her lips as she stifled a gasp of surprise.
“It’s all just so perfect,” she said in a whisper.
“Are you sure you like it?”
“Of course! I can’t believe you did all of this for me.”
“Who else is there, doll? You’re everything to me, so you’d better get used to your husband spoiling the daylights out of you.”
Harlean melted against him, then twined her arms around his neck and kissed him tenderly. Passion was never very far off after a kiss between them. “Touch has a memory. O say, love, say.” The words of John Keats threaded themselves back through her mind. She had loved that poem since the first time she had read it and feeling Chuck’s touch often brought it back to her.
“I’ll never get tired of the way you taste,” he murmured as their kiss deepened, and he pulled her more tightly against him. “I really am the luckiest man alive.”
“What do you say we christen the place?” she asked.
“Right now?”
“Why not? I don’t know how you did all of this without me finding out, and on top of everything you made sure we’d have a bed.”
“I’m discovering there’s not a lot money can’t buy.”
“I’m not sure if you’re more handsome or more resourceful.”
“As long as we christen this new bed right now, I don’t care which one of those gets first place,” he said in a low voice thickened by lust.
Afterward, Chuck fetched a hotel picnic basket from the trunk of the car and spread a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth on the living room floor in front of the fireplace. They feasted on ham sandwiches, a cluster of purple grapes and a wedge of cheese. Chuck had brought along a bottle of Champagne from his father’s secret wine cellar in Chicago. Harlean flinched with surprise as the cork popped and he filled two teacups with the bubbly French nectar to celebrate the occasion. He stretched out, propped his head on an elbow and gazed over at her as she sat cross-legged in her bathrobe.
“A penny for your thoughts,” he bid her.
“I just never thought life could be this good. If this is a dream, I never want to wake up. That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”
“Are you sure it’s enough?”
“A husband I love and a home? Why wouldn’t it be?”
“There must be something more. When you were a little girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?”
“Happy,” she said truthfully. “That was it. And I am.”
Harlean waited a moment to let that settle on him then, as it did, she watched his eyebrows knit together as his expression became a frown. “You don’t want to be an actress or anything, since we’re out here in Hollywood, do you?”
She could tell that the prospect was unsettling to him. They both knew that it was a difficult, demanding and largely disappointing dream for those determined to pursue it.
“Now, why would I want to go and do that? I saw how frustrating it was for my mother—the endless auditions and all those doors slammed in her face. That kind of rejection is for fools. No, thank you.”
Harlean may have inherited that stubborn streak from her mother, and an absolute iron will for getting things she wanted, but better to savor her books, her new home and her marriage, and to enjoy the glitter and glamour of Hollywood from a distance.
* * *
Late in the afternoon two days later, a group of their neighbors organized a party to welcome them. The neighborhood was comprised of a wealthy young society crowd. Fit, tan men wearing monogrammed oxford shirts, linen trousers and bow ties bantered with each other as they carried bottles of bootleg gin up Chuck and Harlean’s walkway. Beside them, their pretty wives and girlfriends wore a confectionary-colored array of cashmere sweaters and ropes of pearls. Each came bearing a casserole, a cake or martini glasses.
As the sun began to set behind the bristling palm trees outside, twenty people crowded into the living room, which was decorated so far with only a sofa, two folding chairs and a flea-market side table. Chuck whispered to her that he’d heard them talking, and two of the girls were heiresses, and one was the daughter of a studio boss.
Harlean herself had been raised in an upper-class group in Missouri and after her mother had remarried, she was educated at a posh private school outside of Chicago. But these people were a cut above that. There was a carefree air that surrounded them, and it was instantly intimidating. Harlean had a feeling that this party was actually designed more to size them up than welcome them.
Just when she was starting to think that this might’ve been a mistake, she saw someone she recognized. The mood lightened instantly as an old friend of hers came up the walkway carrying a bouquet of daisies. She wore a pretty floral dress cinched at the waist and a similar rope of pearls to the other girls.
“Rosalie McCray?” Harlean shrieked with surprise at the pretty, petite girl with the chestnut curls suddenly standing before her. “Gosh, what are you doing here? I remember you told us you lived near Hollywood, but I never imagined!”
“Who else do you think organized this little party?”
The girls embraced and Harlean took the flowers from her. “I wrote to your address in Chicago as soon as we all left the cruise, just like I promised I would,” Rosalie explained. Her accent was sugary sweet, and pure Texas.
“I suppose you didn’t receive it before you came out here? Anyway, Ivor heard that the two of you had moved in right down the street from us so we had to be the first to welcome you to our little corner of heaven.”
Chuck and Harlean had met Rosalie and her husband, Ivor, on their honeymoon cruise through the Panama Canal in January, and the two couples had quickly become friends. Rosalie and Harlean found they had a great deal in common since both of them had been teenage brides with rich young husbands.
“Good to see you again, Rosie,” Chuck said after he’d pressed a breezy kiss onto Rosalie’s cheek. “Like a toddy, kids?”
Chuck had solemnly promised Harlean just that afternoon that he was only going to drink a little today while they entertained their neighbors, but she could tell that he had already knocked back a couple of stiff ones. His voice always grew just a little louder when he was drinking. Knowing that he used alcohol to bolster his confidence, she could see that he felt well out of his league with these people, trust fund or not. Secretly, his drinking frightened her because she suspected his reason for it was deeper than just wanting confidence. She believed, probably subconsciously, it was to keep from confronting his grief over the death of his parents, but for now she tried to put her mind on happier thoughts.
“Gosh, I’m happy to see you,” Harlean exclaimed once Chuck had wandered off.
Rosalie glanced around the crowded bungalow. “Chuck sure got you a swell place here, honey. You know, last month Miss Clara Bow herself moved into the neighborhood, just a couple of blocks from here,” she said in a gossipy tone.
“No! My mother would die of envy!” Harlean squealed, and then they both giggled. “Think she’d mind if we popped over for a cup of sugar?”
“So, how have things been between the two of you since the cruise?”
Rosalie asked the question so suddenly that Harlean was thrown off guard.
“Things are great,” she answered, and she knew that it had been too quickly.
Harlean’s friendship with Rosalie had been cemented when Chuck had gotten so drunk one night that he had passed out at the dinner table and had to be carried to his stateroom by two waiters. Rosalie had helped her outside as she’d wept, and the two had spent the rest of that evening up on deck watching the stars and talking about their childhoods.
She