‘I swear Vivian, you’re the smartest, most beautiful woman in the world. But you’re my friend. You havebeen since I arrived in town. When everyone was pointing fingers at me, you didn’t, and I treasure you too much because of it.’ He swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple bobbed. ‘And if we keeping doing this,’ he waved his finger between the two of them, ‘I will keep hurting you. I don’t want to hurt you.’
She shook her head and looked out of the window, to the Glanzfluss, to the fairy-tale mansion on the other side of it, in which she felt so lonely.
She looked back at Tristan. Tall, so handsome, so sexy. Why did he make her feel like she wasn’t enough for him?
‘Go fuck yourself,’ she said quietly and angrily, as she walked away. She had a hotel to run.
Tristan stood at the table on his own, his hands in his pockets. He was glad not to have seen Vivian’s crying face. Her crying face usually undid him. Her anger he could take. But he had no choice. He could not stop thinking about the English woman in her caramel-coloured underwear. Her pert breasts and silky clitoris. Her inquisitive eyes and no-nonsense normality. She reminded him of the girls he dated before his name was notorious. When he could surf or ski around the world in anonymity. She was finally giving him a conscience. Making him want to come clean. And he couldn’t treat Vivian Steinherr the way he had been for a second longer.
‘Are you early or am I late?’ asked Shivam Masrani, one of Tristan’s party of wine buyers, as he strolled into the hotel bar, hands in his pockets, hair slicked back on this thick head. Tristan tried to unscramble his thoughts and put on his best smile.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Walter sat at the large executive desk in his office, whisky in hand, ruminating on succession. The grandfather clock belonging to his own grandfather Ernst ticked melodically in the corner of his capacious study, an acute reminder that he was on borrowed time. The mansion was quiet. He didn’t know where Anastasia or Dimitri were, but imagined they probably weren’t together. Vivian was at the Anna Maria. Kiki had gone to Lapland, taking a group of children with cancer to meet Father Christmas.
‘Wouldn’t that be better in December?’ Walter had asked.
‘Some of them might not make it to Christmas, Walter,’ Kiki had said with a levelling look. Walter conceded, although he was still a little sore. He wanted out, but he had pride. He hadn’t married Kiki so she could swan off
here, there and everywhere. He had wanted a wife to take care of him in his old age, and she had at first. But her shopping trips and treatments and altruistic trips with sick children soon took priority over her husband, although she wasn’t to know he had cancer too.
Which reminded him. The issue of an heir. Lysander had ruled himself out and suggested Vivian. Caspian seemed so hellbent on shunning the business his ancestors had built,affording him a life of travel and surfing, that he was out too. But what about Anastasia? He had to consider her, and she had experienced more facets of the business than any of his children. But she had never stuck at any of them. He had thought that gifting the Anna Maria to both daughters would show Anastasia the work ethic and staying power that this business took, if she were to work with Vivian up close. Perhaps she was more like Caspian than any of them had realised. A drifter.
But Anastasia’s biggest currency was her beauty. Both his daughters were beautiful of course, but Anastasia was classically so: glossy, symmetrical and sumptuous in her style. Perhaps she could be the figurehead of the Steinherr portfolio, representing the business on the world stage, if the girls did decide to spread their wings, while Vivian kept everything running.
Who was Walter kidding? With that solution, both daughters would feel hard done by.
He swirled the ice cubes in his cut-glass tumbler of Scotch, but the dilemma only made him feel sad. He didn’t want to feel sad. Time was short and pleasures were few. Exhaling a gruff sigh, Walter opened a side drawer of his desk and took out a Cartier box. He placed it on the dark-green leather surface of the desk and opened it. In it sat a white-gold, emerald and diamond panther bracelet. It was a little ostentatious for Lumi’s classic style but he was feeling impulsive, and he suspected she would love it if she knew it were from him.
Walter rang the bell for his butler, who was at the study door within seconds.
‘Yes sir?’
‘Arrange delivery of this please. To Lumi Kivvi at Chalet Edelweiss.’
‘Certainly sir. Any card to go with it?’
‘No, that’s all.’
It was an audacious move, but Walter was feeling more and more reckless by the day.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
There were twoapothekepharmacies in Kristalldorf, which rotated late-night opening during the ski season, to cater for all the tourists’ blister, pain relief and knee-support needs.
Emme had made it to the Lebenapothekein the centre of the village by the skin of her teeth before the kindly pharmacist switched off the lights at 10.05pm. Lexy Harrington had had a crisis when she realised her favoured skin moisturiser had run out, just as she was taking off her make-up.
‘You can use some of mine?’ Emme said, proffering her moisturiser. The kids were in bed and Bill was watching a Jack Reacher movie. Lexy frowned. There was clearly no way she would put Clinique on her porcelain skin.
‘Would you be a doll and pop to the pharmacy? They stock Dr Levy serum there…’ Lexy fawned, her own face taking on the appearance of a sweet, porcelain doll. Lexy was in her bath robe, white towel wrapped in a turban on her head, having spent the evening trying to cling onto her youth.
Emme jumped at the chance. The kids were asleep, the chalet felt claustrophobic, and she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Tristan’s exhilarating touch in the boutique earlier. She needed the air. So Emme found herself picking up Lexy’s 230-franc tube of Dr Levy moisturiser in the nick of time.
Emme was about to head back to the apartment when she thoughtfuck itand decided to extend her walk a little. Make Lexy wait. Emme needed to walk and mull over just howrightthat had felt in the clothes store, when she knew he was so wrong. So she pocketed the skin serum and wound through a backstreet and down a tiny alley whose wooden-beamed huts and small stone houses almost touched overhead. The street was shrouded in darkness and silence, except for distant music coming from a nearby bar.
A couple walked past, wrapped up and giddy, and the man reminded her of Tom. She considered Tom, and how it hadn’t been him she was yearning for in the boutique this afternoon. The woman smiled at Emme as she rested her head on her partner’s shoulder. Emme smiled back as the couple passed.
The silhouette of another figure appeared at the top of the alleyway, backlit by the lamps of a busier street behind him. A long shadow approached and the figure edged into a locked hut’s doorway to make way for Emme. It was only as they were almost side by side, strangers in the dark trying to avoid touching, that she realised the man was Tristan.
