Undying Love (5 page)

I was alone with Allee. I offered her one of the champagne flutes.

“Are you freakin’ nuts? You wanna get me fired? I can’t drink on the job.” She fired me a sexy smirk. “So are you like covering the event for that pseudo-intellectual, piece of crap magazine you write for?”

Man, she sure didn’t mince her words. Her put down irked me, but I knew where she was coming from.
Arts &Smarts
was what it was, and didn’t pretend to be some scholarly art journal. Before I could say a word in my defense, an old, matronly friend of my mother’s wrapped her arms around me and kissed both cheeks.

“Why, Ryan Madewell, I haven’t seen you since your graduation from Andover! You’re as dashing as ever, looking more and more like your father every day!”

Inwardly, I cringed. Allee’s eyes grew as round as saucers.

“Your last name is Madewell?” she asked after the matron had sashayed off. “Like in the Madewell Gallery of Old Masters?”

Embarrassed, I nodded. “Yeah, that’s me. Ryan Madewell IV.”

“See, I knew you were rich,” she said smugly, quickly recovering from her shock.

“It’s my parents who are rich,” I said defensively. “I have to work for a living.”

She furrowed her thick, dark brows. “Come on. You really want me to believe that, Golden Boy?”

Jeez! You just couldn’t bullshit this girl. Truthfully, I needed to work only for my sanity as I had a hefty trust fund. But I wasn’t going to share that with Miss Put-Me-Down.

Lifting her glasses onto her ponytailed head, she eyed me from head to foot. She cocked a saucy smile. “You look good in a tux though I much prefer you in a pair of shorts.”

My body temperature went up several notches. Holy shit! She was doing it to me again—making me hot and horny. I desperately wanted to pin her against the marble wall and shove my tongue inside her mouth. To my surprise, as if she had read my mind, she leaned seductively against the wall next to the Caravaggio. She thrust her pelvis forward and pursed her luscious lips in a sexy pout. “So, Madewell, what does this painting do for you?”

I glanced at the full, creamy-white breasts of the draped nude and then back at Allee. “It turns me on,” I said breathily.
And makes me want to tear off your clothes.

“That’s a very profound effect.” Her mouth curled into that wickedly seductive smile.

I wanted her. Badly. Nervously checking for onlookers—there were none as everyone had gathered at the other end of the gallery to hear my mother’s speech—I moved in close, so close that our hipbones touched. Allee didn’t flinch. I raised my arms above her and pressed my hands, still holding those two damn glasses of champagne, against the cold marble. Closing my eyelids halfway, I leaned into her and felt her warm, sweet breath heat my cheeks. My lips latched onto hers—oh, how delicious they were! —and as my kiss deepened with her moan, I felt my collar-length, sandy hair yanked from behind.

“What the fuck?”

Startled, I pulled away and spun around, sending one of the glasses of champagne crashing to the floor.

It was Charlotte. Her face was red with rage, her eyes narrowed into angry slivers. She grabbed the other champagne flute out of my hand and tossed the chilled bubbly contents into my face. Her eyes clashed with Allee’s. “You lowlife whore,” she screamed. Hurt washed over Allee, but she remained silent and still.

Charlotte grabbed me by the lapel of my jacket. “We’re leaving.”

As she jerked me away, I turned my head. Allee still hadn’t moved. Her gaze locked on mine as if we’d never see each other again. I felt sickened.

Charlotte made me take her to her Sutton Place co-op; the air between us during the ride was frigid. She stormed into her luxurious apartment and stomped straight to the bedroom. When she returned, she was holding a pile of my clothes that I had left there. She dumped them onto the floor. She disappeared again, returning with a large pair of scissors. Still in her slinky gown, she plunked down on the floor and immediately started shredding each and every piece. Every shirt. Every pair of jeans. Every pair of boxers. Every tie and tee. There wasn’t a single tear shed. Or even misty eyes. Just pure, manic madness. She’d had her moments, especially when we bickered about getting engaged—she was ready, I was not—but I’d never seen her like this before. I watched with my eyes frozen wide.

“You fucking asshole,” she shrieked. “Get the fuck out of my life.”

I’d never heard her curse before tonight. Never. I didn’t move.

“What the fuck are you waiting for?” she screamed, her voice shrill.

Suddenly, it hit me.
She
was breaking up with me. And not the other way around.

“GO!” Leaping to her feet, she grabbed one of her many Lalique figurines and hurled it at me. It hit me hard in the head, narrowly missing my eye, before it smashed to smithereens on the polished hardwood floor. I rubbed my throbbing forehead and felt warm blood trickle beneath my fingers.

The vicious assault left me dazed. But one thing was clear. That was it. I was out of there, and she was out of my life.

The breakup. That’s how it happened. As simple and as fast as that.

FIVE

T
he next day I was again the center of attention at my office with the Band-Aid I was wearing above my right brow to cover my nasty gash, courtesy of Charlotte.

“What happened, dude?” asked Duffy, stifling a smart-ass smile. “You get into a fight?”

“I broke up with Charlotte.”

His eyes popped. “She did that to you?”

“Yeah.” I told him the details of her rampage.

“Man, she’s one crazy bitch.” He high fived me. “You should be happy it’s over.”

The truth is, I was. I was a free man. Free to see another. Over lunch at my desk, I called the Metropolitan Museum of Art and asked if they could get a message to a tour guide named Allee. “A-L-L-E-E,” I spelled out.

