Scruples Two (19 page)

“Thanks, I’d really appreciate that. Nobody but my mother’s made me a cup of tea for years. What else do you do around here?”

“Everything but cook, clean or garden.”

“I have an uncle at home just like you,” Quentin said, smiling in recognition. “He’s the fellow without whom the whole enterprise begins to fall apart in a few days. You’re the indispensable man, then.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Burgo said, sizing up the newcomer. For an Englishman he seemed like a regular guy. Maybe he played poker.

After a detailed inspection of the kitchens, the butler’s pantry, the storage pantries, the wine cellar, and the dining rooms for staff and family, Quentin and Burgo settled down in the breakfast room with a pot of tea and the cake, which Burgo had brought out as Gigi had instructed him. Quentin read the inscription. “Not only is this very kind, but I’m actually starving,” he admitted, pleased by the special attention.

“I just called Gigi on the intercom and asked her if she wanted some tea,” Burgo said.

“Gigi?”

“Mrs. Ikehorn’s stepdaughter. She was upstairs reading.”

“A little girl?”

“Not really little, but not big, all things considered,” Burgo said thoughtfully. “Little-ish, for California anyway.”

“How old is she?”

“Youngish. Oh, here she is. Gigi Orsini, Quentin Browning.”

Gigi shook hands automatically, smiled automatically and sat down automatically. She had never met a native Englishman in the flesh, but she was deeply familiar with them as a species, from Laurence Olivier to Alec Guinness, from Alan Bates to Sir Ralph Richardson, from Rex Harrison to David Niven, from John Gielgud to John Lennon. Englishmen in all their varieties could hold no surprises for her, she was certain. Yet somehow she’d missed seeing anyone on film who had prepared her for the reality of this particular young man. He was a tall male of the lean and adventurous type, he looked like a self-reliant explorer of the upper reaches of the Nile rather than a chef, yet his quick, slightly bucktoothed smile made her think suddenly of a schoolboy who’d just come home for the holidays. He had a long, bony nose, biggish ears, and straight blond hair neatly parted on the side, which nevertheless persisted in flopping over his forehead. He had an air of reserve, yet the expression in his gray eyes was candidly friendly.

“Come on, let’s try the cake,” Burgo said as Gigi sat there silently, eyes unfocused, not even sipping the tea he’d made.

“Cake?” Gigi asked, as if the word were in a foreign language.

“The cake on the table, this round white cake,” Burgo said, cutting into it impatiently. He’d been mentally tasting it since yesterday. He never should have licked that icing.

Automatically, Gigi and Quentin each tasted the cake. Burgo ate a large bite of his and thought the top of his head would come off. It was more than Gigi had promised, more than any cake had a right to be.

“It’s okay,” Gigi said remotely.

“It’s truly super cake,” Quentin said absently, looking at her and taking another transcendental bite. She wasn’t his big blond type, but he could always make an exception, and with her punk orange hair, her pointed ears and her just-about-to-smile mouth, she ranked high in the adorable category. “Your chef was an artist.”

“He was,” Gigi said on a sigh.

“I hope I can do half as well.”

“Gigi,” Burgo prodded, “Gigi, when did this cake get itself made exactly?”

“Who knows?” Gigi breathed vaguely.

“You don’t remember? Gigi?
Gigi?”

“No,” she said, giving him a forbidding look.

“Do you cook?” Quentin asked, searching for something to say to this lovely, indifferent, laconic creature.

“Oh no,” said Gigi sadly, “I’ve never had time to learn, not even a minute.”

“But surely, at least the rudiments?”

“I’ve been much too busy, haven’t I, Burgo?”

“What? Oh, sure.…”

“Would you like to learn? Just the basics, that is, enough to get by?” Quentin suggested. Giving girls cooking lessons had never failed him yet.

“Hmm … I suppose so … it’s probably a good idea, just in case, don’t you think, Burgo?”

“Yeah, Gigi, in case you ever have to. On a desert island, maybe,” Burgo said disgustedly. Whatever complicated trap Gigi was now setting for Quentin had become too Machiavellian at this point for him to figure it out. The least she could have done was to notify him of her new deviltry.

“We could skip the peeling onions and carrots stage and go right on to … to scrambled eggs,” Quentin offered, anxious to take away any hint of drudgery.

