CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IVORY WENT WITH her mother to the airport in the limousine. The other woman still had only the one bag with its matching cosmetic case, but she looked smug somehow. It wasn’t anything Ivory could put her finger on, but something wasn’t right.
“Have a good trip home,” Ivory said stiffly.
“Oh, I will,” Marlene said sweetly. Her eyes narrowed on her daughter. “I’ll have a very good trip home. You just make sure you keep those checks coming, dear. I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to come back again, would you? I mean, your friends obviously believe me more than they trust you.”
She turned around and walked into the terminal, leaving her daughter heavyhearted and bitter.
For the rest of the weekend, Ivory brooded about that smug smile on her mother’s face. But she put it into the back of her mind and went to work on Monday, with two days’ rest to get her back to normal.
That night, she went on the talk show. Her knees knocked, but she looked very elegant in her oyster-white Crystal Butterfly Collection suit, and her smile was radiant as she shook hands with the host and sat where she was told.
She answered the first questions about her meteoric rise honestly, spoke very sketchily about her background and only touched on Curry’s part in her success.
“How does Curry Kells treat his designers?” the host probed delicately.
“He’s very fair, and he doesn’t lock us in the basement in chains to keep us hard at work,” she said with a grin. Her eyes lit up at just the mention of his name. She couldn’t help that.
“Does he expect favors for promotions?”
“He expects hard work for them,” she returned serenely. “He’s the sort of boss who makes you feel important. Everyone adores him.”
The interviewer’s eyebrows rose and he gave the audience a sly glance. “Do tell? There was some gossip about how quickly you rose in the company,” he continued, unabashed. “Some people said that you got to the top through your boss’s bedroom.”
“Did they?” Ivory got to her feet and gestured toward her suit. “I designed this, you know. What do you think?” she asked the audience and she modeled it, to sounds of pleasure from women beyond the lights and cameras.
He chuckled, disarmed. “I think you’re very talented. And that this is a good place for a station break.”
He signaled to the camera crew, and Ivory gave him a level stare. “Thank you for inviting me,” she said, and she didn’t sit down again. She smiled and walked offstage.
“Wait! We’re not through!” he called.
“You may not be. I am.”
She kept walking.
Surprisingly, there was no rude comment about her when he went back on the air. He simply introduced the next guest, a comedian, and Ivory got into the waiting limousine and went home. The next day, she was the talk of the office. Curry sent a memo congratulating her on the interview, but it was terse and contained nothing personal. She hadn’t really expected that there would be. Perhaps he’d taken exception to the facetious remark that he didn’t lock his designers in the basement. It hurt, just the same.
Ivory didn’t see Curry for weeks after her mother left. She assumed that he was keeping busy with his mother’s deteriorating condition and Gaby, his new “friend.” The grapevine reported that they were seen together at some of the top nightspots in the city, and Ivory had seen a photograph of the two of them holding hands in one of the tabloids.
That didn’t mean that they were intimate, but it did mean that they were spending a lot of time together. So much for Curry’s assertions about not seeing anyone else, about loving her. He’d believed every lie her mother had told about her, and he hadn’t wanted to be part of her life for a long time now. She’d always heard that men would lie when they wanted sex. Perhaps he had, or perhaps he really had thought he loved her. Despite her disappointment at his lack of trust in her, she loved him. It wasn’t possible to stop. The only thing she could do was stay out of his way, not let anyone see how hurt she was and hope that her mother’s shopping spree had satisfied her.
She threw herself into her work again and managed to think a little less about him as the days passed. He didn’t come by the office anymore, or phone. If he needed to tell her anything, he sent memos or messages by other people. Ivory lost weight, but she kept her chin up and no one knew how much pain Curry had caused her. She heard rumors that his mother was worse. She wished she’d had the right to comfort him, but that wasn’t what he wanted, apparently. She wondered how he could turn his back on the sweetness of their relationship when just the memory of it kept her going day after day. Although August had given way to the first of September, the days were still long and hot.
Ivory had almost succeeded in putting her mother’s visit behind her when a storm broke over her head with the suddenness of a tornado.
It came with no warning at all. She was asked to go to Curry’s office, and told that he had something to discuss with her. She thought it might concern her designs or another interview. Or it might be about bills. It was after the first of the month and the charges would come due on her corporate card. However, she’d used it only to take the Chic Boutiques buyer and her mother out to lunch, and even that bill hadn’t been exorbitant. So surely it wasn’t about the card.
But it was, and he hit her with it the minute she closed the door and sat down in the chair facing his desk. It didn’t take a clairvoyant to tell her that he was raging mad. The set of his jaw and the black glitter in his good eye did that for him.
He threw a thick statement at her across the desk. “Explain that,” he said in a curiously soft tone for a man so angry. “And you’d better have a damned good excuse for it.”
