Million Dollar Road (38 page)

On the sidewalk of the Avenue Montaigne, Lireinne straightened her spine and grew two inches taller. Her eyes narrowed, her upper lip curled in fury.

“You want angry?” Lireinne's voice came from deep in her throat, dangerously close to a growl. None of Luigi's posse seemed to notice or care. “Okay, I'm freaking pissed
now
. Who do you assholes think you are?”

“Perfection,” Peter pronounced, serenely oblivious to having been called an asshole. “Now walk, dearie.” He seemed to be waiting for her to obey him.

Not having offered a word throughout, Luigi Spada raised a skeptical eyebrow and shrugged in disdain.

“She is
bellissima,
true,” he acknowledged with a truculent pout. “But there are many such girls in Paris. Where is the go-to-hell, I ask you?”

Oh, Lireinne had plenty of go-to-hell at this point, enough for a whole yellow school bus packed with dropouts.

“Get a freaking
life,
” she hissed through gritted teeth. “Go fuck yourselves.”

Throwing back her shoulders, her head held high, Lireinne throttled down on her anger and gave it the gas. She shoved past Peter and Luciana with a stiff arm and stalked away from them in her modest heels. Everybody dissed her, everybody! Lireinne's thoughts were furious as she hurried to put distance between her and her tormentors. Even in Paris, she couldn't even take a damned walk without freakazoid famous designers and their bossy sisters getting in her face and treating her like she was nothing.

Her heart raced. Lireinne was riding a thundering wave, feeling as though she could ride that wave all the way across the ocean, all the way back to the trailer where her family, at least, had always known who she was—a human being like everyone else.

But Lireinne hadn't gotten twenty feet down the street before she heard flip-flops slapping behind her in pursuit. Oh, give me a
break,
she thought. Go away! Lireinne walked faster, lengthening her strides. If these people didn't leave her alone, she didn't want to think what she might do to
make
them leave her alone. For sure it wouldn't be pretty.

“
Signorina,
wait!”

Full of exasperation and on the verge of screaming, Lireinne stopped and whirled to glare at Luigi. “What?” she demanded. “What the hell do you want
now
?” She was still wearing the angry face. By now she was so goddamned mad she couldn't have worn another one if she tried.

The overweight designer struggled to catch his breath. “You are a-walking and . . . then I am . . . a-changing what I am thinking before. You are indeed a two, yes?” he managed with a wheeze.

“Yeah, last time I checked—not that it's any of your damned business,” Lireinne said, no longer caring about seeming rude to
anybody
. “Why do you give a shit?”

Luigi snorted impatience at her question. “The samples, they are always the sizes two, sometimes the zero. Come!” he insisted. “Come now, exactly now. The time, she will not wait. And,” he said with a careless wave of his hand, “Luigi Spada will pay,
cara
. I give an American tourist good money to wear my Adventure collection just for the day, good money for a few hours of your time.”

Those kick-ass stilettos in the window at Prada.

Her anger rapidly cooling, Lireinne thought this offer over for a moment.

“How much money?” she asked.

 

Above the Luigi Spada store, the atelier was all the colors of dry bones—white walls, ivory floors, airy milk-colored drapery at the windows, and snowy leather couches. There, over the next three hours, Lireinne stomped, sulked, and stormed in front of the seated, impassive Italian designer, with her angry face firmly in place. If modeling meant wearing killer clothes and an attitude, she was good with that in
spades
. After all, Lireinne's many years of being dismissed, ignored, vilified, and used had created an almost bottomless well of go-to-hell, just waiting to be tapped.

And the collection—the alligator motorcycle jacket, slim jeans, and thigh-high boots in softly gleaming black, the cognac safari suit and chartreuse camisole, the dark-chocolate trench coat and slinky slip dress of shy pink—Lireinne loved
all
of it. Even though she'd never before imagined clothes like these made from gator skins, they were wildly gorgeous, unimaginably inventive.

It was past noon and Lireinne was starving again, but she was glad she hadn't eaten anything but the brioche earlier that morning. Luigi's designs fit almost as though they'd been made for her, but were so snug she hardly dared take a deep breath. That boy Luciana and Peter had been arguing about, Alberto-whoever, must have weighed only a hundred pounds in his shoes, she thought as she waited for the assistant to fasten the back of a sheath dress in flat, metallic gold hide.

