She looked at her daughter with a frown, and Alexandra grinned at her. Her mother always wore bright colors and clothes from wonderful designers. Chanel and Givenchy and Dior and de Ribes, and almost always in brilliant colors. They suited her, but Henri preferred her in black and navy blue and beige and in the country in gray flannel. She had come to her mother's home in a new black dress from Dior, with a matching jacket. "Now stop that. This is new, and Henri loves it." Unlike her exchanges with her husband and her children, Alexandra always spoke to her mother in English, and although she spoke it well, she had a noticeable French accent.

"It looks awful. You should burn it." Margaret de Borne sat down on her couch again, indicated to the butler to pour Alexandra a gla.s.s of wine, and went back to her needlepoint as she smiled happily at her daughter. She always loved her visits, and their private exchanges. She enjoyed going out with her too, but this was always a little more special. They both got out more than they needed to, so they didn't need each other as an excuse to go to the latest fashionable places. Instead, they preferred to eat a simple lunch of salad and cheese and fruit on trays in Margaret's sitting room overlooking her garden. She glanced at her daughter again and shook her head in obvious dismay. "I wish you'd stop doing your hair that color, sweetheart. You look like one of those fading blondes from California. If I had hair your color, I would flaunt it. I'd make it even more red!" She shook her gla.s.ses at her for emphasis before setting them down to sip her wine. She had always loved the red of Alexandra's hair before she began to rinse it blond. It seemed such a waste of one of nature's great gifts. Her own hair had to be helped considerably now twice a month at Alexandre's.

"You know Henri hates it red. It's too loud. He thinks it looks more ladylike this way."

"Henri ... the poor man is so afraid to be a little out of the ordinary. I'm surprised he doesn't make you wear a black wig and cover the whole thing. Seriously, darling, G.o.d gave you red hair, and you ought to enjoy it."

"I don't mind it like this." She smiled easily and sipped her wine. She was used to her mother's complaints about her husband. His were far worse about Margaret. And Alexandra had lived with it for fourteen years. She was only sorry they had never come to like each other, but she had given up long since. It was obvious they were never going to fall in love with each other.

"You're too good-natured. How do you like these, by the way?" She smiled happily, pointing at the new ruby earrings she was wearing. She could afford to be generous with herself, partially thanks to Pierre's generosity when he died, and partially thanks to her own very handsome fortune. "I just got them."

"I thought so." Alexandra laughed. Her mother was always buying beautiful clothes and fabulous baubles. It was good for her, she looked well in what she bought and it made her happy, despite what Henri said about a woman spending "that kind of money." "They're very pretty, and they suit you to perfection."

"Van Cleef." Margaret looked pleased with herself. "And a terrific bargain." But at that, Alexandra laughed heartily as she set down her winegla.s.s.

"I can just imagine."

"No, really! They were under a hundred thousand."

"Dollars or francs?"

"Are you kidding? Dollars of course." Margaret grinned without a trace of guilt as Alexandra laughed at her.

"I thought so." Alexandra smiled. It was not exactly the kind of bargain Henri would have approved of. And after almost thirty years in France, her mother still spoke more English than French, and calculated everything in dollars. "What else have you been up to?"

"The usual. I had lunch with Mimi de Saint Bre yesterday." She was another American woman who had married a t.i.tled Frenchman, and like Margaret, she had a good mind and a wild sense of humor. "We're going to New York together next week."

"What for?"

"Just to get our hair done and do some shopping. I haven't been in months and thought it might be fun before the summer. After that, I'm meeting friends in Rome, and I thought I might go to San Remo for a few weeks. I haven't made up my mind yet."

"Why don't you stay with us for a few weeks afterward?" Alexandra looked delighted at the prospect, but her mother looked cautious.

"I don't want to make your husband nervous."

"Just don't bring the girls' whoopee cushions and those hand buzzers and everything will be fine." They both laughed at the memory. Henri had almost fainted when he sat down in the living room with guests, and landed on one of the whoopee cushions Margaret and the children had planted.

