As you know, they didn’t find any problems, because there are no problems. But they did have trouble finding out much else about you. They said that either you’d had a marriage at some point that you forgot to mention, or maybe had petitioned for a name change.”
She stared at him coldly, sensing the urge to make him suffer. “Rachel Sturbridge isn’t the name I was born with. My family was well-off and respected, but it looked good only from the outside. From the inside, it wasn’t a group you would want to belong to. There wasn’t a lot of love.” She paused, as though bravely controlling her emotions. “What there was, was a lot of cruelty. After I grew up I spent years trying to get over it, and on the advice of my therapist, I severed the connection completely. Being really free of them meant using a different name, so I do. You’re the only person I’ve ever had to explain this to.”
He was embarrassed at his mistake. “Rachel, I’m sorry. I just cared so much about you that I couldn’t know enough.”
She stood up.
He looked horrified. “Please. I never imagined that talking to you about it would bring back bad memories. Stay with me.”
“I’m tired, and I’m going to sleep now. We can talk in the morning.” David had carried both of their suitcases into one of the bedrooms when he’d unloaded the car. Now she went into that room, took hers into the other bedroom, and quietly closed the door.
When she awoke in the morning she knew that two things were going to happen. One was that David Larson was going to buy her a big present. The other was that she was going back to San Francisco. She went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, and began to pull herself together. “I’m heartbroken,” she told the girl in the mirror. It was well said. She would use it.
During the time while he was in Austin she had allowed herself to grow overconfident. She had formed plans that carried them both years into the future. She had pictured them spending time in Europe together—maybe in the Greek islands, which looked beautiful and warm in the magazines, or Provence, which sounded in articles as though it existed solely to serve food and wine to people like her. She was sure David had accumulated enough money already. It seemed to her that the only reason he still traveled around chasing investments was that he’d had nothing better to do until he’d met Rachel Sturbridge. She could have made those years wonderful for him. But that was before he had betrayed her.
She watched herself in the mirror as she said, “I’m heartbroken” again. She meant it. He had told his stupid private detectives to pry into her private life looking for incriminating information, and she was just lucky they had not found anything. It had been a cold, calculating thing to do. Men always wanted you to do impulsive, risky things because you let your passion for them get too strong to resist. They wanted you to trust them completely, holding nothing at all back to protect yourself. But then, after your body and soul had gotten to be things they had, rather than things they wanted, they announced that they had reserved the right to be suspicious and cautious about you.
When David knocked and asked if she would go to breakfast with him, she called through the closed door, “No, you go ahead.”
Rachel spent the next hour working efficiently and methodically to make herself beautiful. She had started beautician’s school the summer she had turned sixteen, and had learned some cosmetology and hairdressing before she had missed a tuition payment. But she had learned her most valuable tricks years before that, in the long succession of beauty pageants her mother had entered her in beginning at age four. She had been born with good skin and small, symmetrical features, and she had a quick, practiced hand with a brush, eyeliner, and mascara.
She was good at dressing herself because she had a hard, objective eye. That was something else the pageant circuit had done for her. She could look at herself the way a contest judge would, with no sentimentality and no mercy. She accentuated her figure’s best points and hid the flaws. She tried all three dresses she had brought, chose the one that would give him the most haunting memory of her body, and put on spike heels.
Rachel packed her suitcase, stood it upright on its wheels, and extended the handle. Then she went to the living room, arranged herself on the small couch, turned on the television set, and waited. David returned about an hour after that.
When he opened the door and saw her, she could tell her effect was what she had intended. He stopped at the door and simply stared for a moment, then took a couple of deep breaths and walked toward her. “Rachel,” he said. “I need to talk to you. I’m really very sorry. I never imagined I was going to hurt your feelings or remind you of anything that caused you pain.”