But ever since she was first zipped into the leather's uncompromising caress, Lireinne had felt a heady sense of...
power
. It was an elusive sensation, one she was discovering she'd always craved without knowing what it was, having never really experienced power before. The alligator designs were an extreme fusion of sophistication and barbarity, and inside them Lireinne discovered she felt like somebody new, a girl who'd never have to take any bullshit from anyone. Glorying in this feeling, she ramped up the attitude another level, letting the power take her to a height she could never have imagined existed for her.

Attitude, power. They brought something with them, hand in hand. They brought a kind of
freedom
. Lireinne's attitude elicited Peter's soft claps of approval, Luciana's sighs of admiration—the outward manifestations of power. The freedom was humming inside, a clear, high song for Lireinne's ears alone.

And yet, his expression considering, Luigi hadn't said anything beyond a direction or two.

“Over here, by the light.”

“Make the bigger steps. Luciana, mess up again her hair.”

“Don't smile.”

It was mid-afternoon in the cramped dressing room and Lireinne was worn almost threadbare. Modeling, she now realized, was harder work than she'd imagined, a lot harder. The girls in the
Vogue
photo shoot hadn't looked dead on their feet, but now she understood that they had to have been. She was as tired as if she'd hosed the barns clean on a Monday.

But only one design remained on the rack in the dressing room—an opalescent white, low-bodiced wedding gown hung with huge, gathered skirts, all of it in the same supple alligator skins. A stiff, armatured crinoline had to be fastened separately underneath the dress to give it volume, and between the foundation garment and the leather gown itself, Lireinne gasped as the assistant wrestled her into both pieces. The whole, layered costume was so heavy she staggered at the sudden weight of it. The voluminous skirts settling around her waist alone were an easy seventy-five pounds of alligator skin, lined with softest silk.

Good thing she was so strong from horsing the hose around the barns all day for months, Lireinne thought. Making the effort to stand erect, she found herself remembering enormous Snowball and her white skin. Luigi would need at least fifteen just like her for the skirt alone, but according to Con, there were only eight leucistics in the whole world. The skins for this gown had to have been bleached and dyed, good news for Snowball and her distant kin.

Lord, who'd have thought this morning that before the day was over Lireinne Hooten from Million Dollar Road would be wearing such an incredible gown, one that had to cost thousands and thousands of dollars? “This last one's for you, you big man-eater,” Lireinne said under her breath, her hand stroking the shining white leather skirt.

Snowball. Her old friend, her sort-of good luck charm.

“Voilà, mademoiselle,”
the assistant said. She sounded wiped out, too.

“Merci.”
For the last time, Lireinne squared her shoulders and straightened her spine, determined to finish this day in the same style in which she'd begun—with attitude. Attitude was all she had left, she was so beat.

Both hands grasping the alligator folds of her skirts, sweeping from the small dressing room into the atelier, Lireinne suddenly halted before the wall of mirrors, stunned by her reflection in the glass. Her fatigue vanished.

“Holy freaking cow,” she whispered.

Everything that had gone before was eclipsed by this dress. Lireinne raised her arms and lifted her long black hair off the white column of her neck, her breasts straining in the tight, scaled bodice. She almost didn't recognize the girl in the mirror. This was no fat chick, this wasn't damaged goods. This was no hoser.

This girl's eyes were glittering pools of black-lashed green, huge and fierce in her heart-shaped, amber-lipped face. Her slender waist rose from the shimmering gown's massive leather bell of gathered folds like a young sapling. And the crescent-shaped scar—the scar Bud hadn't had the money to get fixed—only served to underscore a cruel, almost snarling beauty. What had once been ugly now seemed a perfect punctuation mark, a signal emphasis to Luigi's bold, revolutionary design.

The room was silent, as though it held its collective breath. Lireinne pirouetted a slow circle in front of the mirrors, the wide alligator skirts rippling in dense waves around her black suede pumps.

Tapping her sunglasses against her yellow horse teeth, Luciana pronounced, “The shoes are not correct, but this
Américaine
has it—a hungry, dangerous innocence, most savage. And to think I am finding her like a lost dog in the street!”

Peter said with a sage nod, “I told you so. You never needed the boy, Lu-Lu.”

Luciana said, “
Luigi
. I tell you a thousand times. Luigi!”