“Oh no, I’d want to do it right,” Gigi said, eyes wide and earnest. “I’d want to start at the very beginning and work my way up to eggs … not skipping a single step. I have all the time in the world and nothing else to do.… all summer long.”

“I think I’ll have another piece of cake,” Burgo said, suddenly hit by a wave of foreboding almost strong enough to take away his appetite, “since the two of you don’t seem hungry.”

That evening Gigi drove Quentin on a tour of Los Angeles, from the Santa Monica pier to Beverly Hills, from the Sunset Strip to Pink’s, the famous hot-dog shack that, like many tourist attractions, thrives on humanity’s attraction to thoroughgoing, shameless sordidness.

“Tell me more about the Cotswolds,” she asked Quentin as they stood at a counter and ordered another round of spicy hot dogs buried under chili, mustard and chopped onions.

“Look here, Gigi, you’ve been asking me questions since we got into your car, but you haven’t told me anything about yourself.”

“Oh,” Gigi demurred, looking away with a disenchanted air of mystery that only Bette Davis could have rivaled. “I don’t really know how to begin … it’s been such a complicated, cosmopolitan life, Quentin … traveling between New York and Los Angeles. I’ve had the best of two great cities, I suppose I’m considered prematurely sophisticated, and I have to admit to being unquestionably spoiled, but, damn it, it’s not my fault that I was
born
restless. It’s an incurable problem—forever seeking the next experience, even if it’s outrageous, forever hoping to find the next sensation, even if it’s violent. And the worst of it is that I know exactly what’s wrong with me. You’d think that at twenty-one I’d have found something I could stick to by now—don’t look so surprised, Quentin, I’ve always been cursed by these ridiculously childish looks of mine, they’ve fooled dozens of men.” Gigi shook her head with deliberately theatrical exaggeration at her own deceptively ingenuous appearance, and dismissed it with a blasé gesture. “You see, Quentin, no matter how I wander, how I experiment, something always seems to be beckoning me on, some intensity of living that lies just behind the next encounter.”

“How come you’re spending the summer here, then? It seemed so quiet when I arrived.”

“Last year I was.… how can I put it?… feverish … even, yes, even excessive, almost verging on self-destructive, I’m afraid. Someone at the house will be bound to gossip, so I might as well admit that I became far, far too involved with.… oh, hell … with a rock group … a bizarre episode, now that I look back at it, but not without its attractions.” Gigi smiled a slow, small, wry smile that contained many secrets. “In any case,” she continued, “Billy decided—insisted—that I stay home this summer so she could stop worrying about me, and since I love her, I agreed. Little did I guess it was going to be my chance to learn to … cook.” She gazed up at Quentin through her dark lashes with such wicked naughtiness in her eyes that he was jolted into a realization that the category of adorable was far too limited to hold a personage of Gigi’s worldliness.

“I understand why you said you’d been too busy to learn.”

“It wasn’t exactly a priority.”

“Obviously not. What, ah, which rock group was it, exactly?”

“Oh, I’d rather not say, Quentin. In fact, I’m trying to forget.” She turned slightly away from him and he saw the giveaway blush of memory rise on her fair skin from the bare base of her throat, which lay revealed by the deep neckline of the over-sized white silk shirt she’d tucked into her white jeans. Gigi blushed all the way up to her bangs, her long Indian silver and turquoise earrings swaying as she tried to hide a rush of emotion.

“I’m sorry, Gigi, it was stupid to ask that question. I don’t know why I did.”

“No, don’t be sorry—it’s been over for months.”

“Really over?”

“Completely. I’m totally recovered. In fact, as experience goes, it was as complete a one as I’ve had, and what more can one ask than that?
Non, je ne regrette rien
. Remember that Piaf song, Quentin, ‘regret nothing’? That’s my motto. Come on, let’s go home.”

Gigi was silent as she expertly guided the shocking pink car back to Charing Cross Road. For all of the past year she’d felt herself literally aching to grow up, fruitlessly stretching in every direction to find a way out of the silken skein of the chrysalis of girlhood, but nothing in her life had provided an opportunity. The boys in her gang were emotional children compared to even the least mature of the girls, but they’d continued to hang out together, forming a tight little crowd of their own in the huge senior class. None of them wanted to rock their enviably secure and safely familiar boat until the last year of school was over. There had been the usual amount of teenaged groping and smooching and harmless intrigue, but the boys had all been practically interchangeable as far as she was concerned, and less exciting, by now, than brothers.