“You told me to take the Chic Boutiques buyer to lunch, and Dee said you wouldn’t mind if I let my mother go with us...” She was looking at the statement while she spoke, but when she saw page after page of items that had nothing to do with lunch, she stopped dead. There were charges for dresses at Saks Fifth Avenue, for jewelry at Tiffany, for purses at a Gucci store. They went on and on, totaling thousands of dollars. The account number was that of her corporate credit card.
Instinctively, with trembling hands, she dug in her purse for her wallet. But the card was there, just where it was supposed to be.
She looked at Curry, staggered. It had to have been her mother, and now she understood, too late, what Marlene had meant with her threat that Ivory had better assume the blame.
“Your mother told me that you’d bought a few things for her, but apparently you helped yourself, as well. Weren’t you getting paid enough?” Curry asked coldly. “Did you have to take it to these extremes? Or,” he added with an even colder smile, “did you think your being intimate with me merited perks like this, and that I wouldn’t mind kitting you out in the best the city had to offer?”
“I thought no such thing,” she defended herself weakly. “I haven’t asked you for one single thing!”
“No, you haven’t. You took. Well, it’s coming out of your salary,” he said, leaning back. He named an amount to be deducted weekly. It would leave her enough to eat on, and pay her rent. But she was going to have to be very frugal indeed. The worst of it was knowing that he wouldn’t believe the truth now if she swore it on a stack of Bibles.
“Don’t you have anything to say to me?” Curry prodded.
She tried one small defense. “Would you believe me if I told you that it was probably my mother who...”
“I thought you’d try that tack,” he interrupted coldly, and smiled at her shocked expression. “I had suspicions from the night I saw the two of you together out for dinner. I asked for the statement to be forwarded to me personally instead of to the business office. Marlene told me you bought her some fabulous things and that she tried to stop you, but you insisted. I thought you might have gone into debt charging them for her, but I didn’t realize that you’d bought yourself as well as your mother a closet full of things and charged them all to the company. I couldn’t accuse you without proof. Well, there it is.” He gestured at the statement in Ivory’s hands.
She had to choke down nausea as she stared at the pages of charges, everything from designer clothes to a mink coat to expensive shoes and hats and perfume. She dropped the thick statement as if it had burned her fingers, and her wide gray eyes stared at him sightlessly. It wasn’t true! But he believed Marlene; she could see it in his face. Having spent his life with a loving, self-sacrificing mother, he had no idea that the other kind even existed. He would be gullible because of his own background.
“You don’t know how it was at home,” she began faintly. “She hates me for just existing, and she hated my father until the day he died for saddling her with a child and being forced to marry him. She’s punished me ever since, one way or another. She took me out of school and put me to work on her lover’s farm. She abused me and taunted me, and one night I had to run away because she was trying to...to share me with her drunken boyfriend!”
He just looked at her. He didn’t believe her. If anything, his expression was one of resignation, mixed with bitterness.
She got to her feet, a little unsteadily. “You don’t believe me. Of course. How could I expect you to? Your mother was the exact opposite of mine, and you love her. You don’t even have a frame of reference to see Marlene as she really is. It’s not your fault,” she added gently. “She’s convinced everyone at home that I’m no good, too. She’s very good at it.”
His jaw had contracted a little and that one eye had a faint glitter. “In other words, I’m convicting you on circumstantial evidence? How many times have you told me that money is the most important thing in the world to you?”
Her slender body stiffened as she stood before him. “I don’t steal. And even if I did, I wouldn’t steal from you.”
“You didn’t have to,” he laughed mirthlessly. “I would have given you anything you asked for, don’t you know that? Diamonds, furs, cars...you could have asked me for anything!”
“I didn’t want those things,” she said slowly. “You don’t understand. I thought that if I got rich, I could give Marlene enough to make her leave me alone. And there are so many other things I could do with money,” she continued, thinking of Tim’s care when the time came.
But Curry, with his experience of young women, didn’t think about unselfish reasons for an obsession with wealth. He thought that despite her protests Ivory, like the others, wanted expensive presents and luxury. Didn’t that charge statement prove it?
“Money is the most important thing on earth when you don’t have any,” she said fervently. “It’s the difference between life and death.”
“My God, you are obsessed, aren’t you?”
“Obsessed.” She looked at him with longing and disillusionment. “I should have realized...it’s a matter of trust, you see. If you love people, it’s instinctive to trust them.”
She was babbling, but her nerves were in shreds. She took a deep breath. She didn’t look at him. “Am I fired?”
He hardly heard her. His mind was on what she’d said, about trust. He felt guilty somehow, although God only knew why he should.
“No, you’re not fired,” he said tersely. “You’re too valuable to us. But you’ll repay the company. And I want that card, right now.”
She pulled it out and placed it on the desk, careful not to touch his long fingers as he reached for it.
She looked so vulnerable and hurt that he had to clench his teeth not to get up and reach for her, even in the circumstances.
“May I go now?” she asked huskily.