But Luigi said nothing.

Everybody waited; no one said a word. Silence mounted, like the fevered hush of the air before a storm breaks open the sky.

His face unreadable, Luigi got up from the low leather couch. In the quiet his rubber flip-flops slapped loud across the white wooden floor. He stopped behind Lireinne. His sharp little black eyes met hers in the mirror.

“Cara feroce,”
Luigi murmured.

Curtly, he nodded only once. Lireinne was as still as a girl made of glass when the man placed his hands on her bare shoulders. Luigi turned her around to face him. To her astonishment, he kissed her on both cheeks:
smack, smack
.

“This face,” Luigi said with a grand bow, “is the new face of Luigi Spada. Now I call the fall collection . . .
Adventuress
.”

M
uch to his irritation, Con hadn't been able to get another reservation at Marius et Janette for tonight, but Julien had pulled some obscure French strings and secured a late table at Michel Rostang, a classic restaurant not too far from the hotel. Instead of oysters, caviar, and blinis, tonight would be truffles and cream-laced vichyssoise, but Con wasn't thinking about dinner.

He was seated in Le Bar at the Plaza Athénée, and it was here he planned to give Lireinne the tourmaline earrings from Chopard. They'd be a splendid complement to the green dress she was wearing, and besides, a beautiful girl needed good jewelry to set her off, after all. She'd wear them to Michel Rostang and he'd be the envy of every other man in the room. Con fingered the small, dark-blue box in his jacket pocket, pleasurably anticipating her surprise and delight when she opened it.

But he hesitated. There was something different about Lireinne tonight, a mysterious something like the glint of luminescence in a deep woodland pool. Con couldn't put his finger on the change in her. If anything, she was more spectacular than ever—although she'd had barely five words to say to him since he'd sat down with her five minutes ago. Earlier she'd called him up in the room from downstairs, asking him to meet her here, which seemed odd in itself. And this difference, apparent from the first moment he saw her waiting for him in the bar, was becoming somewhat unsettling.

“What did you do today to top yesterday's hike? Climb three hundred stairs to the dome of Montmartre?” Con joked. But his attempt at wit fell into her silence with a thud. Lireinne only offered a half-smile, shrugging one shoulder in response to his question.

Con tried again. “How'd you spend your day?”

“Shopping.” It was another one-word answer. Lireinne took a delicate sip of her aperitif, a
kir
he'd ordered for her. In the dimly lit, high-ceilinged room, at the lucent, handcrafted glass bar, a raucous trio of American businessmen howled laughter, something about an excursion to the Crazy Horse strip club later that evening. Laughter did little to cover the undisguised attention they were paying to Lireinne. She seemed indifferent to their comments and long, leering looks, but Con had already had enough of it. With luck, they'd leave soon.

“Shopping?” Con waited for Lireinne to elaborate but she didn't say anything else, only nodding her assent. “So why didn't you take the money I left you?” he asked. When he'd gone upstairs to change after his day with Julien, to Con's perplexity he'd found the bills exactly where he'd left them, an untouched, neat stack of euros on the table by the door.

“I didn't want to take it.” Lireinne's reserve was impenetrable, but it occurred to Con that she seemed to be holding something back. What it might be, though, he couldn't fathom.

“Why?”

Lireinne shrugged again, almost irritably. “I told you already. I have my own money.”

It was then that Con became fully aware of the seismological shift in her, the sea change. What had happened to the laughing girl of last night, effervescent as the best champagne, wind-blown and rosy-cheeked from her afternoon's adventure? Who was this enigmatic, beautiful stranger sitting in the gray leather club chair across from him? It was as though Lireinne was behind a wall made of the same heavy glass as the bar: he could see her, he could hear her, but he wasn't reaching her at all.

Digesting this disquieting realization, Con wanted another Glenmorangie and the waiter was nowhere in sight. He drummed the fingers of his right hand on the tabletop.

He was still learning about her, he realized. Lireinne had a needless independent streak, and might be easily offended. Con had attempted to keep his tone affable, but it was becoming a greater effort with each unsatisfying exchange in this terse back-and-forth.

“So . . . what did you buy?” he asked.

