Priceless (19 page)

As Jed mentioned the connection, the maître d’ walked over to greet them.

“Hey, Jed!” The maître d’ clapped him on the back. He was clearly pleased to see him. Jed seemed to have that effect on everybody. New York was full of the friends he’d made on photo shoots or commercial sets or while standing in line at Starbucks. Everybody wanted him in his or her life. He made people feel special. Right then he was inquiring about the maître d’s daughter, who was starting school that fall.

“You got her into the place you wanted, right?”

“We did, thank you for remembering. She’s very excited. Now, I’ve saved a very special table for the pair of you. Follow me.”

It was the best table in the room, right against the windows with an uninterrupted view of downtown Manhattan, magical in that moment before nightfall when the buildings glowed like in a fairy city.

“This is why I live here,” said Jed.

Certainly, Carrie had to agree there was nowhere else on earth like Manhattan at dusk. Or at any time.

“Champagne.” The maître d’ had brought them a couple of glasses. “On me,” he added.

Jed raised a toast to Carrie. “I am so glad to have you here,” he said. “However briefly. I have missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too,” she said.

“Have you?” Jed asked.

Don’t start
, Carrie begged him silently. He didn’t get a chance to. A waiter interrupted the conversation before it had a chance to begin in order to recite the specials. Spring lamb. Some kind of fish on the bone. Carrie and Jed both had the lamb.

It was a far better evening than Carrie had hoped for. Apart from the tricky start, the conversation flowed easily. She had expected Jed to be angry with her and for the entire evening to be taken up with going over what had gone wrong and why. But it wasn’t like that at all. Jed regaled her with some funny stories about his massage clients, the social X-rays. One of them had asked him to accompany her on a monthlong ski trip as her personal masseur, so addictive was his touch. The money would have been good, he admitted, but he’d refused because it would have meant a month out of the class he was taking. He was studying film at night school and putting together a show reel with a view to becoming a commercials director.

Jed also seemed genuinely interested in hearing about Carrie’s time in London.

“How’s Jessica?” he asked.

Carrie was impressed that he remembered her assistant’s name.

“She’s doing well. I thought she would insist on being allowed to return to New York after six months, but she got herself an English boyfriend and that seems to have changed everything.”

“And how about you?”

Carrie raised her eyebrows quizzically.

“English boyfriend?” Jed spelled it out.

“I don’t have time,” she said.

Jed gave a little smile.
“Plus ça change
. I do understand,” he said then.

“What?” she asked.

“That you had to leave. I don’t think I was supportive enough at the time. I could only see your promotion as losing a playmate.” He sighed. “But I understand now that you had to go. It was what you’d been working toward since you were a girl. And it was the right choice. Look at you.”

He lifted his hands and traced the shape of her face in the air. “When you talk about your life in London, there is so much animation in your face. So much excitement and anticipation. You’ve found your place. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so radiant and beautiful as you do tonight.”

Carrie looked into her coffee cup. “Thank you,” she said quietly, feeling inwardly guilty that she had actually dressed down for this outing.

“To you.” Jed raised what was left of his wine. “I hope we’ll always be friends,” he added.

Carrie found the word “friends” strangely stinging.

After dinner they walked back to the hotel. It was something Carrie missed about Manhattan. The ease with which you could get around. London was on a more spread-out scale. And whatever you thought about Manhattan traffic, it didn’t move as quickly or erratically as that in London.

It was a beautiful evening. The cherry blossoms were out. In fact, the restaurant had been decorated in them.

Jed offered her his arm. She took it willingly. It was so easy to be with him. She found herself leaning into his
body. There were few men who could make her feel so feminine. So petite.

When they reached the hotel lobby, Carrie knew she should end the night there. But Jed lingered, finding more questions to ask about London. About anything. Until eventually she asked him to come up for a nightcap. “Since we’ve still got so much to tell each other,” as he said.

Carrie had not made love since she and Jed had last been together. She wondered if it had been the same for him. She doubted it. A heterosexual male model with massage skills in a town like New York, Jed was the ultimate catch. She didn’t want to think about how many offers he must have had. There was probably someone waiting for him right then. And that thought was partly why Carrie said “yes” when Jed asked if he could stay.

They both understood what “stay” really meant. As soon as he had Carrie’s agreement, Jed kicked off his shoes and moved from the armchair to the bed. He smoothed the counterpane beside him, wordlessly inviting Carrie to join him. She took off her own shoes, placing them neatly beside her half-packed case with the precision that had always made Jed smile and tease her. She sat down on the bed. Not quite right next to him, though she knew that soon she would be. They both knew.

“This reminds me of that hotel room in Paris,” said Jed. “What number was it?”

“Four seventeen,” Carrie responded. On their return to New York after their Paris interlude, Jed had sent flowers with nothing but “417” written on the card.

“There I was, thinking that you were going to give me a coffee and send me on my way, but you jumped me. I was quite taken aback.”

“Were you, hell,” said Carrie, shuffling back so that they were properly side by side against the pillows.

“It’s a memory that I will treasure for the rest of my life. It isn’t every day a guy gets ravaged in a hotel room.”

Carrie went to give Jed a playful cuff. He caught her wrist and used the leverage it gave him to pull her into his arms. She fell willingly, and soon they were kissing. It was as hot and heavy as the first time they’d kissed, and yet as intimate and relaxed as the last. Still, after a minute or so, Carrie pulled away. She looked deep into Jed’s eyes. They shouldn’t be doing this. And yet …

It was so easy. So natural. They fell back into each other’s arms like two dancers repeating steps they’d learned and practiced years before. If they didn’t think too hard about it, everything would be fine. They’d go through the old routine and then part. Back to the real world.

