Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [215]
Lysandra wasted no time: she called the maid and instructed her to pack all her things. Then she took a pair of scissors and went through Pierre’s closets systematically snipping his beautifully tailored jackets to shreds, leaving a jumbled heap of flannel pinstripes and chequered cashmere rags on the floor. Her bags were waiting and she put on her new blue Dior matching dress and coat and then she opened the brätle of champagne and drank a toast to the Mandarin, her grandfather, whose wise words would from now be indelibly printed on her brain and whose advice she would always follow. She emptied the rest of the champagne over Pierre’s expensive silk ties and ordered her bags sent downstairs. Then she went to the airport and caught the next flight out to New York, and from there home to San Francisco, to cry on her mother’s shoulder.
Gossip has a short fuse and the explosive story of how Prince Pierre had found his clothes snipped to shreds on the floor of a Paris hotel suite he had not even paid for, and that Lysandra had cut him off without a shilling, made its way back to Hong Kong before her. And it was added to the fund of Lysandra Lai Tsin stories that made up her legend by the time Matt Jarrad met her, thirteen years later.
The sun had completed its descent into the South China Sea and Lysandra turned from her office window with a sigh; Pierre was only an unpleasant memory now, she had divorced him quickly and her attorneys had crushed his attempts to claim part of the Lai Tsin fortune. It had been a nine-days’ wonder in the international newspapers, nothing more, but it had left her wounded.
Robert Chen had returned to Hong Kong to work in the hospital there and now he headed up the neurological wing funded by Lai Tsin. He was her friend and confidant, and he, too, was married to his work, so they understood each other. She devoted her time to the company, only occasionally dating men whose backgrounds she knew and with whom she had business in common, but she never had allowed herself to fall in love again. Until Matt.
It was late. She turned from the window, picked up her purse from her desk and strode quickly to the door. She nodded good night to her secretary, who breathed a sigh of relief and picked up the phone to alert the waiting chauffeur that Madame was on her way down.
Lysandra stepped into the waiting dark-green Rolls, gazing blankly out the window at the crawling traffic as she headed homeward. “Home” was a sprawling, luxurious white “cottage,” half-hidden behind hedges of oleanders and jacaranda on elegant Po Shan Road, and for a single brief year she had shared it with Matt, not caring what the taipans of Hong Kong or anyone else thought.
Matt was an adventurer, she’d known that when she’d met him. He was handsome and easy-going, an artist who traveled the world with a single ancient beat-up leather satchel containing his few shirts, an extra pair of jeans, and his precious paints and brushes.
She had met him at an exhibition of his paintings at a smart new gallery on Nathan Road. She and everyone else had been dressed to the nines in sequined chiffon and black tie, but the artist had turned up in faded jeans and a badly cut, collarless white shirt. He had a tall, rangy body, dark-red hair still wet from the shower and gray-green eyes that seemed to see right through her self-contained facade. His generous mouth turned up at the corners in a half-smile as he watched her sizing him up.
“Sorry about the shirt,” he said. “When I saw how smart the gallery was and the words ‘champagne and canapés’ on the invitations, I dashed to the tailor around the corner and had him run up half a dozen of these in an hour.” He grinned, his eyes lighting with delight. “I’ve been living in a hut on a beach in Bali for the past year; I guess I’m just not fit for society anymore. I’ve forgotten all the rules.”
“You don’t look like a man who obeys rules, anyway,” she said.
Their eyes met for a long moment and then he said, “I guess you could say that’s true.”
She lingered