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the salesperson, "I'll take that one." Which usually was the most expensive item available. And now she was treated with great respect, fawned over, wherever she went to buy. |
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I pay in other ways, she thought. I paid dearly for my indulgences by bedding Vincent, something I endured. Driving the BMW was something she relished. And there was MarinaMarina who had changed Camilla's life forever. |
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She had waited months before beginning a gradual change from, as Marina put it so bluntly, "crow to peacock." She prepared Vincent with cryptic references to an inheritance and to stock market successes. More time passed before she showed Vincent her new apartment. He had to know that she now had "private funds." It would be too absurd to be tripped up by the ethics laws. |
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Vincent chose not to be inquisitorial. Perhaps he was piqued by her new independence. But it never occurred to him to investigate the source of her affluence. With heavy-handed humor, he had teased her about the fact that so many of her possessions now had the names or initials of the makers on them, rather than hers. Giorgio Armani, Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, Sonia Rykiel. "I have never understood a woman's passion for advertising someone else's creations," he said, "and for free." |
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You've never understood that, and a great deal more besides, Camilla thought. You're so dull, Vincent, and you haven't a clue. |
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Marina had made it possible for Camilla to live surrounded by costly things. She had taken to grooming herself accordingly. Her thin, masculine body was honed by diet and aerobics. She had the small, high breasts and narrow, boyish hips of an Olympic athlete. When naked, she always ran her hands down over her stomach, just to make sure that it was as flat as it looked in the mirror. The thought that she might suddenly return to the plump creature she had been in childhood often haunted her. |
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