Authors: Gabriella Pierce
666 Park Avenue (8 page)
A
n hour later,
J
ane was perched on a sleek black pod chair
in the offices of Conran and Associates, trying to ignore the painful blister forming on her right pinky toe. She’d walked up and down the street three times, her suede boots getting less and less comfortable with each pass, before noticing the understated brass C&A plaque on what she was sure was an apartment building.
“So.” Pamela Bronsky, the managing codirector of the firm, looked from Jane to her résumé and back again, her almond eyes hard behind thick brown frames. Her glossy brown hair was piled on top of her head in an odd-looking update of a beehive, and Jane guessed that she considered it an artistic style. She began to second-guess her decision to leave on her blouse, pencil skirt, and pearls ensemble from that morning. She had deemed it businesslike enough for a job interview (especially with someone who sounded desperate to hire her), but maybe it was
too
businesslike? Clearly, she had done something to put Pamela off because in person, the architect was nowhere near as breathless and bubbly as she had been on the phone. It was as if Jane had walked into someone else’s interview, and that someone was apparently annoying and underqualified.
Pamela clicked the top of her maroon metal pen a few times. “I see that all of your experience is foreign.”
“Well yes,” Jane said, leaning forward, aiming for a tone and demeanor that screamed
Hire me!
“I interned for Atelier Antoine in Paris; I joined them right out of school. From there I became an assistant, and had just been promoted to designer when I moved. I would love to have the same kind of ground level–up experience here—”
“Of course. But you see, we don’t really have any international projects at the moment.”
An automatic room freshener emitted a puff of vanilla-scented air into the office with a hiss. Jane leaned back, puzzled.
I know. That’s why you
wanted
me.
“Well, that’s an area where I think that I could be an asset to you,” she said instead.
Just like
you
said—in that new international division that just
has
to get up and running?
She heard herself prattling on about the cultural differences between America and Europe, giving Pamela a miniature sociology lecture that she couldn’t seem to switch off. By the time she had gotten to the issue of table manners, Pamela looked openly bored, and Jane forced herself to wrap it up. “As someone with a foot in both worlds, so to speak—”
“Do you, though?” Pamela pushed her glasses up on her nose and stared at Jane.
Jane stopped abruptly, straightening the cuffs of her Elie Tahari blouse before she could remind herself not to fidget. “I’m sorry?”
“Do you actually have ‘a foot in both worlds’?”
Click, click, click,
went Pamela’s pen. “Your schooling is French, as are all of your professional credentials, and you’ve been in this country all of a day. Have you even looked into becoming licensed in New York? I don’t believe that your school is accredited here, and the process could take months even if you
are
eligible. Which I don’t believe that you are.”
Jane inhaled, stung. She hadn’t expected to have a license just handed to her, of course, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t be an asset while she worked toward one. That was fairly standard in an architectural office. She glanced at the downtown skyline visible through Pamela’s charmless square window. An ambulance flashed its way down the street, the pitch of its siren rising and then falling as it passed them. The stuttering whoop was familiar to her only from movies; it was completely different from the steady, two-toned bleat of French sirens. Jane felt a wave of homesickness, but there was no point in nostalgia. She wanted a life with Malcolm, and that life was here. She would just have to fight for it a little harder than she had thought, was all.
Jane perched herself at the very edge of her chair, bracing herself, for an awkward moment, on its Space Age lip before finding her balance. “My understanding from when we
spoke
”—she couldn’t stop an edge from creeping into the word—“was that you were looking for someone to liaise with
potential
international clients.” There was a long pause.
. . .
just take a hint, Mrs. Soon-to-Be Doran . . .
“Excuse me, what was that?” Jane asked. She was nearly sure that she had never mentioned Malcolm to Pamela—and certainly not by name. She had wanted to at least
try
to find something on her own, without any of the preferential treatment that a soon-to-be Doran would surely get. She’d wanted her new connections to be something to fall back on, not rely on exclusively.
Pamela’s French-manicured fingers rifled absently through the papers on her desk. “What was what? Look, I’m sorry. You’re simply not the right fit for us. But I see that you’re wearing an engagement ring. Take some time off. Do cake-tastings and bridesmaids’ brunches and spa days or whatever.” Oblivious to Jane’s suddenly narrowed eyes, Pamela leaned forward. “Honestly, I
wish
that I’d had that kind of freedom when it came to planning my wedding. The DJ was a nightmare.” She twirled a felt-tipped pen through her fingers. “You’re really very lucky, you know.”
Jane forced a tight smile, gripping the strap of her distressed-leather handbag. She tried not to think about its contents—the plans for Madame Godinaux’s renovations, the office building she’d helped design near the Bastille; Pamela hadn’t asked a single question about Jane’s portfolio. “That’s so kind of you to think about my interests,” Jane hissed between clenched teeth, but Pamela seemed not to notice her tone. Instead she continued to nod, glossy brown nouveau-beehive bobbing absurdly, clearly relieved that Jane was finally catching on.
