Chapter 10

The limo drove up to a 44-story building on the east side of Lexington Avenue and the doorman raced to open the door for Kris and me. At the same time the chauffeur got out from behind the wheel after first electrically popping the trunk lid. We only had a few of our things with us; most would be coming over from Teterboro by truck.

“Tom,” I said, speaking to the doorman, “I would like you to meet my fiancée, Kristin Collins. Needless to say, I’m sure you will treat her with the same care and courtesy you always extend to me.”

Tom Mason, the doorman, saluted Kris, then did a double-take when he realized how overwhelmingly beautiful she was. She grinned and extended her hand, which he took with great delicacy.

“I’m really not breakable, Tom,” she commented with a warm grin to avoid hurting his feelings.

“Mr. Harris is the luckiest man in the world, Miss Collins. And I’m sure he’ll make you very happy!” To me he said, “Congratulations, sir, on your wonderful good fortune!”

“Thank you, Tom,” I replied, “and I certainly intend to do everything in my power to make Kris very happy.”

“He already has, Tom,” Kris added with another of her very warm smiles. “Very happy indeed!” Then she added, “Brrr ... It’s cold, and I only have this light coat...”

Although it was late March and after the first day of spring, the temperature was still in the 40s, and at street level surrounded by tall buildings there was no sunshine to warm things up.

Mason hustled to open the door of the building for us and commented that he would have our luggage brought up immediately.

Kris’s eyes widened a bit as we were greeted by both a receptionist seated behind a solid marble desk and an armed security guard. “They don’t mess around with security in this building, do they?”

There were three banks of elevators, two to the right and one to the left of the reception desk as we faced it. But instead of going to any of them, I went to an unmarked elevator door set off by itself to the left. As we approached, the doors smoothly opened.

Entering the rather spacious elevator car, Kris softly whistled. It was sided with highly polished furniture-grade cherry and even had a leather-cushioned bench across the rear along with a lovely mirror on the back wall. The mirror was flanked with two scones that held fresh-cut spring flowers. It really looked nice. There were only three buttons on the control board reading G, L, and P, going from bottom to top. I touched the P button; the doors closed and the car began its very rapid ascent.

It slowed, then came to a very smooth stop and the doors opened silently revealing an entrance hall just a bit larger than the elevator car itself. Like the car, it, too, was paneled in the same cherry wood and there was a mirror and scones duplicating the arrangement in the elevator, although the mirror in the hall was substantially wider. Straight ahead was a door.

Although it appeared to be ordinary, it was anything but. In fact, the same thing was true of the entire entrance hall. Behind the drywall and inside the door itself was a half-inch of the strongest armor known. Anyone trying to blow the door of the apartment would find themselves being blown up instead, since the force of the explosion could only go upward, but just enough to dissipate a blast but not nearly enough to help the blaster.

Ah, yes ... The joys of being rich. One can never take one’s own security for granted.

Glancing at Kris, I could see that her eyes were wide with both excitement and amazement at what she had already seen. After first taking the key from my pocket, I lifted her up in my arms, unlocked the door, and carried her across the threshold.

She just snuggled close to my chest and as soon as we were in the apartment, she unleashed all her love and power in a kiss. I had to lean against a wall to keep from falling on my face! Gently putting her back on her feet, I began our tour of the apartment.

The apartment on the top floor of a building is normally known as the penthouse. In our case, that is a particularly apt title. The reason is that while it was at the top of the building, it wasn’t really a part of it. We received utility service from the building, of course, but didn’t even need to. For electric power, there was a Caterpillar diesel generator sized at more than double the apartment’s peak power consumption. Its fuel supply could keep it going for more than a year without the need for refueling. For water, we had an Olympic-sized 50-meter pool with eight full lanes that was seven feet deep. The unchlorinated water was passed through three separate filters at a rate roughly three times the normal swimming-pool filtration rate. It was far purer than any drinking water and could supply the apartment with water for quite some time.

Know what? Fifty meters by eight lanes by seven feet (more than two meters) is a lot of water.

The shape of the penthouse was a U with the open side facing north. There was a giant terrace into which the pool was sunk that made up the inside of the U with the pool running laterally — east-west — across the top. Almost all of the rooms opened directly onto the terrace. From the far right end, there was a kitchen with breakfast area, then the dining room, living room, family room, library and then a series of bedroom suites, followed by the gym, with the master suite at the end of the line.

The fact of the matter was that often I would just cross the terrace to get my coffee in the morning, saving me from having to stumble an interminable distance if I chose to go all the way around the U to reach the kitchen.

I began showing Kris around in our bedroom — she adored it — and made our way around. She oohed and aahed at the library, the decor of the living and dining rooms, and finally we reached the kitchen. There she just gaped saying it was the finest facility she had ever heard of, let alone actually seen, least of all actually being able to use. From there we went out to the terrace. She loved the pool and the sauna, but decided the overall vista was rather bleak.

