Ballet Shoes and Engine Grease (29 page)

Someone spoke.
“Shall I stop it, Sir?”

Soames
, Crimson thought. It had been Soames.

Uncle Stephan flapped away the question
and resumed talking. “You have fire in you, Crimson. Maybe I’m an
old fool, but I feel you might do well with my son. Melt that ice
around him. That’s why I fixed it up so that he’ll have to marry
you, or hang around to help you. So sue me, if I did wrong.” He
gave a wheezing burst of laughter. “All it has cost you is six
months of your time when you’d be moping around anyway, trying to
figure out what to do with your life. Am I right? Am I right?” He
stared at her from the screen, sunken eyes still sharp.

Crimso
n found herself nodding, telling a dead man that he’d been
right.

“
I know, I know,” Uncle Stephan said.
“You’ll ask, why in God’s name did I risk the future of Constantine
Motors on a bit of matchmaking? And I’ll answer that it needed
risking. The world’s changing. My grandfather and my father built
that company on testosterone. Toys for boys. And I kept up the same
style of management. But the world is changing. Women have power
now. Real power. Lots of it. Hell, Maggie Thatcher ran the UK, and
now in Germany they have that woman who is smarter than all the men
put together. I wanted to inject a bit of woman’s thinking into the
business. I hope you did that, Crimson. And now we get to the
difficult part.”

A sleeve appeared in the picture as
S
oames passed Uncle
Stephan a glass of water. He drank a few sips, handed back the
glass. “I’ll have one more bottle of whiskey before I die. But
don’t tell your mother.” He winked at Crimson from the screen.
“Now, to the difficult part. Of course, I couldn’t really risk the
business. Not
really
. So, I’ve
made a second will. My final one. I’m going to put it in a parcel
with this tape and leave it with your mother to mail to my lawyer a
few weeks before Christmas when your time running Constantine
Motors is up. If she forgets…?” He let the question hang in the
air. “Well, if she forgets, the final joke is on her, and the rest
of us will never know.”

Appearing to tire out, he gave a small,
careless wave.
“Goodbye,
Crimson. Sorry if I messed up your life. I had to try. I wanted to
show Nick that I love him, and I tried to do it by fixing him up
with a good woman, a woman like Tamara, who has so much love in her
that she brightens up a man’s life, like a burst of sunshine. I’m
going off to drink that whiskey now. Sorry about the obsolete
technology. I’m about to die and Soames knows how to operate this
old equipment. Over and out.”

The
image on the screen faded into a hissing
snowstorm.

“
Son of a bitch.” Nick, who had remained on
his feet, went to the door, opened it and called for the lawyer,
who’d been standing outside in the corridor, talking on the
telephone.

“Has Miss Mills watched the tape?” Adam
Andrews asked.

“
She has,” Nick assured him. “We both have,
and it seems there is a new will. I assume it is the document you
referred to earlier. What’s the bottom line?”

The lawyer pulled out a notepad from his
pocket and glanced at it before speaking.
“Myrna Constantine gets twenty percent. Esmeralda
Mills gets twenty percent, to be held in trust, eventually to pass
on to her daughter Crimson Mills. Nicholas Constantine gets the
rest.”

Crimson watched Nick, saw
a look of triumph flicker
across his face. Triumph, and relief, and a flash of sharp, tearing
anger at the charade of it. She, on the other hand, felt frozen.
She’d heard someone describe the sensation not too long ago. It
might have been Nick.
I froze. I went icy cold
. That’s exactly how she felt now. Icy cold and
frozen.

****

“
Come on, Crimson.” Nick shook her
shoulder, but she refused to get out of the chair and leave the
conference room. The lawyer had gone to process the new will for
probate. Peter Tomlinson, who had hovered down the corridor and had
been the first to hear the news, had gone to brief the other
directors, leaving Nick alone with Crimson.

