Goldie.
You move about the room in tandem, arms linked, smiling coolly as you’re introduced to my friends. You in your superbly cut dinner jacket—a gift, I assume, and very generous. Her in plum-colored moiré that clings like a second skin. She’s handsome, I’ll grant. Well put together and perfectly made up. But with a few more miles on her than most men your age would find appealing. But perhaps you like that sort of woman.
I watch the way your eyes take in the room, as if you’re taking notes, gathering names and faces, pairing them with fortunes perhaps. I pretend not to care where you are as cocktails drag on, to not notice you chatting with Teddy, but it’s impossible. Your presence—the fact of you—sets my nerves jangling. It isn’t the way your eyes snag mine from time to time. Or the tiny smile that lifts the corners of your mouth when they do. It’s that I can’t think why you’ve turned up again like the proverbial bad penny. What do you want with us? With me?
I’m relieved when we’re finally called to dinner. The seating arrangements have been decided in advance, staked out with place cards of creamy ivory vellum, which will allow me to keep an eye on you from a safe distance.
Strange that the word safe should pop into my head at such a moment, as if your mere presence poses some kind of danger. It’s ridiculous, really. How could I be unsafe in such a lovely room, surrounded by people with such impeccable pedigrees?
I smile serenely as I look about for Teddy, expecting him to join me. And then I see that your place card and not his rests beside mine. A fact that doesn’t appear to surprise you at all.
My fiancé has been seated at the opposite end of the table—beside your date, conveniently enough. Her eyes lift to mine as I take my seat, as if she knows I’m watching. I expect to see jealousy, the petulant glare of a woman whose escort has been lured away by another. I’ve grown used to that kind of look from women. Especially those who had hopes of landing Teddy for themselves. But there’s only a cool appraisal in the look she gives me. Watchful. Curious. As if she’s trying to decide what to make of me.
I’m the first to look away, unsettled by her open regard, but I see your eyes snag hers for the merest instant. I don’t know how you arranged it—you never did say—but something about the look leaves me certain that this second meeting is no accident. Out of politeness—or perhaps because I’ve already drunk too many cocktails—I allow you to draw me into conversation. We speak of horses, or at least we begin that way. My newfound interest in Thoroughbred racing, my recent trip to Saratoga for the Spinaway Stakes, my birthday present from my father.
Eventually, or perhaps inevitably, we land on the subject of breeding. Whether it was my mention or yours, I do not recall. You ask how I happened to become interested in such a subject. You’re so condescending and snide, so sure of yourself and your smooth British charm, that I find myself gritting my teeth. You’re goading me with that bland smile of yours, writing me off as some rich little miss who asked for a pony for her birthday and got two, but I refuse to be underestimated. Suddenly, I want very badly to put you in your place.
And just like that we’re no longer talking about horses. You know it and I know it, but we both keep sparring, raising the stakes with each clever innuendo and double entendre, skating perilously close to the edge of indecency.
It’s a place I’ve never been, this sensual war of words. And yet it feels startlingly familiar. A déjà vu of the body. A knowing—of where it might lead and how it might end. All at once, I understand the danger I sensed earlier. It’s this. This moment of needing to prove something to you. And perhaps to myself. Something even I don’t understand.
You’re smirking, clearly pleased with yourself, and I’m furious for becoming tangled in my own web. I don’t know how to get out of it without exposing myself as the novice I am, and I’d sooner bite off my own tongue than give you that satisfaction. And so I play on, brash, reckless, and completely out of my depth, as I suspect you well know. I mean to shock you, but you’re not shocked at all. Far from it.
In the end, you call my bluff.
Your eyes hold fast to mine—a deeper blue than I had previously noted, with small gold flecks around the pupils—and suddenly I’m terribly warm, which I suppose is what usually happens when one plays with fire.
“I should like very much to see these fine animals of yours,” you say with that lazy smile you’ve perfected to keep little fools like me off-balance.
“And I should very much like to show them to you,” I answer, because what else can I say? You’ve laid your cards on the table, and I must do the same. “Perhaps we can manage it sometime.”
“I’m free tomorrow afternoon,” you suggest smoothly. “And I rather fancy a trip out to the Hamptons. I hear it’s pretty country.”
And just like that, I’m caught.
FIVE
ASHLYN
Restoration is a long and involved business, particularly when the damage is extensive. Progress will be slow. Expect setbacks. Exercise patience. Persist.
—Ashlyn Greer, The Care & Feeding of Old Books
September 28, 1984
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Ashlyn reminded herself to focus on the job at hand as she worked to remove a strip of old linen tape from the second of Gertrude’s Nancy Drew books, but it was difficult when all she could think about was the mystery surrounding her latest literary find.
After several chapters of Regretting Belle with its decidedly masculine slant, it had been fascinating to immerse herself in Forever, and Other Lies and see the lovers’ first meeting through Belle’s eyes. The details of that night in the ballroom of the St. Regis. The nearly identical lines of dialogue. The mutual, slow-smoldering attraction. It all synced up neatly.
Perhaps . . . too neatly?
She was convinced the books weren’t actually works of fiction, that the characters were real, that the love story—if it could be called a love story—was real. But what if she had it wrong? What if they were something else entirely? What if they’d been conceived as a kind of metafiction, a literary gimmick designed to hook readers with the illusion of two distinctly different voices? A pair of lovers with old axes to grind. A kind of romantic whodunit.