If the Shoe Fits (29 page)

On the drive home, Devon concentrated on the car and hummed a light tune.

“What’d you do at work today?” Sarah asked.

“Oh, nothing much.”

“Did you even go in?” She couldn’t keep the stridency from her tone.

“Even?”

“Sorry. I’m feeling a bit tetchy, I guess. You and your mom live in some crazy dream world where the words ‘getting work done’ usually refer to a weekend getting plastic surgery in Switzerland.”

“I worked on a few ideas for your squishy-steel stiletto idea. Does that count?”

Her stomach flipped. Maybe this was what it was like to be in love with a crazy genius. “You did?!”

“You’re unbelievable. I offer to take you to Venice or Rome for a romantic getaway, and you’re more turned on by a high heel.”

She looked out the window to hide the smile.

He came to a stoplight and reached for her chin. “You don’t have to look away. I love it.”

She kissed the palm of his hand. “I love you too. I’m sorry I’m grumpy.”

“I wish you’d let me help.”

“I decided it’s a good idea.”

Finally!
thought Devon. Now he’d find a way to confess he’d been nosing around for months.

“I’d love to hire you as a general contractor or whatever you want to call it, to oversee the construction… the guy who’s supposed to be doing that is such a waste. Would you be willing?”

Shit!
That was not the kind of help he had in mind, but he’d do whatever she needed.

She sensed his hesitation. “It’s fine if you don’t want to. I totally understand. You’d rather do all the financial stuff, but I really need to do that on my own. You know what I mean?”

Double
shit.

“Of course I understand. I’ll get on those guys tomorrow and your place will be done with plenty of time to spare.”

“I feel better already,” Sarah said, and sank deeper into the soft leather upholstery of the powerful car.

The next eight weeks went by in a thrilling blur. Devon and Sarah were the toast of the season. The Chelsea Flower Show. Glyndebourne. Ascot. Henley. Polo. Wimbledon.

Bronte used all of the publicity to capitalize on promotional opportunities for Sarah’s store opening in London. The tabloids were ravenous: the ducal brothers, the American best friends. Sarah’s head began to swim with the constant whirl of social engagements on top of all of her work responsibilities. She still kept her room at the Connaught, even though she rarely used it. Devon had begun to hint (constantly) that it was silly for her to pay exorbitant hotel fees (as if
he
cared about economy) when his large, spacious apartment was more than big enough for both of them.

“Just move in already, Sarah.”

“Already? We’ve barely been together two months.”

He was back at it one late Thursday night in July when they’d come home from an evening at the theater.

“You know what I mean. We’re staying together, aren’t we?” He came up behind her in the bathroom as she finished taking off her earrings and put them in her jewelry case. She leaned back into him.

“Of course we’re staying together. Eventually. But I have so much I need to get done in the next few months and you are very…” He was kissing her neck and reaching his hands under her blouse. “…distracting…” She sounded simultaneously delighted and exasperated.

“Mm-hmm…” he hummed into her skin.

“Devon!”

“Sarah!”

He was so gorgeous, staring at her expectantly like that in the mirror. He hadn’t asked her to marry him, but she suspected he was only holding on by a thread. It was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Who wouldn’t?

“Let me just get through the store opening and then we can figure it out. Maybe we can move into my apartment over the store when it’s done.”

“Wherever you want…” he said into her skin when he resumed kissing her.

They slipped into bed, and as usual, the outside world slipped away.

***

Six hours later, Sarah woke up refreshed and ready to face the day.

It was four in the morning.

She tried to appreciate the comfort of Devon’s warm embrace and even thought of taking advantage of him, to enjoy it further, but her mind was already racing forward to meet the day. She’d received another update from the investigator and she wanted to look at the new numbers. Corporate sabotage? Money laundering? It was all starting to seem likely.

