Never Too Rich (34 page)

Ruby lifted her hands in futile helplessness.
“Flowers, flowers, and now you bring more flowers,” she muttered
darkly. “You know what this place is beginning to smell like?”

“
A summer terrace on the Riviera?”
he suggested, struggling through the floral mountain blocking the
door.

“
A funeral parlor’s more like it,”
said Ruby with a stern waggle of a forefinger. “I’ve got a good
mind not to let you in.”

But of course, despite her mutterings and grumbles
to the contrary, Ruby adored him, and he knew it. She was his
strongest ally, always ready to put in a good word for him.
Shrewdly and instinctively, she, better than Edwina, knew what was
good for Edwina. And, as Ruby’s devotion to Edwina knew no bounds,
the effort she expended pouring oil upon troubled waters was
considerable.

“
Well?” R.L. asked.

“
Well, what?”

“
Doesn’t it look romantic?” He
gestured around at the flowers. “Come on, admit it,
Ruby.”

“
You think it’s
romantic?”
Hallelujah’s incredulous voice scoffed from directly
above.

Her voice was so close and so loud that R.L. nearly
jumped out of his skin. Startled, he leaned his head back, looked
up, and nearly gagged. Her face was just above his. Feet hooked
casually through the banister of the second-floor railing, she hung
there, upsidedown, like a bat.

“
Hallelujah Cooper, you get off
that railing this very instant!” Ruby scolded, her brow lowering
wrathfully. “If your mama catches you doing this, she’ll take a
hairbrush to your bottom!”

“
Oh, Ruby,” Hallelujah said with
maddening blitheness, “you
know
Ma never lays a hand on
me.”

“
And I know she should!”

Hallelujah eyed R.L. with amusement. “You must have
done something totally grody and absolutely geeky to have to buy Ma
all these flowers just to make up.” She grinned disarmingly.
“What’d ya do? Shack up for a quickie and get caught?”

Ruby had taken all she could take. “Get down from
there!” she bellowed.

“
You mean up, don’t
you?”

“
I mean
now!”

With an exasperated sigh Hallelujah did a series of
seemingly effortless acrobatics before casually disappearing from
view.

Ruby shook her head. “That girl’s going to be the
death of me yet.”

“
Ruby,” R.L. broke in, “did Eds see
the flowers yet?”

“
No, but something tells me they
are a waste of good money.” Ruby placed her hands on her hips,
pushed out her imposing double-prowed bosom, and squinted with
suspicion. “Hallelujah was right on the mark, huh? You’ve done
something
you shouldn’t have. That’s what all these flowers
are for. To make up.”

R.L. didn’t answer. “I need to talk to Eds, Ruby,”
he said solemnly. “It’s serious.”

She sighed deeply. “Wish I could help you, honey.
She’s been locked upstairs in the study for hours. I don’t know
what’s gotten into her. She won’t say. Hallelujah thinks it’s
something to do with designing clothes.”

“
Designing?” He perked up dreamily,
the word music to his ears. “Did you say
designing?’”
Excitedly he grabbed Ruby by her thick upper arms and shook her.
“For real?”

“
What’s the matter with you?” Ruby
shook his hands off with mock indignation and made a production of
brushing her sleeves.

“
Ruby, it’s important!
Is
she designing?”

“
How should I know?” she sniffed.
“She doesn’t talk about it to me. Just keeps that door locked like
it’s the gold room in Fort Knox.”

“
Which room’s the
study?”

“
Second door on the left
upstairs.”

R.L. startled her by picking her up, whirling her
around, and planting a big happy kiss on her cheek before setting
her back down. Then, spinning around on the sole of one shoe, he
leapt up the curving stairs, taking them three at a time.

“
She won’t let you in!” Ruby called
up after him.

It was as if he hadn’t heard. Eds is designing! was
all he could think.

He pounded happily on the study door.

Edwina’s voice, distracted and muffled, came softly
through it. “Hal, sweetie pie, how many times do I need to tell
you? Will you
please
leave your poor overwrought mother
alone?”

He chuckled to himself and knocked again.

