lief to get the Danny Krantz gossip column business cleared up, and she’d enjoyed catching up, but that was all. There was a reason they had drifted apart since she had left Brown. Their lives had gone in completely different directions. And right now the last thing she needed was more complications.
‘Well, so long, Matt’ she said with an awkward wave. And she turned and walked out of the restaurant back into the street.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was an extraordinary night at Somerset Tower, the iconic new skyscraper at Columbus Circle. Outside, military–grade searchlights swung back and forth across the building, making the party visible anywhere in the city. At street level, paparazzi yelled and jostled, their flashlights popping like gunfire, as New York’s most beautiful people walked down the red carpet and through the lobby to the doors of the high–speed elevator. Already there was a queue forming of people clamouring to be whisked up to the Skin Plus launch on the sixtieth floor, though no one appeared to mind the wait as they were plied with Riedel flutes of Cristal and delicate canapés from drop–dead–gorgeous waiters. Liz Asgill swept through the centre of her creation towards the executive elevator, listening to the snippets of conversation as she passed by.
‘It’s sensational.’
‘Have you seen the light–therapy booths?’
‘Apparently they are booked up for the next three months already.’
The words made Liz giddy with pride and excitement, although she didn’t need the congratulations of the three hundred guests to know she had created magic. As the lift doors opened onto the top floor, she could see the excitement crackling across the room like electricity. Skin Plus was a hit. In a city saturated with luxury spas, the Skin Plus Day Spa was the most cutting–edge, the most desirable, the most now. In every corner of the 25,000–square–foot space were technological advancements to make NASA blush: skin imaging banks that helped diagnose skin problems, light therapy pods that helped reverse the signs of ageing, and the patent–pending nervodermis machine, a contraption that used light pulses to stimulate the elasticity of skin, eliminating lines and wrinkles. Alongside the space–age gadgetry were rows of products, their boxes proud and pristine, lined up on the gleaming glass counters. The nutritional centre, home of the spa’s cuisine, would tonight also offer tastes of their tantalizing dietary supplements, which promised to keep a complexion’s brightness, and ‘Skinny Smoothies’, fruit drinks packed with properties to keep your skin looking good from the inside. New Yorkers were a breed that liked to look and feel young, and everything they needed to do that was here.
The only thing missing from the scene, the one thing that would have made the night perfect for Liz was her father. Eight years ago, just a few weeks after her thirtieth birthday, Liz had floated the idea of a high–end cosmeceutical range to Howard Asgill over lunch at the Rainbow Rooms. The restaurant, on the sixty–four floor of the Rockefeller Center, was her favourite place to lunch in the city; a place where she felt in charge, successful, and almost literally on top of the world, and she’d felt buoyed further by her recent appointment to the post of Vice President of New Product Development. At the time, cosmeceuticals, a term coined for a combination of cosmetics and pharmaceutical expertise, meant sterile serums dispensed by doctors and dermatologists, or expensive creams created by the most up–market brands in the industry; brands that could afford to spend huge amounts on research and development into such scientific advances.
Liz’s idea to enter the cosmeceutical sector was a bold departure for Asgill Cosmetics, who had until that point concentrated on mid– to low price points for their products. The profit margins on cosmeceuticals were lower than in other sectors of the beauty industry, due to the vast amount of research involved, but Howard Asgill recognized that cosmeceuticals were going to be one of the fastest–growing and most important sectors of the skincare market, one they could not afford to miss out on. So he had given Liz the go–ahead and approved her idea to launch the new Skin Plus range via a luxury spa. She knew this venture would succeed or fail on image alone; consumers had to believe that the Skin Plus range was absolutely the best available and they had to believe it worked. What better way to convince them than by showing them the products in action? And a huge dose of A–list exclusivity never did any harm either, especially in Manhattan.
The Skin Plus range certainly had that, thought Liz, watching the faces of the party–goers, glowing with the knowledge that tonight they were at the very centre of things. If only Father could have been here to see it, to see me, thought Liz.
Meredith swept to her daughter’s side looking imperial, flushed with a happiness Liz had not seen since Brooke’s engagement party.
‘This is just fabulous, darling. Absolutely everyone is here.’
Liz smiled thinly at her mother’s enthusiasm. She had spent weeks arguing about the budget for the party with Meredith and William, who both thought a launch event costing a million dollars was excessive and unnecessary. William particularly had thought it better to take a select band of journalists to the Turks and Caicos to gently persuade them to give favourable and extensive coverage to the Skin Plus range in their publications. But that was cheap talk, thought Liz – quite the opposite of the Skin Plus ethos. Beauty editors were exhausted from trips and they would cover the Skin Plus range anyway because of the amount of advertising Asgill Cosmetics gave their magazines.
‘Not quite everyone,’ said Liz, craning her elegant neck. ‘I can’t see Brooke and David anywhere. Patrick McMullen is here and is desperate to get a photo of them.’ McMullen was the famous party photographer who sold his work into all the prestigious media outlets. If the golden couple did not appear, the chance of blanket coverage in the papers and magazines was not so assured.
‘It’s okay, Brooke has just arrived,’ said Tess Garrett, drawing up beside them. ‘It took us twenty minutes to get through the lobby downstairs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many paparazzi.’
Liz looked at Tess sharply. The meaning of her words had only just sunk in.
‘What do you mean Brooke has just arrived? Where is David?’
Tess looked surprised. ‘I thought you knew. He’s out of town.’
‘Out of town?’ snapped Liz. She could barely believe the selfishness of her sister. For weeks Liz had been impressing upon her the importance of the photo opportunity.
She saw Tess glance at her mother. Since when had those two been in such cahoots? Liz wondered. The Brit, however, did not look ruffled.
‘Don’t worry, Liz, the papers want pictures of gorgeous women on the front of their newspapers, not good–looking men, however important they are. And if the feeding frenzy downstairs is anything to go by, we don’t really need David. Brooke will be front page of the Post and the Daily News tomorrow without him.’
How dare she? thought Liz, narrowing her eyes. The pushy hack has been here two minutes, didn’t even have anything to do with Asgill Cosmetics, and here she was giving her a lecture on PR and marketing strategy!
‘I think it’s for me and my corporate communications director to decide what we do and don’t need,’ she said coolly. Meredith touched her daughter gently on the arm.
‘Tess is only here to help, Elizabeth. We’re all on the same side.’
Liz took a breath. She had been talking to Doctor Derkowitz, one of the Skin Plus dermatologist advisers only an hour ago. What was it he had said? Stress is one of the worst things for the skin.
She forced a smile towards her mother. ‘You’d look very lovely this evening if you didn’t look so angry,’ smiled Meredith in return.
Liz felt disarmed by the compliment. It was rare that her mother even seemed to notice her at all, let alone comment on her appearance. Her slate–grey silk Balenciaga cocktail dress, skimming her lithe body, and five–inch satin heels, had meant she had attracted almost as many compliments as her spa. Enrique had blow–dried her hair, collagen regeneration, road–tested at the therapy rooms, made her skin look plump, a
nd her custom–blended scent ensured she looked, smelt, and felt sensational. For as long as Liz could remember, Meredith’s parental joy and pride seemed to be only directed at William, Sean, and Brooke. It had stopped mattering to her many years ago, the second she realized her anger and sadness were simply futile. Instead, Liz had buried those unwanted emotions of rejection, of feeling overlooked and underappreciated. But perhaps tonight, finally, after all these years, she had done something right.
‘I’m not angry,’ said Liz, relaxing a little. ‘Just anxious.’