She knew she was blushing, but could others tell? And could they tell why? Surely they couldn't miss it. It was really quite obvious.
She took a glass of champagne off a passing tray and put the rim to her mouth, more to hide the concern that would be obvious in the tightness of lips than because she needed the champagne. This was no time for her to be getting tipsy. As a former Miss South Carolina and anchor to WCBD-NBC news in Charleston, Caroline Sullivan knew how to throttle her emotions down and step out in pride and full control.
But how was it they couldn't see what she saw?
She'd have to leave soon. She couldn't stay here. The sculptor, Drago DeRege, had already waved to her from across the Atrium Art Gallery floor. He was standing next to his contribution to the exhibit, entitled "Retreat Treat," which was part of the Spoleto music and art festival and which was formed from an artists' retreat week held in the mountains south of Asheville, North Carolina, the previous summer. She had looked coolly at him when he'd waved, though, and then at his sculpture, and had turned from him, instinctively holding her hand out for that glass of champagne.
She knew the Brazilian abstract artist, Luiz Cabrera, was here because she could hear the brassy trumpet of his laugh from across the gallery space. So self-assured, knowing he cut a striking figure, but also so much taken with himself, with his magnetism and prowess. She couldn't drift into his orbit again. She'd already decided she'd have to make up an excuse to leave early.
She'd had no idea what this exhibit was about before entering the gallery. She and Charles were patrons of Spoleto and thus were appearing at many openings and musical events, although Charles would be leaving from here for a meeting down in Savannah after this art opening, leaving attendance at the Dorrance Dance troupe performance at the Memminger Auditorium to her tonight, and not reappearing until Sunday afternoon. Charles had immediately wafted off upon entering the gallery. As a prominent member of an old Charleston family and owner of the company supplying nearly every beverage one would imagine to the city and surrounding counties, Charles' presence was in much demand.
Caroline didn't begrudge Charles his spot in the Charleston limelight. He had been a good catch for her just as she had been a first-rate trophy wife for him. She was his third, although she went to great lengths to establish that she was in no way connected to his breakup with his second wife. Still robust in his late forties—he was seventeen years Caroline's senior—he kept himself in great shape, looked a good ten years younger than he was, and could smooze and glad hand with the best of them.
He also was good, if self-centered, in bed.
She could see him across the floor, surrounded by a bevy of eager hangers on. Did he even know they were at an art opening, Caroline wondered. She hoped not. She found she had to hold her champagne glass with two hands, she was trembling so badly. Could others see it? She certainly hoped not.
"Are you OK, Caroline?" the smooth baritone voice whispered at her side. "Your smile isn't on as straight as usual, sweetheart."
"Ken, just the man I was looking for."
"I certainly hope so, doll. And that you were looking for a man." He laid his hand, discretely of course, on the rise of her buttocks through the peach silk of her gown. A proprietary gesture known to all, but one that he was keeping between the two of them.
Good ole Ken, she thought. The young, hunky GP, Kenneth Blaine. Everyone called him Ken, though, and had done so since the joke had gone around calling him and his then-wife Ken and Barbie because they were both just too perfect. He was a Ken, in fact, but her name had really been Suzie. It didn't matter. They'd been divorced for over a year. Caroline hadn't been the cause for that divorce either. The demands of his hospital residency and some of the nurses he worked with had taken care of that.
"I can't stay here. It's too stifling. And I don't think I want to go to the dance troupe performance tonight, either," Caroline said. "What I want to do is to go out to Summerplace."
"Then I think that's exactly what you should do," he answered. "Charles?"
"He's going to Savannah for two nights straight from here."
"You need a ride?"
"I'll go back to Tradd Street for my car. I'll take a taxi there. Charles expects me to leave in a taxi."
"Very good." Ken drifted off, giving a smile to Bunny Moultrie en route to an area nearer the door to Meeting Street. Caroline would wait for him to leave the gallery, giving him several minutes.