“You mean Allee Adair?” asked the operator, clearly impressed by who I was.

So, she was probably Irish. I should have guessed that by her coloring. “Yes,” I said, sure that there wasn’t another tour guide with her unusually spelled first name.

“Please tell her that I’d like to meet her for dinner. Have her call me on my cell phone.” I gave the operator my number and hung up.

All afternoon, it was difficult for me to focus. My head hurt from the cut, and I waited anxiously to hear back from Allee. Finally, at four p.m., my cell phone rang. I recognized the caller ID number. The Met’s. It had to be her.

“Hi,” I said awkwardly.

“Hi,” she said back in that raspy voice that completely undid me.

“So, would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”

“Sure. As long as I pay for my share.”

Man, she was a strange bird. “Fine. I’ll pick you up. What time do you get out of work?”

“Six.”

“Great. Meet me in front of the museum.”

“Look for me.” CLICK.

I hit “END” on my iPhone and sucked in a deep breath. It had been a long time since I’d asked a girl out on a first date. That tingly excitement I’d felt as a teenager surged inside me. I knew the perfect place to take her. And since she insisted on going Dutch, it wouldn’t cost her an arm and a leg on her meager salary.

The restaurant I took Allee to was a small Greek diner on Madison Avenue, just a few blocks away from the Met. It had been there forever. My nanny Maria used to take me and my sister there when we were kids. I remembered it having the best hot fudge sundaes in the world.

We sat facing each other in a red leather booth. The restaurant, which was extremely popular at breakfast and lunch, was not too busy at this time of day. It was filled mostly with older, neighborhood residents, many of them dining alone with a newspaper or book. After perusing the menu, we both ordered the Tuesday special—chicken potpie. When I added a glass of the house white wine, Allee followed suit.

I immediately imbibed the wine after the waiter set the two glasses on the table. My stomach bunched with nerves. What do you say to a girl on your first date? It had been such a long time. The stuff I used to talk about in high school and college would probably come across as plain out stupid. Like what’s your major? Or what are you going to do after you graduate?

Allee didn’t touch her wine. Instead, she scrutinized my face, zeroing in on the Band-Aid on my forehead. “So, Golden Boy, what the hell happened to your face?”

Although I really was tired of talking about it, I was glad she had started some form of conversation.

“Shaving mishap.” Embarrassment mixed with shakiness as I flashed back to my violent breakup with Charlotte.

“Bullshit. I don’t know any guys who shave their forehead.” She paused as she studied my face further. “It was her. That blond psycho-bitch.”

I grimaced. “Yeah.”

“Your girlfriend? She looks like your type.”

“Ex-girlfriend.” It actually felt good to say that. Liberating.

She nodded pensively and took a sip of her wine. It was hard to tell what she was thinking. Finally, she said, “I hope she looks worse.”

I couldn’t help smiling. Her wicked sense of humor made her even sexier.

“So, Madewell, tell me something I don’t know about your life.”

She hardly knew a thing about my life. I told her how I was born into privilege, or at least, that’s how others perceived it. Actually, it was more a life of neglect. “My mother was never there for me, and I literally had to make appointments with my father to see him.”

“That’s whacked.” She chuckled. Her laugh was deep and sexy, and it made me smile again. I continued.

“My sister and I were raised by our nanny, Maria. I think if she hadn’t been there for us, we would have run away or turned to drugs. She was loving and kept us grounded. When I turned thirteen, my parents sent me off to boarding school—Andover.”

She snorted. “Bet they couldn’t wait to get rid of you.”

“Yeah. Seriously, if there was a boarding school for preschoolers, I would have been there.”

She laughed again. I liked the fact that she enjoyed my sense of humor. Charlotte never had, finding my off-color comments totally unnecessary.

“So then what, Golden Boy?”

“No choice. Off to my father’s alma mater, Harvard. He wanted me to major in finance. I wanted to major in English. After a long battle, we finally compromised. He let me major in English as an undergraduate as long as I went to Harvard Business School for grad school. His goal has always been to groom me to take over Madewell Media when he retires.”

“And is that what you want to do?” asked Allee, leaning in closer to me.

“No. I want to be a novelist. But that’s never going to happen. Okay, your turn.”

Allee’s life story was so different from mine yet, in some ways, so similar. At the age of three, she lost her parents, both artists, in a tragic auto accident. From that point on, she went in and out of the foster care system, landing with one unloving family after another. We were both orphans of sorts. What kept her going was education and books. She dreamed and worked hard, earning the grades to get her a partial scholarship and student loan to Parsons, a college known for its fine arts program. On a field trip to the Met in high school, she had fallen in love with art and vowed one day that she would work in a museum.

“Who are your favorite painters?” I asked, intrigued by her passion.

“I know it’s mundane, but I love the French Impressionists. The Madewell Gallery is awesome, but it can’t compare to the Met’s Impressionist collection. I could hang out with those paintings all day.” Her face grew dreamy, and there was yet another level of beauty to her. I think she had no clue how beautiful she was, even in that drab Met uniform.

“Why haven’t you been to Paris?”

Her face turned somber. “I was almost going to go there my junior year in college.”

“Why didn’t you?” I immediately regretted my question because it probably had something to do with not being able to afford it.

She hesitated, running her forefinger around the rim of the wine glass. “I had to deal with some personal shit.”