Lipstick Jungle

“I was damn right too,” Victory said. “I think I’m going to be able to eat some eggs now.”

Another minute passed, and then she spun around in a panic. “Lyne,” she said suddenly. “He wasn’t . . . really angry, was he? I mean, not angry enough to call off the deal . . . ?”

“I think you’d have to ask him that,” Lyne said. He smiled sympathetically.

Victory got up from the table and grabbed her cell phone, hurrying down the steps. A few minutes later, she returned, dragging her feet. She sat down in her chair in shock.

“Well?” Lyne asked.

“He said it was a good thing I hadn’t signed the papers yet, because this deal was something we both needed to think long and hard about.”

“I’m sorry,” Lyne growled softly.

Victory stared out at the sea. She could feel tears forming in her eyes. “It’s okay,” she said thickly. The tears spilled out under the sunglasses. She wiped them away with her napkin. “I’m a fuck-up. That’s all. And now I’ve probably ruined my business.”

“Aw, come on,” Lyne said. “You haven’t ruined your business at all. You’ve still got it, don’t you?”

“It isn’t just that,” she said, twisting her napkin. “I’ve just realized something terrible about myself. I behaved exactly the same way toward Pierre Berteuil that I do with every man I get involved with. Whether it’s business or romance. At a certain point, I freak out. And then I lose it. I . . . how would you say it . . . rip them a new asshole. And they run away. And who can blame them? I did the same thing to you and Pierre . . . And I never even slept with him . . .”

“Well, you know what they say: A business partnership is a kind of marriage,” Lyne said. “And if it goes bad, it’s worse. In any case, at least you’ve identified the problem. And as you always say, you can’t solve a problem until you identify it correctly.”

“Do I really say that?” she asked, lifting her head. “Gosh. I do say an awful lot of crap sometimes.”

“And sometimes it’s actually true,” Lyne said, standing up.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“We’re going shopping,” he said, holding out his hand.

She shook her head. “I can’t go shopping now. I’m broke.”

“I’m buying, kiddo,” he said, taking her hand and pulling her to her feet. “This is a tit-for-tat deal. Next time one of my deals falls through, you can take me shopping.”

“That’s sure to be an expensive proposition.”

“And by then I expect you’ll be able to afford it.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “I like to think of it this way,” he said, casually removing her sunglasses and returning them to his own face. “It’s not every day that you get to lose twenty-five million dollars. I mean, how many people can boast about that?”

Chapter 14

NICO O’NEILLY LEANED FORWARD, AND PEERING CLOSELY into the magnifying mirror, parted her hair at the scalp, looking for visible signs of gray hair. Her roots were maybe an eighth of an inch, and right at the scalp, mixed in with the slightly darker and duller hair that was her natural shade, were defiantly bright and silvery hairs that glistened like Christmas tinsel. These hairs were of a different form and nature than her regular hair, springing up like inch-long Slinkys, creating a halo of frizz that could no longer be tamed by the blow-dryer. Even when they grew, they were still resistant to dye, and when she examined pieces of her hair, she found a disturbing number o

f strands that resembled tarnished silver. Her mother had cried the day she’d found her first gray hair at thirty-eight, and Nico remembered the afternoon she’d come home to find her mother in tears, staring at a gray hair she’d plucked out from the front of her scalp. “I’m old. I’m oooooold,” she’d sobbed.

“What does that mean, Momma?”

“It means that Daddy won’t love me anymore.”

Even back then, at fifteen, Nico thought this kind of insidious negative thinking was ridiculous. “I will never allow myself to be that way,” she decided. “I will never be in that position.”

She stepped away from the mirror and sighed, washing her hands. Despite her best efforts, in the last six months she felt as if she had aged. There was, she knew, nothing that could ultimately be done to stop the process, and someday all her hair would be gray and she would go through menopause. But lately, she’d found herself wondering what she would really look like if you took away the restylane, botox, veneers, and hair color. Sometimes now, she had the distinct sensation that underneath these common cosmetic improvements was an old crone, held together with a bit of glue and paint.

Mutton dressed as lamb, she thought.

On the other hand, if you really considered it, mutton was much more interesting than lamb, if only for the simple fact that it had survived long enough to become mutton. Lamb got eaten, mutton did not.

And on this slightly cheery note, she went downstairs.

Seymour was in the breakfast room, studying expensive real estate brochures of town houses in the West Village.