Too Damn Rich Read Free Page B

weary resignation. "By the way. Don't forget you have a two
o'clock appointment at Kenneth's."
    "Not anymore I don't," Dina said grandly.
"Call Kenneth. Tell him that from now on he can come here if he
wants to do my hair." Then, severing the connection, she flung
aside the covers and popped out of bed.
    Stretching luxuriously, she took a few
moments to savor her new position. Then, humming cheerfully to
herself, she slipped into a salmon pink silk robe trimmed with
ostrich feathers and wiggled her feet into fuzzy little salmon pink
heels. Thus clad, she swept imperiously off to the bathroom.
    For once, she did not dally to admire the van
Gogh portrait above the marble mantel, the Degas Racehorses over
the gilt console, or her treasured trio of sweet little Renoirs.
This was one morning that Dina Goldsmith did not need the tangibles
of priceless art and antiques to validate her position. Today she
knew exactly who she was—and where she stood in this town.
    All in all, she had to admit that little Dina
Van Vliet of Gouda, the cheese capital of Holland, had not done so
badly for herself. She had come a long way in her twenty-nine
years—a long, long way.
    Further than anyone imagined ...
     
    Dina Goldsmith's earliest memories were of
cheese, which was why she refused to touch it now—and woe be to
anyone who put so much as an ounce of it in the refrigerator!
    Like Proust's petite madeleine, the very
smell, indeed the mere thought of cheese, was enough to set
off remembrances of things past. Which wasn't surprising,
considering the fact that her father had worked in one of Gouda's
famed cheese factories.
    Trouble was, that's what she remembered best
about him. The smell of cheese which surrounded him like a miasma.
Clinging to his clothes. His hair. His skin. Somehow, no matter how
much he bathed, the stench never quite washed out. Even now, after
all these years, she still couldn't seem to get it out of her
nostrils.
    But life, always rich in ironies, had used
cheese to provide her the ticket out of Gouda.
    Dina Van Vliet was a classic Nordic golden
girl. Five feet, nine inches tall, she had hair like cornsilk,
sharply etched cheekbones, and wide-set aquamarine eyes. Besides
her looks and a knockout body, she possessed legs that made her a
showstopper—enough so that she won the title of Miss Gouda.
    From there, it was a hop to Amsterdam, where
she garnered the crown of Miss Netherlands, and then a skip and a
jump to the Miss Universe pageant in Caracas, Venezuela.
    Alas, Miss Netherlands never made it to the
semifinals. But no matter. Dina Van Vliet was a realist. No one
needed to tell her what her most valuable assets were. She
knew that better than anyone.
    She also knew she wasn't about to return to
the land of windmills, wooden shoes, and cheese. So she packed up
her consolation prizes, took the nine thousand dollars her maternal
grandmother had left her, and moved to the mogul-rich canyons of
New York City, where she shared a rent-controlled apartment on the
fashionable Upper East Side.
    More important, she invested in one very
good, very expensive, and very revealing multifunctional black
evening dress and a passable string of cultured pearls.
    Thus armed, and shamelessly using her pageant
title to gain entree, she plunged into the Manhattan social circuit
like a cruising shark. Cocktail parties, dinners, opening nights,
and charity benefits—Dina worked them all, in the process turning
down countless offers for hops in the sack, and just as many
marriage proposals, all from some of Manhattan's dreamiest and most
handsome young men.
    But Dina had no use for trust-fund babies.
She knew what she wanted, and was determined to get it.
    And lo and behold! Before you could say
"Cheese!", she had found her Moneybags in Robert A. Goldsmith, the
recently widowed founder and chairman of GoldMart, Inc.
    So it wasn't exactly love at first sight.
    So he was overweight, unattractive, balding,
and fiftysomething.
    So he was a