Fancy Pants

Chapter 2

One of the widowed Chloe's former lovers sent his Silver Cloud Rolls to take her home from the hospital after she'd given birth to her daughter. Comfortably ensconced in its plush leather seats, Chloe gazed down at the tiny flannel-wrapped baby who had been so spectacularly conceived in the center of

Harrods' fur salon and ran her finger along the child's soft cheek. "My beautiful little Francesca," she murmured. "You won't need a father or a grandmother. You won't need anyone but me… because

I'm going to give you everything in the world."

Unfortunately for Black Jack's daughter, Chloe proceeded to do exactly that.

In 1961, when Francesca was six years old and Chloe twenty-six, the two of them posed for a fashion spread in British Vogue. On the left side of the page was the often reproduced black-and-white Karsh photograph of Nita wearing a dress from her Gypsy collection, and on the right, Chloe and Francesca. Mother and daughter stood in a sea of crumpled white backdrop paper, both of them dressed in black. The white paper, their pale white skin, and their black velvet cloaks with flowing hoods made the photograph a study in contrasts. The only real color came from four jolts of piercing green-the unforgettable Serritella eyes leaping out from the page, shimmering like imperial jewels.

After the shock of the photograph had worn off, more critical readers noted that the glamorous Chloe's features were, perhaps, not quite as exotic as her mother's. But even the most critical could find no fault with the child. She looked like a fantasy of a perfect little girl, with a beatific smile and an angel's unearthly beauty shining in the oval of her tiny face. Only the photographer who had taken the picture viewed the child differently. He had two small scars, like twin white dashes, on the back of his hand where her sharp little front teeth had bitten through his skin.

"No, no, pet," Chloe had admonished the afternoon Francesca had bitten the photographer. "We mustn't bite the nice man." She wagged a long fingernail polished a shiny ebony at her daughter.

Francesca glared mutinously at her mother. She wanted to be home playing with her new puppet theater, not having her picture taken by an ugly man who kept telling her not to wiggle. She stubbed the toe of one shiny black patent leather shoe into the crumpled sheets of white backdrop paper and shook loose her chestnut curls from the confines of the black velvet hood. Mummy had promised her a special trip to Madame Tussaud's if she cooperated, and Francesca loved Madame Tussaud's. Even so, she wasn't absolutely certain she'd driven the best bargain possible. She loved Saint-Tropez, too.

After consoling the photographer over his injured hand, Chloe reached out to straighten her daughter's hair and then pulled back with a sudden yelp when she received the same treatment as the photographer. "Naughty girl!" she wailed, lifting her hand to her mouth and sucking on her wound.

Francesca's eyes immediately clouded with tears, and Chloe was furious with herself for having spoken so sharply. Quickly, she pulled her daughter close in a hug. "Never mind," she crooned. "Chloe isn't angry, darling. Bad Mummy. We'll buy you a pretty new dolly on our way home."

Francesca snuggled securely into her adoring mother's arms and peeked up at the photographer through the thick fringe of her lashes. Then she stuck out her tongue.

That afternoon marked the first but not the last time Chloe felt the sting of Francesca's tiny, sharp teeth. But even after three nannies had resigned, Chloe refused to admit that her daughter's biting was a problem. Francesca was merely high-spirited, and Chloe certainly had no intention of earning her daughter's hatred by making an issue out of something so trivial. Francesca's reign of terror might have continued unabated if a strange child had not bitten her back after a tussle over a swing in the park.

When Francesca discovered that the experience was painful, the biting stopped. She wasn't a deliberately cruel child; she just wanted to get her way.