As Gigi drove she couldn’t believe how passively she had lived inside an old skin she had long ago outgrown, how quietly she’d remained sheltered by Billy and Josie and Burgo and the routine of the great house and her friendship with Maze. As it had turned out, she and Maze might as well have been sent to a convent school as Uni, she thought, although among its thousands of students there were gangs as wild as anyone could imagine.

With each mile the car covered, she seemed to be speeding into the landscape of adulthood. Each time she glanced quickly at Quentin’s fascinatingly bony profile, her hands tensed resolutely on the wheel and she grew older and wiser and more sure of herself. He was a man and she was a woman, Gigi told herself, she had become a woman the instant she told him she didn’t know how to cook. But of all the amazing string of lies she’d told Quentin, surprising even herself, one thing was true, she didn’t believe in regrets. Now that she grasped just how sheltered she’d been, there could be no looking backward.

Gigi greeted the gateman, glided quietly up the long drive and parked her car in the garage. No one seemed awake in the house, to her familiar senses, as she opened the front door, trembling slightly with her intensity of purpose.

“No key?” asked Quentin.

“Not necessary with the security guards. You’ll learn about them.”

“But how do I find my way to my room? I’m lost without Burgo.”

“I’ll guide you, no problem. But come on up and see my apartment first. It’s worth the trip as another tourist attraction, especially after Pink’s.”

“Like sneaking a look at the Queen’s private rooms in Buckingham Palace?”

“My place is far more comfortable, from what I’ve heard.” Quickly Gigi led the way through the house and up the stairs. Last year her bedroom had been expanded and redecorated into a complete suite by breaking down the wall into the neighboring guest room, so that now she had a large sitting room, a small kitchen and a dressing room as well, all done in a combination of luxury and glamour that Billy hoped would be an enticement to Gigi to attend UCLA and live at home during her college years.

“It’s pure … Hollywood,” Quentin finally said in an astonished voice as she led him around, ending up at the
pièce de résistance
, the biggest bed he’d ever seen, hung from the ceiling in such a prodigal amount of striped pale green, white and pink silk that it was fit for Catherine the Great to use as a traveling tent.

“That was the basic idea. Would you like a drink?”

“No, thanks.”

“Would you like a kiss?”

“Yes, please.”

Gigi reached up and put her arms around his neck and kissed him briefly on his chin.

“Well, I’d better get back to my room,” Quentin said with determination.

“What’s your hurry?”

“Gigi …”

“Yes?”

“What are you up to? Looking for the next encounter again, the next complete experience?”

“Exactly,” Gigi answered in a laughing voice, relieved that he’d taken the ball out of her unaccustomed hands. “But only if you’re interested. It’s not part of the job.”

“Jesus, Gigi, you don’t mince words,” he groaned.

“You have exactly five seconds to make up your mind,” Gigi informed him, clenching her hands with determination and holding her breath with impatience.

“Ah … Hollywood,” Quentin Browning whispered in surrender and took her in his arms, lifting her off the floor and depositing her on the bed. He kissed her eager, triumphant mouth over and over, and ever more deeply as he unbuttoned her shirt and freed her small, rosy, exquisitely young and pointed breasts. Quickly impatient with mere kisses, no matter how excellent, Gigi tugged on his hair so that he was forced to leave her mouth and bend down to her breasts. She took them in her hands and roughly thrust her delicately arrogant nipples into his mouth, as avidly as if she wanted him to bite them. “Wait, wait,” he muttered, but Gigi chose not to hear him, and hurried to wriggle out of her jeans and panties while he was still busy learning how much the little pink tips could swell and harden. “God, you’re greedy,” he mumbled as he became aware of her nakedness, “a greedy little girl, so greedy,” and he stripped as quickly as he could. She threw her arms around his chest and rubbed herself up and down against his bare body, as violently as if she were on fire and was trying to smother the flames with his skin, all the while kissing him ardently wherever her thirsty mouth landed.

“Hold it,” he commanded, pinioning her arms so that he could look at her, so that he could examine the deep indentation of her waist, the splendidly modeled swelling of her elegantly formed hips and legs, the slight roundness of her belly and the flaunted promise of her tangle of pubic hair.