"Do you remember how awful that was?" Margaret could hardly stop laughing at the memory, and there were tears in Alexandra's eyes when she stopped laughing. It had been awful for Henri, but in truth it was desperately funny, and they had all been banished to their rooms afterward, including Margaret, who had taught Marie-Louise how to short-sheet the beds, which had complicated matters even further. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that she was not Henri's favorite houseguest. "Actually, I thought I'd see what I could find for them in New York ... nothing quite so outrageous of course ..." But her eyes twinkled wickedly at the prospect. She used to buy silly jokes like that for her late husband, and he had always loved them. For him, being married to Margaret was like having another child. Alexandra had always been a bit more serious than that, even as a little girl, and especially after she got married.

"I'll tell Henri you're coming."

Margaret grinned. "Wait until you really want to annoy him."

"Mother!" Alexandra laughed. Her mother had very few illusions. "You make him sound so awful and he isn't!" She always defended her husband, and to Henri, she defended her mother. She was loyal to both.

"He is not awful, darling." Margaret grinned. "Just stuffy." The afternoon seemed to fly by, as it always did when they were together, and at four-thirty Alexandra looked at her watch and stretched regretfully. She was so comfortable in the cozy room, looking out at the garden, and in her mother's company. They always had such a good time together. Margaret was still her closest friend, and always had been.

"I should go ... much as I hate to ..." Alexandra stood up with obvious regret as Margaret watched her.

"Why? Are you giving a party tonight?"

"No, that's next week. Tonight we're dining at the elysee, and Henri will get nervous if I don't come home early and start getting ready."

"You ought to do something wonderful to surprise him, like wear a skintight dress covered with rhinestones, and tease your hair straight up. It would do them good at the elysee." She chuckled at the thought and Alexandra smiled. Her mother probably would have done something just like that, and Henri would have called his attorneys in the morning. With him, that was always the implication. Step out of line and ... Alexandra never tested his mettle in that direction. She loved him too much to risk everything for pranks like her mother's. And besides, she wasn't like that.

"You're a lot braver than I am, Maman."

"That's only because I'm not married to your husband. I can do exactly what I want now. And before, your father always let me get away with anything I wanted. I was very lucky." She smiled gently at her daughter.

"Papa was lucky too. And he knew it," Alexandra reminded her and the two women embraced and walked slowly downstairs, as the butler waited to let her out with his usual warm smile. He had been with them since she was a little girl, and he called her "Madame Alexandra" as he helped her into her car and closed the door firmly. She waved at her mother as the driver took her home in the Citroen, and she felt the same sadness she always did when she left her mother. Life had been so simple on the rue de Varenne, living with her parents ... before ... but that wasn't fair either. She loved Henri, and of course, the children. They were the life force of her existence. But seeing her mother always made her long for a life that was simpler, and a time when she didn't have quite so much to live up to.

She was still thinking of it as she slipped out of her dress and ran her bath, and took out a serious, well-covered black evening gown for their dinner that night at the elysee Palace.

The girls came in to say h.e.l.lo to her while she was in the tub, and she heard Henri go into his study while she was getting dressed, but he didn't come in to speak to her and she didn't see him until they met in the front hall, ready to go out for the evening. Her dress had long sleeves and a high neck, and a long slender skirt with beautiful gold embroidery on it. It was exquisitely made and from an old collection of Saint Laurent. She wore it with a short sable jacket and a pair of outstanding diamond earrings given to her by her father.

"You look lovely tonight." His eyes were admiring, his voice restrained, and his manner impeccably formal.

"Thank you." She turned to him with her blond good looks, her hair swept into a smooth French twist, exactly as it had been worn years before by Grace Kelly. It was a good look for Alexandra, and one that Henri approved of. "Did you have a good day?" Her eyes looked lonely, and she suddenly wished he would kiss her, but he didn't.

"Very pleasant, thank you," he answered. There were times when they were like two strangers, and the intimacies of the night before seemed all but forgotten in the formality of the moment. He helped her into the car, and the driver pulled away, with both of them lost in thought in separate worlds in the backseat, and two little girls in nightgowns watching from the upstairs window.

Chapter 12.

