Angelique Rising (14 page)

             
"How nice to
finally
meet you, Angelique," he said and she caught the minor barb there, "please come in. I believe you have already met my brother, Malcolm; these are his daughters, Tinka and Maureen."

             
"Once again, a pleasure, Angelique," Malcolm said with a peculiarly thin half-smile, like he was hoping to provoke a nervous reaction from her. She didn't like him speaking her name.

             
"Yes," she stumbled a lackluster response, "a pleasure."

             
"You look very fetching in that dress," he said, "is lavender your favorite color?"

             
"Um, yes," she responded nonplussed, it wasn't true.

             
"Angelique," the seated woman hummed in a honeyed voice trying for diplomatic but achieving only flippant, "welcome to
our
family, how divine that you and Wyatt have found each other." It'll last another week tops, her manner definitively implied.

             
Angelique turned to Wyatt's ex. There was one word to describe Maureen, Angelique saw, and that was
sexy.
She was blonde with pouty lips (Angelique suspected collagen involvement), a perfect face, and Angelique understood instantly how Maureen had gotten Wyatt to the alter.

             
"I can't WAIT to see you perform tonight, your dress at the Gala was to
die
for, you were
the bomb
, I don't know how you stayed up! I'd have been scared stiff flying around on those things and--"

             
"Tinka, I'm sure Angelique finds her fan adoration quite boring," Maureen interrupted in a voice of cold politeness carefully denuded of any fan interest let alone adoration. "So tell us, Angelique, all about the wedding. We haven't been able to get a thing out of George here." Her eyes zeroed in on Angelique's ring, scrutinizing it. "What did you wear? Wang?" Somehow she managed to get three syllables into the word.

             
Angelique sat on a pale blue circular couch surrounded by Cochrans awaiting her answer and decided oh what the hell, she might as well dive in.

             
"If you want to know about my wedding you'll have to ask Wyatt I'm afraid," she replied cheerily, "I don't remember a thing about it." She turned to Wyatt.
You explain it, buster.

             
George grinned at Wyatt in utter ebullience as the shockwave reverberated throughout the seated Cochrans.

             
"You don't remember... your wedding?" Wyatt's father asked, the tone of irate reservation in his voice increasing exponentially.

             
"I got her drunk," Wyatt said in a laconic grunt.

             
"Plastered. Sloshed. Smash-oh-
laahed
," George added helpfully.

             
All righty
Angelique thought enjoying the rich showstopper irony --they'd all assumed she'd used
her
wily ways to trick Wyatt into marriage and had just learned it was quite the other way 'round. Wyatt stared at them, resolutely daring any of them to make a comment. Malcolm was the first to recover.

             
"Quite a bit different from
your
wedding, Maureen," he buried his fangs for the pure amusement of it, "motivationally I mean."

             
"Perhaps you'd like to open your presents, Wyatt," Beth interjected with the lightning fast tact of a well practiced hostess rescuing the situation.

             
"Wow," Tinka intoned, fixated on the image of a blitzed bride cornered into I do's by Wyatt.

             
George shot a gloating look at Maureen. Bitch Central was smoldering, like she'd just bitten into a tamale while having an orgasm and learning her implants were leaking. Yesiree, he had the coolest brother in the world!

             
Hors d' oeuvres were consumed, presents were opened, all was appreciated, the motions gone through. In actuality everyone was too stunned with the thought of Wyatt getting Angelique drunk in order to marry her to pay any real attention, until Angelique spoke.

             
"Okay now mine, Wyatt," she smiled mischievously, decisions about how much to reveal filtering through her eyes, "but I have to explain it first. Remember when I took you hang gliding? I called in a bunch of favors and had five people up there taping us when we flew."

             
"Why on earth did you do that?"

             
"I wanted to make a video montage of us flying, I thought it would be cool. But," she cleared her throat meaningfully,
"events
overtook me so I only got around to editing the videos this week. I decided to make it your birthday present but when I tried to add the background music I couldn't find anything
that fit and I must have gone through a hundred different tracks."

             
"Heh, how about
I'm Getting Married In The Morning,
you could--"

             
"George,"
Beth scolded, "go on, Angelique."

             
"Then I thought of something. You know how some people keep diaries or journals under their beds? I kinda do that but with music, I write songs and record them for my private music library. And you had two songs in it."

             
"You have a private music library? I'm in it?"

             
"The first song I have about you,
you're
the music. I mean the music is what you would be if you were music --in my opinion anyway-- but the lyrics are you explaining to me that we were married. Obviously the lyrics wouldn't fit a hang gliding montage [well,
obviously,
he thought, dazed], but the music was
you.
So I went to the Center and hired an orchestra and recorded just the music, as an instrumental, and it fit perfectly!"

             
"You hired an orchestra? Where did you get the money?"

             
"From her account at the Center," Malcolm said evenly, "she emptied it out."

             
Wyatt stared at Angelique in disbelief.

             
"That was... all the money you had. Two hundred thousand dollars. You spent all of that on a
birthday present
for me?"

             
"Wyatt, it came out great!" she said pulling a DVD with a bow on it from her purse and handing it to him, her eyes twinkling with glee.

