Lovers by Judith Krantz Page B

always been keenly interested in the big clan’s other outstanding rebel, Billy Ikehorn, whose doings had gradually become the stuff of family legend. He had been a kid when she left Boston and just seventeen when, at twenty-one, she’d married Ikehorn, but he still remembered how the women of the family had discussed the subject of Josiah Winthrop’s daughter quietly among themselves at Sunday lunch, in tones that were the Boston equivalent of scandalized gossip. He’d read about her building of Scruples with the approval he reserved for absolutely anything that showed a spirit of enterprise, short of unsuccessful bank robbery.
    As he let Burgo take his car, Ben Winthrop looked overthe vast house and its acres of surrounding gardens, softly illuminated by night, with quick appraisal. An expert on every kind of real estate, he still got a thrill out of recognizing the ultimate, no matter if you couldn’t build a mall on it. He was shown in by a maid, and advanced to meet Billy with his characteristic quick and long stride, that of a man who was always in a hurry.
    “Welcome, Cousin Ben,” Billy said, scrutinizing his face. “I certainly can’t say that you look familiar.”
    “That’s probably because we’ve never met. I was part of another wave of cousins. Your bunch never fraternized much with mine until we got older.”
    “My bunch never fraternized with
me,”
she said in the matter-of-fact way people learn to deal with the deepest wounds of childhood.
    Ben Winthrop was a man with presence, Billy decided as she introduced him to Spider. He had a lean, hard face, a lean, hard body, a lean, hard handshake and a slow, thoroughly convincing smile that had, even in the moment of greeting, something thoughtful about it, as if it weren’t prompted by an automatic response but by a genuine inner decision.
    Nanny Elizabeth came downstairs and presented Max and Hal. Billy watched as her new cousin looked them over closely, knowing enough not to offer them a stranger’s finger, covered with a stranger’s germs, to touch and, God forbid, then put in their mouths. Instead he stroked the soles of their feet with more than the normal degree of appreciation she would have expected from a bachelor.
    “I don’t have children, but that indescribably wonderful way they smell has a powerful impact on me,” he said as the nanny carried the sleepy pair away. “I get to inspect a lot of them, my friends are all reproducing like mad, but your two have more powerful stares than any I’ve encountered. I feel as if they’ve scanned my brain and judged it passable, just barely. Am I wrong, or are they particularly fine examples of their species?”
    “Nah, they’re mutts,” Spider said.
    “In that case, I stand corrected.”
    He was a clever boy, Billy thought, this Ben Winthrop, or rather a clever man. She looked at him with renewed interest. He had a high and lightly furrowed forehead that gave him an almost intellectual air, lots of independent-minded brown hair that grew in several directions at once in spite of a good haircut, a biggish, long, bumpy, idiosyncratic nose, highly strokable like that of an intelligent dog, a firmly cut mouth, long and thin, and a good chin. His eyes were the indeterminate deep gray blue of a changeable winter sea, and the way they were set under his brows gave him a look of being trustworthy and open, although she doubted that a mall tycoon would possess those attributes. He must be at least three inches shorter than Spider, perhaps barely six feet tall, and he moved well, in possession of the space around him. There was something slightly professorial about him, Oxford donnish, Billy thought, which most probably was due to the lingering influence of growing up in Boston.
    What would his cock look like when he was aroused, she wondered.
Good God!
How had that popped into her mind? She who was so totally ga-ga about Spider that other men didn’t exist. How on earth could she have had such an