“These.” Lireinne stretched an elegant leg from under the table and gestured at her shoe, a strappy, pointed-toe stiletto in gleaming black calfskin, stamped with a tiny brass logo on the instep. With a beatific smile, she said softly, “
Prada
. Aren't they cool?”

On Lireinne's slender feet the stilettos were very cool indeed, as well as incredibly hot. The shoe's thin leather straps braceleted the remarkable architecture of her ankles, the heels exaggerating the curve of her calf. And anything from Prada cost a pile of money, Con thought, his unease mounting by the minute. How the hell had she been able to buy them when she hadn't taken the euros this morning? No way she'd have had enough cash on her to buy a pair of shoes from Prada, not even if she'd saved every goddamned penny she'd ever made at the farm.

“They're knockoffs, right?” Those shoes had to be counterfeit.

Lireinne arched her scarred eyebrow, obviously irked at the suggestion. “No. I bought them this afternoon on the Avenue Montaigne, on my way back to the hotel.” She swallowed the last of her
kir
. “Can I have another drink?”

“Oh, come on, Lireinne. How'd you buy them?” Con demanded. “You don't have that kind of money, not for shoes like those!” He swiveled his head, looking for the waiter. “And of course you can have another drink. For God's sake, you know I'll buy you whatever you want. What the hell did you do for money? Rob a bank?” Only half kidding, he was now impatient and almost alarmed at her evasiveness.

Lireinne's eyes had turned hard at his questions, her full lips compressed into an uncompromising line. “I earned the money, okay?”

“
Earned
it?”

“Earned it.” Lireinne tossed her hair over her shoulder. “You didn't have to pay, so why do you care anyway?”

Why did he care? How could she ask such a thing?

Con rattled the ice cubes in his empty glass. “Because I love you, honey,” he said with some asperity. It was an impossible story, her making the money for those shoes. Surely she hadn't
stolen
them. “Now look,” Con said, struggling to find words that wouldn't enflame this rapidly escalating situation, “I don't want you involved in something . . . shady, not when I'm always going to take care of you. Exactly
how
did you earn the money? You better tell me the truth right now, babe, 'cause I can still fix it if—”

“Oh, for crap's sake,” Lireinne interrupted. “I modeled, okay?” She folded her arms, her rose-leaf mouth turning sulky. “And that's part of what I gotta talk to you about.”

“You modeled? You?” Con's face tightened.

“Yes, me.
I modeled
.” Taking a deep breath, Lireinne seemed to be preparing herself for what she meant to say next, but the waiter finally appeared at the table.

“
M'sieur, mademoiselle.
Would you have another cocktail?”

Her expression transforming from a narrow-eyed defensiveness to one that was considerably more charming, Lireinne held out her glass.
“Une autre pour moi, si'l vous plaît?”
The waiter bowed and took the long-stemmed glass from her with a nod of surpassing correctness.

“Me too, please,” Con said. Inside he was seething, but made sure to maintain a pleasant demeanor in front of the waiter because he hated a scene, he hated a scene like he hated conflict. This disagreement had all the earmarks of turning into a messy scene in a public space.

Like hell, she'd modeled!

Young, uneducated, and unconnected, even though she was singularly beautiful, Paris was rife with pretty girls. The only way Lireinne could've modeled for anyone would have been to take off her clothes. Con was nearly wild at the thought, only just able to contain his sudden, furious jealousy at the idea of someone other than him seeing her naked, but with a strenuous effort he managed not to react. Goddammit, Con thought, he'd have to march over to Montmartre first thing in the morning and buy up everything—photos, drawings, paintings, scribbles, every goddamned thing—from the scumbag who'd taken advantage of his girl's naïveté.

As soon as the waiter left the table, Con exploded. “You're talking about nude modeling, right? Like for some half-ass, piece-of-shit artist over on the Rue Montparnasse? What were you thinking?” Con shook his head, deeply frustrated at her heedlessness, all for a pair of shoes he could have bought for her himself. “Honey, you were taken advantage of, taking your clothes off for some creep with a palette knife!”

“Excuse me?”

Lireinne's eyes were green ice. In a low voice, surprising to Con in its sudden bitterness, she snapped, “Of
course
you'd go there! You're the exact same as everybody else. You think I'm some kind of
whore
. For your information, I didn't take off my clothes to get the money, you asshole. I worked hard for it, modeling for Luigi Spada, not for some freaking artist. God, like get over it, okay? You don't get to tell me what to do!”

