she felt ridiculous, hobbling like this.
Yes, Maria, but the better news is that your heel could have come off when you were on Fifth Avenue, heading for that meeting with the man from L’Orangerie.
What an impression she’d have made then.
Not that it would have mattered.
L’Orangerie’s head buyer had been polite enough to keep the lunch appointment and honest enough to begin it by telling her he wasn’t going to buy her designs.
“I like them, Ms. Santos,” he’d said, “I like them very much—but your name will mean nothing to our clients. Perhaps after you’ve had a bit more exposure …?”
More exposure? Maria gave an inelegant snort as she turned the corner. How much more exposure did she need? After winning the Caligari prize, she’d sold to Tiffany’s. To Harry Winston. To Barney’s.
She’d said all that to her luncheon companion. And he had said yes, he knew she had, but her status in those places was insignificant compared to designers like Paloma Picasso and Elsa Peretti, n’est-ce pas?
Not, she’d wanted to say. Not n’est-ce pas.
Maybe she didn’t have a lot of pieces in the display cases. Maybe the stores didn’t buy whole page ads for her in The New York Times and the high fashion magazines. Okay, maybe they didn’t advertise her name at all.
But she’d sold to the big players. That mattered. And the pieces she’d designed were certainly more significant than that phony French accent laid over the unmistakable underpinnings of his Brooklyn upbringing.
She almost told him so.
Fortunately, sanity had made her put a forkful of salad instead of her foot in her mouth.
She couldn’t afford to insult a jewelry buyer of such influence. The world to which she wanted entry was small. Gossipy. Insulting one of its door-keepers came under the heading of Shooting Yourself in the Head Just to See if the Gun Would Fire.
Besides, he was right.
She’d been incredibly lucky to sell a few pieces to those stores. Who knew if she’d ever sell them others? Who knew how she’d sell them others? Not landing the Aristan commission had been an enormous setback.
When you could add a discreet line to your business card that said ‘By commission to Their Majesties, King Aegeus and Queen Tia of Aristo,’ you had the world by the tail.
She’d lost the chance to have that happen.
Correction. A man had taken that chance from her. A man who had seduced her and then tossed her out of his bed as if she’d been a twenty-dollar whore.
“Stop that,” she muttered to herself. Why think of him now? Why waste time looking back? There was no point.
Maria made a left on Broome Street, hobbled to the next corner, turned down that street and, finally, there it was. Her building. Well, not hers. The building in which she lived. And worked. That was the great thing about renting a loft. There was plenty of space within its high walls, room for sleeping and eating, but mostly room for working.
If she could keep working.
The fact of the matter was, she was in debt up to her ears.
The loft cost thousands a month to rent. The gold and silver, the precious and semi-precious stones with which she worked, cost thousands, too. She had only one employee, Joaquin, but she had to meet his salary every week. And designing something that would be a fit gift for the Queen of Aristo’s sixtieth birthday had taken hours and hours of time.
So she’d borrowed the small fortune she’d needed to pay her rent, her bills, to set aside other projects and devote endless hours to a design for the competition.
Useless, all of it. Useless.
She had been one of the three finalists. They’d all been invited to Aristo, where the winner would be announced at a ceremony. And she’d lost any possibility of being that winner in one night. One foolish night.
A handful of hours had ruined her hopes and dreams, had left her humiliated beyond measure and the truth was, it was her fault, all of it. Not the fault of the man who’d seduced her.
Alexandros, the Prince of Aristo, had only proved what she already knew. The hell with soft lights and sweet talk. All a man wanted from a woman was sex. That she, of all women, should have forgotten that cold truth and given in to a moment’s weakness, was unforgivable.
Once you’d warmed a man’s bed, he had no further use for you. If something unexpected happened, like, in this case, it turning out that he was an Aristan prince and you were a finalist in the competition to design his mother’s birthday gift, he’d lay the blame for the seduction on you, even when he was the one who’d done the seducing.
Her father had put the blame on her mother.
The mighty prince had put the blame on her.
“Damn this useless shoe,” Maria said furiously. To hell with the snow and the icy pavement. She bent down, ripped off both the broken shoe and its mate, and strode the last few wet yards to her front door.
It swung open just as she reached it. Joaquin stepped onto the street, smiled when he saw her but his smile changed to bewilderment as his startled gaze dropped to her nylon-clad feet.
“Maria? ¿Cuál es la materia? ¿Por qué está usted descalzo en este tiempo?”
Maria forced a smile. “Nothing’s wrong. I broke my heel, that’s all.” She stepped past him into the vestibule. “I thought you’d be gone by now.”
The door swung shut behind her. She started up the stairs to the loft, Joaquin at her heels. There was a freight elevator, but, as usual, it wasn’t working.
“I am still here, as you can see. I waited in hopes you would return to tell me good news.”
Maria nodded but said nothing. When they reached the third floor, she stabbed her key into the lock, walked briskly across the age-dulled hardwood floor, dropped her shoes and bag on a table near one of the loft’s big windows and turned toward her old friend and co-worker.
“That was good of you.”
Joaquin’s warm brown eyes searched her face. “It did not go well?”
Maria sighed as she slipped her coat from her shoulders. She could lie or at least make the meeting with the buyer sound more hopeful, but there was no point. Joaquin knew her too well. He’d been working for her for five years. More than that, they’d grown up in neighboring apartments in a crumbling building in the Bronx, which was not a place most people thought of when they spoke of New York.
Joaquin and his family had come from Puerto Rico to the mainland when he was five and she was six. He was the brother she’d never had.
So, no. Trying to fool him was useless.
“Maria?” he said softly, and she sighed.
“We