The day after Hilary saw Arthur Patterson, when he had told her he didn't know how to find her sister, Hilary felt as though the world had come to an end. She was seventeen years old and she felt as though her life was over. For years she had lived only to find Megan and Axie. And now there was no hope. They were gone forever.

She began her first job the next day with an aching void in her chest, but her face was calm, her eyes cool, and no one would have known the agony of despair she was feeling. The only thing that kept her going was her determination to survive in spite of everything, and her hatred for Arthur.

She felt like a machine as she moved through the days and nights, but she performed her job well. She improved her typing, studied steno from a book, and went to college at night, just as she had promised herself years before she would. She did everything she had said she would, but through it all there was not so much a sense of accomplishment but of heartless determination. She was going to succeed at all costs, but even she didn't know why she wanted to make it. There was no one to prove anything to. No one who cared. No one to love or who loved her.

She only kept the job for a year, and then she got a better one. She heard about it before anyone else, at the employment agency where she worked, and she went to the interview before anyone else even knew about it. It was as a receptionist at CBA-News. It was a fabulous job that paid almost twice what her current job did, and she had to be quick, smart, and good, and she was all three. The woman who interviewed her was very impressed with her. She got the job, and managed to stay on in school. And she got steady raises from then on. She eventually became a secretary, and then a production a.s.sistant, and within five years a producer. She was incredibly bright, and by then she had graduated from college. She was twenty-three years old and she was well on her way to a real career. She was respected by her superiors, and feared by some of her employees, most in fact, and she seemed to have few friends at work. She kept aloof and worked hard, staying late most of the time, and turning in projects deserving of the praise she won. She was a remarkable girl, and when she became one of the main producers of the evening news at twenty-five, Adam Kane, the man in charge of network news invited her out to celebrate. She hesitated and then decided it would be politically unwise to refuse him. She accepted gracefully and found herself dining at the Brussels with him, drinking champagne and talking shop, discussing how important the network was and where she hoped to go eventually. He was surprised to hear that she had long-range goals, particularly since they were more ambitious than his own plans for the future.

"Hey, hold on there ... what is this?-a staff meeting for women's lib?" He was an attractive man with brown hair and gentle brown eyes, and a philosophical way of looking at life. "Why such big plans?" She was the first woman he'd ever known who had admitted her ambitions to him, and he admitted to her that he found it frightening. He and his wife had just gotten divorced because she didn't think she wanted to be a "wife anymore." and it had shaken him to the core. They had two little boys and a house in Darien, and now suddenly he was living alone on the West Side, and women were talking to him about "goals within corporate management." He laughed softly as he looked at her. She was so beautiful and so young and so intense and yet there was something missing. "What's happened to women who want to have babies and live in the suburbs? Is that totally out of fashion?"

She smiled at him, aware that she might have overstated her case, but she so seldom went out with men. She forgot that one had to be quiet about things, and this one was nice. She liked working for him. "I guess that's out for some of us." She didn't apologize for it. She knew where she wanted to go, and nothing would stop her until she got there. She was still running from the demons of the past after seventeen years and knew she probably would forever. She accepted that now, though she didn't explain it to him. She never told anyone anything. She lived alone, and she went to work, and other than that, she had no interest in anything. He sensed that now, and it frightened him, for her. He knew how much more there was to life. He was thirty-eight years old and he had married at twenty-three. And now he was discovering endless new horizons.

"Don't you want a husband and kids one day?"

She shook her head. He looked as though she could be honest with him. "That's not very important to me." More than that, she didn't want anyone she could lose ... least of all two little girls ... two little children someone could take away from her.... She knew she would never let that happen to her. She wanted to be alone, and she was, and it only hurt occasionally, like now, as she looked at this man and wondered what it would be like to be close to him. Or was it only the champagne, she wondered.

"My children are the best thing in my life, Hilary. Don't cheat yourself of that." She couldn't tell him that in a way, she had already had kids. She never told anyone that, and knew she never would. Ever.

"Why does everyone think you have to have kids to be complete?"