Chloe purchased a Queen Anne house on Upper Grosvenor Street not far from the American embassy and the eastern edge of Hyde Park. Four stories high, but less than thirty feet wide, the narrow structure had been restored in the 1930s by Syrie Maugham, the wife of Somerset Maugham and one of the most celebrated decorators of her time. A winding staircase led from the ground floor to the drawing room, sweeping past a Cecil Beaton portrait of Chloe and Francesca. Coral faux marbre columns framed the entrance to the drawing room, which held a stylish mix of French and Italian pieces as well as several Adam chairs and a collection of Venetian mirrors. On the next floor Francesca's bedroom was decorated like Sleeping Beauty's castle. Against a backdrop of lace curtains swagged with pink silk rosettes and a bed topped by a gilded wooden crown draped with thirty yards of filmy white tulle, Francesca reigned as a princess over all she surveyed.

Occasionally she held court in her fairy-tale room, pouring sweetened tea from a Dresden china pot for the daughter of one of Chloe's friends. "I am Princess Aurora," she announced to the Honorable Clara Millingford on one particular visit, prettily tossing the chestnut curls she had inherited, along with her reckless nature, from Black Jack Day. "You are one of the good women from the village who has come to visit me."

Clara, the only daughter of Viscount Allsworth, had no intention of being a good woman from the village while snooty Francesca Day acted like royalty. She set down her third lemon biscuit and exclaimed,

"I want to be Princess Aurora!"

The suggestion astonished Francesca so much that she laughed, a delicate little peal of silvery sound. "Don't be silly, darling Clara. You have those great big freckles. Not that freckles arenH perfectly nice, of course, but certainly not for Princess Aurora, who was the most famous beauty in the land. I'll be Princess Aurora, and you can be the queen."

Francesca thought her compromise was eminently fair and she was heartbroken when Clara, like so many other little girls who had come to play with her, refused to return. Their abandonment baffled her. Hadn't she shared all her pretty toys with them? Hadn't she let them play in her beautiful bedroom?

Chloe ignored any hints that her child was becoming dreadfully spoiled. Francesca was her baby, her angel, her perfect little girl. She hired the most liberal tutors, bought the newest dolls, the latest games, fussed over her, petted her, and let her do everything she wanted as long as it could not possibly endanger her. Unexpected death had already reared its ugly head twice in Chloe's life, and the thought of something happening to her precious child made her blood run cold. Francesca was her anchor, the only emotional attachment she had been able to maintain in her aimless life. Sometimes she lay sleepless in her bed, her skin clammy, as she envisioned the horrors that could befall a little girl cursed with her father's reckless nature. She saw Francesca jumping into a swimming pool never to come up again, tumbling from a ski lift, tearing the muscles in her legs while practicing ballet, scarring her face in an accident on a bicycle. She couldn't shake the awful fear that something terrible lurked just beyond her vision ready to snatch up her daughter, and she wanted to wrap Francesca in cotton and lock her away in a beautiful silken place where nothing could ever hurt her.

"No!" she shrieked as Francesca dashed from her side and ran down the sidewalk after a pigeon. "Come back here! Don't run away like that!"

"But I like to run," Francesca protested. "The wind makes whistles in my ears."

Chloe knelt down and held out her arms. "Running musses your hair and makes your face all red. People won't love you if you're not pretty." She clasped Francesca tightly in her arms while she uttered this most terrible threat, using it the way other mothers might offer up the horrors of the boogey man.

Sometimes Francesca rebelled, practicing cartwheels in secret or swinging from a tree limb when her nanny's attention was distracted. But her activities were always discovered, and her pleasure-loving mother, who never denied her anything, who never reprimanded her for even the most outrageous misbehavior, became so distraught that she frightened Francesca.

"You could have been killed!" she would shriek, pointing to a grass stain on Francesca's yellow linen frock or a dirty smear on her cheek. "See how ugly you look! How awful! Nobody loves ugly little girls!" And then Chloe would begin to cry in such a heartbroken fashion that Francesca would grow frightened. After several of these disturbing episodes, she learned her lesson: anything in life was permissible… as long as she looked pretty doing it.

