Glitter Baby (Wynette, Texas #3)(92)

The song came to an end. She got out of bed and pushed the rewind button to play it again. The music kept her from hearing the door open, and she didn’t know that Alexi had entered until she turned around.

It had been nearly a month since he’d visited her rooms, and she wished that her hair was combed and that her eyes weren’t red from crying. She nervously toyed with the front of her robe. “I—I’m a wreck.”

“But always beautiful,” he replied. “Fix yourself for me, chérie. I’ll wait.”

This was what made him so dangerous. Not his terrible cruelties, but his awful tenderness. Both were intentional, and each, in its own way, entirely sincere.

While he took a seat in the room’s most comfortable chair, she gathered up what she needed and slipped into the bathroom. When she came out, he lay on the bed, all the lamps turned off except one on the opposite side of the room. The dim light hid his unhealthy pallor, as well as the network of fine lines at the corners of her own eyes.

She wore a simple white nightgown. Her toenails were bare of polish and her scrubbed face clean of makeup. She’d threaded a ribbon through her hair.

She lay back on the bed without speaking. He pushed her nightgown to her waist. She kept her legs tightly closed while he caressed her and slowly removed her underpants. When he pushed at her knees, she whimpered as if she were afraid, and he rewarded her for the whimper with one of the deep caresses she liked so much. She tried to push her legs closed again to please him, but he’d begun to kiss the insides of her thighs, and her eyelids drifted shut. This was their unspoken pact. Now that his teenage mistresses were gone, she played the child bride for him, and he let her keep her eyes shut so she could remember Flynn and dream about James Dean.

Usually he left as soon as it was over, but this time he lay still, a sheen of sweat visible on the flaccid skin of his chest. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Would you hand me my robe, chérie? There are some pills in the pocket.”

She got the robe for him and turned away as he pulled out the vial of pills. Instead of making him weaker, his illness had strengthened his power. Now, with his first-floor fortress and the army of watchful assistants carrying out his orders, he’d made himself invulnerable.

She went into the bathroom to shower. When she came out, he was still there, sitting in a chair and sipping a drink. “I ordered whiskey for you.” He pointed with his glass toward a tumbler on a silver tray.

How typically cruel of him. The cruelty coming after the tenderness in a tightly woven pattern of contradictions that had directed the course of her life for more than twenty-five years. “You know I don’t drink anymore.”

“Really, chérie, you shouldn’t lie to me. Do you think I don’t know about the empty bottles your maid finds hidden in the bottom of the wastebasket?”

There were no empty bottles. This was his way of threatening her to make certain she did his bidding. She remembered the pictures of the sanitarium he’d shown her, a collection of ugly gray buildings in the most remote part of the Swiss Alps. “What do you want from me, Alexi?”

“You are a stupid woman. A stupid, helpless woman. I cannot imagine why I ever loved you.” A small muscle ticked near his temple. “I’m sending you away,” he said abruptly.

A chill shot through her. The ugly gray buildings sat like great cold stones in the snow. She thought of the pills hidden away in the bottom of her old jewelry box.

All the rebels were dead now.

He crossed his legs and took a sip from his drink. “The sight of you depresses me. I do not wish to have you near me any longer.”

Death from the pills would be painless. It wouldn’t be like the suffocating salt water that had closed over Natalie’s head or the terrible pain Jimmy had felt when he died. She’d simply go to bed and drift into endless sleep.

The hard Russian eyes of Alexi Savagar sliced through the layers of her skin like a razor. “I am sending you to New York,” he said. “What you do once you are there no longer concerns me.”





Baby Resurrected





Chapter 21




The bronze satin gown hugged her body with its high neck, bare arms, and slashed skirt. She wanted to part her hair in the middle and wear it in a low Spanish knot like a flamenco dancer, but Michel wouldn’t let her. “That big streaky mane is the Glitter Baby’s trademark. For tonight, you have to wear it down.”

Fleur had just moved into her living quarters at the townhouse, but Michel ordered her to dress at the apartment where Kissy could supervise. Her former roommate stuck her head in the bedroom. “The limo’s outside.”

“Wish me luck,” Fleur said.

“Not so fast.” Kissy turned Fleur toward the mirror. “Look at yourself.”

“Come on, Kissy, I don’t have time—”

“Stop squirming and look in the mirror.”

Fleur glanced at her reflection. The gown was exquisite. Instead of deemphasizing her height, Michel’s lean design accentuated it. The diagonal slash of skirt started at mid-thigh and crossed over her body, offering tantalizing glimpses of long legs through the filmy black point d’esprit flounce that filled the space.

Slowly she lifted her eyes. In a few weeks, she’d be twenty-six, and her face had a new maturity. She catalogued her separate parts—the wide-spaced green eyes, the marking-pen brows, the mouth that spread all over—and then, for an instant, it all came together, and her face finally seemed to belong to her.