Special Delivery

The tires of the red Ferrari squealed, as it came around the corner and dove neatly into the space where Jack Watson always parked it.  It was in the parking lot of his Beverly Hills store, Julie's.  Exactly twenty years before, he had named it after his then nine-year-old daughter.  It had been a lark to him then, something he was going to do for fun, after deciding to give up producing movies.

He had produced seven or eight low-budget films, none of them remarkable, and before that he had spent half a dozen years, after college, working on and off as an actor.  His film career had been relatively minor, filled with all the usual hope and promises that never turned out quite as he planned, and too often turned out to be disappointing.  But his luck changed when he got into retail with the unexpected help of an uncle, who had left him some money.  Without even trying, it seemed, he wound up with the store that every woman in Los Angeles would have killed to shop in.  His wife helped him with the buying at first, but within two years he figured out that he had a better eye for the merchandise than she did.  And much to her chagrin, also for the women who wore it.  Every woman in town, actresses and socialites, models and just ordinary housewives with money to spend, wanted to go to Julie's...and meet Jack Watson.  He was one of those men who didn't even have to try.  Women were just drawn to him like bees to honey.  And he loved it.  And them.

Two years after he opened his store, to no one's surprise but his own, his wife left him.  And for the past eighteen years, he had to admit, he had never missed her.  He had met her on the set of one of his films, she had come to read for him, and spent the next two weeks lost in passion with him in his Malibu cottage.  He had been madly in love with her at first, and they were married six months later, his first and only foray into marriage.  It had lasted for fifteen years and two kids, but had ended with all the bitterness and venom that, as far as he was concerned, was inevitable in any marriage.  He had only been tempted to try it again once in the years afterward, with a woman who was far too smart to have him.  She was the only woman who had ever made him want to be faithful to her, and for once he had been.  He had been in his forties then, she had been thirty-nine, French, and a very successful artist.  They had lived together for two years, and when she died in an accident on her way to meet him in Palm Springs, he had thought he would never recover from it.  For the first time in his life, Jack Watson had known real pain.  She was everything he had always dreamed of, and in rare moments of seriousness even now, he still said she was the only woman he had ever loved, and he meant it.  Dorianne Matthieu was funny and irreverent, sexy and beautiful, and in her own way, utterly outrageous.  She didn't put up with anything from him, and she said that only a fool would marry him, but he had never doubted for a moment that she loved him.  And he adored her.  She took him to Paris to meet her friends, and they had traveled everywhere together, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America.  To him, it had always seemed that the moments he spent with her were tinged with magic.  Until she died and left him with the resounding emptiness and overwhelming sense of loss that he actually thought might kill him.

There had been women since, lots of them, to fill the nights and the days.  In the dozen years since her death, he had hardly ever been alone, not physically anyway, but he had never loved another woman either, nor did he want to.  As far as he was concerned, loving was far too painful.  At fifty-nine, Jack Watson had everything he had ever wanted: a business that seemed to do nothing but grow and crank out money.

He had opened a Palm Springs store, before Dori died, and another in New York five years later.  And for the past two years, he had been thinking about opening one in San Francisco.  But at his age, he was no longer entirely sure he wanted the headaches of further expansion.  Maybe if his son, Paul, would come into the business with him, but so far he hadn't had much luck in seducing Paul away from his own film career.  At thirty-two, Paul was already a very successful young producer.  He was far more successful at it than his father had been, and he genuinely loved it.  But Jack had a profound distrust of the insecurities of the film industry, and its almost inevitable disappointments.  And he would have given anything to lure Paul into the business.  Maybe one day.  But surely not for the moment.  Paul didn't want to hear it.

Paul loved his work, and his wife.  He had been married for the past two years, and the only thing that seemed to be missing from his life, or so he claimed, was a baby.  Jack wasn't even sure how much Paul cared, but it was obvious that Jan did.  She worked in an art gallery, and Jack always had the impression that she was just hanging around, waiting to have kids.  She was a little bland for him, but she was a nice girl, and she obviously made Paul very happy.  She was also beautiful; her mother was the long-retired but spectacular-looking actress Amanda Robbins.  She was long, lean, and blonde, still wonderful to look at, at fifty.  She had given up an extraordinary movie career twenty-six years before to marry a very staid, respectable, and as far as Jack was concerned, extremely boring banker named Matthew Kingston.  They had two beautiful daughters, a huge house in Bel Air, and moved in the most respectable circles.

Amanda was one of the few women in Los Angeles who never shopped at Jack's store, and it always amused him, on the rare occasions when their paths crossed, to realize that she absolutely couldn't stand him.  She seemed to hate everything he was, and everything he represented.  And it wouldn't have surprised him at all to learn that Amanda had done everything in her  power to dissuade her daughter from marrying Paul Watson.  She and her husband seemed to take a dim view of show business, and they had been sure that eventually Paul would turn out to be just as promiscuous as his father.  But he wasn't.  Paul was a serious young man, and he had already proven to them that he was a solid, reliable husband.  They had eventually accepted him into the fold of their family, although they had never warmed to his father.  Jack's reputation was well known in L.A.  He was good-looking, seen everywhere, and famous for cruising in and out of bed with every starlet and model who crossed his path, and he made no apology for it.  He was always kind to the women he went out with, too much so, in fact.  He was generous, intelligent, nice to be around, and always fun to be with.  The women he went out with always adored him, and now and then one of them was even foolish enough to think they might "catch" him for more than just a brief affair.  But Jack Watson was too smart for that.  He saw to it that they came and went out of his life before they could settle down, or have time to start leaving their clothes in his closet.  And he was always painfully honest with them, he made no promises, created no false impressions.  He gave them a good time, took them to all the places they had ever read about or dreamed of, wined and dined them in the best restaurants, and before they knew what had hit them, he had moved on, to the next one.  And they were left with a pleasant, albeit brief, memory of an affair with a handsome, sexy man, who left them gasping for more, and wishing they had been able to hang on to him for just a little longer.

It was impossible to be angry at Jack, or even stay that way for long.  Everything about him was irresistibly charming, even the way he left them.  He dated married women once in a while, but had only the nicest things to say about their husbands.  Jack Watson was a fun guy, terrific in bed and an incurable playboy, and never pretended for a millisecond to be anything different.  And at fifty-nine, he still looked a dozen years younger.  He worked out when he had time, swam in the ocean frequently, still had his house in Malibu, and he loved his women nearly as much as his red Ferrari.  The only things he really did care about, and was serious about, were his children.  Julie and Paul were the lights of his life, and always would be.  Their mother was only a dim memory, and one that still made him grateful whenever he thought of her, that she had had the good sense to leave him.  For the past eighteen years, he had done exactly what he wanted, even when he was with Dori.  He was spoiled, he had money, his business was a huge success, and he was irresistible to women, and what's more, he knew it.  Though oddly, there was nothing arrogant about him.  He was sexy, and fun, and almost always happy.  He loved to have a good time.  "Adorable" was a word women often used to describe him.  They liked him, and he liked them.

"'Morning, Jack." The manager of Julie's smiled at him, as he hurried through the store to the private elevator that would take him up to his office.  It was on the fourth floor, and was entirely done in steel and black leather.  It had been designed for him by a very famous Italian interior designer, yet another woman he had been involved with.  She ha...