The two of them lived an elegant vagabond life on the proceeds of Chloe's legacy as well as the largess of the stream of men who passed through her life in much the same way their fathers had once passed through Nita's. Chloe's outrageous sense of style and spendthrift ways contributed to her reputation on the international social circuit as an amusing companion and highly entertaining houseguest, someone who could always be counted upon to enliven even the most tedious occasion. It was Chloe who dictated that the last two weeks of February must always be spent on the crescent-shaped beaches of Rio de Janeiro; Chloe who enlivened the leaden hours at Deauville, when everyone had grown bored with polo, by staging elaborate treasure hunts that sent all of them out racing through the French countryside in small sleek cars searching for bald-headed priests, uncut emeralds, or a perfectly chilled bottle of Cheval Blanc '19; Chloe who insisted one Christmas that they abandon Saint-Moritz for a Moorish villa in the Algarve where they were entertained by a group of amusingly dissolute rock stars and a bottomless supply of hashish.

More frequently than not, Chloe brought her daughter with her, along with a nanny and whatever tutor was currently in charge of Francesca's slipshod education. These caretakers generally kept Francesca separated from the adults during the daytime, but at night Chloe sometimes offered her up to the jaded jet-setters as if the child were a particularly clever card trick.

"Here she is, everyone!" Chloe announced on one particular occasion as she led Francesca onto the afterdeck of Aristotle Onassis's yacht Christina, which was anchored for the night off the coast of Trinidad. A green canopy covered the spacious lounge at the stern, and the guests reclined in comfortable chairs at the edge of a mosaic reproduction of the Cretan Bull of Minos set into the teak deck. The mosaic had served as a dance floor barely an hour before and later would be lowered nine feet and filled with water for those who wished to take a swim before retiring.

"Come here, my pretty princess," Onassis said, holding out his arms. "Come give Uncle Ari a kiss."

Francesca rubbed the sleep from her eyes and stepped forward, an exquisite baby doll of a little girl. Her perfect little mouth formed a gentle Cupid's bow, and her green eyes opened and closed as if the lids were delicately weighted. Froths of Belgian lace at the throat of her long white nightgown fluttered in the night breeze, and her bare feet peeked out from beneath the hem, revealing toenails polished the same delicate shade of pink as the inside of a rabbit's ear. Despite the fact that she was only nine years old and had been awakened at two o'clock in the morning, her senses gradually grew alert. All day she had been abandoned to the care of servants, and now she was eager for a chance to garner the attention of the grown-ups. Maybe if she was especially good tonight, they would let her sit on the afterdeck with them tomorrow.

Onassis, with his beaklike nose and narrow eyes, covered even at night with sinister wraparound sunglasses, frightened her, but she obediently stepped into his embrace. He had given her a pretty necklace shaped like a starfish the night before, and she didn't want to risk sacrificing any other presents that might come her way.

As he lifted her onto his lap, she glanced over at Chloe, who had cuddled next to her current lover, Giancarlo Morandi, the Italian Formula One driver. Francesca knew all about lovers because Chloe had explained them to her. Lovers were fascinating men who took care of women and made them feel beautiful. Francesca couldn't wait to be grown up enough to have a lover of her own. Not Giancarlo, though. Sometimes he went off with other women and made her mummy cry. Instead, Francesca wanted a lover who would read books to her and take her to the circus and smoke a pipe like some of the men she had seen walking with their little girls along the Serpentine.

"Attention everyone!" Chloe sat up and clapped her hands in the air above her head, like one of the flamenco dancers Francesca had seen perform the last time they were in Torremolinos. "My beautiful daughter will now illustrate what abysmally ignorant peasants all of you are." Derisive hoots greeted this announcement, and Francesca heard Onassis chuckle in her ear.

