Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas #1)(10)

Onassis, with his beaklike nose and narrow eyes, covered even at night with sinister wraparound sunglasses, frightened her, but she obediently stepped into his embrace. He had given her a pretty necklace shaped like a starfish the night before, and she didn't want to risk sacrificing any other presents that might come her way.

As he lifted her onto his lap, she glanced over at Chloe, who had cuddled next to her current lover, Giancarlo Morandi, the Italian Formula One driver. Francesca knew all about lovers because Chloe had explained them to her. Lovers were fascinating men who took care of women and made them feel beautiful. Francesca couldn't wait to be grown up enough to have a lover of her own. Not Giancarlo, though. Sometimes he went off with other women and made her mummy cry. Instead, Francesca wanted a lover who would read books to her and take her to the circus and smoke a pipe like some of the men she had seen walking with their little girls along the Serpentine.

“Attention everyone!” Chloe sat up and clapped her hands in the air above her head, like one of the flamenco dancers Francesca had seen perform the last time they were in Torremolinos. “My beautiful daughter will now illustrate what abysmally ignorant peasants all of you are.” Derisive hoots greeted this announcement, and Francesca heard Onassis chuckle in her ear.

Chloe snuggled close to Giancarlo again, rubbing one leg of her white Courrèges hip-huggers against his calf while she tilted her head in Francesca's direction. “Pay no attention to them, my sweet,” she declared loftily. “They're riffraff of the very worst sort. I can't think why I bother with them.” The couturier giggled. As Chloe pointed to a low mahogany table, the wedge-shaped front of her new Sassoon haircut swept forward over her cheek, forming a hard, straight edge. “Educate them, will you, Francesca? No one except your uncle Ari is the slightest bit discriminating.”

Francesca slid off Onassis's knee and walked toward the table. She could feel everyone's eyes on her and she deliberately prolonged the moment, taking slow steps, keeping her shoulders back, pretending she was a tiny princess on the way to her throne. As she reached the table and saw the six small gold-rimmed porcelain bowls, she smiled and flipped her hair away from her face. Kneeling on the rug in front of the table, she regarded the bowls thoughtfully.

The contents shone against the white porcelain of the bowls, six mounds of glistening wet caviar in various shades of red, gray, and beige. Her hand touched the end bowl, which held a generous heap of pearly red eggs. “Salmon roe,” she said, pushing it away. “Not worth considering. True caviar comes only from the sturgeon of the Caspian Sea.”

Onassis laughed and one of the movie stars applauded. Francesca quickly disposed of two other bowls. “These are both lumpfish caviar, so we can't consider them either.”

The decorator leaned toward Chloe. “Information gleaned at the breast,” he inquired, “or through osmosis?”

Chloe gave him a wicked leer. “At the breast, of course.”

“And what glorious ones they are, cara. “ Giancarlo ran his hand over the front of Chloe's bare-midriff top.

“This is beluga,” Francesca announced, not pleased at having the attention slip from herself, especially after she'd spent the entire day with a governess who kept muttering terrible things just because Francesca refused to do her boring multiplication tables. She placed the tip of her finger on the edge of the center bowl. “You'll notice that beluga has the largest grains.” Shifting her hand to the next bowl, she declared, “This is sevruga. The color is the same, but the grains are smaller. And this is osetra, my very favorite. The eggs are almost as large as the beluga, but the color is more golden.”

She heard a satisfying chorus of laughter mixed with applause, and then everyone began congratulating Chloe on her clever child. At first Francesca smiled at the compliments, but then her happiness began to fade as she realized that everyone was looking at Chloe instead of at her. Why was her mother getting all the attention when she wasn't the one who'd done the trick? Clearly, the grownups would never let her sit on the afterdeck with them tomorrow. Angry and frustrated, Francesca jumped to her feet and swept her arm across the table, sending the porcelain bowls flying and smearing caviar all over Aristotle Onassis's polished teak deck.

“Francesca!” Chloe exclaimed. “What's wrong, my darling?”

Onassis scowled and muttered something in Greek that sounded vaguely threatening to Francesca. She puffed out her bottom lip and tried to think how to recover from her mistake. Her small problem with temper tantrums was supposed to be a secret—something that, under no circumstances, could ever be displayed in front of Chloe's friends. “I'm sorry, Mummy,” she said. “It was an accident.”

“Of course it was, pet,” Chloe replied. “Everyone knows that.”

Onassis's expression of displeasure did not ease, however, and Francesca knew stronger action was called for. With a dramatic cry of anguish, she fled across the deck to his side and flung herself in his lap. “I'm sorry, Uncle Ari,” she sobbed, her eyes instantly filling with tears—one of her very best tricks. “It was an accident, really it was!” The tears leaked over her bottom lids and trickled down her cheeks as she concentrated very hard on not flinching from the gaze of those black wraparound sunglasses.

“I love you, Uncle Ari,” she sighed, turning the full force of her pitiful tear-streaked face upward in an expression she had gleaned from an old Shirley Temple movie. “I love you, and I wish you were my very own daddy.”