Sidney Sheldon's Mistress of the Game (31 page)

“Obviously our key concern this morning is our stock price. My view is that before we make any other decisions, we need to act now to limit the damage and reassure our shareholders.”

Silence.

Lexi plowed on.

“My first thought on seeing these pictures was to resign immediately.” August heard the mutterings of “hear, hear.” Mercifully, Lexi didn’t. “But we all know that sudden and unexpected management change is the
last
thing likely to restore investor confidence. Our stock has risen steadily for the last six months on the expectation that I would take over as chairman next month. I don’t believe that me throwing myself on my sword is going to help us.”

Logan Marshall whispered to August: “Pity she didn’t think of that before she threw herself on all those college boys’ swords at Harvard. And on film, too. What was she thinking?”

“I disagree.”

Max got to his feet. He looked confident, poised and rested. Lexi thought:
How the hell does he manage to look so beautiful at five o’clock in the morning?

“Let’s look at what we’re dealing with, shall we?” Max pulled a remote control from his pocket. A second later, a screen descended from the ceiling. On it was an image of Lexi, naked and on her knees, giving oral sex to a faceless man while two other men looked on.

August Sandford objected: “Is this really necessary? We’ve all seen the pictures.”

“Yes, and we’ve had a whole weekend to digest them,” said Max. “Think about our shareholders, waking up this morning and looking at that for the first time.”

He jabbed at the button on his remote. Another picture: Lexi snorting cocaine. And another. And another. They’d all been taken at the same party, during freshman week at Harvard. The “friend” who took them had been persuaded years before (with the help of a fat check) to hand the chip from his digital camera over to Lexi. She should have destroyed it at the time. But some crazy impulse made her keep it, locked away in the safe at her apartment. A reminder of the “Party Girl Lexi” she had left behind, the old, promiscuous self she had shed like a snake’s skin since falling in love with Max.

Falling in love.

Only one another person knew the code to that safe.

Max was still talking. He made eye contact with each board member in turn. When he came to Lexi, he looked through her as if she were a ghost.

No wonder you were so anxious to ship me off to Dark Harbor. How long have you been planning this, you bastard?

“It’s not only our shareholders. We have to think about the damage this can do to Kruger-Brent internally. I’ve already had e-mails from the heads of the Dubai, Kuwait and Delhi offices, all threatening to quit if Lexi becomes chairman. Tristram, have you gotten any calls?”

Tristram Harwood nodded grimly. America might be prepared to forgive its favorite daughter her youthful indiscretions. But Kruger-Brent operated all over the world, in Muslim and Hindu countries. Having a woman chairman, a
deaf
woman chairman, was bad enough. But this sort of stigma? It would cripple them.

Lexi sat and watched in silence while the men around her debated her future. Only it wasn’t a debate. It was a show trial. The verdict, guilty, had been decided before she ever walked into the room.

Of course it was Max who had betrayed her. He’d played her, just like August said he would. Images of their lovemaking, the wild, pagan passion of the last six months, swept unbidden through Lexi’s mind.
Was it all just a game to him? Part of his battle plan?
It must have been. And yet his desire, his love for her, felt so real.

She weighed her options:

I could tell them. I could tell the board it was Max who stole those pictures and made them public. Max who precipitated this crisis. Max who got us all into this mess.

But even as she thought it, Lexi knew she would never do that. The market had already lost its faith in her. Kruger-Brent’s share price would plunge this morning as a result. If Max’s name was tarnished, too, investors would have nothing to cling to. The company would fall out of Blackwell-family hands. It might even collapse altogether.

Kruger-Brent was the one great love of Lexi’s life. She could not allow it to go under.

She looked at Max.
That’s what you were counting on, wasn’t it? You knew I wouldn’t turn you in. You knew I love this company too much.

She hated him for what he’d done to her. But she hated him even more for what he’d done to Kruger-Brent. To secure the chairmanship for himself, he’d put the entire firm in jeopardy.

Lexi got to her feet.

“Enough.”

She held up a hand for silence. The muttering ceased.

