Glitter Baby (Wynette, Texas #3)(24)

His English was as American as hers, and that made her hate him even more. “He doesn’t scare me,” she said belligerently.

“That’s because you don’t know him.”

“I guess some of us are lucky.” She made the words as nasty as she could.

“I guess.” He walked over to the door and began flicking off the ceiling lights from a panel of switches. “You’d better go now. I have to lock up before he finds out we’ve been in here.”

She hated him for being so tiny and pretty. A puff of air could blow him away. “I’ll bet you do everything he tells you to. Like a scared rabbit.”

He shrugged.

She couldn’t face him a moment longer. She dashed through the door and rushed out into the garden. All those years she’d worked so hard to win her father’s love by being the bravest, the fastest, and the strongest. The joke was on her.



Michel gazed at the door his sister had disappeared through. He shouldn’t have let himself hope they’d be friends, but he’d wanted it so much. He’d needed something, someone, to help fill the aching chasm left by the death of the grandmother who’d raised him. Solange had said he was her chance to make up for past mistakes.

It was his grandmother who’d overheard his mother screaming the news to his father that she was pregnant with Michel. Belinda had told Alexi she wouldn’t give any more love to the child she was carrying than he’d given to the baby abandoned at the Couvent de l’Annonciation. His grandmother said his father had laughed at Belinda’s threats. He’d said Belinda couldn’t resist loving her own flesh and blood. That this baby would make her forget the other one.

But his father had been wrong. Solange was the one who’d held him, and played with him, and comforted him when he was hurt. Michel should be glad she was finally free from her suffering, but he wanted her back, puffing away on her lipstick-stained Gauloise, stroking his hair as he knelt in front of her, offering all the love that the others in the house on the Rue de la Bienfaisance denied him.

She was the one who’d negotiated the uneasy truce between his parents. Belinda had agreed to be seen in public with Michel in return for twice-yearly visits with her daughter. But the truce hadn’t changed the fact that his mother didn’t love him. She said he was his father’s child. But Alexi didn’t want him, either, not when he’d seen that Michel couldn’t be like him.

All the trouble in his family had happened because of his sister, the mysterious Fleur. Not even his grandmother knew why Fleur had been sent away.

He left the garage and made his way back to his rooms in the attic. He’d gradually transported his belongings up there until no one remembered exactly how it was that the heir to the Savagar fortune came to be living in the old servants’ quarters.

He lay on his bed and locked his hands behind his head. A white parachute hung as a canopy over his small iron bed. He’d bought it in an army surplus store not far from the Boston prep school he attended. He liked the way the parachute rippled in the moving air currents and sheltered him like a great, silken womb.

On the whitewashed walls he’d hung his precious collection of photographs. Lauren Bacall in Helen Rose’s classic red sheath from Designing Woman. Carroll Baker swinging from a chandelier in The Carpetbaggers, clad in Edith Head’s gaudy sprinkle of beads and ostrich plumes. Above his desk, Rita Hayworth wore Jean Louis’s famous Gilda gown, and, by her side, Shirley Jones struck a pose in the deliciously tawdry pink slip she’d worn in Elmer Gantry. The women and their wonderful costumes enchanted him.

He picked up his sketch pad and began drawing a tall, thin girl, with bold slashes for eyebrows and a wide mouth. His telephone rang. It was André. Michel’s fingers began to tremble around the receiver.

“I just heard the wretched news about your grandmother,” André said. “I’m so sorry. This is very difficult for you.”

Michel’s throat constricted at the warm show of sympathy.

“Is it possible for you to slip out this evening? I—I want to see you. I want to comfort you, chéri.”

“I’d like that,” Michel said softly. “I’ve missed you.”

“And I’ve missed you. England was beastly, but Danielle insisted on staying through the weekend.”

Michel didn’t like being reminded of André’s wife, but soon André would leave her, and the two of them would move to the south of Spain and live in a fishing cottage. In the mornings Michel would sweep the terra-cotta floors, plump the cushions, and set out earthenware pitchers filled with flowers and wicker bowls piled with ripe fruit. In the afternoons, while André read him poetry, Michel would create beautiful clothes on the sewing machine he’d taught himself to use. At night they would love each other to the music of the Gulf of Cadiz lapping at the sandy shore outside their window. That’s the way Michel dreamed it.

“I could meet you in an hour,” he said softly.

“An hour it is.” André’s voice dropped in pitch. “Je t’adore, Michel.”

Michel choked back his tears. “Je t’adore, André.”



Fleur had never worn such an elegant dress, a long-sleeved black sheath, with small, overlapping leaves picked out in tiny black beads at one shoulder. Belinda put Fleur’s hair up in a loose chignon and fastened polished onyx drops at her ears. “There,” her mother said as she stepped back to observe her handiwork. “Let him call you a peasant now.”