Jennifer Sturman - The Pact

Peter turned toward me as the band began to play. “Care to dance?” he asked.

“I’d love to,” I answered, quickly, before my brain could thoroughly analyze the situation and pass down a judgment that would forbid physical contact of any sort. He helped me up from my chair and took my hand in his. His palm was pleasantly warm and dry. From the corner of my eye, I saw Jane and Luisa exchange a bemused look.

Peter led me onto the dance floor and swung me smoothly into a fox-trot. I silently thanked my parents for those nights as a child when my mother had played our old battered piano while my father twirled me around the living room, my bare feet resting atop his polished shoes as he taught me the elements of ballroom dance that he’d learned long ago in Moscow.

I was so appreciative of how well Peter led and so busy refereeing the battle raging between disparate internal constituents that I almost forgot to pay attention to anything he was saying.

“—how talented she is,” I heard him say. “I mean, I’d heard her name, but I’ve never really followed the art scene. And somehow I never pictured Richard with an artist. I was in New York on business a few months ago, and I stopped into the gallery to see her show. I had no idea—I mean, I didn’t know what to expect, really, but I was incredibly impressed. I would have been interested in buying a couple of pieces if everything hadn’t already been sold. Although, I doubt I would have been able to afford anything. The prices all seemed to have an extra zero or two on them.” He was talking about Emma’s most recent exhibition, I realized, which had opened at the prestigious Gagosian Gallery in May and met with unqualified critical praise.

“Everything was spoken for by the end of the opening,” I told him proudly. “And the reviews were great, too. As soon as I can get a day off, I’m going to have to dredge up all of my old notebooks and letters to see if Emma doodled in any of the margins. I could make a killing on eBay and retire. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.” He laughed.

“What do you do now that you don’t get days off and you want to retire so badly?”

“Ugh,” I replied. “Do you really want to know?” For some reason, finding out about my profession was usually enough to send most men running. Not, I reminded myself, that I should care what any friend of Richard’s thought of me or my chosen career.

“Of course. It can’t be any worse than hawking your best friend’s personal memorabilia on the Web.”

“I’m an investment banker,” I confessed. “Mergers and Acquisitions at Winslow, Brown.” I cocked my head and waited for him to gasp with horror and run, shrieking, from the dance floor.

Instead, he chuckled. “You say that like you’re a bounty hunter or a paid assassin.”

“Not too far off,” I said. “Even worse, it’s so 1987.”

“Hardly. I’m sure it’s very high-powered. All of that glamorous wheeling and dealing.” There was a teasing edge to his voice.

I laughed. “I guess it depends on how you define glamorous.” I’d spent far more sleepless nights crunching numbers and cranking out client presentations for smug bald men than I cared to remember. My life at Winslow, Brown bore about as much resemblance to Gordon Gekko’s in Wall Street as my legs did to Cindy Crawford’s. But at least the rules for a successful career in investment banking were clear, and I knew how to follow them. My hours were long and grueling, and I frequently despised my colleagues and my clients, but my bonus checks were large and if I continued to play the game, I might be in a position to retire well before my fortieth birthday with several million in the bank, financially secure and independent at last. I changed the subject. “What about you? What do you do?”

“Me? Equally embarrassing. Very 1999.”

“What? Tell me,” I demanded.

“I run an Internet start-up.”

“How is that embarrassing? Now that really does sound glamorous. And hip. I bet you never have to wear a suit. And you probably get to take your dog to work.”

“Right,” he said. “I spend most of my time sucking up to venture capitalists and worrying about how I’m going to make the payroll.”

“Still, it must be exciting,” I told him, even though the very idea of so much risk and uncertainty was enough to make my blood pressure rise.

“It doesn’t seem so exciting when you can’t sleep because you don’t know where your next round of financing is going to come from,” he replied, but his easy tone suggested that he didn’t really lose much sleep.

“Maybe I could help,” I started to offer, when a sharp elbow jostled me and a spike heel stamped down on my foot. Icy liquid splashed down my dress and a glass shattered on the floor, but I was blinded by pain and hardly noticed.

“Oh, dear,” I heard someone drawl in a faintly slurred lockjaw. “Now look what I’ve done. Darling, are you all right?” The black curtain of physical anguish that had swept before my eyes faded to jagged purple and white lines, through which I could make out one of Emma’s aged great-aunts gazing at me with tipsy alarm and wearing a dress that had probably been the height of chic when she’d purchased it from Monsieur Balmain’s house of couture back in the late 1950s. Its pattern clashed in an unfortunate way with the vibrating stripes that clouded my vision. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, even if you factored in the heft of her bee-hived hair, but I still felt as if a Mack truck had run over my foot.

“I’m fine,” I managed to gasp out. “Really.” You old bat, I added silently.

“Oh, but your frock, darling. I’m so sorry.”

“Nothing a little seltzer water won’t fix,” I said as politely as I could under the circumstances. She was still apologizing as Peter took me by the elbow and steered me across the room and through a swinging door into the kitchen. The room was busy with staff cleaning up the remains of the elaborate meal, but a harried waitress pointed us to a side pantry in answer to Peter’s inquiry about seltzer.

This was just great, I thought to myself as Peter guided me across the crowded kitchen. Only a moment ago I’d been managing to dance and have a conversation with an attractive man simultaneously. Now I had a huge splotch all over the front of my dress and had provided him with a choice demonstration of just what a clumsy oaf I was.

Peter led us through another swinging door into the pantry, a small room lined with counters and cabinets. “Alone at last,” he said with a smile that acknowledged the cheesiness of his words. “But that looked like it hurt.” His eyes were filled with concern.

“Which part?” I asked, trying to put up a valiant front. “The puncture wound to my foot or the destruction of a perfectly good Armani? Do you think I should get a tetanus shot? Matthew probably has his doctor’s bag around here somewhere.”

Peter put his arms around my waist and set me on one of the counters. This simple gesture was almost enough to make me forget the pain I was in. He knelt to examine my foot, while I studied the top of his head. I gripped the edge of the counter tightly to prevent myself from running my hands through his hair, which was full and sun-streaked, with a couple of adorable cowlicks shooting off in unlikely directions. “Okay, there’s no blood. And I don’t think anything’s broken.” He rose to his feet and looked at my dress. “I wish that I could say the same thing about the Armani.”

I quickly inspected the Scotch-and-soda-colored stain spreading across the creamy silk. “It’s not looking good, is it?”

“Well, if the seltzer doesn’t work, maybe we could just get a bottle of whisky and dye the entire thing?”