An instant later the door opened a crack and one eye
peered out with irritation before changing to a glare of
malevolence. “You!” Edwina accused, her voice whisper soft, yet the
word encapsulating all her fury. “Go away.” She started to close
the door on him.

Quick as a flash, he wedged his foot in the doorway.
“Eds,” he said quickly, “we need to talk.”

“
We have nothing to discuss!” she
stated emphatically. “As far as I’m concerned, you no longer exist.
Now, would you
please
get out?”

“
Look, Eds,” he said in a tone of
humble reason, “after what we’ve shared these past months, wouldn’t
you say the least we could do is communicate? I don’t want to throw
away everything we’ve got. Do you?”

“
Damn you!”
A sudden tremor
had come into her voice and her one visible eye was threatening
tears. “You know just the right buttons to push, don’t you? But
then, you always did.”

Everything inside him wanted to reach out, drag her
from behind that door, hold her protectively, and keep the world’s
hurt at bay— and yet, wasn’t it he who had caused her grief in the
first place? How ironic! The shining knight who was prepared to
slay dragons for her was himself the dragon.

“
I’m just asking for a few minutes
to talk,” he begged quietly.

Edwina iced him with her eye. “Aren’t we doing
that?” she asked frostily. “Not that I seem to have much choice,
with your foot stuck in my door.”

He looked down at his foot, took a steadying breath,
and looked back up at her. “I flew down from Boston in the hopes we
could work things out.”

“
Then fly right back.”

“
Eds,
please,”
he pleaded
softly. “Just hear me out? Granted, I made a terrible
mistake—”

“
Mistake!
Is
that
what you call it?”

“
I admit you’re justifiably angry—”
That was as far as he got.

“
You bet your Boston Brahmin ass,
I’m justified! There I was, in my greatest hour of need, and I call
you. And what happens?” Her voice was thick and her silver-gray
eyes had gone dull and cloudy. “Some two-bit floozy answers the
phone and tells me she’s making it with you!”

“
She . . . she wasn’t a
two-bit—”

“
Whatever she cost, she was a
floozy!”

“
Do we have to talk past this
door?”

She looked at him a few moments longer, then seemed
to make up her mind. “All right. I’ll give you two minutes, you
cheating bastard. Then you leave. Okay?”

“
Okay.”

She opened the door wider, came stiffly out in the
hall, and snapped the door shut behind her. “I’m waiting.” Tapping
her foot impatiently, she folded her arms tightly across her
breasts, her long lacquered fingernails blurring like hummingbirds’
wings.

She looked so remote and unforgiving that R.L.
decided he must fire up the famous Shacklebury charm a little. So
he smiled.

R.L.’s smile.

It was a youthful smile, a choirboy’s smile, a smile
so appealingly winsome and innocent and wholesome, so utterly warm
and sincere, that it touched the lips last; it started in the
deepest regions of his eyes and crinkled his laugh lines
beguilingly, then slowly lit up his entire face from within, and
then, and only then, curved his lips into that most impossibly
engaging of slightly lopsided smiles. It was the most potent weapon
of his considerable arsenal, that Shacklebury smile, and he knew
it—experience had taught him that it melted even the hardest of
hearts.

But it didn’t melt Edwina’s, because stones don’t
melt. “You can put that smile right back where it came from,” she
said, for once inured to his charms. “It won’t work this time.”

The smile left his face. “You’re one hell of a tough
lady,” he conceded.

Her chin went up and she shook her head. “No, R.L.,
I’m not a tough lady. What I am is one hell of a fool for having
gotten involved with you in the first place.” She gave a low,
bitter laugh. “Not that it matters anymore.”

“
Of course it matters!”

Her nostrils flared defiantly. “And pray tell, why
should it?”

“
Because . . . because we had
something beautiful!”

“ ‘
Had,’ “ she said, “is the
operative word. We don’t
have.
The sooner you admit it to
yourself, the easier it will be for both of us in the long run.
It’s over.”

“
Just like that?” he said
sadly.

“
Just like that.”

“
So I meant that little to
you.”