I was forced to agree with her.

Then as we returned to the kitchen, she saw a little garden growing in a precast concrete bed. She bent over, sniffed and then sighed. “How utterly wonderful! Now I know what my first meal is going to be.”

It turned out that, unbeknownst to me, we had a lovely little herb garden growing right outside the kitchen door. We had earlier determined that there were eggs and bacon as well as the usual perishables normally stocked in a refrigerator. I sat at the kitchen counter and just watched her.

Incredibly, everything she needed was right where she expected to find it. “Someone really knows kitchens and cooking,” she commented.

In no time things were moving along. At that point she took a break in her preparations and went to the wine “cellar”, a windowless area beyond the kitchen. (It also contained a walk-in freezer as well as a walk-in refrigerator for food.) There were two very large walk-in refrigerators, one maintained at 40 degrees for the whites and champagnes, while the other was about 53 degrees for the reds. (While most people are familiar with the idea of serving red wines “at room temperature,” actually what is meant is “cellar temperature”. And since a chateau’s cellar in France normally maintains a temperature in the low 50s, that’s what I did, too.)

She looked over the whites, checking labels and vintages and nodding approvingly. “Cam,” she asked, “were these all your selections?”

“No, sweetie. This was stocked by my master sommelier. Guys who pay far more attention to these things than I ever did, all tell me that they’re good.”

“They certainly are,” she agreed. Then she took a bottle of white that she said was getting dangerously close to the end of its prime, pointing out that they had a much shorter shelf life than did fine reds.

The lunch she prepared turned out to be an omelette aux fines herbes, using the fresh herbs she had clipped from our garden, along with bacon and pommes soufflé. The potatoes puffed up perfectly like little balloons and the omelette was utterly perfect.

Can life be any better than this? I don’t think so, and didn’t at the time.

We sat at the bright breakfast table sipping our wine while both of us were looking out through the glass wall to the terrace outside. Clearly, my lover was planning in her mind exactly what she was going to do. It turned out that her ideas were elaborate. She intended to actually grass a large portion of the terrace and use a number of precast concrete containers to hold flower beds and shrubs.

Since it’s only money and Kris was doing her best to help me spend it, I agreed, essentially giving her a blank check. Then I called down to the maintenance chief and told him I needed a crew to help my fiancée.

“That’s something I wanted to speak to you about,” Kris said when I hung up. “You said it to Tom Mason, and now you’ve said it again. What’s up? We both know damned well that I’m your resident slut and that’s all I am. Why don’t you level with them and tell them I’m your new mistress?”

“Are you supposed to do anything I say?” I asked.

“Of course!”

“Fine. In that case, I’ll continue to introduce you as my fiancée, and you, slave, will shut up. Right?”

“Yes, sir,” she agreed in the flattest tone of voice I had ever heard coming from her.

Snapping my fingers, I added, “Damn! We’ll have to go to Tiffany’s first thing tomorrow to buy you a ring. You can’t be an authentic-looking fiancée without a nice ring!”

“Yes, sir,” she repeated in an even flatter tone of voice.

A few minutes later there was a knock on the front door. I opened it to greet five men wearing the building’s maintenance uniform. Kris had managed to locate a warm jacket by this time and led the group out on the terrace to explain what she had in mind.

She was just getting warmed up when one man — the crew chief, I guess — held up his hand and proceeded to speak to the other four in Spanish. At that point, Kris, instantly understanding what was going on, shifted to Spanish, too.

It was funny, really. The looks of utter consternation on the five faces was something to see. The men were hearing the purest Spanish they had ever heard in their lives and their faces reflected this fact. Jaws were literally hanging open. Then the picture changed dramatically. The men smiled. Then they beamed. Then their heads were nodding up and down a mile a minute.

Then one offered a suggestion — Kris was telling them what she had in mind — then another chimed in. At that point Kris led the way to the library and its very powerful computer. I showed her where the house plans were, and she called up the site plan for the entire rooftop area. Then she started spotting her concrete planters.

The men were utterly enthralled. Then I began to hear references to La Señora. They became more frequent and I realized that they were referring to Kris as The Lady. Moreover, the words were spoken almost reverently; clearly she had utterly captivated the crew.

Beginning just a few days later, the whole building became a beehive of activity. A couple of operating engineers appeared to check out the hoists that were permanently affixed at the two northern corners of the building. They had booms long enough to permit one or the other to reach any spot on the roof. There was more activity than at any time since the building itself had been completed.

But there was more. The planters were positioned and the much lower beds for the “lawn” were built. As it developed, special soil was brought up to fill them and then the planting began. Initially, there were bulb flowers planted while in bloom, beginning with lovely little crocuses. They were followed by daffodils — both Kris and I adore bright yellow daffodils — and then a succession of others.