The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [200]
Azaylee’s head shot up. “Oh, Missie,” she said, glancing imploringly at her, and Missie stared back at her, surprised.
“I understand,” Villaloso replied coolly. “Another day perhaps?”
Azaylee stared after him as he walked away without even a glance in her direction. After all that had happened between them last night….
“Whatever’s the matter with you?” Missie grumbled. “You would think I had refused to let you be Queen of the Rose Bowl Parade instead of sending that nasty man on his way. He’s a gambler and a womanizer and I’m certainly not going on any picnic with him, let alone to a racetrack.”
“How can you say that?” Azaylee muttered angrily. “You barely know him.”
Missie’s eyebrows rose in a question. “And I suppose you know him better? Now let’s finish breakfast. I’ve arranged for the pro to give you both a tennis lesson. You look as if you could use a good run around the court to put some life back into you.” She inspected their faces critically. “Goodness, we come here for a rest and a holiday and you both look like ghosts.”
Rachel sighed, remembering the night spent throwing up, and said feelingly, “I guess it was the lemonade….” She put her hand to her mouth with a little gasp. “I mean, maybe we’ve been drinking too much lemonade.”
“Too much food and not enough exercise,” Missie agreed, sweeping them quickly from the dining room before Villaloso could speak to them again.
Missie kept the two of them busy for the next few days, sending them to tennis lessons morning and afternoon, organizing times for proper swimming, not just playing about in the water, with twenty laps to be completed each time, taking them for long walks and sending them to bed early. But when the end of the holiday came and they were driving back to Los Angeles, she wondered worriedly if she had overdone it. Azaylee looked so pale and tired and Rachel was so quiet. She watched her, puzzled, as the miles sped by, because whenever Azaylee’s eye caught hers she could swear she looked frightened. She shrugged away the idea as ridiculous. After all, what could the girl possibly be frightened of? She was just returning from a lovely holiday.
Missie had been thinking of Zev a lot while she was away and she had come to a decision. If Zev Abramski was not going to ask her to marry him, then she would ask him.
She dressed simply the night they got back, in a plain blue skirt and white blouse. She brushed her softly waved cap of short bronze hair, wishing she hadn’t cut it—Zev had loved her long hair so much. She sprayed on her old favorite lily perfume from Elise and inspected herself critically in the mirror, wondering how different this twice-married, twice-widowed twenty-nine-year-old woman looked to him from the eighteen-year-old naïve girl he had first met. Rosa said she still walked like a young deer, and despite all her sorrows and struggles her face looked the same. Just the eyes were warier now.
On an impulse, she tugged the old cardboard valise from beneath the bed and tipped its contents onto the pink coverlet. The diamonds in the tiara glittered and the huge emerald looked the color of the sea off Constantinople, shot with sunlight. Russia and the past had never seemed farther away, and she realized that since she had been with Zev she had barely thought of the Cheka and the Arnhaldts, except in her dreams. They were buried in the past along with the Ivanoff treasure.
She picked up Misha’s photograph and gazed at it tenderly, and then she took Azaylee’s picture from her dresser and compared the two. There was no resemblance; the girl was just like her mother. She held his picture to her breast wondering whether after all these years she should show it to Azaylee and tell her the truth; but the doctor had warned her that she was not strong enough mentally to cope with the double shock of finding her real parents only to lose them to a cruel death.
“I’ll always love you, Misha,” she whispered, pressing him against her heart, “but you understand,