"These days they don't. Most women think like you, but they're wrong. Hilary, the women who don't have children now are going to panic in ten or fifteen years, mark my words, we're going to see a whole generation of women fighting their own biology before it's too late. But now they're all cool, they figure they've got years ahead of them. But it's a mistake to rule it out. You've never been married?" He looked into her eyes and he liked what he saw there, courage and honesty and integrity and intelligence. But he saw fear too. She was running from something and he couldn't figure out what it was that had hurt her. Maybe, maybe she'd had a bad experience with someone ... not unlike his with Barb. He still couldn't believe she had left him and taken his children.

Hilary shook her head in answer to his question. "No, I've never been married." And then she laughed. "I'm only twenty-five. What's the big rush?"

"These days none at all. I was just curious. I was twenty-three when I got married. My wife was twenty-one. It was real important to us. But that was fifteen years ago, things have changed a h.e.l.l of a lot since then. This is 1974. We got married in '59." And then he smiled at her over the last of their champagne. "What were you doing then? You were probably just a kid."

Her eyes clouded over then, thinking back. 1959 ... she'd been in Boston then, with Eileen and Jack ... or were they in Jacksonville by then? ... the thought of it almost made her feel ill. Axie and Megan were already gone. "Oh, nothing much. I was living with an aunt in Boston around then." She tried to make it sound ordinary, almost fun.

"Where were your folks?"

"They died when I was eight ... and nine ..."

"Separately?" She nodded, anxious to change the subject back to work again. She didn't want to talk to him about this. Not to him or anyone. "How terrible. In accidents?" She nodded noncommittally and finished her champagne at one gulp. "Were you an only child?"

She looked him in the eye then with something cold and hard he didn't understand and nodded at him. "Yes, I was."

"It doesn't sound like much fun." He felt sorry for her and she hated that too. She didn't want pity from him or from anyone. She tried to smile at him to lighten the mood, but he was looking so intensely at her, it made her nervous.

"Maybe that's why I love my work so much. It's home to me." That seemed pathetic to him, but he didn't say so.

"Where'd you go to school?"

"N.Y.U." But she didn't tell him she'd gone at night, while she was working.

He nodded. "Barb and I went to U.C. Berkeley."

"That must have been fun." She smiled and he reached out to her, not anxious to talk about his ex-wife anymore, but only about her.

"I'm glad we went out to dinner tonight. I've been wanting to talk to you for a long time. You do a h.e.l.l of a job at the network."

"I should." She grinned. "I've been around CBA for long enough. Seven years." Years of pushing and shoving her way up, until she was a producer. She had a right to be proud of herself and she was. It was a long, long way from the Jacksonville juvenile home, or the foster homes she'd been in, or even her life with Jack and Eileen in Boston.

"Do you think you'll stay?" he asked, and she stared at him.

"At CBA? Why would I go anywhere?"

"Because in this business people move around a lot." He certainly had, and he wasn't unusual in their field.

She shook her head at him, with a look of determination in her eyes that startled him. "I'm not going anywhere, my friend. I've got my eye on an office wayyyy upstairs." And he sensed that she meant it more than she had meant anything else she'd said that night.

"Why?" That kind of ambition puzzled him. He was successful, and he liked his job, but he had never aspired to great heights, and he couldn't imagine wanting that, particularly not if you were a beautiful young girl.

"Because it's important to me." She was being honest with him. "It means security. And accomplishment. And it's something tangible I can take home with me at night."

But he knew better than that. "Until they fire you and hire someone else. Don't hang everything on your job, Hilary. You'll end up alone one day, and disappointed."

"That doesn't frighten me." She'd been alone all her life. She was used to it. In fact, she liked it that way, no one could hurt her or let her down, or betray her that way.

She was an odd girl, he thought, and he had never known anyone as independent as she was. He took her home that night, and hoped she would invite him upstairs but she only shook his hand with a warm smile and thanked him for the evening. And he went home so h.o.r.n.y for her, that as soon as he got upstairs, he called her. He didn't even care if he woke her up, and he doubted that she was asleep yet.

Her voice was husky when she picked up the phone, and he closed his eyes, listening to her. He was a nice guy, and he hated living alone. And she was so d.a.m.n beautiful ... he knew his boys would love her too ... "h.e.l.lo?"

