His brother wouldn’t let him hang out with his friends, so Alexia went to go to bed. When he arrived in his bedroom he found a pile of coats covering the bed. In a rage, he started throwing all the coats of his brother’s guests on the floor, but soon realized someone was asleep underneath the pile. She was a beautiful redhead with a smattering of freckles on her nose and cheeks, who more than likely was too tipsy to figure out which of the teddy bear coats belonged to her and gave up. Alexia grabbed a blanket and a pillow and fell asleep on the floor. Sometime before dawn, he woke up and the girl was on top of him kissing his neck and telling him he was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, as she slid off her thong and dropped it playfully on the carpet.
After that night his fate was sealed. He decided he was a guy who would never settle down. He loved the way beautiful girls made him feel, and he loved making them feel incredible, too. He loved the flirting, the dancing, the kissing, the cuddling, and was even happy to sleep over after sex, which he knew most other guys detested. To him, women were so much better than men. They smelled better, they dressed better, and they were so soft to the touch.
It was for this very reason that he was so desperately unhappy to be sent off to an all-boys boarding school in Maryland for high school (his father and brother had both graduated from the esteemed school). He missed the company of women. He missed fancy rich girls, the ones who shopped and gossiped. The ones who loved tea parties and Broadway shows. The ones who had little dogs they dressed up in sparkling crystal collars. The ones who spent hours and hours—and hundreds of dollars—in salons debating their hair and nail colors.
He barely made it to the Christmas holiday his first year at Georgetown Preparatory. When he arrived home for vacation and saw his mother, he wept in her arms and begged her not to send him back to that horrible, wretched place, and she didn’t. Instead she allowed him to go abroad and become a ski bum for the rest of the year. It was because of this and his late birthday that he was now a repeat sophomore at Collegiate. He knew some people called him a mama’s boy, but he didn’t care. Being back in Manhattan and living with a full-time nanny was worth it.
This was why Vronsky was feeling so out of sorts when it came to Anna. Yes, she was gorgeous and beautifully dressed, but there were hundreds of such girls in the city—he had a constant rotation of at least three such girls at any given moment. There was something special about Anna. Why else was he so taken with her after only meeting her once?
After he dropped the homeless man’s dog at the dog walker’s apartment, he’d headed over to Steven’s house, hoping he could see Anna for just a moment more. It was Steven who answered the door and told him Anna was otherwise engaged with saving his ass from the wrath of his angry girlfriend. Having no other choice, Vronsky small-talked with Steven and waited. It figured that she finally appeared right as he was leaving, but Anna was worth the wait. By God, he would wait ten thousand hours to spend ten seconds with her.
Suddenly he remembered that Beatrice, his favorite cousin, was a classmate of Anna’s in Greenwich. He stopped in his tracks, not caring that the wind was picking up and the icy snow was pelting him in the face, and texted Bea, who was a big party girl and often spent her nights in the city crashing at the SoHo apartment of her older stepbrother. Bubbles appeared, followed by a text telling him to come to her favorite hangout in the Village. She was with two hot models who were just his type. Giddy with anticipation, he wasted no time hailing a cab. His cousin would surely be able to give him what he ravenously desired: inside info on the winsome creature known as Anna K.
XV
Vronsky entered the Beatrice Inn to find his cousin sitting on the bar, her Jimmy Choo thigh-high boots dangling, and her head thrown back in abandon. Behind her an extremely tall hipster bartender poured their most expensive tequila into her mouth straight from the bottle. His cousin Bea had always been one of the most popular girls in Greenwich and by the end of freshman year she had secured her queen bee status and quickly set her sights on Manhattan.
Vronsky knew the key to her success wasn’t that she came from one of Greenwich’s oldest families, her surprisingly natural good looks, or her piles of family money—that was half the kids in Greenwich. What Beatrice had was information. No teenager can keep a secret and Bea was happy to be the one others confessed to. Beatrice never judged and how could she? For Bea had seen it all, heard more, and probably done worse herself. Her senior yearbook quote would surely read, “If you don’t have something nice to say about someone … then come find me at lunch.”
As promised, she was currently hanging out with two teen models, Daler and Rowney. They weren’t old enough to drive but were both six feet tall and weighed a combined 202 pounds. Both girls walked runways in fashion shows all over the globe and were in the city for Fashion Week. If Vronsky had had the pleasure of their introduction two days ago things would have gone differently. But tonight he barely gave either one a second glance.
“Bea, I need to talk to you.” Vronsky dutifully drank the shot of rye the bartender handed him. “Outside,” he said in a low voice, “alone.”
Beatrice peered out at her cousin through her mink eyelash extensions and nodded. Even though Bea was clearly wasted, she perked up like a shark at the promise of a bloody good story.
Minutes later the two of them were outside, their backs pressed to the wall, blowing cigarette smoke into the swirling snow. Bea listened to Vronsky’s tale of first seeing Anna at Grand Central, Steven’s infidelity, which had brought his sister into the city, and finally Vronsky’s current state of mind.
Beatrice flicked her butt into the street, pulled out her vape pen, and took a long drag. She turned to face her handsome young cousin, reaching out to brush some snow from his blond locks in an almost motherly way. “Weird, not at all what I was expecting,” she said with a wicked grin. “I can’t believe you never met Anna K. before tonight.”
“That’s all you have to say?” he said with impatience. “What do I need to know?”
“That all depends. Do you just want to fuck her? Or is this a more serious malady?” Beatrice was nothing if not direct.
Normally he would have laughed at his cousin’s crudeness, but he found himself unable to smile. “I’m afraid the malady could be serious.”
She pulled the lapels of her fur jacket up and shivered. “Let’s go back in, get drunk, and figure it out.”
Vronsky exhaled and watched his breath waft up into the snowy night.
Inside, Beatrice dismissed her two model sidekicks for the night. They went all sulky, pointy elbows and pouty lips, until Bea handed over a baggie of party favors. While the waitstaff cleaned up around them, Bea and Vronsky sat down in a leather booth and talked.
Bea told her cousin that she and Anna were friendly from years of attending the same school and social functions, but they weren’t close. “Such a waste,” his cousin mumbled. “She’s probably the most beautiful girl in Greenwich, but she never capitalized on what she could do with it.” She paused here and stared at Vronsky.
“Present company excluded,” he added, paying the flattery toll so Bea would continue.
Beatrice laughed brightly at his compliment. Vronsky was such a tasty-looking morsel, and more than once in a drunken horny stupor, she had thought about reaching over to check out his goods, but kept herself in check because as much as she lived for shock value, even she knew that getting busted for fooling around with family would be hard to recover from. Though she had heard from many sources that he was quite skilled in the boudoir, which is why she proudly started the rumor that his nickname “the Count” referred to the number of girls he had slept with.