Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [174]
She covered his mouth with tender kisses, stifling his words, counting their final minutes together, and when the time came for him to go she cowered naked in their bed as he packed his bags, telling herself she mustn’t cry and that she should be glad for the happiness she had been given.
His bags were in the hall and she heard him instructing the porter and then his footsteps as he walked back to her bedroom. He stood in the doorway, his eyes devouring her. He looked the way he had when she first met him, handsome, well-dressed, powerful—a man with a future. She knelt on the tumbled bed, the sheet covering her nakedness, waiting for him to say good-bye. He walked toward her and wrapped the silken strands of her hair around his hands like golden chains as she tilted her face to him. “This isn’t the end, Francie,” he promised, his eyes burning into hers. And then he strode quickly away.
Annie stared suspiciously at Francie. There was a hectic flush on her usually pale cheeks and a nervous air about her that was different. She had dragged her from one Paris couturier to another, buying recklessly at Patou and Lelong, Molyneux and Chanel, and now they were sitting in Madame Vionnet’s dove-gray salon while models paraded sinuously in front of them. There was nothing there to suit Annie’s rounded figure. Vionnet made sleek, easy, graceful clothes in clinging crepe de chine and supple satins, but they were perfect for Francie’s tall, streamlined body and long legs, and Annie shook her head, marveling as Francie ordered a dozen dresses in different colors. “Where on earth are you going to wear all these things?” she asked. “You go to Hong Kong once every few years, and when you’re in San Francisco you are working hard for your charities and the rest of the time you spend on the ranch. I hardly think you’ll be wearing Madame Vionnet’s sugar-plum slipper satin to tend your vines?”
Francie shrugged and gave her a too-brilliant smile. “Oh, I don’t know, they’re all just so pretty,” she answered vaguely, but she knew she was buying them because Buck would have loved her in them. It was impossible to put him out of her mind and impossible not to think of herself as part of his life. She had received a cablegram from him every day since he had left and they all said the same thing: “I love you.” She was playing with fire, but if Buck ever came back to her she would not be able to send him away again.
Annie said suspiciously, “You haven’t met a man, have you?” and Francie blushed. “I see,” Annie laughed, pleased. “Then why haven’t you told me about him?”
Francie bit her lip, staring embarrassed at her hands. “I can’t.”
“That means he’s married.” Annie sighed. “Oh dear, Francie, what have you gotten yourself into now?”
“Annie, it’s Buck Wingate.” The news brimmed from her lips. “It’s like a miracle. I mean, love can be a miracle, can’t it? It’s not like with Edward when I just fell slowly in love with him. This is Love, Annie.” She almost shouted the word, and the vendeuses and the models turned to smile—love was love in any language. Francie dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper as she told Annie quickly about her whirlwind affair.
“And you sent him away?” Annie asked, amazed.
“I sent him away,” she repeated, her blue eyes searching anxiously for approval.
“Then why all the new clothes? It seems to me you might be expecting him back again.”
“Yes … no … oh, Annie, I don’t know. If he came back … oh, what should I do?”
A vendeuse interrupted with the account for Madame Harrison to sign, and then they left the salon and strolled thoughtfully down the avenue together. “Buck fell for you the minute he saw you at my party,” Annie said. “I knew it even if you didn’t. But everything’s against it, Francie, it’s not just Maryanne, it’s his career. You realize he would have to give it up if he married you?”
Francie hung her head, she had hoped against hope that Annie would pull an answer out of her practical bag of tricks, but there was none. A man’s work was his life.