Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [191]
Annie was in the Dales Lounge greeting her guests as usual before going to the dining room to check that everything was in order. But tonight her guests only had half her attention. She had let Buck into her penthouse apartment and left him there and now she was watching for Francie. Finally she saw her hurrying through the crowded lobby at a few minutes after eight. From a distance Annie watched her take out her key, and step inside the little private elevator. As the gilded metal gates swung closed Annie heaved a worried sigh. She hoped she had done the right thing.
Francie closed her eyes as the elevator wooshed silently upward to the twentieth floor. The gates swung open, she opened her eyes, and Buck was standing there, looking at her.
“Francie,” he said, his eyes full of love.
“Buck.” She stepped from the elevator and held out her hand politely, searching his face. “You look the same, just a little older.”
“Seven years older,” he reminded her. He couldn’t have described what she was wearing but it was blue and it brought out the color of her eyes, and at a time when every woman had bobbed her hair she still wore hers long, swept back with jeweled combs into a sumptuous heavy golden swathe at the neck.
“You didn’t cut it,” he said, remembering her promise and she shook her head.
“I would have hated it if you had,” he said. “I always think of you like this.”
Their eyes locked and the same old feeling swept over her. If she had ever doubted that she would love Buck Wingate till the day she died, now she knew for sure. But he was another woman’s husband, an important man. A “man of the people,” the press were calling him now.
“I shouldn’t have come,” she said nervously. “There’s nothing for us to say, Buck.”
“Yes, there is.” He caught her hand in his and held it against his cheek, then he kissed her fingers gently. “I feel as though time has been frozen, that we are back where we were. That life is just a simple matter of you love me and I love you.”
She pulled her hand away. “But that’s not true, is it? Time hasn’t been frozen and life is never that simple. I’ve made a life for myself now. I have my work, my charities, and my daughter. I don’t need any more secrets and lies. I just want peace of mind.”
She walked to the long white sofa by the window and sat down before her knees collapsed from under her. Her heart was pounding and all she really wanted to do was to hurl herself into his arms, but she couldn’t. She had Lysandra to think of. She clasped her hands loosely around her knees, leaning forward, watching him.
“Maryanne went to see you, didn’t she?” he asked.
She shrugged. “And if she did? She was right.”
“Why didn’t you at least call me, speak to me …?”
He looked desperate and she wanted to take his hand and tell him it was all right, nothing had changed. “I was pregnant. You were married, you had your children to consider. And your career. I had to make the decision.”
“Your decision, Francie. Not mine. There were two of us involved. Surely I had a right to half the votes?”
His eyes pleaded with her and she sighed. “I’m not here to talk about you and me, Buck; I’m here because of Lysandra. She doesn’t know you are her father and I don’t want her to know. I told her her father left us before she was born and she accepts that. She’s still only seven, but she asks questions and I tell her what you were like, that you would have loved her. I can’t expect her to understand now, but maybe when she is older, when she is a woman herself, then she might.”
Buck thought of his two children, so immersed in their own lives he rarely saw them, and of this new daughter whom he was forbidden to see and he threw his arms wide and cried, “What is it I’m doing wrong? My life is nothing, I have nothing—”
“Oh, Buck, don’t say that. Please don’t say that.” She looked at him, shocked.
“It’s true,” he said bitterly. “When I met you in Paris, I told you my life was a facade, a sham. Nothing has changed.”
“You have your work,” she said. “A brilliant future, everybody says so….”
He shrugged, and she got up