And catching on she certainly was: Pamela was unaware of her slip, Jane realized, because it had been a nonverbal one.
So much for leaving my magic in Europe,
she thought wryly, but most of her mind was occupied with a much more pressing mystery. How did Pamela know who she was marrying . . . and what did it have to do with this bizarre farce of an interview? She thought about asking, about trying to figure out some subtle approach that would get her more information, but Pamela’s face was shuttered. She had already moved on to a stack of what looked suspiciously like résumés. “I’ll just see myself out,” Jane announced resolutely, standing.
She stalked out of Pamela’s office with as much dignity as she could manage, although she yanked the glass door shut behind her so hard that it rattled ominously in its frame. She tried to control her breathing as she threaded her way through the scattered desks in the main office, but she was too keyed-up to keep her face from flushing crimson. A bulb in an Art Deco shade flickered wildly, and something behind the receptionist’s desk let out an ear-piercing beep. Jane jumped.
“It’s okay,” the mousy receptionist told Jane, although she was clearly just as shaken by the sudden blast of noise. Her small, squeaky voice perfectly matched her looks. “It’s just the intercom from the street. I guess it’s on the fritz.
Again.
”
She frowned and fiddled with some buttons on her desk as Pamela stormed out of her office, hands over her ears. “For God’s sake, Sally, I thought we had that damned intercom fixed.” She stopped short when she saw Jane still in the office. For a tense moment, Jane waited for the other woman to say something to her—to apologize, even—but instead Pamela just spun on her stacked heel and slammed her office door behind her nearly as hard as Jane had. “Call that worthless repairman back and do
not
take no for an answer!” Pamela’s voice rang through the door. The receptionist hunched obediently over her phone.
All at once, for the first time since she’d learned that she was a witch, Jane was glad for her powers. She closed her eyes and let hot rage wash freely over her. When she felt good and out of control, she forced her body forward into the stairwell right on cue for the speaker to emit an extra shrill, extra long
beeeep
. A crash came from the office behind her, and she heard at least two voices shouting.
Oops.
J
ane turned up the collar of her cream-colored wool
coat against the sudden gust of wind that blew down Park Avenue. She had been walking since her sorry excuse for an interview. Taking the subway while angry would guarantee some kind of train malfunction that would just raise her blood pressure even more, especially now that she knew that her magic was still rattling around in her body. The lingering sense of triumph over her intercom prank had vanished somewhere around Union Square, and since then she had just forced one foot in front of the other, trying to keep from thinking too hard about the whole fiasco.
Even walking in New York was different from walking in Paris, she’d realized quickly. Rather than navigating a lunatic maze of triangular streets until she found herself face-to-face with a surprise Mètro entrance, she felt drawn along by the city’s endless straight avenues and convenient right angles. She was mildly surprised when she realized that she’d already reached the low 30s; it barely felt like any time had passed at all.
She didn’t know what she was more depressed about: the dramatic reemergence of her powers or the fact that Lynne had clearly sabotaged her interview, a realization she’d had as she passed through the arch of Washington Square Park.
Why did I tell her the name of the firm I was interviewing at?
she berated herself, although she never could have guessed that Lynne would actually call the firm. She’d known the Dorans were influential, but tanking her in less than an hour with nothing more than a name to go on took a type of influence she couldn’t even imagine. She had been told that New York was all about who you knew. Ironically, now that she had hooked up with people who knew absolutely everyone, it was working miserably against her.
A cab rushed past, nearly clipping her as she crossed 37th Street. The MetLife building loomed in the distance, and she was overcome with an enormous sense of loneliness. She missed the easy camaraderie of her office-mates, missed having inside jokes and the kind of silliness that only comes with girlfriends. Malcolm was wonderful, of course, but he couldn’t possibly replace her entire world all on his own—and it seemed that his mother might object to her attempts to fill her new life with anything else.
More than anything, though, she missed Gran, which surprised her more than a little. She had always thought of herself as an orphan, a runaway, someone from a difficult past. But regardless of their many conflicts, Jane had always known for an absolute certainty that if she’d ever needed someone, if the sky was falling, if she had nowhere else to go, that Gran would be there waiting. Maybe not with open arms, exactly, but at the very least with a glass of pastis and a comfortingly dense slice of stöllen.
And with love,
Jane admitted. It was easier to see that now that she knew why Gran had been so stiflingly overprotective, although that thought led her to another painful one.
I wish she had told me.
She twisted the smooth silver ring on her middle finger, tracing its beveled edge. Gran’s final letter had been typically brief and to the point, and it left Jane with many more questions than it had answered. She “had power,” but she didn’t know how to use it—or how
not
to use it. Surely Gran would have known why Jane heard some people’s thoughts but not others’, or how she could avoid knocking the lights out when she was annoyed.
And she could have told me about my parents.