After a few more minutes of pretending she might be able to fall back to sleep, she got out of bed, pulled on Devon’s white shirt that she’d pulled off him the night before, and padded quietly back to the dining room table. The city lights were dim but cast enough of a glow that she could see her way around the apartment. She opened her computer bag and pulled out her iPad and iPhone; both were so low on battery power, they were about to crash. She grabbed the charging cable but was unable to find the wall adapter.

She headed into Devon’s small office. He had cleared out the closet as promised, but he still used the immaculate desk for his after-hours work. She flipped on the light and saw his computer. She put the cable into the side of his laptop to charge her phone that way instead. When the computer screen lit up, recognizing the new device, Sarah clicked that she did not want to sync. She was about to turn back to the living room when she noticed myriad lines of data scrolling up the computer screen. She was only giving it a brief glance, not wanting to pry, but she looked more closely when she realized it was filled with information that read like a travel log from her own diary: Chicago… Chicago… Milan… Chicago… Geneva… New York… Chicago… Chicago… and she recognized the IP addresses.

She felt him standing behind her, but she couldn’t bring herself to actually turn and face him. She wasn’t sure she could bear the sight of him. There was something psychotic about the whole thing. “Why, Devon?”

“I was going to tell you—”

“When? Like, one day when I got around to revealing my deepest secrets to you? Like, that I was a virgin when we met? Oh, wait, I did that! Or that I am totally insecure about my father? Oh, wait—I confessed that too. You want more? Are you always going to want more, Devon? When will you have enough of me for you to reveal
you
?” By the end, she wasn’t even screaming, it was more of a lacerating snipe. The bitter sarcasm in her voice was totally unfamiliar to him. She pulled the charging cable out from the side of his computer, wanting to smash his whole laptop on the floor, or better yet against the side of his head.

She turned her back to him as she passed through the narrow door, not wanting her treacherous body to respond to his slightest touch. She put all of her things from the dining table back into her briefcase. After changing into a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt, Sarah gathered a few things out of the bathroom and the closet and shoved it all unceremoniously into her luggage. The wheelie bag had been at the back of the closet since she’d started shacking up with him in May. Thank God she had kept her room at the Connaught.

“I need some space, Devon. It’s not just that craziness—” She pointed toward the office. “Although that’s a big part of it. I need to be on my own a bit. Please.”

Devon was still in the shadows at the far end of the flat, near the door to his office, while Sarah spoke from near the front door.

“You may have cost me a small fortune,
Lord
Heyworth.” For some reason the honorific seemed despicable all of a sudden; he was so far from honorable. “I have had a forensic accountant working on the books for over a year and a retired Internet fraud investigator from the FBI checking into the
perpetrator
who has been lurking around my servers for the past few months to see if the two were related. You idiot!” She pulled on her light canvas jacket and finally turned to look at him. “You were both in fucking cyberspace circling around each other. He told me to leave a few holes in my firewall to see if we could draw you out. You are quite the clever one, aren’t you? Rerouting all of your late-night spying through South American open relays. And, in the midst of all this cloak-and-dagger matrix
bullshit
, I am faced with the very real possibility that one of my closest associates is stealing my designs and selling them to the thieves in China who are replicating them with cheap materials and shoddy workmanship, and shipping them so quickly that they’re on a folding table on Canal Street the same week I stock them uptown on Madison Avenue.” She caught her breath. “I will have to speak to my lawyers about whether or not to press charges. Probably best if you don’t call me for a while. A long while! I’m so mad I don’t even know the right words to convey how
fucking
mad I am right now. Are you getting that?”

At
least
he
knows
better
than
to
answer
that
, Sarah thought gratefully.

She grabbed her computer bag off the dining room table and pulled at the telescoped handle of her luggage. It tilted awkwardly and almost fell over.

“And by the way,” she barked, “I despise wheelie bags!”

She slammed his front door as hard as she could, feeling instantly guilty about possibly waking the innocent neighbors, then stormed down the hallway and into the elevator.

