“No more stories.”
“—about these shoes,” he said, eyebrows lifted. When she nodded, he continued. “I bought them the summer I interned at Goldman. Some of the guys in my internship cohort were like me—smart, hungry, working their way through school—but some of them were from families that built the original houses in the Hamptons, families that married into the Rockefellers and the Carnegies. That summer I got invited to do things I’d never seen or done before, sailing to Newport for the weekend, that sort of thing. My dad sold plumbing supplies. My mother taught school until she took early retirement a couple years ago. For vacations we went camping in a fifth wheel, hiked the Appalachian Trail. Not sailing. Not to the Hamptons. Those guys all had these shoes,” he said, and nudged his with his big toe. “I didn’t. I had sneakers. Cheap sneakers, at that.”
“So you bought those shoes.”
“I bought these shoes. And wore them, and the Wayfarers, even though I looked like a total poser in them and couldn’t tell aft from bow, until they had enough saltwater and sand and sweat in them to pass for a resident’s shoes. I still remember the day someone asked me for directions because I looked like a local. By then I knew I was going to make it. I was going to fucking own Wall Street. But I’d made it on a totally different level the day a tourist in the Hamptons asked me for directions.”
She didn’t laugh at him. “They gave you confidence.”
“Yup.”
“Why are you wearing them today?”
She wasn’t going to let him off the hook. Not Simone, with her redhead’s temper and her deft fingers and her eye for precision. He tipped back the bottle, savored the slide of liquid down his throat. “I wanted to remember that kid. He seems like a stranger, a kid from a story. Philly boy takes the city by storm. That kind of story.”
“Those are the stories we tell most frequently,” she said. “But I don’t know that they’re the best stories. I like stories of failures, of reinventions, of second chances.”
He seized the opening like he used to storm a margin call. “Tell me why you left France. Why the Fashion District? Who are you?” he asked.
“You tell me about me,” she said.
He liked the way she nudged him with her knee, like they were friends, flirting friends, touching friends. “What makes you think I know anything about you?”
“A big component of investment banking is research. You are a successful investment banker. Therefore you are a competent researcher, or you employ them.”
Jealousy burned as badly as his irritated stomach lining. “Did you learn that from Stéphane?” he asked, because she had him dead to rights. He’d researched her, and knew all about Stéphane Roussel, the French finance genius who helped her start up Irresistible.
She lifted one eyebrow, calling him on his bullshit, and the confidence radiating from her nearly blew all his circuits. He had a sudden image of her taking her life by the hand and giving it a sharp spin, like a weighted globe, just to see what shook out.
“You are Simone Demarchelier, part of the fifth generation of Demarchelier House, designing clothes for over a hundred and fifty years. You took a degree at the Sorbonne, then joined your family’s house, starting in the ready-to-wear collection and moving on to couture design. You stayed for almost a decade until you suddenly split from the family business, moved to New York, and opened Irresistible. You’ve not gone out of your way to hide your connections, nor have you played them up. You bought this building with a down payment from your own money, and Stéphane arranged the financing for the rest of it. How did I do?”
“Very well,” she said. “But it’s all public knowledge.”
“The next step is the insider information we’re not supposed to use.”
“Ah. And to whom did you speak for the juicy gossip?”
“No one.”
“Thank you.”
“I want to learn you for myself.” He hoped, somewhere inside, that she’d extend the same courtesy when the shit hit the fan. “Why did you leave your family’s house? Most designers would sell their mothers to work for Demarchelier.”
“They were increasingly focused on the brand. I know that’s part of the business now, but I’m a bit of a purist. I wanted to control the process from beginning to end, every element from fabric to design to showroom space, and I wanted to do it on my own.”
“Some people call this your vanity project.”
She shrugged, clearly unconcerned with what people thought. “I answer to myself, which is easy enough to say when I have Demarchelier as a fallback option. Perhaps that is a vanity project.”
“But you don’t give a damn what people think.”
“I don’t,” she said. “I stopped asking for permission. Life got shockingly simple when I did.”