Jane knew that her parents had died in a car crash when she was ten months old, skidding off a narrow mountain road in North Carolina during a flash storm, while Jane was at a neighbor’s house. Until Gran’s letter, she hadn’t even known the truth about why her parents had left France to begin with, and now she counted the many other things that she didn’t know: what her mother had
really
been like? Had she truly met Jane’s father ice-skating, or was that just a cover for some witchy encounter? Of course, that also raised the question of whether her father had known the truth about his wife’s magic—and whether he’d accepted it. Had she used her own magic openly, or hidden it, like Gran? And what happened when she’d gotten angry? Did she explode fuse boxes, like her daughter, or bring bad weather, or something else entirely?
Jane’s heel caught in a crack in the sidewalk, and she nearly fell as the horrible thought occurred to her:
Did she raise storms? Were she and my father arguing about something while they were driving? Was the accident just “one of those things,” or was it one of Those Things?
But everyone who could give her answers was gone.
On 45th Street, a cloud of acrid smoke hit her, and Jane realized she was starving.
Grilled sole indeed,
she grumbled silently. And she hadn’t even managed to finish the thing, her jaw had spent so much time dropping open during her strange lunch with Lynne. She stopped at an aromatic street vendor’s cart, bought a hot dog from a stocky man with an incomprehensible accent, and pulled the napkin away greedily as she resumed her uptown trek. It was shockingly good, and she fought down the temptation to buy another one at 51st Street.
By 60th, her energy was flagging, the tingling in her feet had upgraded to a burn, and she was nearly ready to admit defeat and hail a cab for the rest of the way, but she knew she would be too embarrassed to tell the driver that she was only going eight blocks. Jane reflected that Lynne wouldn’t let a little thing like that stop her . . . but then, Lynne would have just had her creepy driver pick her up in the first place.
I clearly have a lot to learn about “being a Doran.”
She hitched her handbag up a little and resolutely marched to the gloomy front door of 665, silently cheering when she remembered the code—and managed not to zap herself. She waved halfheartedly at Gunther, who looked as though he’d just as soon keep napping, and rested her head against the cool paneling of the elevator for as long as she could before its doors opened again.
Fortunately, they opened to reveal the one thing that she wanted to see most: Malcolm, grinning his easy grin, dark gold hair charmingly tousled, cream-colored linen shirt revealing a tempting triangle of tanned skin around his collarbone. “You look like you’ve just run the marathon,” he told her.
“Well, I was only walking,” she admitted. “But it was from West Fourth and I get extra credit for doing it in heels.”
His smile widened. “You could use a martini and some authentic homemade Creole gumbo.”
She accepted the arm he offered and they began limping down the hall. “Make that martini a nice chardonnay and I’m sold,” she sighed. “French, remember? Speaking of which”—she glanced at him suspiciously—“you’re not Creole. And since when do you cook?” Other than the eggs that morning, she couldn’t remember seeing Malcolm eat anything but room service or restaurant fare.
“I don’t,” he admitted shamelessly. “But I
do
have access to an excellent chef, who could probably arrange it so that I’m stirring something whenever you happen to walk into the kitchen.”
She smiled. “How about I just agree to give you the credit, and you convince this chef to send the gumbo to our room? I’m not up for a formal dining experience.”
“Deal.”
Twenty minutes later, they were cozily snuggled into overstuffed armchairs next to a roaring fire, the spicy smell of Cajun soup heavy in the air. Jane wiggled her toes with a happy sigh.
“Better?” Malcolm asked with a raised eyebrow.
“This is the life,” she replied. She hesitated for a moment, but the heat from the fire was working its way in and the heat from the wine was working its way out, and between the two she was feeling bold. “Except—and I don’t mean to sound like one of
those
fiancées—I’m not sure that your mother and I are getting along so well.” Then the story came pouring out: lunch, the awful wedding dresses, the interview, and Jane’s suspicions about what had gone wrong. She tried to keep her version of events as fair—and unmagical—as possible, but by the end of it, she couldn’t tell whether she was downplaying things or being melodramatic. She twisted a lock of limp, pale hair around her fingers and waited for Malcolm’s verdict.
He looked concerned.
Because he agrees about Lynne, or because he thinks that I’m criticizing Mommie Dearest?
she wondered nervously. But although he looked sincerely sympathetic, his response was ambiguous. “That sounds awful. Mom gets a little enthusiastic, but she usually comes back down to earth, so you shouldn’t worry too much. The perfect job will turn up. Then we’ll have a wonderful wedding and live happily ever after.”
“I
do
like the sound of that,” she admitted, stretching her toes out toward the fire. She turned her head just in time to catch him staring appreciatively at her legs, bare now under her old cotton robe.
With a wide, wolfish grin he leaped from his chair and swung her up into his arms. “It just so happens that I can think of some other things you might like,” he whispered, his breath warm and seductive on her neck.
He crossed the room in two long strides and set her down gently on the red-and-gold duvet. His lips moved across her collarbone, and she felt her back arc as the last of the stress of the day melted from her mind. It felt as though her skin was on fire at every point of contact, and she twined her fingers through the golden waves of his hair and gave herself over to burning alive.