Summerplace was the unimaginatively named Sullivan summer home on the Ashley River flowing in from the southwest to give boundary to the southern side of the Charleston peninsula. Built in the mid 1750s as a rice and tea plantation, Summerplace was in the upriver area that Sullivans for generations escaped too, along with most of the rest of the wealthy in Charleston, to escape the worst of the sultry heat and the mosquitoes and stench in the city. The family had had the Tradd Street house almost as long. It had been built in 1770. All of it, the comfort and prestige, had been the biggest reason Caroline had married Charles, although he had been a premium catch beyond the family position and she didn't have to act happy to see him in bed.
She inserted herself in the group talking with her husband, at Charles' side, slipping an arm through his, and giving both him and the men he was talking to a Miss South Carolina smile, which was much appreciated all around. She was the traditional statuesque and curvy sunny blonde beauty who won beauty pageants in the South, and it didn't hurt that her stint in TV had shown her to be as smart as a whip too. That said, she was always the proper lady in public, for which society forgave her whatever whispers there were about her privately.
And in Charleston, if there weren't whispers about you, you were either four generations dead or as dull and ugly as a rock.
Doing what she could to ensure that Charles wasn't looking at the artwork, she used the first opportunity to inform him in her low, sultry voice that, "I'm going to go ahead and go. There's a snag in the Spoleto schedule that Crystal has asked me to help unsnag before the performance at the Memminger this evening."
"You do what you have to do, honey," Charles said in that hearty always-a-salesman voice of his. "Don't think Charleston can run on its own without the guiding hand of this little lady," he said to the men gathered around him. He obviously took great pride in his trophy wife. All of the men beamed, each wishing that he'd landed her first—in truth still wishing they could get her into bed—each knowing, from Charles' reputation, though, that he had the expertise in bed to hold her.
And you do what you have to do, Caroline thought a bit bitterly, while keeping her Miss South Carolina smile on her face, becoming more in control now, recovering from the initial shock that assaulted her when she arrive at the art gallery, completely unprepared for what she found. Charles' little trip to Savannah this weekend helped her in her decision where to go from the gallery. She knew the business that Charles just had to get away to in Savannah during Spoleto, where the Sullivans had major hosting responsibility, was a quadroon named Nicolette.
As she turned from Charles and his group, her tracks covered, Caroline caught a glimpse of a mammoth black man a few groups away, waving a hand, and heard a bass voice singing out, "Caroline, there you are." Pretending she didn't hear the portraitist, one of the exhibiting artists, she glided in graceful Miss South Carolina form in her peach-colored silk clingy gown toward the gallery's Church Street entrance. She could hear the distinctive laugh of Luiz floating overhead near the Meeting Street entrance. She wouldn't have left by that entrance anyway, even though it was closer to the Memminger Auditorium where she supposedly was headed, because Kenneth had used that exit.
Changing from the taxi to her own car at the townhouse, she drove out of the city and up the Ashley River Road, past Middleton Plantation to the entrance of Summerplace. Rather than driving her Audi convertible all the way to the manor house, though, she turned off onto a narrow trail leading to an old overseer's cottage, now one of their guest houses—one that Charles had let her claim for her own retreat.
Kenneth's BMW sedan was parked under some trees behind the house, but she pulled her car into a garage and closed the garage door behind her before entering the house.
There was a trail of tux clothing leading up the stairway from the entrance hall. She kicked off her heels at the bottom of the staircase, letting them rest on top of Kenneth's black patent-leather boats he called shoes and disrobed as she mounted the stairs.
Leave it to Kenneth to wear thong briefs, she mused as she climbed the last step to the second floor and paused to leave her peach-colored lace panties on top of his briefs.
He was lying on his back of the bed, his legs bent and open. He was truly a Ken in every way, but a Ken plus. He was muscular but trim. A reddish blond to her platinum blonde. And whereas the Ken doll was sexless, he was decidedly sexed. His cock was long and thickish and was erect. He took his hand away from it as Caroline appeared at the door.
Robbing cradles, she thought, but not all that much. He was only six years her junior. But whereas Charles was good, Kenneth was better, because he had the stamina of a much younger man than Charles.