“
It’s good news,” he told her. “If you
want, I can give you twenty percent of the stock. Then we’ll be
exactly where we would have been if you had pulled it off. Why so
glum? Hey, Crimson, wake up. Look at me. Ground control to
Crimson.” He smoothed a strand of hair behind her ear, but she just
sat there, as if she were a mechanical toy with the battery run
out. He was getting worried. Perhaps he should call a
doctor.

“
What’s wrong, Crimsy?” he tried again.
“Talk to me, baby.”

Finally, she looked at him. Her eyes
wer
e huge and dark. He
could see shadows of hurt in them, the kind of hurt that cut deep
inside. “I failed,” she said, and her voice sounded very small. “I
always fail. When I was a kid, people in Longwood looked down on my
family. My dad was a drunk. Mom kept a roof over our heads,
although I think she sometimes got food stamps from welfare. I
promised myself that one day I’d be somebody. That I’d show them
all.”

“
You—”

She
cut him off. “I was not a bright kid. I worked hard at
school, but I was never more than mediocre. So, becoming a famous
lawyer or doctor or winning the Nobel Prize wasn’t on the cards.
Then I discovered ballet. And it filled me with purpose. I’d be the
new Margot Fonteyn, the new Natalia Makarova. I practiced until my
bones ached and my toes bled. But I never made the grade.
Strictly
corps de ballet
.
Even then, I was barely good enough. It was hard, always having to
worry that there were others who were better than me, and I’d be
dropped the next season. And here…”

She made
a small, futile gesture with one hand to encompass
the building they were in. “Finally, I thought that I had achieved
something. But even here I failed. Two hundred thousand dollars
short of what was needed.”

Nick studied her pale face. Her eyes were
bright with t
ears, but
she was refusing to let them fall. He squatted beside her and
cupped her soft cheek in his palm. “Don’t you understand?” he said.
“It no longer matters. That crazy will is invalid. It’s been
superseded by a more recent will. It makes no difference that you
missed the profit target.”

“
But that’s just it, Nicholas.” A frisson
traveled over him as he heard her stilted, formal voice. He
couldn’t recall Crimson ever calling him Nicholas. Perhaps right in
the beginning. Now, it seemed to symbolize the wedge between
them.

“
It matters to me,” she said. “And what
matters to me even more is that your father expected me to fail. He
made me try, but he knew that I would fail. Like I always do. He
set me up for failure, and it hurts.”

Nick didn’t know what to say, how to
console her.
In the end,
he merely stood beside her, leaned over her, and enfolded her in
his arms, for an instant shielding her from the world.

He’d never understood that a beneath
Crimson’
s prickly manner
lurked a sense of inferiority, a lack of confidence. Memories
rushed through his mind of how he had taunted her in the beginning.
No wonder she’d thrown him out on his ear. No wonder she’d assumed
that he’d never marry her for any other reason than financial
gain.

****

One. T
wo. Three
. Crimson gripped her ankles, pressed her nose to
her knees and held the stretch, her legs straight on the parquet
floor. Springsteen boomed on the headphones. Through the big
picture window, New York City skyline glittered in the December
sun, pristine beneath the thin coating of snow that had fallen
overnight.

Almost a month ago, after the auction,
w
hen she had broken free
from Nick’s embrace and rushed out of the office, she’d sought
refuge in the apartment above Myrna and Esmeralda’s shop. A week
later, she had moved into Nick’s condo. Instead of approaching her
directly with the offer, he’d passed the keys to her through
Esmeralda.

L
oneliness welled up inside her, a hollow ache that she
tried to banish with physical exercise. She had thought he would
come after her. The sense of failure that had caused her to flee,
the shock of being used as a pawn in a charade, had faded in a day
or two. In its wake had arrived an even more dismal feeling. That
of a discarded female.

Nick had simply cut her loose.

Oh,
he called her every few days, hurried telephone calls to
make sure she was all right. He’d sent her emails, too, telling her
to be patient, telling her that he was busy and would come and see
her as soon as the business shut down for Christmas.

She also missed her coworkers, Hank and
Peter and Jorge and Anna, although they were keeping in touch.
Short, evasive emails—everything was well, they informed her, and
said they were working hard
under the new management
. Which, of course, was Nick.