Chloe snuggled close to Giancarlo again, rubbing one leg of her white Courreges hip-huggers against his calf while she tilted her head in Francesca's direction. "Pay no attention to them, my sweet," she declared loftily. "They're riffraff of the very worst sort. I can't think why I bother with them." The couturier giggled. As Chloe pointed to a low mahogany table, the wedge-shaped front of her new Sassoon haircut swept forward over her cheek, forming a hard, straight edge. "Educate them, will you, Francesca? No one except your uncle Ari is the slightest bit discriminating."

Francesca slid off Onassis's knee and walked toward the table. She could feel everyone's eyes on her and she deliberately prolonged the moment, taking slow steps, keeping her shoulders back, pretending she was a tiny princess on the way to her throne. As she reached the table and saw the six small gold-rimmed porcelain bowls, she smiled and flipped her hair away from her face. Kneeling on the rug in front of the table, she regarded the bowls thoughtfully.

The contents shone against the white porcelain of the bowls, six mounds of glistening wet caviar in various shades of red, gray, and beige. Her hand touched the end bowl, which held a generous heap of pearly red eggs. "Salmon roe," she said, pushing it away. "Not worth considering. True caviar comes only from the sturgeon of the Caspian Sea."

Onassis laughed and one of the movie stars applauded. Francesca quickly disposed of two other bowls. "These are both lumpfish caviar, so we can't consider them either."

The decorator leaned toward Chloe. "Information gleaned at the breast," he inquired, "or through osmosis?"

Chloe gave him a wicked leer. "At the breast, of course."

"And what glorious ones they are, cara." Giancarlo ran his hand over the front of Chloe's bare-midriff top.

"This is beluga," Francesca announced, not pleased at having the attention slip from herself, especially after she'd spent the entire day with a governess who kept muttering terrible things just because Francesca refused to do her boring multiplication tables. She placed the tip of her finger on the edge of the center bowl. "You'll notice that beluga has the largest grains." Shifting her hand to the next bowl, she declared, "This is sevruga. The color is the same, but the grains are smaller. And this is osetra, my very favorite. The eggs are almost as large as the beluga, but the color is more golden."

She heard a satisfying chorus of laughter mixed with applause, and then everyone began congratulating Chloe on her clever child. At first Francesca smiled at the compliments, but then her happiness began to fade as she realized that everyone was looking at Chloe instead of at her. Why was her mother getting all the attention when she wasn't the one who'd done the trick? Clearly, the grown-ups would never let her sit on the afterdeck with them tomorrow. Angry and frustrated, Francesca jumped to her feet and swept her arm across the table, sending the porcelain bowls flying and smearing caviar all over Aristotle Onassis's polished teak deck.

"Francesca!" Chloe exclaimed. "What's wrong, my darling?"

Onassis scowled and muttered something in Greek that sounded vaguely threatening to Francesca. She puffed out her bottom lip and tried to think how to recover from her mistake. Her small problem with temper tantrums was supposed to be a secret-something that, under no circumstances, could ever be displayed in front of Chloe's friends. "I'm sorry, Mummy," she said. "It was an accident."

"Of course it was, pet," Chloe replied. "Everyone knows that."

Onassis's expression of displeasure did not ease, however, and Franceses knew stronger action was called for. With a dramatic cry of anguish, she fled across the deck to his side and flung herself in his lap. "I'm sorry, Uncle Ari," she sobbed, her eyes instantly filling with tears-one of her very best tricks. "It was an accident, really it was!" The tears leaked over her bottom lids and trickled down her cheeks as she concentrated very hard on not flinching from the gaze of those black wraparound sunglasses.

"I love you, Uncle Ari," she sighed, turning the full force of her pitiful tear-streaked face upward in an expression she had gleaned from an old Shirley Temple movie. "I love you, and I wish you were my very own daddy."

Onassis chuckled and said he hoped he never had to face her over a bargaining table.

