Scruples Two by Judith Krantz Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t want to impose on Gigi, she didn’t want to make her feel that there was anything that should be improved about her. Billy tried to put herself in Gigi’s place. She was a girl who had just lost her mother and was trying valiantly not to impose her own deep pain on a stranger; a girl who found herself transported overnight into what must be an overpoweringly grand atmosphere; a girl whose father had left her alone for the day without saying good-bye; alone with an unknown older woman who Gigi had to have learned from the media was not just plain rich but famously, abnormally rich. Far more famous for being rich than for owning Scruples or being married to Vito Orsini.
    And yet.… and yet. Suddenly Billy knew whom Gigi reminded her of. Spider Elliott, of all people. He had always treated her exactly like everybody else, as if she didn’t have a bean. He talked to her with the same openness as Gigi did. Her money had never impressed him worth a damn, and she felt that it didn’t impress Gigi either. She knew it didn’t impress Gigi. The house and the grounds interested her, she was curious about details and how things were done, but they didn’t awe her. She wasn’t mentally pinching herself, and at the same time trying to act as if her surroundings weren’t new to her. This was passing strange, to say the least.
    “Gigi,” Billy heard herself saying with the same stealthy seductiveness as the snake in the Garden of Eden on the subject of apples, “have you always worn your hair long?”
    Sara, currently the hottest hand with scissors at Vidal Sassoon’s Beverly Hills Salon, was delighted to give Mrs. Orsini an appointment in half an hour. For anyone else, as Billy well knew, the wait would be a week.
    “Holy Father, what have we here?” Sara asked in her quick Cockney deadpan when Gigi sat down in her chair.
    “A golden opportunity for you, kiddo,” Billy snapped. She wasn’t going to have any of the cheeky Brits Vidal brought over from London putting Gigi down as they managed to do with half the population of the city, male as well as female. “I want you to give my young friend here a look that will do her justice, not illustrate any of your pet theories, or Vidal’s either, for that matter. One trendy slash too much—just one—and we’re going to find ourselves with a serious problem.”
    “I take your meaning, Mrs. Orsini,” Sara said, lifting up the weighty mass of Gigi’s totally unshaped head of hair in both hands so that she could see her hairline at the back. “Full, isn’t it? Nothing you can’t do when there’s plenty to play with.”
    “You’re working today, kiddo, not playing,” Billy said severely, sitting down next to the hairdresser’s chair.
    Sara looked at her sideways and ground her teeth. Billy’s grim policewoman’s expression reminded her of her own mum’s when she started to practice cutting on her younger sisters. The only thing worse was a mother with a handsome little boy. For the next half hour she put her scissors aside and combed and brushed Gigi’s hair into dozens of different styles. Gigi and Billy watched, mesmerized. Nothing worked.
    “Mrs. Orsini, I’m going to have to cut quite a bit to get anywhere,” Sara said finally. “Cut and thin.”
    “A half-inch at a time, Sara. Just don’t surprise me.”
    “Rightio.” She set to work, as cautiously as a sculptor cutting directly into a precious piece of marble. Gradually Gigi’s neck was revealed, a very white neck that, for all its extreme delicacy of shape, was exactly as strong as it needed to be to form the perfect base for her head. More and more hair fell to the floor and was swept up by an assistant almost as soon as it fell. Repeatedly, Sara partially wet Gigi’s hair and blew it dry to estimate her progress. Basically it was ever-so-slightly wavy hair, she thought, and it wanted urgently to flip upward at the sides. She couldn’t think of anybody who had emerged from Sassoon’s