Danielle Steel: Lightning

“Actually, darling, I think you'd be pretty poor company, from the looks of all this.” He looked at the debris of broken objects around them, and he didn't have the energy to fight her anymore. “What would you think in my place? You dance me around your bed for the last year, very pleasantly, I might add, and all the while, Simon is destroying my business. It's hard to believe you knew nothing of what was happening, though I'd like to think you didn't. I found out that my wife knew about us all along, by the way. I must say, you have to give the poor woman credit. I gave her the worst deal any woman's ever had this side of hell, while she lies around half dead puking her brains out on chemo, and she's elegant enough not to admit she knows we're having an affair. Hats off to her. She's quite a lady.” Unlike Miss Daphne Belrose, he thought, but didn't say it.

“Why don't you go back to her then?” she asked, sitting on a black leather chair, and swinging one leg over the other, just enough for him to see what she had there. But he'd seen it before, and he was no longer bewitched. The spell had been broken.

“Alex is too smart to ever take me back,” he said quietly, in answer to Daphne's suggestion. “I don't blame her a bit. I think I at least owe it to her not to go near her.”

“Maybe you two deserve each other. Mr. and Mrs. Perfect. Mr. Honest. Mr. Pure, who had no idea how Simon was multiplying his business by millions. Just how naive are you, Sam? Or to be perfectly blunt, how stupid? Don't tell me you didn't know anything. I didn't help him set it up, but for God's sake, even I could figure out what was happening. Don't tell me you couldn't.”

“The incredible stupidity of it all is that I wasn't paying attention. I was so busy trying to get under your skirts that I never saw what was going on around me. You blinded me, my dear. I was a total fool, and I suppose I deserve what's happening.”

“Nothing's happening, Sam. It's all over. You're finished,” she said derisively, as though it amused her.

“I know I am. Thanks to Simon.”

“You won't get a job as a bank clerk when this is all over.”

“And you, Daphne? How do you feel about that? Will you be around to make my dinner when I get home from a pathetic little job somewhere, selling thumbtacks?” He was looking at her with total contempt, and spoke to her in a voice dripping with sarcasm. He knew just who she was now.

“I don't think so,” she said, uncrossing her legs again, showing him everything he had wanted. He had lost a lifetime for what she had between her legs, and it hardly seemed worth it. “The fun is over, Sam. It's time for me to move on. But it was fun, wasn't it?”

“Very much so,” he agreed, as she walked over to him slowly, and ran a hand inside his open shirt. She felt his nipples, and his chest, and his very firm stomach and he didn't move and then she tried to slide her hand slowly into his trousers, but he grabbed her hand before she got any further. It was the only thing they'd ever really had, raw sex, and a lot of it. But there was too high a price to pay for the pleasure.

“Will you miss me?” she asked, not pulling away from him, but on the contrary, moving closer. It was as though she wanted to prove something by casting a spell on him one more time, but he wouldn't let her.

“I'll miss you,” he said regretfully. “I'll miss the illusion.” He had traded real life for a fantasy, and he knew it. It was a bitter admission. And he had lost Alex in the process.

Daphne pressed her lips down hard on his, and held him with her hands until she could feel him throbbing and he kissed her with the last of his passion for her, and then pulled away and looked at her unhappily, realizing that he would never know if she had collaborated in his destruction or if it had all been done by her cousin. It was terrible not knowing.

“One last time,” she asked in a hoarse voice. She had grown to like him better than she meant to. She was not one to get involved, or stay that way forever. And with him it had been different. But even she knew, it was all over.

He shook his head in answer to her question. He left the apartment for a long, quiet walk then. He had a lot to think about. And he came back two and a half hours later. There was no sound when he came in. And when he looked around, she was gone. The apartment was as empty as his heart. She had taken everything he'd given her, and left him nothing, except memories and questions. That night on the eleven o'clock news, they announced that Simon Barrymore had been indicted by the grand jury on sixteen counts of embezzlement and fraud. There was no mention of his cousin and possible accomplice, Daphne Belrose, who was, at that very moment, on the red-eye to London.

Chapter 20

Sam's appearance before the grand jury was awesome and frightening. It took all day. And at the end of it, their indictments remained as they had been made. Samuel Livingston Parker was ordered to stand trial on nine different charges. Each of his partners had been charged with thirteen, and Simon Barry-more with sixteen.

Alex had not gone to the hearings with Sam. But she called him after she saw Phillip Smith back in the office.

“I'm sorry, Sam,” she said quietly. She had thought the indictments would stick. But now he would have to fight them, or plea-bargain in some way, in the hope of reducing the charges. The trial had been set for November 19, and they had three months to prepare their defense.

Phillip Smith had already drafted three of the firm's best lawyers to help him. Another firm was representing Larry and Tom, and someone Alex had never heard of was representing Simon.

“What about the girl?” Alex asked matter-of-factly. “They didn't get her at all. How'd she pull that off?”

“Luck, I guess.”

“She must be pleased,” Alex said coolly.

“I wouldn't know. She left for London. She figured the good times were over.” And she wasn't wrong. Sam knew what was in store for him. Success in the financial world was very fickle. Once the money and the hot deals were gone, and after a scandal like this, so was the respect and the recognition. He hadn't tried it yet, and had no immediate desire to, but he was sure that if he called La Grenouille or Le Cirque or the Four Seasons, all the reservations available to him would be at five-thirty and eleven-thirty, and the table would be in the kitchen. The champagne only flowed as long as the money.

And in a moment, even after two decades, the name Sam Parker would be forgotten.

The odd thing was that he had always told himself it didn't matter to him, but he realized now it did. Just knowing that his name was dirt, that his business had gone down the tubes, and the reputation he'd had along with it, made him feel finished. He suddenly realized what Alex had felt when she lost her breast, and with it her sense of femininity and sex appeal, and her ability to have children. She had felt diminished as a woman. And he of course hadn't helped by going out with another woman. Nice guy, he reminded himself. All he seemed to have were regrets now. But with the loss of his important position and his respectability based on it, he felt a loss of his manhood.

“Phillip is putting together a great team for you,” Alex said encouragingly on the phone. The worst of it for Sam was that she seemed to bear him no malice. It would almost have been easier if she'd hated him, but apparently she didn't. She seemed not to care about what he'd done to her at all. She had made her peace with everything that had happened to her. He had no idea how she'd done it. And clearly he hadn't figured out about her involvement with Brock yet. Alex gave away nothing, and even Annabelle's mentions of him didn't seem to imply anything but friendship.