After Francesca was dismissed, she returned to her suite, passing by the children's room where she took her lessons during the day at a bright yellow table positioned directly in front of a Parisian mural painted by Ludwig Bemelmans. The mural made her feel as if she'd stepped into one of his Madeline books-except better dressed, of course. The room had been designed for Onassis's two children, but since neither was on board, Francesca had it all to herself. Although it was a pretty place, she actually preferred the bar, where once a day she was permitted to enjoy ginger ale served in a champagne glass along with a paper parasol and a maraschino cherry.

Whenever she sat at the bar, she took tiny sips from her drink to make it last while she gazed down through the glass top at a lighted replica of the sea complete with little ships she could move with magnets. The footrests of the bar stools were polished whales' teeth, which she could just touch with the toes of her tiny handmade Italian sandals, and the upholstery of the seats felt silky soft on the backs of her thighs. She remembered one time when her mother had screamed with laughter because Uncle Ari had told her they were all sitting on the foreskin of a whale's penis. Francesca had laughed, too, and told Uncle Ari that he was silly- didn't he mean an elephant's peanuts?

The Christina held nine suites, each with its own elaborately decorated living and bedroom areas as well as a pink marble bath that Chloe pronounced "so opulent it borders on the tacky." The suites were all named after different Greek islands, the shapes of which were outlined in gold leaf on a medallion fastened to the door. Sir Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine, frequent visitors on board the Christina, had already retired for the night in their suite, Corfu. Francesca passed it, then looked for the outline of her particular island-Lesbos. Chloe had laughed when they were put in Lesbos, telling Francesca that several dozen men would most definitely disagree with the choice. When Francesca had asked why, Chloe had said she was too young to understand.

Francesca hated it when Chloe answered her questions like that, so she had hidden the blue plastic case containing her mother's diaphragm, an object Chloe had once told her was her most precious possession, although Francesca couldn't really see why. She hadn't given it back, either-at least not until Giancarlo Morandi had pulled her from her lessons when Chloe wasn't watching and threatened to throw her overboard and let the sharks eat out her eyeballs unless she told him what she'd done with it… Francesca hated Giancarlo Morandi now and tried to stay far away from him.

Just as she reached Lesbos, Francesca heard the door of Rhodes opening. She looked up to see Evan Varian walk out into the corridor, and she smiled in his direction, letting him see her pretty, straight teeth and the matching pair of dimples that indented her cheeks.

"Hello, princess," he said, speaking in the full, liquid tones he used whether playing the rogue counterintelligence officer John Bullett in the recently released and phenomenally successful Bullett spy film, or appearing as Hamlet at the Old Vic. Despite his background as the son of an Irish schoolteacher and a Welsh bricklayer, Varian had the sharp features of an English aristocrat and the casually long haircut of an Oxford don. He wore a lavender polo shirt with a paisley ascot and white duck trousers.

But most important to Francesca, he carried a pipe-a wonderful brown daddy's pipe with a marbled wooden bowl. "Aren't you up a little late?" he inquired.

"I stay up this late all the time," she replied, with a small shake of her curls and all the self-importance she could muster. "Only babies go to bed early."

"Oh, I see. And you most definitely aren't a baby. Are you sneaking out to meet a gentleman admirer, perhaps?"

"No, silly. Mummy woke me up to do the caviar trick."

"Ah, yes, the caviar trick." He tamped the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe with his thumb. "Did she blindfold you for the taste test this time, or was it a simple sight identification?"

"Just by sight. She doesn't ask me to do the blindfold trick anymore because the last time we did it, I started to gag." She saw that he was getting ready to move on, and she acted quickly. "Don't vou think Mummy's looking awfully pretty tonight?"

"Your mummy always looks pretty." He cupped a match in his palm and held it over the bowl.

"Cecil Beaton says that she's one of the most beautiful women in Europe. Her figure's nearly perfect, and of course she's a wonderful hostess." Francesca cast about for an example that would impress him. "Do you know that Mummy did curry before absolutely anyone else thought of it?"