She seethed the whole way down to the lobby and out to the sidewalk, then gave a moment of pure thanks that in the midst of the barren wasteland of a neighborhood that surrounded Devon Heyworth’s barren wasteland of an apartment, one sad, lonely taxi moved slowly along the wet, dark street in her direction. She flagged him down and had never been happier to say, “The Connaught, please.”

How
could
someone
so
smart
be
so
stupid?
she wondered about Devon, then realized she might as well be asking the same question about herself.

She got out of the taxi when it pulled to a stop at Carlos Place, yanking her computer bag over one shoulder and then tugging the now-much-maligned wheelie bag behind her. It nearly tipped over again onto the sidewalk and she almost burst into bawling tears right at the corner of Mount Street. Luckily, the night porter dashed from the lobby and grabbed the innocent luggage.

“Thank you, Gavin.” She thought she might hug him, then realized he would probably be mortified.

He widened his eyes slightly in question.

“Just… thank you,” she muttered.

She trudged up the few steps to the welcoming hotel lobby, peaceful and quiet at that early hour, and tried not to think too hard about the fact that she was starting to feel more at home in this hotel than anywhere else on earth. She reached her room and thanked Gavin profusely once again for all his help (
with
a
piece
of
luggage
that
a
toddler
could
have
managed
, she thought with a self-deprecating sigh).

She was too peeved and wound up to get back into bed, but, after all that, it was only a quarter past five in the morning. She drew a hot bath and tried to calm down, tried to think strategically about some of the damage… to her pride and her heart.

Of course, she was not going to press charges against Devon, unless there was a law against being a complete ass. Still, even if his intentions were honorable, his entire modus operandi was suspect and disturbing. Over the past few months of trying to tease out some meaning from what had passed between them at the wedding and then in Chicago shortly thereafter, and even during these wonderful months of traipsing around glamorous London on the arm of one of the world’s most eligible bachelors, Sarah had always seen herself as the younger, naïve, inexperienced party.

Now she had to contend with the fact that Devon’s urbane, polished-yet-blasé, fast-car-driving persona was merely a thin veneer over a streak of immaturity a mile wide. All of that absurd posturing—or antiposturing—was ridiculous. On the one hand, he was an accomplished adult: why couldn’t he just
man
up
and show the world the strong, brilliant, intelligent person he was? He had it all backward, flouting convention in order to hide, rather than celebrate, his achievements.

She stepped out of the cooling bath water and tried to stall for as much time as she could, drying her hair, primping, unpacking, then finally walking the three blocks over to her office-cum-construction site at Bruton Place.

She couldn’t even bring herself to check her email, still feeling Devon’s stealthy,
adolescent
, spying presence snaking through the entire weave of her business operation. She telephoned the investigator, Stephen Pell, whom she had hired to research the breaches and left him a message with no specifics, but making it clear that he needed to return her call as soon as possible.

She left a similar message for Julie Cameron, her assistant in New York, then hesitated before calling Carrie Schmidt in Chicago. She let that moment stew for a while—why had she hesitated? Was it Carrie who had been stealing the computer-aided design files and leaking them to the Chinese counterfeiters? What possible motivation could she have? She had been with Sarah for years; she was paid a generous salary. Sarah made a mental note to have Pell dig a little deeper into Carrie’s activities at work.

Then she didn’t know whom to call. She wanted to dump everything on somebody.

Eliot Cranbrook would be a good ear on the business side; after they’d cleared up the potential-girlfriend issues, he’d become a real friend. But there was no way she could be honest with him about the extent of her emotional turmoil. As much as she had come to adore him as a friend, she was always mindful of the Sarah James of Sarah James Shoes that she wanted to present to Eliot. All of the madness about bringing him to Dunlear in May to run interference with Devon was bad enough, but at least it had worked (up until now). The possibility of Danieli-Fauchard making an offer to purchase Sarah James Shoes at some point in the future was real, and Sarah could not risk showing Eliot the full extent of her folly.