“It’s clear that you all feel the same way. Therefore, for the good of the company, I will withdraw my name from the chairmanship ballot. I will formally resign from Kruger-Brent this afternoon.”

The attorneys’ shoulders slumped visibly with relief.

Max opened his mouth to speak. But when he looked into Lexi’s eyes, the words died on his lips. The things he wanted to say meant nothing now:
I’m sorry. I still love you
. He’d had to destroy her in order to win Kruger-Brent for Eve. It was his destiny, his life’s purpose. He’d had no choice. One day, he hoped, Lexi would see that. She would understand.

With a quiet dignity that made August Sandford want to cry, Lexi gathered up her briefcase, turned and left the room.

“Good luck, Max.”

Lexi waited for the elevator doors to close before unclenching her fists. Blood dripped from her palms from where she had dug her own fingernails into the flesh.

Good luck, Max.

Good luck, Judas, you treacherous son of a bitch.

Her Bible studies came back to her.

“And Jesus said, ‘I tell you solemnly, one of you will betray me. But woe to that man, the betrayer! It would be better for that man if he had never been born.’”

Lexi was going to make Max wish that he had never been born.

Her cousin had won the battle.

But the war had only just begun.

BOOK TWO

T
WENTY
-T
WO

L
OS
A
NGELES
. F
IVE
Y
EARS
L
ATER

PAOLO COZMICI LOOKED AT THE EXQUISITELY DECORATED Bel Air drawing room and scowled.

“Too many flowers. It looks like somebody died.”

Robbie Templeton kissed him indulgently on the top of his bald head. “The flowers are perfect. Everything’s perfect. Relax, babe. Have a drink.”

Tonight was Robbie’s fortieth birthday party. With typical altruism, he had decided to mark the milestone with a charity event that he hoped would raise a million dollars for the Templeton/Cozmici AIDS Foundation. Stars from the worlds of classical and pop music, as well as a smattering of Hollywood movie actors, would soon be pulling up to Robbie and Paolo’s wrought-iron gates, where a huddle of eager paparazzi was already gathered. The sprawling Bel Air estate had been home to classical music’s happiest couple for the past three years. The real-estate agent described it as “a French Country manor,” a turn of phrase that had reduced poor Paolo to paroxysms of laughter.

“’Ave you ever been to France?”

It was in fact a vast, vulgar, wedding cake of a house, smothered in enough climbing roses to make Martha Stewart wince. The gardens
came complete with a fake stream powered by a hidden electric pump and a faux-medieval bridge. It was the epitome of tackiness: brash, American, suburban.
Disney
. But it was also incredibly comfortable, boasted heart-stopping views from almost every room, and—crucially—afforded total privacy. Robbie and Paolo had been blissfully happy there.

“Ah, Lex, there you are. Would you please tell Monsieur le Grinch here that the house looks awesome?”

“The house looks awesome.”

It was hard to believe that Lexi Templeton was thirty years old. Skipping down the stairs in a vintage gray Hardy Amies ball gown, with diamonds gleaming at her ears, neck and wrists, her skin still shone like a teenager’s. She wore her hair long and loose, another girlish touch that belied the steely businesswoman within.

After Lexi left Kruger-Brent five years ago in a storm of scandal, most business pundits wrote her off. Overnight, her picture stopped appearing on the front covers of magazines. Lexi made no statements, responded to no rumors, approved no messages through “friends” or “insiders.” She stopped attending celebrity parties, charity auctions, gallery openings. Word was that she’d left America, but no one knew for sure. As the months went by, people ceased to care.

But those who assumed Lexi had crawled under a rock to lick her wounds had profoundly underestimated the strength of her ambition, not to mention the resilience of her spirit.

Ten days after Max’s coup, Lexi awoke to the sound of horns blaring outside her new, rented apartment. The media had driven her out of her old place. The noise was muffled at first, as if everything had been covered with a fresh fall of snow. But during the next few days, the snow slowly started melting. Sounds became sharper, crisper. Lexi delighted in each one like a newborn child. Water gushing from the faucet in her bathroom made her laugh out loud. Vendors cursing on the street below brought a lump to her throat. Strangest of all was her own voice. It didn’t seem to belong to her at all.

