Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [213]
The phone rang, and when she picked it up it was him. “Thank you for the flowers,” she said breathlessly. “I’ve never seen so many in my life, you must have ransacked every florist in Hong Kong.”
He laughed and asked her to dinner at the Peninsula Hotel and she caused raised eyebrows among the “colonials” in her sea-green brocade cheongsam and high-piled blond hair. “They forget my heritage is Chinese,” she told Pierre, proudly. She wore one of his gardenias at her shoulder and he told her he would never smell its wonderful scent again without thinking of her. “Gardenias were made for you,” he said as she smiled, excited to be in the company of the handsomest man in the room. When he took her home he kissed her hand on the doorstep and she watched as he strode back to his waiting car; he turned to wave and she kept the memory to dream about in bed that night.
The next evening when she returned from the office there was a small parcel wrapped in scarlet paper and tied with shiny ribbons waiting for her. She read her name, written in his own writing, and hefted the parcel excitedly from hand to hand wondering what it could be. Then she ripped it open and stared in delight at the exquisite little jade fan, carved so finely it resembled a piece of lace. But the card he had written enchanted her even more: “I found this on Hollywood Road. I thought of you in your Chinese cheongsam, and knew it belonged to you.”
She called his number excitedly. “It’s much too extravagant a present,” she told him, laughing, “but I can’t bear to give it back. I shall just have to buy you something in exchange.”
“I never accept presents from women,” he said, suddenly cold.
She replied, flustered, “Oh, I didn’t mean anything wrong, I just—well, I guess I just wanted to make you as happy as you made me.”
“That’s all I ask in return,” he said gallantly. “And one more thing—have supper again with me tonight.”
Lysandra thought of the dinner she was supposed to attend that night and knew she would cancel it. He took her to a Chinese restaurant in Kowloon and she wore cool-blue linen and carried her exquisite jade fan, wafting it gently to and fro in the sultry air as he entertained her with stories of his family, who went back all the way before Louis, the Sun King, who was the only French king Lysandra knew much about.
She dined with him the next night and the next, and her pretty little apartment was filled with so many fresh flowers it was like an exotic garden. And each night he gave her a different gift: jade combs studded with pearls and yellow diamonds—“the color of your hair,” he told her; a pair of gold-embroidered silk slippers with curled-up toes said to have belonged to the Dragon Empress Cixi that he “thought would appeal to her”; and last—because she forbade any more, a glorious jeweled egg, reputedly Fabergé, that he said he’d bought from an old Russian emigre eking out his last days on a pittance in a tiny apartment surrounded by czarist treasures.
Philip and Irene Chen soon heard of Lysandra’s new suitor and the word about him was not good. “It’s only a flirtation,” Irene guessed worriedly, “but she’s so young and inexperienced. I hope she doesn’t do anything foolish.” And she wished Robert were there to give her a friendly word of warning, but he was doing his internship in Georgetown.
Lysandra took Pierre to see her grandfather’s old mansion on Repulse Bay, now a fabulous museum. She showed him the towering Lai Tsin building and her merchant ships in the harbor. And when he took her in his arms and kissed her and whispered words of passion in her ear, she eagerly agreed to marry him.
“Let’s keep it to ourselves,” he said jubilantly. “We’ll throw a big party later in Paris for all my friends.”
She thought guiltily of her mother, who would have so loved to be at her wedding, but Pierre