             
He stared at her in humored horror. Nobody had ever done anything like that for him before. Tinka leapt up and in one fluid move snatched the DVD from his hand, raced to the flat screen on the wall and inserted the disc. It flickered on.

             
Music began. Delicately. It teetered, recovered, appeared to find its footing. It was led by a full orchestra's violins exuding a sweetness as other instruments joined in almost in secret causing the music to swell, not crushingly, or even prodigiously, but in quiet understated power. Wyatt and Angelique appeared on the screen harnessed together under a vast white nylon-silk kite leaping in tandem from a cliff over the ocean. Instead of falling they were caught by the wind and swept upward into the sky as if gravity and time had dropped naturally away from them.

             
The melody became curious but enticing as it grew, inviting listeners to come along with them, float, but then it grabbed. The kite dipped, tilting, rising through the air over the ocean waves and seaside cliff below, the faces of Wyatt and Angelique aglow. French horns joined in, their sound sharpening the tremulous sound of pianos and flutes to a potent timbre, possessing, then soaring. Onscreen Angelique and Wyatt ascended suddenly, as if Heaven itself had abruptly summoned them and the music exploded with crashing cymbals in splendor, fireworks, almost seizing its listeners to be conveyed away with them aloft through the clouds to someplace else, someplace that couldn't be imagined.

             
Finally the kite descended, racing above the beach as the glittering sand flashed by underneath. The music ebbed gradually as if its work was done. The kite flared dramatically upward, silently stalled, then slipped backward alighting, settling Wyatt and Angelique smoothly down upon their feet. Still tethered together, laughing, they turned to each other, their faces radiant, blushing, obviously about to kiss just as the wing of the kite tipped shielding them from view. The tantalizing music closed in dying muffled echoes, then silence.

             
And no one in the room moved.

             
Wyatt was a statue. Frozen. His parents were not breathing. Tinka was overcome, mute. Maureen was devastated. Malcolm clenched his fists in impotent cold fury as George struggled to blink back a chasm of loneliness and longing. And everyone knew someone needed to say
something
. But no one did. Finally they all began looking at each other in small embarrassed little glances. It was Wyatt who collected himself first.

             
"That... that was lovely, Angelique. Thank you."

             
Nobody was saying anything. Nothing. Angelique was horrified.

             
"You didn't like it?" she erupted peering about at the Cochrans. "I could fix it--"

             
"No," Henry almost warbled, a strangled sound leaching into his voice, "don't change anything."

             
Angelique was accepted into the Cochran family and it had nothing to do with how beautiful she was.

             
Not on the outside anyway.

Chapter Six

             
Angelique stepped out from the wings onto the small stage striding confidently across to a stool that held her ear-attached microphone and the wand. She ignored the audience completely as she put on the microphone and picked up the thick short wand. For some reason it always excited the audience when she did that simple action --ignore them; it gave them the titillation that they were spying on her, seeing something they weren't supposed to see. She surreptitiously signaled the band behind her to start playing before she finally turned to the audience as if only now were they worthy of her attention.

             
Of course her vision immediately flew across the dance floor straight to Wyatt, once again seated at a table with his family across from her but this time drinking in the sight of her, and she him. She was dressed in a tight, sleeveless, floor length dress of blazing white that hugged her perfectly (especially her butt) that had bright yellow sunflowers crocheted from the hem slanting/growing upward along gold embroidery to her waist, over her breast, and across her shoulder. Her hair cascaded down her bare back in a twisting, bouncing pony tail. She saw Wyatt's expression falter, she figured that was the moment he realized no way could she be wearing underwear under a dress like that. She shot him a look of
Heh, you marry a performer...
to which he pursed his lips and shot back a look of
Enjoy it while you got it Mrs. Cochran.

             
The Performance Club was large but with judicious lighting it nevertheless had a small, intimate ambiance to it. Angelique could see out to the first four rows of tables surrounding the dance floor, before the rest, and the balcony tables, became hidden in darkness. She couldn't even see the immense polished maple bar she knew was across the room.

             
The Club sat atop the Performance Center and served as the most prestigious pivotal collecting place for the city's --truly for the entire eastern seaboard's-- wealthy and powerful, to congregate, to see and be seen. Malcolm didn't technically "own" any of it, he had it all in a charitable trust to which he'd appointed himself sole Trustee. Strangely, he rarely visited the Club, staying mostly below in the operatic sections and to a lesser extent down checking over the ballet schools, his alpha male persona frightening the young girls and flustering the teenage ones (a fun diversion, especially when he made them dance for him).

             
Angelique's music was fast and hammering, a good one to get the blood flowing, but she knew it wasn't her song that would have the audience enthralled. No, they would be enamored with what she was holding, the wand, in actuality a whip. A very special whip. She began to sing.

             
I need someone to take me places I've never been... I need someone to bring me the darkest side of sin...

             
Stepping out onto the dance floor raising the wand above her head as the long thick leather-looking whip shot out from it, all fifteen feet, she heard the rustle of astonishment from the audience. She twirled and zipped it around above her head like a lasso, normally looking at the audience selecting her first victim, but she already knew who that was going to be.