A
s Crimson pressed her nose to her knees again, an icy touch
landed on her back, cold fingers stroking the sliver of exposed
skin between her leggings and tank top. She shrieked, scrambled up
and ripped the headphones from her ears. A stream of music was left
floating in the air, like a thin, distant cry.

Nick
.
He was dressed casually, in a green sweater and jeans, his
hair windblown, a touch of color in his cheeks from the chill
outside. Crimson felt her heart give a single hard thump. Had he
come to make her face what she had refused to think about? She had
ignored the passage of days and weeks, just as she had ignored the
tenderness in her breasts and the slight nausea in the
mornings.

“
Sorry.” Nick’s eyes were intent on her. “I
knocked before I came in.”

“
Do you want to move back in for the
holidays?” Crimson asked.

She knew Constantine Motors was shutting
down, from today, until the beginning of January. Foreboding seized
her. Was she going to become a homeless person? Her mind filled
with images of ragged creatures huddled in cardboard boxes beneath
bridges.

“
I’ve come to bring you a Christmas
present,” Nick said. “Three, actually.”

Her gaze shot
up to his face. He looked tired. Tired, but
elated. An odd, almost tender expression played around his mouth.
Foolishly, good manners made her stammer out an apology. “Sorry…I
wasn’t expecting to see you…I haven’t anything for you…”

Except, of course, the
du
bious news that she
refused to contemplate.

“
It’s okay.” Nick indicated the ballet
slippers on her feet. “Practicing?”

“
I thought I might get a job teaching.”
Granted, in a few months she might swell up like a balloon and be
as agile as a baby elephant. “Or, maybe an administrative job with
a dance company, now that I have some business experience,” she
hastened to add.

“
So, you’re not pregnant, then?”

Phew
. Talk about a direct attack. Slowly, as
inevitable as a tide, color washed up her neck and spread across
her cheeks. “I…I don’t know.”

“
You don’t know? It’s almost month,
Crimson.”

She wriggled a little, like a worm on a
hook.
“Dancers have
notoriously irregular periods. Many female athletes do. Low
bodyweight, heavy training, all that…”

“
And you’ve not thought to take a
test?”

“
I haven’t…had time to go to the
drugstore...” She flicked him a guarded glance.
Please let me pretend I’ve been
too busy
. Even if she
was jobless, lived in a serviced apartment, and got most of her
meals in the deli downstairs, she had the right to pretend that she
was too busy to get a pregnancy test.

Nick
shrugged and gave her a small smile that seemed to hold a
glimmer of satisfaction. “Perhaps it’s better not to know yet,” he
said, and handed her a large, slim envelope. “Present number
one.”

Curious
, Crimson studied him, then directed her attention to the
envelope and tore it open. Inside, she found a single sheet of
paper.
Constantine Motors. Income statement.
Estimate
. Her eyes
settled on the figure at the bottom of the column of
numbers.

Profit for the year.
$7,346,372.

She looked up at Nick
. “That’s above target,” she said,
puzzled. “Almost fifty thousand dollars above the
target.”

He
nodded. “We made two more Spurs. We had underestimated the
demand for right-hand-drive cars. An Australian media tycoon wanted
one. We made it black and orange and called it Spur Amber. A friend
of the Japanese guy who bought Spur Jet wanted an identical one. We
called it Spur Obsidian. The factory worked overtime every night.
The employees didn’t get paid extra. They donated their
time.”

“
But…” Her brows furrowed. “Surely, it
didn’t matter anymore...?”

“
It mattered to you.” Nick brushed the back
of his fingers across her cheek in a gentle gesture. “I wanted you
to know that you didn’t fail. That’s why I haven’t been around.
I’ve been busting my gut at Constantine Motors to hit the profit
target.” He dug in the front pocket of his jeans, pulled out a
small velvet box. “Present number two. It’s not about the business
anymore, or my father’s will. It’s only about you and
me.”