His eye smoldered as he stared at her. “By all means,” he said with gentle contempt. He noticed belatedly that she was wearing the same suit she’d worn to work several days recently, the gray one with the pink silk blouse that matched it. The only jewelry she had on—that she ever wore, in fact—was the pink pearl necklace and earrings he’d given her last Christmas. Her fingers were ringless. Her shoes were new, but hardly designer quality. He scowled suddenly. If she’d spent all that money on designer clothes and jewelry for her mother and for herself, why wasn’t she wearing any of them?
She’d gone by the time his mind stopped inquiring. His eyes were back on the list of purchases, and he became more intent on it. He wanted to go to her apartment and have a look around. If she’d bought the things, they’d be there. It irritated him that even now, after her mother’s damning remarks, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that she was basically dishonest. He wanted to see for himself what she had in her closet.
But those plans came to nothing. He had a telephone call before he left the office, and he had to go straight to his mother’s apartment. The nurse was with her, pampering her while she got over the aftereffects of her latest radiation treatment.
Teresa Kells’s hair was painfully sparse now, and her face was thin and drawn from pain and sickness.
She looked up at her son with a weary smile. “It’s not good for you to spend so much time here. Who called you?”
“Audrey. She had a meeting and couldn’t get here. She worries.” He sat down on the bed and kissed her thin cheek gently. “We both worry.”
“It won’t do any good, my boy,” she said heavily, closing her eyes. “I don’t have much time left, you know.”
“Don’t talk like that!”
She opened her eyes and managed a weary smile. “You’d talk like that, too, in my place. I’m tired. So tired. I feel bad all the time, the treatments make me sick. I get transfusions twice a week. I can’t go on much longer. Listen. You need to marry and have a family. A nice, good girl to love you.” She glowered up at him. “You’re taking out some new model. Audrey tries to hide the tabloids from me, but the housekeeper brings them. I saw this new girl. Who is she?”
“She’s just one of the models from work, Mama,” he said tersely. “I take her out to show off pieces from our new collection, that’s all.”
She studied him curiously. He was fine-drawn, too, and he wasn’t happy. He hadn’t been happy for a long time now, and she wondered why she hadn’t noticed. She reached up to him and he took her wrinkled hand in his and held it tight.
“What happened to Ivory?” she asked huskily. “You never brought her to see me again.”
“You were right about her the first time,” he said coldly, ignoring the voice at the back of his head that denied it. “She ran up some high bills on the company card. Jewels and furs and designer clothes. I’m docking her salary to get it all back.”
She saw the pain he couldn’t quite hide. “You loved her.”
He shrugged and put her hand back down. “I was infatuated. She wasn’t what I thought she was.”
“It hurts when people we love betray us. I was hurt when your father left. He wasn’t a bad man, but he was irresponsible. I missed him, all the same. You don’t stop loving people because they’re flawed.” She hesitated. “My mind, it seems to come and go. I don’t want you to be unhappy. I’m sorry about Ivory.”
“Yes, I know, Mama.”
She touched his sleeve. “Audrey and I watched that girl when she was on the talk show. She’s pretty. That man was unkind to her, but she held her own. She’s got class.”
“Class! She lied about her background,” he said icily. “She’s the daughter of a Texas sharecropper. She was dirt-poor, and now she won’t even have anything to do with her own mother!”
“She didn’t seem that sort of woman,” Teresa murmured. “Maybe she thought you wouldn’t want her if you knew about her background.”
“She knew about mine,” he countered. “She knew I wouldn’t hold it against her. Poverty is no shame.”
“Of course not. But if she came up poor, maybe she thinks money is the answer to everything. When the man mentioned you, she blushed. She loves you. Remember, I asked, and she said she did.”
His face was harder than ever. “That was before she made it to the top of the design ladder.”
Her fingers smoothed over the fabric of his jacket sleeve. “But you loved her, too.” She closed her eyes. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you. It will be harder for you, if you don’t have somebody to hold on to, when I go.”
“Stop talking like that!” He laughed uncomfortably and patted her cheek. “You’re going to be fine!”
Her dark eyes opened, full of pain. “We both know that is not so, my son. You must let me go.”
His face contorted. He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it fervently. “All my life you sacrificed for me, for Audrey. And now, when you need it most, I can do nothing for you.”
“Oh, but you have,” she replied gently. “It is such a great gift for any mother to have the unconditional love of her children. You have been all I could have asked of my son.”
“And you, all I could have asked of my mother.”
She drew his head to her shoulder and smoothed over his dark hair. Her eyes closed with a weary smile.
She died that night. Ivory heard about it, as did the rest of the office staff, and she contributed money to send flowers. She phoned Curry’s apartment, but there was no answer. He was at Audrey’s house, apparently, and Ivory didn’t know the number or the address there. It was painfully significant to her that he hadn’t called her for comfort or support. He was too angry still, she supposed, but he was grief-stricken and she wanted to comfort him.
She didn’t go to the funeral, even though she knew her absence would raise eyebrows. Curry quite obviously didn’t want her there, or he’d have been in touch with her. She didn’t want to impose on him at such a time. She was sorry about Teresa Kells, whom she’d liked very much.