Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [216]
He looked searchingly at her and her heart jumped almost to her throat; she had never met anyone like this, a free spirit, a man who lived by his own rules.
She took him back to her lovely house on Po Shan Road and fed him scrambled eggs and champagne and when he touched her cheek and then kissed her she knew that what she was feeling was new. He asked her about her life and she told him about her family and then about Pierre. “I’ve never met a man yet who didn’t think of my money as soon as he met me,” she said challengingly.
He looked at her coolly and said, “Well, I guess you have now, Miss Moneybags. All I can think of is that your skin is like new cream and your eyes change color from aquamarine to sapphire in the candlelight, and that your hair should be tumbling down your back, not confined with jeweled combs. You’re a pre-Raphaelite maiden and I don’t want your money. All I want is to paint you.”
She looked at him astonished. “You don’t want to make love to me?”
He grinned and took her face between his hands. “That as well,” he admitted.
That had been a year ago; a year of passionate lovemaking and passionate fights because she had kept her personal vow to devote her life to running the Lai Tsin Corporation, and maintained her strict business regime, leaving the house at seven-thirty each morning, often not returning until eight or nine at night. He would be there waiting for her, his lanky body propped against the verandah rail, a glass of whiskey in his hand, and champagne—her only drink—waiting in the silver bucket, beaded with icy drops. She had told herself sternly she wasn’t going to give up what she was—who she was—for any man, and each night the distance seemed to grow between them.
“Drop it,” he told her one night. “Let it all go, Lysandra. The company doesn’t need you on a day-to-day basis, those guys could run it standing on their heads. Live your own life—be a woman for a change.” He looked at her with those quiet, gray-green eyes and said, “Marry me, Lysandra.”
She shrugged away his proposal, dwelling angrily on the fact that he thought the Lai Tsin Corporation could manage without her. Her—its dedicated taipan. He’d waited for her answer but she hadn’t given him one and he turned away with a wry smile, and she thought nervously that his eyes looked sad.
He had left her just as easily as he’d met her. “Where are you going?” she’d asked, puzzled, as he’d flung his few possessions into the battered leather satchel.
“Away,” he’d replied quietly.
“Away?” Her eyes were wide with the question.
“Away from you, my love,” he’d said, with his endearing lopsided smile.
And then he’d slung his bag over his shoulder and with a final glance from those quiet gray-green eyes he’d turned and walked out of their bedroom, out of the beautiful white house on the smartest road on the Peak, and out of her life forever.
The Rolls turned into the driveway and she stepped quickly from it and into the house. She glanced as she always did at the verandah, half expecting to see him there waiting for her, but of course he wasn’t, and she walked disconsolately through to her bedroom. Their room, as she always thought of it now, but without the clutter of his paints on the bathroom sink, and his watch—bought for a few dollars from a Cathay Road street vendor—lying on the bedside table, without his sweater tossed over the chair and his books on her shelves, the house felt like a silent tomb. No one would be coming, there was no need to dress, so she showered quickly and changed into a soft gray cashmere robe.
Ah Sing, who was really too old to look after her any longer but held an honorary position over the servants, came bustling into the room. Her face was as crumpled as a pickled walnut, her gray hair was scraped back from her wrinkled brow and she still insisted on wearing the traditional black smock and baggy pants of her profession. “It’s come, Young Mistress,” she said in Chinese,