"Hi, Hilary ... I just wanted to tell you what a nice time I had tonight."

She laughed softly at him, and he liked the sound of that too. "So did I. But don't you try to distract me at work, Mr. Kane. I'm not planning to lose my job over anyone. Not even you."

"I got that. Want to have lunch sometime this week?"

"Sure. If I'm not too swamped."

"Tomorrow sound okay?"

She laughed again, a delicious mixture of hot smoke and icy cool. "Why don't you relax, Adam. I told you, I'm not going anywhere."

"Good. Then let's take advantage of it. I'll pick you up in your office at twelve-fifteen. Okay?" He sounded like a little kid, and she was smiling in the dark, lying in bed, and much as she hated to admit it, even to herself, he did something to her no other man had till then. And she trusted him. Maybe it was all right ... just for a lunch or two ... what harm could that do? She hadn't allowed herself anything more since coming to New York, and oddly enough she had never wanted anyone. Other people had boyfriends, and affairs, and broken hearts. And all Hilary wanted were promotions and raises and work. That was her lover, and so far it had treated her very well. "Twelve-fifteen?" he repeated in the face of silence from her.

"Fine." Her voice flowed over the single word, and he felt as though he were floating when he hung up.

There was a single rose on her desk the next day, and they had lunch at the Veau d'Or and she didn't get back to her office till three o'clock.

"This is terrible, Adam. I never do things like this." She threw the long black hair over her shoulder, and rolled up the sleeves of her shirt. It was a beautiful warm day and she didn't even feel like going back to work. "You're a miserable influence. I just got a promotion and now you're going to get me canned."

"Good, then will you marry me? We can move to New Jersey and have ten kids."

"How depressing." She looked at him with her icy green eyes, and he felt something he never had before. She became a challenge. There was a wall around her he would have done anything to climb, but he still wasn't sure how far she'd let him go. They were still circling each other carefully, but he had so much to say to her and she was such intelligent company. And he appealed to her in a way no one had before. It was a dangerous combination, and at times it frightened her, particularly when he distracted her from her work, but after all he was her boss.

He invited her to dinner on Sat.u.r.day, but she declined, and she turned down his next two invitations to lunch, but he looked so unhappy about it when he stopped to talk to her that she finally relented and agreed to go out with him the following Friday night. They went to P. J. Clarke's for a hamburger, and then a walk up Third Avenue to her new apartment on Fifty-ninth Street.

"Why do you keep such a distance between us?" He looked sincerely unhappy about it. He was crazy about her, and he was dying for her to let him get closer.

"I'm not sure it's such a good idea. It could make things awfully complicated at work. You're my boss, Adam." She smiled up at him, and as attracted to him as she was, she was afraid of repercussions at the office.

And then he smiled at her regretfully. "Not for much longer, I'm afraid, if that makes any difference to you. I'm being transferred to sales in two weeks. I just heard about it today."

"How do you feel about that?" She was concerned for him. It was kind of a sidestep, and in his shoes she'd have been crushed, but he didn't look too disturbed as he shrugged and smiled at her.

"No big deal. I might like it better than where I am ... except for you, of course. Will you see me more often then?" It would certainly make things easier for her, but she still wasn't sure if she should get involved with him. Life was so much easier living as a celibate.

Celibacy had become a way of life to her, and giving it up meant risking a part of herself. "Hilary?" He was looking down at her as they walked, and he gently took her hand. He seemed very young as he smiled at her, and in some ways he still was. "I want to be with you ... you mean a lot to me ..."

"Adam, you don't even know who I am ... I could be anyone ... La femme aux yeux verts La femme aux yeux verts ..." The words slipped out and she laughed. ..." The words slipped out and she laughed.

"What does that mean?"

"It's French." She had revived her French in college, and was surprised to find it was still there, dormant but not dead, a final gift from her mother. "It means the woman with green eyes."

"How come you speak French?" He wanted to know everything about her, and there was so little she wanted to tell him.

"I spoke it a long time ago ... when I was a little girl. And I picked it up again in college."