"A legendary coup, princess, but before you exert yourself any further in extolling your mother's virtues, don't forget that the two of us despise each other."

"Pooh, she'll like you if I tell her to. Mummy does everything I want."

"I've noticed," he observed dryly. "However, even if you managed to change your mummy's opinion, which I think highly unlikely, you won't change mine, so I'm afraid you're going to have to cast your net elsewhere for a father. I must tell you that even the thought of being permanently shackled with Chloe's neuroses makes me shudder."

Nothing was going right for Francesca that evening, and she spoke pettishly. "But I'm afraid she's going to marry Giancarlo, and if she does, it'll all be your fault! He's a terrible shit, and I hate him."

"God, Francesca, you use the most awful language for a child. Chloe should spank you."

The storm clouds gathered in her eyes. "What a beastly thing to say! I think you're a shit, too!"

Varian tugged on the legs of his trousers so he wouldn't crease them as he knelt down beside her. "Francesca, my cherub, you should consider yourself lucky that I'm not your daddy, because if I were, I'd lock you up in the back of a dark closet and leave you there until you mummified."

Genuine tears stung Francesca's eyes. "I hate you," she cried as she kicked him hard in the shin. Varian jumped up with a yelp.

The door of Corfu swung open. "Is it too much to request that an old man be allowed to sleep in peace!" Sir Winston Churchill's growl filled the passageway. "Could you conduct your business elsewhere, Mr. Varian? And you, missy, get to bed at once or our card game is off for tomorrow!"

Francesca scampered into Lesbos without a word of protest. If she couldn't have a daddy, at least she could have a granddaddy.

As the years passed, Chloe's romantic entanglements grew so complex that even Francesca accepted the fact that her mother would never settle on one man long enough to marry him. She forced herself to look upon her lack of a father as an advantage. She had enough adults to cope with in her life, she reasoned, and she certainly didn't need any more of them telling her what she should or shouldn't do, especially as she began to catch the attention of a bevy of adolescent boys. They stumbled over their feet whenever she was near, and their voices cracked when they tried to talk to her. She gave them soft, wicked smiles just so she could watch them blush, and she practiced all the flirtatious tricks she had seen Chloe use- the generous laughter, the graceful tilt of the head, the sidelong glances. Every one of them worked.

The Age of Aquarius had found its princess. Francesca's little-girl clothes gave way to peasant dresses with fringed paisley shawls and multicolored love beads strung on silken thread. She frizzed her hair, pierced her ears, and expertly applied makeup to enlarge her eyes until they seemed to fill her face. The top of her head had barely passed her mother's eyebrows when, much to her disappointment, she stopped growing. But unlike Chloe, who still held the remnants of a pudgy child deep inside her, Francesca never had any reason to doubt her own beauty. It simply existed, that was all-just like air and light and water. Just like Mary Quant, for goodness' sake! By the time she was seventeen, Black Jack Day's daughter had become a legend.

Evan Varian reentered her life in the disco at Annabel's. She and her date were leaving to go to the

White Tower for baklava, and they had just walked past the glass partition that separated the disco from Annabel's dining room. Even in the determinedly fashionable atmosphere of London's most popular club, Francesca's scarlet velvet trouser suit with its padded shoulders gathered more than its share of attention, especially since she had neglected to wear a blouse beneath the deep open V of the wasp-waisted jacket, and the insides of her seventeen-year-old breasts curved enticingly above the spot where the lapels joined. The effect became all the more alluring because of her short Twiggy hairstyle, which made her look rather like London's most erotic schoolboy.

"Well, if it isn't my little princess." The sonorous voice rang out in perfect pear-shaped tones designed to be heard in the far reaches of the National Theatre. "It appears she's all grown up and ready to take on the world."

Except for watching him in the Bullett spy films, she had not seen Evan Varian for years. Now, as she spun around to face him, she felt as if she were confronting his on-screen presence. He wore the same immaculately fitted Savile Row suit, the same pale blue silk shirt and handmade Italian shoes. Silver had threaded his temples since their last encounter on board the Christina, but now his hair lay conservatively tamed to his head by an expert razor cut.

