Platinum Doll. Anne Girard

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СКАЧАТЬ it’s a good thing I have one,” he returned with a wink.

      Chuck didn’t like to talk about the accident that had left him wealthy, and he had only told her the story once. It was that night on this same car seat, with the top down, beneath a vast and sparkling canopy of stars.

      “At least they died together,” he had said quietly. “Father never could have gone on without Mother. She was his whole world. Like you are to me, Harlean. You’re the best thing to happen to me, the only good thing since I lost them. Those were awful times and I never thought I’d be happy ever again until the night I met you.”

      Her heart wrenched. She couldn’t imagine that sort of pain. “Oh, Chuck.”

      “No, I mean it, and I’m gonna marry you. I want what they had. I need it, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make you feel like a queen.”

      It was the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to her. It had felt like a fairy tale that night, like being swept up in one of the romantic novels she read.

      And it brought out the longing for a relationship with her own father, a man who she saw so rarely after the divorce that he too might as well have been dead. Her gentle side came from him.

      “You don’t have to say that because of what we just did,” she had said with a nervous laugh.

      “I’m saying it because I love you, Harlean Carpenter. I’m crazy about you, and I think you feel the same about me.”

      “Of course I do, but I’m only sixteen, Chuck, and, jeez, you’re just twenty.”

      “True, but I’m a rich twenty!” Pleased with the idea, he had smiled, his handsome face half in shadow from the moonlight. “Or I will be rich in November when I turn twenty-one and that trust fund is mine. Then I can take care of you in fine style. We can go anywhere in the world, do anything we want.”

      “You know Mommie said I can’t get married before I’m eighteen.”

      “To hell with your mommie,” he had snapped, but the vulnerable way he had just opened up to her about losing his parents in a horrific boating accident four years earlier, smoothed the harshest part of his tone.

      “I’m sorry, doll. I shouldn’t have said that.” He gazed up at the sky for a long time and she knew he was considering what he was about to say. She could tell there was an internal struggle so she’d tried not to even move, fearing he would change his mind.

      “It was the week after I turned sixteen. I was supposed to go out on the lake with my dad. He had it all planned. It was the thing we used to do together. He really loved that. ‘Time with my boy,’ he used to say. But I was being petulant that day, a real louse. I honestly don’t even remember why, but I told him I wasn’t going and that was that.”

      In spite of his achingly quiet monotone, Harlean could hear the tremble beneath it. “He had the trip planned so my mother went with him instead.”

      She watched a crystal tear fall from his eye onto the tip of his ear and disappear into a copper coil of hair. “She’d be alive today if I’d done what I was supposed to do.”

      She knew that meant he would have died in her place, but she couldn’t bear to say what of course he already knew, and the guilt that must have been attached to that. Harlean touched his arm but he didn’t react to it. The moment was extinguished when he sat up, composed again. His willingness to allow more of the recollection had vanished.

      “I’m sorry for what I said about your mother earlier, but you can’t let her run your life forever. Especially not once we’re married. Then we will have each other to depend on, just the two of us.”

      It had never occurred to Harlean before that night beneath the stars that there might be a time she would want to avoid her mother’s powerful sphere of influence and her deep, abiding love for her only child. The two of them had been a team since the divorce and that first trip they had made to Hollywood together, one underscored by their hopes and dreams.

      What an adventure that had been!

      The rooming house on Gramercy Place, with the tiny sagging beds and the paper-thin walls, her mother’s auditions most days on the bustling Paramount and Fox studio lots, the parade of costumed actors that would pass by Harlean as she waited patiently outside on the curb with only a book to keep her company, and the promise of an ice-cream soda afterward... So many memories of that time would never leave her.

      Harlean had known from an early age how much her mother relied on her as she tried to make it in the motion picture industry. They had become more like best friends than mother and daughter during those crazy, whirlwind days, and she had relished the sensation because it made her feel important to a mother she idolized.

      Their bond became unbreakable, no matter what Chuck thought or felt about her. Harlean was determined to love them both, and have them both in her life, along with this exciting new chapter back in Hollywood. In time, she would convince him of that and they would learn to respect one another. The prospect of their future here was too thrilling for anything from the past to ruin it.

      They pulled to a stop at the top of the incline before the monolithic white hotel. She nervously smoothed out the front of her skirt as she watched well-heeled guests coming and going through the main entrance. Women wore calf-length dresses, silk stockings, wide-brimmed hats or crocheted caps over stylishly bobbed hair set in tight finger waves. Men were turned out in expensive double-breasted camel-hair suit coats and fedoras. A bellman in a red uniform and white gloves rushed over to open her car door.

      “We’re really staying the night here?”

      “We’re paid up for the week. I wanted to surprise you,” he said with pride.

      Love really was like a whirlwind, she thought. It could catch you up and carry you along so that nothing else mattered.

      They were shown to a large, terra-cotta roofed bungalow overlooking an emerald-green lawn flanked by bougainvillea and hibiscus. The glistening new hotel swimming pool, surrounded by a ring of towering palm trees, lay beyond and gave everything a tropical feel. Harlean went to the patio door to take in the view past the painted wicker furniture while Chuck tipped the bellman and asked him to bring a bucket of ice. She knew it was for the bottle of bootleg gin he had buried in his suitcase. Never mind that Prohibition had made it illegal. Chuck always said that particular law didn’t apply to people with money, or an ounce of ingenuity, anyway.

      When she heard the door close, Harlean turned around, awestruck. “Everything is so beautiful.”

      “You are beautiful.”

      He came toward her, tall and sinewy, then drew her into an embrace. He always smelled like sandalwood cologne and Ivory soap. The combination was intoxicating. Sunlight streamed in behind them, making all of the silk, rose and gold-colored chintz in the room shimmer.

      This was an enchanted place, just like all of Hollywood.

      “Are you going in for a dip, to wash off a bit of that road dust?” he asked as he pressed a featherlight kiss onto her cheek, then another and another.

      “I have a better idea,” she said coyly.

      “Oh?”

      “Yes, СКАЧАТЬ