By Blood Written (13 page)

“No!”
she gasped.

Taylor nodded her head.

“It can’t be,” Brett whispered.

“It is, dear heart. Believe it.”

“You’re sleeping with a client?” Brett asked, aghast.

Taylor leaned forward, rested her forehead on the counter, and moaned.

“Oh my God, is it serious?”

Taylor raised her head. “He’s moving here after the tour.

And he wants to go on vacation together. The Caribbean …”

Brett walked around the counter and sat on a stool next to Taylor, then put an arm around her shoulder.

“I mean, Taylor—” she stammered. “How did it happen?”

Taylor wearily let her head fall onto Brett’s shoulder. “Oh, God, he was staying at my apartment. We’d been working so closely together for so long and we went out to celebrate the night he signed the contract and had that great signing at the Barnes & Noble. There was a lot of brandy and hand-holding, and then we went back to my place and one thing just kind of led to another.”

“But sweetie, that night of the party he had that blond bimbo up in the guest bedroom.”

Taylor sat up straight, reached for her wineglass. “I know,”

she said defensively. “I know. He apologized. Profusely …

He was so damn charming about it all.” She took another long sip of the wine, polishing off all but a few drops at the bottom. Then she turned and smiled weakly at Brett.

“At least we did the safe-sex thing.”

Brett smiled back at her sympathetically. “Well, thank God for small favors.” She got up, retrieved the wine bottle, and filled both their glasses.

“I’ve got to ask this, babe,” Brett said as she stuffed the cork back in the wine bottle. “I mean, do you like this guy?

Are you in love with him? Is this going anywhere?”

“I don’t know,” Taylor said, trying not to sound whiny and not at all sure she was succeeding. “But it’s been so long since I’ve been with anyone. I work a gazillion hours a week. You know how hard it is to meet anybody in Manhattan if you don’t do the bar scene?”

Brett shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never not done the bar scene.”

“It’s damn hard. And the men I work with are either disaffected grungemeisters or incredibly attractive, perfect men who also happen to be gay.”

“Okay,” Brett snapped. “You’re lonely, you’re horny, blah blah blah.
But Michael Schiftmann?
“

“Why not?” Taylor demanded. “I mean, he’s a good-looking guy, he’s intelligent—”

Brett turned, held up her index finger. “And he is rich.”

“Okay, that too. So what’s wrong with it?”

“Have you ever read his books?” Brett asked. “The guy’s a perv! Trust me, I edit him!”

“Of course I’ve read his books. His books aren’t him,”

Taylor insisted.

“Okay, grant you that. The main question is, do you like him?”

Taylor thought for a moment. “I like him. Yes, I like him.

Could I love him? I don’t know.”

Brett leaned down on the counter again, smiling, and lowering her voice to a conspiratorial level. “And there is one other thing … Is he any good?”

Taylor looked directly into her friend’s eyes and stared for a moment, then: “Un-fucking-believable. The best ever, Brett. I mean it, the Earth shook and I was fogged up the rest of the day.”

Brett straightened up quickly. “Whoa, girl! Okay, as your friend and spiritual advisor in matters of the heart, I recommend you go for it, ASAP. Ride that wave as far as it’ll go.”

Taylor smiled. “You think so?”

“Hey, what’s the downside? The worst that can happen is it doesn’t work out, then you have to suffer with great sex from a rich guy until he dumps you or you dump him.”

“It could be worse than that,” Taylor said. “I could lose him as a client.”

Brett took her hands in hers and squeezed them. “He’s a smart guy, Taylor. He knows who got him where he is. Business is business, no matter what.”

Taylor thought about that for a moment. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. At least I hope you are.”

“C’mon, the Empire Diner awaits. Let’s get down there before it gets too crowded.”

Brett Silverman always considered Saturdays her quiet time in the office; a chance to go through the mountain of paper in her in-box, stack up the phone calls that hadn’t yet been returned so she’d be ready to go first thing Monday morning, go through the e-mail messages she hadn’t had time to deal with.

