Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [212]
She worked for a year at Philip Chen’s side, learning all he could teach her. She took books home to study at night and worried about the time wasted attending weekend swimming parties at the country club or dancing with endless young men who always seemed so much younger and more carefree than she was, at parties at the Peninsula Hotel. Behind her pretty blond facade was a very serious young woman determined to live up to the demands of her inheritance, and nothing was going to stand in her way. And then, when she was just twenty-two, she met Pierre d’Arancourt.
He was forty and very distinguished-looking. His black hair had a silver streak at each temple, his nose was properly arrogant and his mouth sensual. He was lean and tall and his shoulders were broad, and he was different from any of the boys she had met. She first saw him riding in a visitors’ race at the Happy Valley Racetrack.
“Who is he?” she asked, her eyes wide with interest, immediately placing fifty dollars on him to win.
“Oh, that’s Prince Pierre,” someone told her casually. “He shows up every now and then in Hong Kong when he’s bored with Paris or New York or Buenos Aires. He’s French, with an old title, but brought up mostly in Argentina—that’s why he rides so well, I guess.”
“I guess,” she breathed, lifting her binoculars to watch as he rode to win.
He was at the dance given that night at the Government House and she noticed that he had noticed her watching him and she looked shyly away. In all her twenty-two years she had never had a boyfriend—oh, she’d been out on plenty of dates but she had never had a real boyfriend. She knew her mother worried about it, but Annie understood it was the wrong time in her life. She had to work hard and beat the game first, and though no one realized it, behind her cool facade she was an insecure young girl who knew nothing about love.
Pierre was so much older than she was, she didn’t know exactly how to respond when he came over and introduced himself and asked her to dance. She thought that he was even handsomer than Buck, and she listened entranced to his tales of his ranch in Argentina and his apartment on the Avenue Foch in Paris and the family château in the Loire. His life sounded cosmopolitan and glamorous, peppered with exotic names from the theater, movies, and society, and light years removed from her own cloistered, single-minded existence.
“And what do you do with yourself all day, out here in Hong Kong?” he asked, somehow managing to make it sound boringly provincial, and when she told him that she worked hard learning to run the company she had inherited from her grandfather, he laughed. His dark eyes were filled with mocking amusement at the idea as he said, “Well, maybe we should do something to change all that. You’re far too beautiful to be wasted on mere business.”
No one had ever called her beautiful before and Lysandra smiled breathlessly at him, saying nothing. She had been forced to leave him then and join her own party for supper, but she glanced his way often that night.
The next morning alongside her breakfast plate was a bouquet of tiny, perfect yellow rosebuds and a note, saying he hoped he would see her again. She put the flowers in water, remembering with a little frisson of excitement his dark eyes looking into hers and his deep voice telling her she was beautiful. Her head was in a whirl all day thinking of him, hoping he would call, but at six-thirty he still hadn’t and she drove disappointedly home to her small apartment in the mid-levels. Ah Sing flung open the door, her face wreathed in smiles, and as she stepped inside, Lysandra