“Luigi Spada?”

Con's mouth sagged in disbelief, both at this impossible story and how swiftly she'd become furious with him. He was only looking out for her, after all. This was nothing like the Lireinne he knew.

“You're mistaken.” Con tried to be soothing. “Somebody lied to you. Darling, I love you with all my heart but . . .”

With an impatient wave, Lireinne interrupted him again, her tone level and deadly. “Okay,” she said, “here's a big ol' news flash. You can knock it off with that ‘I love you' crap, got it? You don't love me and for sure I don't love you! Go ahead, fire me now and get it over with. Luigi wants me to sign a contract with him; he wants me to be
the
model for his new collection. He says by spring I'm going to be famous, like Kate Moss. And here's another big news flash—I don't have to sleep with him for this job 'cause he's not like
you
. Luigi's gay, okay? He's got a boyfriend.”

“What?”
Con faltered, almost whispering. Like a great suspended chandelier breaking free of its moorings, the world as Con understood it crashed to the ground in jagged, heart-piercing shards of incomprehension.

“Slow down, Lireinne. I, I don't get any of this,” he managed, barely able to say the words without stuttering. “What do you mean, me firing you? I would never do that to you. I don't know what happened today to make you even think such a thing, but, but . . .”

Con shook his head, struggling to understand this inexplicable . . .
tantrum
. He adored Lireinne, he'd do anything for her; this, at least, was solid ground. “Maybe you're not ready to love me yet,” he said, his voice strengthening, “but I do love you, I'm crazy about you. You've known that for weeks. For God's sake, you couldn't
not
know.”

“Yeah, sure.” Lireinne nodded with a curled-lip disdain. “Face it,” she drawled contemptuously, “since the moment you met me, all you wanted was to nail my ass, to use me just like everybody always tries to use me. Listen up,
Con
. You creep me out, touching me all the time, and I don't want you, okay?”

“You don't want me?” Con repeated stupidly.

“God, no—I don't want anybody!”

“So, okay, okay. I'll give you time until you . . .”

“I will never love you.” It was a flat, cold declaration of immutable fact.

Con was stricken speechless. He was already drowning in Lireinne's spate of wounding words, but at this—
I will never love you
—he flushed a deep, injured red. Not only did she not return his feelings for her, she'd as much as told him he was a fool for thinking she ever would.

And she'd called him . . .
creepy
.

Him? Creepy? What, then, had these past months been about? How could he have been so deluded by her? Somewhere beyond the crashing waves of betrayed trust in his own blithe assurance of her, of what he'd been convinced was the love of a lifetime, a floundering voice wailed
wait
.

But Con couldn't listen, not now. Instead, he seized upon his injured pride, his hurt and bewildered pain, and turned it back on Lireinne in blazing scorn.

“So, let me get this straight,” he grated. “You modeled for Luigi Spada and now, all of a sudden, you're telling me you can't—or won't—have me on a bet. News flash for
you,
little girl. You were a goddamned hoser. I gave you a chance no one else would've given some high-school dropout, no matter how pretty you are. No, I really put my ass out there for you and now that you don't need me anymore, you're telling me the last three months have been a lie? Who's using who, Lireinne?”

Her composure regained, Lireinne lifted her green silk shoulders in careless agreement. “Whatever,” she said. “If you want to think about it like that, I guess we used each other, okay? But let's get it right, Con. You didn't promote me because you needed some freaking assistant. You just wanted to get laid. All this ‘I love you' shit is something you made up so you can feel good about yourself. We both know what you're
really
after, and you can forget it.”

She pushed her long, glossy hair behind her shoulders and gazed at Con, as implacable and dispassionate as a Vegas pit boss at a blackjack table. “Anyway, all that's over now. Luciana says I'm going to be huge after the collection previews. I'm gonna earn heaps of money, with nobody . . .
grabbing
me all the time.”

“Oh, yeah?” Con raised a furious eyebrow, scoffing, “How much money? You're out of your mind if you think Spada's going to pay you enough to live on. Oh, and if you're bent out of shape, worrying that some people think you're a, a . . . whore, just wait until he expects you to put out like one! In this business, that's what happens to girls like you. I should know—every time I make a trip over here, models are always handed out like goddamned after-dinner mints.”