Pull together the stack of rejected submissions for Marcie, her assistant, to get started on …

Brett had slept late this Saturday after a huge meal at the Empire Diner with Taylor the night before, followed by several more glasses of wine before bedtime after her friend grabbed a cab back to SoHo. She’d watched an old movie on cable, gotten more than a little drunk, then stayed under the covers until almost noon. She drank a pot of coffee and scrambled some eggs and read the
Times
before grabbing a cab to her office around three. There was no particular reason to move quickly on this Saturday afternoon; this was only the latest in a string of dateless Saturday nights she’d endured. She was beginning to wonder how long her dry spell was going to last.

Manhattan had chilled overnight; the afternoon temperatures back down into the low thirties. In line with the latest cost-saving measures, the heat in her building had been cut back. Brett threw off her parka but left her ski sweater on as she sat down at her desk.

At least, she thought, she was here alone: no meetings, no frantic phone calls, no juggling six projects at once.

An hour into her work, Brett Silverman began to get sleepy and to wonder if she shouldn’t just bag it and head back to her brownstone for a long nap before her solo dinner. She leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, fighting the urge to indulge in self-pity at the prospect of eating dinner alone. She wondered if perhaps Taylor might be free again tonight. What the hell, with her new boyfriend thousands of miles away in Southern California, she was probably facing a dateless Saturday night as well.

Brett relaxed and put her feet up on her desk, contemplat-ing Michael Schiftmann and Taylor Robinson as an item.

She wanted her friend to be happy, but still there was something that made her profoundly uneasy at the news. She tried to put it out of her mind and leaned forward to grab another stack of correspondence to answer when her phone suddenly went off.

Brett fumbled for the phone, jolted out of what she realized had become a quite serious reverie. She also wondered who would be calling in on her direct line on a Saturday afternoon.

“Hello,” she said.

“Brett? Carol.”

Brett smiled. “Hello, Carol Gee! Welcome to your last day on the road for a long while.”

“Thank God,” Carol said. “I quite literally couldn’t take another day of this.”

Brett felt her grip on the handset tighten. “Has something happened?” She heard Carol Gee sigh loudly into the phone and then groan.

“Oh, I just can’t take any more,” Carol said.

“What did he do now?”

“Nothing. I shouldn’t say anything. I just wanted to call and blow off some steam. You’re the only person I can talk to at the office about this.”

“Look, it’s almost over,” Brett said. “I know this has been a rough trip. But after tonight, hey, you’re on vacation for a week.”

“About time,” Carol said. “I just hope a week’s long enough.”

“Go hide out, lie on a beach, forget there are such things as telephones, fax machines, e-mail …”

“Best-selling authors,” Carol interjected.

“C’mon, it can’t be that bad,” Brett countered. “After all, his fans like him, his mother likes him—”

“God knows why,” Carol said, exasperated. “You know, last night he went out—”

“He’s even got a girlfriend,” Brett said.

“What?” Carol asked, her voice shocked.

“Oh, I’m not supposed to say anything, but these kinds of things never stay hidden very long. Truth is, he and Taylor have got a little thing going on.”

“What? What did you say?”

“He and Taylor.”

“Taylor Robinson, his agent?” Carol Gee sounded surprised beyond belief.

“Yeah, it was a shock to me, too,” Brett agreed. “But apparently this may be pretty serious.”

“My God,” Carol whispered, her voice sounding far off.

“Yeah,” Brett said, then added, “Hey, you all right?”

For a few moments, Brett heard only the hissing of trans-continental static. “Carol, you there?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m here. Just surprised. That’s all.”

“The whole world’s going to be surprised,” Brett said, chatting on. “I expect this is the kind of thing that’ll even make the scandal sheets, maybe even
Hard Copy
or
Entertainment Tonight.
But you know what they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. It’ll sell the hell out of his books.

Maybe it’ll even—”

“Brett, I gotta run,” Carol interrupted. “I’ll call you the next day or so, okay?”

“Don’t you dare,” Brett said, her voice mock-stern. “After tonight’s signing, you’re on mandatory R&R for the next seven days. I don’t want to hear your voice until you’re back in the office a week from Monday. Okay?”

“Sure,” Carol said. Brett thought she still sounded distracted, far away. “Sure.”