Her date for the evening, a baronet home on holiday from Eton, suddenly seemed as young as milk-fed veal. "Hello, Evan," she said, giving Varian a smile that managed to be both haughty and bewitching.

He ignored the obvious impatience of the blond fashion model draped over his arm as he surveyed Francesca's scarlet velvet trouser suit. "Little Francesca. The last time I saw you, you didn't have so many clothes on. As I remember, you were wearing a nightgown."

Other girls might have blushed, but other girls didn't have Francesca's bottomless self-confidence. "Really? I've forgotten. Amusing of you to remember." And then, because she had quite made up her mind to catch the grown-up interest of this most sophisticated Evan Varian, she nodded at her escort and permitted him to lead her away.

Varian called her the next day and invited her to dine with him. "Certainly not," Chloe shrieked, jumping up from her lotus position in the center of the drawing room carpet where she dabbled at meditation twice a day, except on alternate Mondays when she had her legs waxed. "Evan is more than twenty years older than you, and he's a notorious playboy. My God, he's already had four wives! I absolutely won't have you involved with him."

Francesca sighed and stretched. "Sorry, Mummy, but it's rather a fait accompli. I'm smitten."

"Be reasonable, darling. He's old enough to be your father."

"Was he ever your lover?"

"Of course not. You know the two of us never got on."

"Then I don't see what possible objection you could have."

Chloe begged and pleaded, but Francesca paid no attention. She had grown tired of being treated like a child. She was ready for adult adventure-sexual adventure.

A few months beforef she had made a great show out of insisting that Chloe take her to the doctor for birth control pills. At first Chloe had protested, but she had quickly changed her mind when she had stumbled upon Francesca in a heated embrace with a young man who was pushing his hand under her skirt. Ever since, one of those pills appeared on Francesca's breakfast tray each morning to be swallowed with great ceremony.

Francesca had told no one that the pills had so far proven unnecessary, nor had she let anyone see how her continued virginity upset her. All of her friends spoke so glibly about their sexual experiences that she was terrified they would find" out she was lying about her own. If anyone discovered what an absolute infant she was, she was absolutely certain she would lose her standing as the most fashionable member of London's trendy younger set.

With stubborn determination, she reduced her youthful sexuality to a simple matter of social position. It was easier for her that way, since social position was something she understood, while the loneliness produced by her abnormal childhood, the aching need for some deep connection with another human being, only bewildered her.

However, despite her determination to lose her virginity, she had hit upon an unexpected stumbling block. So much of her life had been spent with adults that she didn't feel entirely comfortable with her peers, even those worshiping boys who followed her around like well-trained lapdogs. She understood that having sex would involve placing a certain amount of trust in her partner, and she couldn't imagine trusting those callow young boys. She had immediately seen an answer to her dilemma when she set eyes on Evan Varian at Annabel's. Who better than an experienced man of the world to escort her through those fragile final portals into womanhood? She saw no connection at all between her choice of Evan to be her first lover and her choice of him, years earlier, to be her father.

So, ignoring Chloe's protests, Francesca accepted Evan's invitation to dine at Mirabelle the following weekend. They sat at a table next to one of the small hothouses where the restaurant's fresh flowers were grown and dined on rack of lamb stuffed with veal and truffles. He touched her fingers, angled his head attentively whenever she spoke, and told her she was the most beautiful woman in the room. Francesca privately considered that rather a foregone conclusion, but the compliment pleased her nonetheless, especially since the exotic Bianca Jagger was nibbling at a lobster souffle in front of one of the tapestried walls on the opposite side of the room. After dinner, they went to Leith's for a tangy lemon mousse and glace strawberries, and then on to Varian's Kensington home where he played a Chopin mazurka for her on the grand piano in the sitting room and gave her a memorable kiss. Yet when he tried to lead her upstairs to his bedroom, she balked.