Dr. Cheung was elated. “Congratulations, my dear. I’m only sorry that so much of what you’re hearing at the moment is so unpleasant.”

Like everyone else in America, Dr. Cheung had seen the pictures and read the reports. They were hanging the poor girl out to dry.

Lexi, however, seemed unfazed: “Don’t worry about me, Doctor. I can hear again. That’s all that matters.”

And it was. Suddenly Lexi felt invincible. Raising capital against her
Kruger-Brent stock—despite the drop in value, Lexi’s stake was still worth over $100 million—she quietly started her own real-estate company, Templeton Estates. She began buying up cheap tracts of land in Africa, following the same business plan she’d intended to adopt as chairman of Kruger-Brent. Within two years, the company was outperforming almost all of its African competitors.
This
year Lexi had finally had the immense satisfaction of watching Templeton’s market share in Africa overtake Kruger-Brent’s.

Only one company, Gabriel McGregor and Dia Ghali’s Cape Town-based Phoenix Group, consistently outperformed them. But then Phoenix had had a five-year head start on Templeton. No one could deny that for a five-year-old business, Templeton Estates had made one hell of a mark.

As her company flourished, so Lexi’s own self-esteem started to revive. When Max betrayed her, releasing those awful, degrading pictures, part of her wanted to crawl away and die. Now, with both her hearing and her fortune restored, she found herself taking her first baby steps back into public life. On the spur of the moment, she showed up one night at the opening of a friend’s restaurant in her native New York. Wearing a vintage Bill Blass dress, Lexi utterly stole the show, cutting as dazzlingly glamorous and enigmatic a figure as she had in the old days. Soon afterward the floodgates opened. Once again, men flocked to her. And not just any men. Lexi dated musicians, businessmen, movie stars, always moving on within a few weeks, keeping the tabloids guessing. With the dollar at an all-time low and the economy in the doldrums, America craved glamour and excitement like a crack whore craving a fix. What better way to revive the national spirit than to welcome this conquering, beautiful Blackwell daughter back into the collective American fold?

So she had a wild and crazy youth. So what? Who didn’t?

She can hear again and she’s back on her feet.

Lexi was a star, a fighter, a winner. She had reinvented herself once again. Once again, America was glued to the edge of its seat.

Paolo Cozmici needn’t have worried. The party was a terrific success, with just the right amount of scandal to satisfy Hollywood’s gossip fiends:

A famous music producer got locked in the bathroom with a beautiful singer who was not his wife.

The singer’s name was David.

A movie actress was so wasted climbing into the hot tub that she forgot about the hairpiece she wore to hide her bald spot. When her twenty-year-old boy glanced down and saw what he thought was a dead rat floating between his legs, he passed out. The poor kid nearly drowned.

Michael Schett, this year’s “Hollywood’s Hottest Hunk” according to
People
magazine, arrived with
Playboy
’s Miss September, but dumped her like a campaign promise when he laid eyes on Lexi. Unfortunately for Michael Schett, Lexi wasn’t interested.

Michael cornered Robbie Templeton by the bar. “You gotta help me. I’m crashing and burning here. You’re her brother. Tell me how to impress her.”

With his Cary Grant looks, legendary prowess in the sack, and a string of hit movies to his name, Michael Schett was not used to rejection. He hadn’t had a girl dismiss him like this since seventh grade.

Robbie grinned. “Lexi likes a challenge. You could always start making out with me. Maybe she’ll try to ‘turn’ you?”

Michael Schett roared with laughter. He’d known Robbie and Paolo for years.

“Nice try, Liberace. She’s cute, but no girl is
that
cute.”

“Hey, you know what they say, Michael. You’re not a man till you had a man and didn’t like it.”

In the wee small hours of the morning, once all the guests had gone, Paolo went to bed, leaving Robbie alone with Lexi.

“You know, Michael Schett is really into you.”

Lexi rolled her eyes.