And Carrie had spent so long without this kind of contact. She wanted to be held and kissed and, she admitted it, fucked. She wanted to feel desired.

When they were both naked, their skin slick with the heat of their passion, Carrie moved so that she was on top of Jed, her legs about his waist. She edged backward so that she could feel the tip of his cock against her. Her body cried out to be penetrated. She felt a moment of supreme release as Jed took matters into his hands and pushed up into her.

The fit was so good. Carrie had never had a lover like Jed. His cock seemed to have been made for her. As she rocked her way to an orgasm, he grew and stretched inside her until she felt that she had never been touched so absolutely before. Their bodies were completely joined.

With her hands on Jed’s wide, flat chest, Carrie eased herself up and down. Jed held her by the waist, helping her, speeding her up or slowing her down. As her arousal
grew and she felt her orgasm creeping up on her, Carrie let her head tip backward. Jed’s hands moved to her breasts, magnificent above him. Carrie was in a world of her own now, rocking, rocking. Faster and faster. Her thighs tightened against Jed’s waist. She began to dissolve around him. The only thing she could hear was the pumping of her own heart as the blood raced around her body, taking her pleasure to every part of her being.

Carrie didn’t have to worry about Jed. The moment she started to come, he was coming too. The feeling of her pulsing around his shaft was too much to resist. Each time she moved downward, he thrust upward to meet her. Their sighs echoed each other. Jed cried out Carrie’s name.

“Can I stay the night?” he asked.

Carrie nodded mutely. She shouldn’t have done it, she knew. She shouldn’t have made love to him. But it felt so good to be back in his arms. She felt so connected to him right then. Almost connected enough to tell him the truth about her feelings. Almost connected enough to admit them to herself.

If only it could always be like this. If only she could trust that Jed would always want to be this close to her. Then she might have been able to give their relationship a proper shot. But the shiver of unhappiness she had felt earlier, when he’d called her his friend, was nothing compared to the pain she would feel if she totally invested her heart and found herself rejected.

So Carrie said nothing. It was far better to do without these moments than find herself like her mother or sister. Loved and then abandoned and unable to get over it.

The next day, Carrie was taking the first flight back to London out of Kennedy. She left Jed sleeping, putting a
note on hotel paper on the side of the bed where she had lain.

“I hope you’ll come to London sometime soon,” she wrote. But before she left the room, she crept back and stole the note away again. Jed would never know how close she’d come to admitting her vulnerability.

CHAPTER 24

A
s she waited for her flight back to London, Carrie picked up a copy of
Vanity Fair
in the first-class lounge. Flicking through it, her attention was drawn to a name she hadn’t heard in a while: Mathieu Randon.

Carrie knew all about Mathieu Randon. When she’d begun her career in the auction houses, he’d been a client for whom everyone rolled out the red carpet. Head of Domaine Randon, a multinational luxury goods conglomerate based in Paris, he was high on the list of invitees to any big event at Ehrenpreis in New York. He rarely showed up himself, though he had bought certain items through the house. Most notably a painting by Andrew Wyeth, who was the artist of Carrie’s own favorite painting:
Christina’s World
.

The last Carrie had heard of Mathieu Randon was that he had recently come out of a coma. Eighteen months ago, he’d been struck on the head by a falling wine barrel when an earthquake had hit his company’s Napa Valley vineyard. Recent photographs showed him leaving the hospital in a wheelchair, his head lolling to
one side, his eyes unfocused and glazed. It was widely assumed that would be the last anyone heard of him. He was facing a long time in rehabilitation. According to reports, he was hardly able to speak. Nobody could be sure that his laser-sharp business brain was what it once had been.

But here he was. Back from the dead and back in his office, giving an interview to
Vanity Fair
.

“People ask if I have changed,” said Randon. “Of course I’ve changed. How could anyone spend eighteen months in a coma, away from the stimulation of the outside world, and remain unchanged? But I do not believe that my life has been diminished for that time away. Rather, it has been enriched.

“It sounds like a cliché to say that now I understand the value of things far better than I once did. Whereas once I was only content to spend my waking hours generating money, and thought contemplation was for the simpleminded, now I am just as happy to look out of my window and see a butterfly or a flower in bloom.”

He’s losing it
, thought Carrie.

“I have found new meaning in my life. And, most important, I have found God.”

Lost it
, Carrie confirmed to herself.

The interviewer expressed the cynicism of much of his readership when he asked Randon how he could possibly square his billionaire lifestyle with the ethics of Christianity.

“Indeed it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” Randon quoted. “That’s why I’m formulating a strategy for disposing of some of my assets with a view to establishing a place where people of a like mind can find peace and contemplation. That is my mission now. That is the real reason I was put on this earth. That is clearly
why I spent the first fifty years of my life so focused, to the point of blindness, on amassing material wealth. It was all part of God’s plan. To enable me to one day establish a haven for pilgrims and students of the word of Christ, our Lord.”

“Like a monastery?” the interviewer suggested.

The question drew a smile from the lips of Mathieu Randon, one-time fixture on the European party circuit. He was rumored to have bedded more than a thousand women. Allegedly he had the books of several model agencies on his bedside table. The photos of those models he had slept with were marked with a cross and rated out of ten. Married men all over the world had cursed his wife-stealing name. And now …