Lipstick Jungle

“How ya doin’, man?” Kirby asked, avoiding looking at Nico. She arranged her face into an expression of patient annoyance.

“Coming to St. Barts this year?” Lyne asked him. Kirby swayed from one foot to the other, putting his hands in his pockets and pulling his tweed coat tight across his ass. Nico couldn’t help looking at it.

“That depends,” Kirby said. “You inviting me on your yacht this year?”

Lyne cleverly avoided answering him by turning to Nico. “Do you know Nico O’Neilly?” he asked.

She looked at Kirby, giving him the coldest face she could muster. Please, Kirby, she prayed, don’t be stupid right now.

“Yeah . . . ?” Kirby said, looking at her hesitantly as if he wasn’t sure or couldn’t remember. “I think we might’a met once before.”

“Maybe,” Nico said dismissively, deliberately not holding out her hand. Lyne turned back to Kirby to say good-bye, and Nico took the opportunity to get away.

“Nice to see you, Lyne,” she said, pointing at the fish store. “I’ve got to . . .”

“Oh, yeah,” Lyne said, waving her away. “Best caviar prices in the city.”

She nodded as if she knew that, and opened the door. A whoosh of warm, pungent air rushed out at her. The bell tinkled.

* * *

“HERE’S YOUR PRESENT,” SHE said, handing Kirby a tin of Beluga caviar. “For being such a good boy.”

“Thanks,” he said, taking the tin from her and putting it down on the glass coffee table. They were standing in the living room of his apartment. Kirby had finally gotten away from Lyne and gone home, and she had followed him after waiting in the store for fifteen minutes. He placed his body right up against hers. “If I’d known I would get caviar for lying to Lyne Bennett, I’d do it every day,” he said into her neck.

“I wouldn’t make a habit of it, darling,” she said.

“How about making a habit of this?” he asked. He suddenly pushed her down, bending her face-down over the arm of the couch. He straddled her legs, his hands reaching around to the front of her pants to undo the zipper. “You’re a bad girl, aren’t you?” he said, tucking his hands into the sides of her pants and yanking them down to her ankles. He rubbed her bare ass with the palm of his hand. “Did you like that?” he asked. “You almost got caught. You’re a very bad girl . . .”

He slapped her ass. She let out a cry of surprise and pleasure. He lifted her onto the floor, placing himself behind her. “No,” she said weakly.

“No, what?” he said. He slapped her ass again. And there, on his eighty percent discounted Ralph Lauren leopard-print carpet, they had the best sex ever.

“See?” Kirby said afterward, sitting on the couch naked with one foot crossed over his other thigh. “I told you I could act.”

Chapter 5

THERE WAS, NICO O’NEILLY THOUGHT, AN OWNERSHIP in sex. If you owned your sex life, you owned the world.

Or felt l

ike you did, anyway.

For the last six weeks, ever since she’d begun her naughty friendship with Kirby, she’d been on top of the world. Her walk was brisk, her remarks sharp. She smiled a lot and made jokes. She had various parts of her body waxed and preened. She was filled with desire—not just for Kirby, but for life.

And other people had begun to take notice.

She never would have imagined it, but Kirby Atwood was inadvertently helping her career.

About a month had passed since that Sunday afternoon when they’d run into Lyne Bennett. It was a close call, but as she’d guessed, Lyne hadn’t considered it of enough importance to mention it to Victory. Still, the thrill of almost getting caught, and then not, was exciting, and she’d become bolder and bolder, secretly arranging for Kirby to show up at some of the cocktail parties and events she was required to attend almost every evening. They had never done anything in public except talk, but the fact that Kirby was there, that he was watching her and she could steal glances at him, made what might have been a dull evening so much more interesting. She loved the feeling of power it gave her, of having a secret that no one else could even begin to suspect. As she moved through the warm, overly decorated party rooms in December, doing business, schmoozing, always subtly but calculatingly putting herself forward, she felt untouchable.

There had been that brief emotional thump during the Christmas vacation in Aspen, when she’d felt exhausted and empty and alone, even though she and Seymour and Katrina had been on top of each other in that small, two-bedroom suite at the Little Nell hotel. But the slight depression had passed the minute they’d landed at JFK. Poor Kirby hadn’t gone on Lyne’s yacht after all (it always surprised her that he knew Lyne, but beautiful young men like Kirby tended to get around), and instead had gone to his family’s house in St. Louis. They had finally met up the first Thursday after the New Year—she had efficiently cut a lunch short and skittled up to his apartment. For the first ten minutes, he’d been in a mood, sitting on the couch trying to insert a new battery into a remote control, and every now and then looking up at her with a baleful expression on his face. He finally managed to get the battery in properly and turned on the TV. “So,” he said, pretending to be interested in the “Ellen DeGeneres Show.” “Did you sleep with him?”

“Who?” she asked, thinking that if he didn’t get over this mood and get on with the sex, she’d have to leave before they could do it.

“You know,” he said accusingly. “Your husband.”

“Seymour?”