Her eyes darkened even more and became wet stones.
“On the contrary, R.L.,” she said. “It’s because you meant so very
much to me.

“
And now it’s all over? Because I
slipped?”

“
Slipped”
she growled in
exasperation. “R.L.! An alcoholic slips. A drug addict slips.
Slipping implies a preexisting condition one is successfully
fighting.” Suddenly she clapped her hand over her mouth. “Or are
you trying to tell me you’re a sex maniac undergoing
therapy?”

“
Eds—”

“
Don’t you ‘Eds’ me! Do you have
any idea of the dangers of sleeping around in this day and
age?”

“
Yes,” he said in a grieving
whisper.

“
But it didn’t make any
difference,” she went on, “did it? Oh, no. You dropped your
trousers all the same! And now you dare run back to me! Well, no
dice. Ciao, baby.”

He sighed to himself. What was there to say? That he
had almost, but not quite, gone to bed with Catherine Gage? Did it
really make any difference that he hadn’t? For he’d intended to, no
doubt about that.

Edwina glanced pointedly at her wristwatch. “Your
two minutes,” she said with mock sweetness, “are up.”

“
What?
But I didn’t even get
a chance to—”

“
Out!”
She pointed to the
landing with a trembling forefinger.

“
But I love you, Eds! I know things
are in a mess right now, but I want to straighten it out!” Seeing
her implacable obduracy, he said passionately, “Didn’t you hear me?
I said I
love you.”

She was unmerciful—a female Genghis Khan.
“Professions of love no longer cut any ice with me, R.L.,” she said
in a clipped voice. “Now, will you get out? Or do I have to throw
you out?”

In a defiant show of machismo, he stubbornly stood
his ground. “You’ll have to throw me out.”

“
Never say I didn’t give you fair
warning.”

“
Warning for what?”

She sighed painfully.
“This.”

He didn’t see it coming. In fact, it was the last
thing on earth he expected. One moment, her knees were where knees
normally are—at knee level. The next, one of them flashed upward
and slammed into that certain spot of male anatomy where it hurts
the most.

Five things happened simultaneously:

His eyes bulged.

He let out a grunt.

He cupped his balls.

He went pale.

He fell heavily to his knees.

His reaction brought her exquisite gratification.
She stood back and eyed him as he salaamed the floor in pain.

Finally he raised his head and looked up at her with
a mixture of hurt and confusion. “Now, why did you have to do
that?” he squeaked in a breathy falsetto.

“
Because,” Edwina explained
sweetly, “you just don’t listen. When I say get out, you get out.”
She pointed a quivering finger down the hall. “Now, beat it,
buster, before I cut them off.”

Prudently, he beat it.

Chapter 36

Fear and loathing rumbled down Second Avenue. Caught
the red light at Fourteenth Street. Didn’t let it faze him.

Snake simply passed on the right, banked the big
double-tank Harley into an illegal turn on red, and thundered west
along Fourteenth. Satan’s Warriors weren’t sticklers for law and
order—only white supremacy.

He cruised slowly, the Wisconsin-made engine
snarling righteously. Cars whooshed past, hitting him with their
slipstreams. He couldn’t care less. He wasn’t in a hurry. So what
if the poor fuckers in their sardine cans passed him; it was no
skin off his back. All he had to do was open the throttle and he
could leave them all behind in a cloud of blue exhaust.

That knowledge gave a slow ride special
pleasure.

A carful of teenagers came in on the left lane, rock
music pounding, and stayed alongside.

He glanced over at them and grinned. A girl in the
backseat caught his eye.

He blew her a hairy kiss.

Her conceit repelled it. In a huff, she haughtily
raised her chin and turned her pretty face away.

“
Well, up yours too, bitch!” Snake
muttered, flashing her a birdie.

The car sped up and shot past him.

“
So you want to show off,
fuck-face? That it?” Snake laughed at the driver. “Well, try
this
on for size, asshole!” He twisted the accelerator and
opened up. The sudden burst of speed filled him with an unholy joy
and the wind stung his eyes as the big bike leapt effortlessly past
the car.