"Another time, perhaps," she said breezily. "I'm not in the mood." It didn't occur to her to tell him that she would like it very much if he would just hold her for a while or simply stroke her hair and let her cuddle up against him. Varian didn't like her rejection, but she restored his good mood with a saucy smile that promised future pleasures.

Two weeks later, she forced herself to make the long trek at his side up the curving Adam staircase, past the Constable landscape and recamier bench, through the arched entry-way, and into his lavishly decorated Louis XIV bedroom suite.

"You're luscious," he said, coming out of his dressing room in a maroon and navy silk dressing robe with J.B. monogrammed in elaborate script on the pocket, obviously a costume he'd appropriated from his last film. He approached her, his hand going out to stroke her breast above the towel she'd wrapped around herself after she'd taken off her clothes in the bathroom. " 'Beauty like the breast of a dove-soft as down and sweet as mother's milk,'" he quoted.

"Is that from Shakespeare?" she asked nervously. She wished he weren't wearing such heavy cologne.

Evan shook his head. "It's from Dead Men's Tears, right before I pushed the stiletto through the Russian spy's heart." He ran his fingers along the curve of her neck. "Perhaps you'd go over to the bed now."

Francesca didn't want to do any such thing-she wasn't even certain she liked Evan Varian-but she'd come too far to turn back without humiliating herself, so she did as he asked. The mattress squeaked as she lay down upon it. Why did his mattress have to squeak? Why was the room so cold? Without warning, Evan fell on top of her. Alarmed, she tried to push him away, but he was muttering something in her ear while he fumbled with her towel. "Oh… stop! Evan-"

"Please, darling," he said. "Do as I ask…"

"Get off me!" Panic pounded at her chest. She began shoving at his shoulders as the towel gave way.

Again he muttered something, but in her distress she caught just the last part of it. "… make me excited," he whispered, pulling open his dressing gown.

"You beast! Get away! Get off me." As she screamed, she curled her hands into fists and began beating at his back.

He pried her legs open with his knees. "… just once and then I'll stop. Just once call me by name."

"Evan!"

"No!" An awful hardness probed at her. "Call me- Bullett."

"Bullett?"

The instant the word left her lips, he thrust inside her. She screamed as she felt herself being consumed by a hot stab of pain, and then, before she could release the second scream, he began to shudder.

"You swine," she sobbed hysterically, beating at his back and trying to kick at him with her pinioned legs. "You awful, filthy beast." Using strength she hadn't known she possessed, she finally pushed his weight off her and jumped from the bed, taking the coverlet with her and holding it over her naked, invaded body. "I'll have you arrested," she cried, tears rushing down her cheeks. "I'll see you punished for this, you bloody pervert."

"Pervert?" He pulled his dressing gown closed and got up from the bed, his chest still heaving. "I wouldn't be so quick to call me a pervert, Francesca," he said coolly. "If you weren't such an inept lover, none of this would have happened."

"Inept!" The accusation startled her so much that she nearly forgot the throbbing pain between her legs and the ugly stickiness leaking onto her thighs. "Inept? You attacked me!"

He knotted the sash and looked at her with hostile eyes. "How amused everyone will be when I tell them the beautiful Francesca Day is frigid."

"I'm not frigid!"

"Of course you're frigid. I've made love to hundreds of women, and you're the first one who's ever complained." He walked over to a gilded commode and picked up his pipe. "God, Francesca, if I'd known you were such a dreadful fuck, I wouldn't have bothered with you."

Francesca fled into the bathroom, shoved herself into her clothes, and raced from the house. She forced herself to suppress the realization that she had been violated. It had been a dreadful misunderstanding, and she would simply make herself forget about it. After all, she was Francesca Serritella Day. Nothing truly horrible could ever happen to her.