The two women hung up, and Brett went back to the stacks of paper on her desk. As she thumbed through the addenda to a contract that had to go out by next Wednesday, she suddenly remembered her pledge of secrecy to Taylor the night before and briefly felt a surge of guilt.

“What difference does it make?” she whispered to herself as she turned to page six. “These things always go public sooner or later.”

CHAPTER 11
?

Saturday afternoon, San Diego

Carol Gee hung up the phone and stared out the twenty-fifth-story window of the Hyatt Regency San Diego. Her room overlooked the harbor and the glimmering deep blue of the Pacific Ocean. The sun was high overhead, the day brilliantly clear. Far below her, in the distance, the Coro-nado ferry chugged slowly southwest.

Right now, she would have given anything to be on that ferry, sailing away to anywhere but here. Ten stories above her—on the Gold Passport floor, of course—Michael Schiftmann was settling into his room and planning God knew what for his last evening on book tour. Carol had almost five hours to herself, time that she would need if she intended to regroup and steel herself for the signing tonight after what she had just learned.

Carol stood there for a long time, leaning against the heavy plate glass and staring out at the sea. She tried to find a calm place inside herself, someplace where she could sort out all the conflicts, all the noise in her head. She wished, honestly wished, that Brett Silverman had never said a thing to her about Michael Schiftmann and Taylor Robinson’s involvement. If she’d never been told, she’d never have been faced with the kind of dilemma now forced upon her.

It wasn’t that Carol Gee and Taylor were even that close.

They knew each other casually, as professionals, in a business that, as large as it was, was still based on personal relationships. And Carol Gee had also been in the publishing business long enough to know that, to paraphrase the cliche, no good deed goes unpunished. The smart thing to do would be to keep her mouth shut, spend one more night babysitting, then go hang out on a beach for a week to rebuild her dimin-ished reserves and forget the past couple of months.

Carol Gee, however, had one problem: a nagging conscience. She wasn’t a prude or moral right-wing zealot; she’d had her share of lovers. And while the number of lovers she’d had in her twenty-eight years would have shocked her parents and probably killed her grandparents, the truth was she was just about average for a woman in her late twenties.

So the fact that Michael Schiftmann had been picking up women on the book tour virtually from day one wasn’t so much a moral issue for Carol as it was one of trust. If she were in Taylor’s position—a thought that momentarily repulsed her—would she want to know the man she was seriously involved with had been bedding the literary equivalent of groupies all across the continent? What about health issues, AIDS and all that? Carol had already seen more than one friend felled by the disease, not all of them gay men.

Carol absentmindedly raised her left thumb to her lips and chewed the nail. Should she tell Taylor what she knew?

Should she call Brett back and let her know, or perhaps ask her advice on how to handle it?

And again, the question came back to her: If it were she, would she want to know?

“Damn it,” she whispered. She looked down, checked the clock: one-thirty. She and Michael planned to meet in the lobby just before six-thirty to drive to the last signing, at the Barnes

& Noble on Rosecrans. They would either get dinner together afterward or, as Carol was now extremely inclined to do, each order in from room service and eat alone.

Carol sighed. “I can’t imagine eating another meal with that man,” she said out loud.

She went into the bathroom and washed her face, then brushed her shoulder-length, bone-straight black hair. As she stared into the mirror, she saw for the first time how tired she looked.

“You need a break,” she whispered to her reflection.

Carol walked back into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. She picked up a stack of brochures she’d gotten out of the lobby. As always, she’d read them, then return the ones she didn’t need to the rack downstairs. She looked through the brochure for the San Diego Zoo, then the one for Sea-World. She’d asked at the front desk earlier which was the best attraction and quickly learned that San Diegans split into two camps: Either you’re a zoo fanatic or you’re a Sea-World fanatic. There didn’t seem to be much in between.

Maybe, she thought, a walk on the beach would do just as well.

Then Carol Gee, exhausted, pulled her draperies closed, peeled off her slacks, took off her blouse and put on a T-shirt, and slid between the covers. In a matter of moments, she was fast asleep.

Carol shook her head, trying to focus, to wake completely up, as the polished chrome doors of the elevator opened in the Hyatt Regency lobby. Behind her, the glass walls of the elevator revealed a panorama that Carol, slightly acropho-bic, had been unable to stomach.