Lauren Weisberger - Chasing Harry Winston

The outfit took a bit longer. She discarded two sundresses, a belted tunic, and a pair of tight white pants before finding the winner: perfectly worn skinny Levi’s that literally lifted and displayed her ass, topped with two barely-there racerback tanks layered one over the other and finished with this season’s Chloe buckle flats. Her skin, permanently tan from both genes and months spent on the beaches of Rio, literally popped against the white cotton tank tops, and her hair spilled down over her shoulders. She added a mismatched bunch of gold bangles to one bronzed wrist and chose a pair of small, understated gold knot earrings to finish the look. Forty-five minutes after hanging up with Gilles, Adriana tiptoed past the guest bathroom toward the front door, loathe to wake the sleeping bird.

“Arghwahhhhhhh!”

She heard flapping and another screech-indiscernible in content but oddly mournful in nature-followed by more frantic flapping. Christ , she thought as she opened the bathroom door. It sounds like he’s dying in there.

“You cannot die right now,” she addressed the sheet-draped cage. “At least have the courtesy to wait until after I meet Maddox. Better yet, wait for Emmy. I have no idea what to do with a dead bird.”

Silence. Then, a positively sorrowful cry. She’d never heard anything like it before, but the misery of it made her shiver with fear.

Adriana jumped forward and tore the sheet from the cage, desperate to quiet the suffering animal. “What is it, Otis?” she crooned through the bars. “Are you sick?”

It wasn’t until Otis cocked his head in that telltale-and perfectly healthy-way that Adriana knew she’d been had. She’d made it out of the bathroom and halfway through the foyer before Otis belted out “Fat Girl!” in triplicate, stopping only to cackle between calls.

“Go ahead and die, you winged rodent. I hope it’s long and slow and very painful. I’ll dance on your miserable birdie grave.” The whole situation was enraging! Just because Emmy felt too guilty to sell or murder the damn bird should not mean that others had to endure its abuse. What are you supposed to say when your best friend calls the night before her trip, panicked that her vet no longer boards birds in his kennel? Any remotely rational person would say exactly what Adriana had said-namely, that if she couldn’t wear it, eat it, or accessorize with it, she wasn’t interested-but Emmy’s sheer panic had eventually worn her down. She swore that Otis was relatively low maintenance and that with the exception of a few moody outbursts, Adriana probably wouldn’t even notice he was there. Yeah, not notice. That’s why she was standing in the elevator, wondering if her hips looked a bit wider these days. Or why she was about to trek the twenty blocks downtown rather than take a cab, because clearly she needed the exercise. Fucking buzzard.

Her heart rate was elevated from a combination of physical exertion and excitement by the time she arrived, and she felt a little sticky from sweat, but the dampness gave Adriana a sheen that heightened her beauty. Not a few passing men wondered if she’d just rolled out of bed after a morning of lovemaking; the others wondered what it would be like to join her.

Gilles appeared moments after she texted him. He noticed a group of PAs standing outside one of the trailers watching them, so he grabbed Adriana’s hips, pushed his pelvis against hers, and kissed her full on the mouth. “Damn, girl, you’re gorgeous,” he announced. “Almost makes me wish I were straight.”

“Yes, querido , me, too. I’d marry you in a second. In fact, if I haven’t found myself a husband in the next year, will you marry me?”

“Tempting, I have to say. Commit to one person for the rest of my life and a woman at that? Just castrate me now.”

“Wait, I think I’m onto something. We’d have a completely open relationship, of course-you’d be welcome to sleep with anyone you like-but we could go to parties and family stuff together and still have our own separate lives. We’d be the new Will and Grace. I think it sounds fantastic.”

“Yes, Adi dear, but what, may I ask, is in it for me? You forget, I do all of those things now without being married…”

“What’s in it for you? Hmm,” Adriana pressed her forefinger to her lips and pretended to think. “Let’s see. Oh, I don’t know…unrestricted access to my unlimited trust fund, perhaps? Would that work?”

Gilles dropped to one denim-glad knee and brought her hand to his lips. “Adriana de Souza, will you marry me?”

She laughed and pulled him up. “One year, querido . I’ve got one year to find myself a proper husband-and by proper, I mean one who wants to have sex with me-and if not, you and I are getting hitched. Sound good?”

“I’m hard right now, I swear I am. Just say it again: trust fund .”

He led her halfway down Prince Street before breaking the news that there would be no Angelina introductions that day.

“Tell me you’re kidding. I got up and showered and dressed at ten A.M., for chrissake. Is Maddox at least here with a nanny?”

“Sorry, honey. But I am scheduled to do Paul Rudd in twenty minutes, and you’re welcome to come sit in.”

Adriana sniffed. “He’s cute, I guess.”

“And, if you’re a good girl, I might even let you stay for the early-evening shoot-”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I’m going out with that finance guy.”

“Oh, that finance guy. Got it. Well, as super-fun as that sounds, they’re shooting a scene tonight with Tyra…a lingerie scene…and there’s talk that Naomi might join her…”

“Shut up.”

“Not kidding.”

“When?”

“It’s called for seven at Sky Studios. There’ll probably be drinks afterward.”

Adriana slowly exhaled and looked at Gilles. “I’m in.”

“Given.” He pulled open the door on a Haddad’s trailer and waited for Adriana to step ahead. A teenage girl she didn’t recognize sat patiently in one of four chairs, back to the lit mirror, as a pudgy female stylist wrestled a round brush through the girl’s thick waves. The other three chairs appeared recently vacated, still littered with Mason Pearson brushes, T3 ionic hairdryers, and every Kérastase product sold in North America.

“Gilles, they pushed up the call time by a half hour because Tobias needs to get out of here early,” the stylist called out over the drone of the blowdryer. “I’m handling everything here, so why don’t you head to the location for touch-ups?”

“On it,” Gilles sang. He hefted a huge leather tote overflowing with supplies onto his shoulder and motioned Adriana toward the door. “To the set we go.”

The scene was already under way when they arrived at the loft, and their set passes were scrutinized by no fewer than three PAs.

“This place is harder to breach than Chez Cruise,” Adriana whispered when they’d finally made it inside.

Gilles smiled but remained alert, carefully sidestepping the tangle of wires and extension cords. “Right before you got here I watched them tell a mailman that he wasn’t allowed to deliver the mail until they were done for the day.”

The huge, classic SoHo loft had sixteen-foot ceilings and exposed brick and all sorts of very intimidating modern art sculptures. The crew had set up a king-sized bed with a metal four-poster frame-the kind that looks like a huge hollow box has been attached to the top-in the living room in front of the fireplace. With its chic brown and lime-green duvet and matching low-profile nightstands, it looked like a photo straight from the West Elm catalog. But far more interesting was the nearly nude actress splayed across it.

“Quiet on the set!” a deep male voice boomed from somewhere overhead.