Meet Me in Venice Read Free Page A

food “to make sure it was okay.”
    Preshy was on the right, taller than the others and skinny with it, her gold hair frizzing into a halo in the humid sea air, green-blue eyes sparkling with fun, her wide mouth open in a laugh. None of them could be called great beauties but they were young and attractive and vividly alive.
    As girls, the three of them had spent summer weeks at Daria’s family’s tumbledown gray shingled cottage on Cape Cod, idling away the hours that seemed to stretch pleasantly into infinity, lathering on the sun lotion and lying full-out, intent on getting thatenviable bronze tan. They would take long walks down the beach, flirting with the college boys they met along the way, meeting up with them again as the sun went down for beer and cheese dip on the brittle peeling wooden deck. Then disco dancing as the moon came up, windswept and happy with the testosterone-high boys and themselves, sexy in short shorts and tank tops, displaying their tans.
    Preshy had met Sylvie at one of the schools she occasionally attended whenever she was in Paris, and later, when she met Daria at school in Boston, she had brought Sylvie there with her because she just knew the three of them would get on. They had been best friends ever since. There was nothing they didn’t know about each other and she loved them like sisters.
    Overwhelmed with sudden nostalgia for the past when they had all been so carefree, so young, with all the world and the future beckoning them on to new lives, Preshy wondered if, after all, she had made the wrong choices. But that past was gone and now all she had to look forward was becoming a successful career woman. Marriage and babies were definitely not in her stars.
    Telling herself not to be so foolish and sentimental, she put the photo back on the shelf next to the one of Grandfather Hennessy and his pretty blond Austrian bride. It was taken on their wedding day and the bride was wearing a bizarre necklace of what looked to be diamonds and emeralds with a robin’s egg—sized pearl in the center. It seemed a strange piece of jewelry for a young bride to wear with her simple traditional dress, but Preshy had never seen the real thing. The necklace had not turned up amongst Grandfather’s possessions, and it seemed to have simply disappeared.
    Of course there was a photo of Preshy’s parents whose faces for tier were just a blur from the past, yet she had loving memories of them and especially of the time they took her to Venice, an event everyone said she was too young to remember but that she knew she did.
    There were, of course, several pictures of Aunt Grizelda: one of her sipping a gin fizz with Prince Rainier on a terrace on the Côte d’Azur; and another of her accepting the winner’s trophy at some racetrack with the King of Spain at her side; and yet another in a cloud of scarlet tulle at a table of international celebrities at the annual Red Cross Gala in Monte Carlo, her long sweep of hair even redder than the dress and her wide beaming smile enhanced with a slick of scarlet lipstick. And with her, of course, was her longtime best friend, blond, rangy, ex—Follies showgirl Mimi Moskowitz, widow of a rich investment banker from a prominent family.
    Grizelda adored the warm South of France climate, the fashions, the parties, the gin fizzes and the entertaining company. And so did Preshy. She was always made a great fuss over and treated like a grown-up—apart from the gin fizzes that is.
    Now the two widows shared a lavish penthouse apartment in Monte Carlo, traveling together to visit the friends still left to them. Neither of them had children and they considered Preshy their daughter, so of course, over the years they’d done their best to spoil her.
    “But let’s face it, darling,” Grizelda had said, finally defeated. “The girl’s unspoilable. She cares nothing for jewels and clothes.All she likes are those boring antiques. She’s never even seriously cared about a