Chapter 8 #2
He saw the last of his patients that day and gave his staff their Christmas bonuses.
He and Mickie were leaving the next day for St. Barts.
He could hardly keep himself together enough to pack, and he threw his clothes into a suitcase that night.
Mickie was busy in the guest room she had taken over as a closet, and packing her own clothes in five suitcases, so she didn’t see Alex, or notice the shaking hands, the perspiring face, the gray color of his skin, or the terror in his eyes as he packed.
He had no idea what he was going to do if the two women went to the police to bring criminal charges against him. He was vulnerable in so many ways.
He called Wendy, his assistant, the next morning before they left, and told her to go to the office and lock up all the brochures, he said he was going to do new ones when he got back.
He trusted her and she promised to do it.
Alex was well aware that if the police got hold of them, the fraudulent before and after photos of Mickie would be damaging and would not help his case.
He did not say that to Wendy. He had replenished his Botox supply since he’d seen those women, and he was certain that his newest supply was not counterfeit.
He had used the current supplier before.
He promised himself not to use liquid silicone again when he got back.
He had gotten lucky too many times, since it wasn’t FDA approved. Using it was risky.
They left for the airport with a luggage van driven by one of their security guards.
Alex had two valises and Mickie five. She was in high spirits in a beautiful huge straw hat too big to pack, white jeans, a white linen Chanel jacket, and sky blue platform espadrilles.
She looked exquisite as they boarded their newly leased jet paid for with the money from the Koreans for the spa in Dallas.
And Alex had paid two million dollars to charter the two-hundred-and-eighty-foot yacht, with a crew of twenty-five, to cruise around the Caribbean for two weeks.
He intended to use the Korean investors’ money to repay the three million dollars he had taken.
He could afford to once he went over his accounts for the year, and they didn’t need the money for Dallas yet.
He and Mickie hadn’t invited any guests for New Year’s and now he didn’t want to.
He needed time to think about what he would do if the two women pressed charges.
It was all terrifying. He had never had a problem like it before.
Everyone loved their treatments and his patients adored him.
There were just a few that weren’t happy with their results, but that was to be expected, dealing with people’s bodies and faces and their sometimes unrealistic expectations.
He tried to weed those out but sometimes they slipped below the radar.
The two women who had written letters certainly had.
But if their photographs were honest and not Photoshopped, they had good reason to be upset, and even to want him behind bars.
Their faces were ruined and could never be fully restored.
“You’re very quiet,” Mickie commented, as they sat across from each other at the dining table on their new plane. It was beautiful inside and out, and extremely comfortable. It was fitted for twelve passengers and a crew of five: captain, co-pilot, engineer, two flight attendants.
“It’s been an exhausting week,” he said to Mickie, trying to smile. She walked around the table to bend down next to him and whisper in his ear.
“Don’t you think we should christen the plane?
” she asked him. There was a luxurious bedroom for them, with a dressing room and bath.
Alex looked up at her with a weak smile.
“I’ll have you shipshape in no time,” she whispered to him.
“Better than acupuncture,” which he firmly believed in for himself when he was stressed or tired.
More than that, he was panicked, with a terror that had his guts in a vise-like grip and hadn’t let go in six days, since the first letter.
He wanted to rewind the film and cut that part out. But he couldn’t.
A short time later, Alex thanked the stewardess and followed Mickie to the bedroom, looking very circumspect.
It was a nine-and-a-half-hour flight to St. Martin, where the boat was meeting them, and perfectly reasonable that they would take a rest during the flight.
Rest was not what Mickie had in mind. She used her most artful tricks that always worked on him, and finally dragged him back from the grim place in his head where he’d been trapped all week.
He forgot about everything but Mickie and her magic, as they flew east across the country, heading toward the Caribbean.
She tormented him exquisitely for nearly three hours, which emptied his mind completely, and after that he slept for two hours.
She lay beside him for a while and then went to read magazines.
Alex emerged from the cabin, looking refreshed five hours later, in time for a lunch of caviar, smoked salmon, and crab salad.
The food was superb, and they served his favorite white wine, a Chassagne-Montrachet, while Mickie drank champagne, her drug of choice.
She had never gotten into drugs, but she loved alcohol, and had an enormous tolerance for vast quantities of good champagne.
They had stocked up on Cristal for her. She had easily become accustomed to the finer things in life in the last six months, thanks to Alex.
He wondered how long that would last, if he went to prison.
And then he suddenly remembered that a wife could not testify against her husband.
He was going to propose to her on the boat, and marry her as soon as they got back to L.A.
, if she agreed. She was very young, and had said to him right from the beginning that she had no interest in marriage yet.
She felt too young to get married, but he had to coerce or bribe her into it somehow.
It was crucial that she not be able to tell the truth of what she knew.
The before and after photographs alone would make them guilty of fraud.
It was all racing through his mind as they headed south into the Caribbean, with the turquoise waters beneath them, and he was already tense again by the time he finished lunch.
They went back to their bedroom after lunch to attempt to calm him down again.
Mickie could tell that something was bothering him, and she had no idea what.
But two weeks on a superyacht would fix anything, and she could take care of the rest.
They landed in St. Martin, and the boat came from St. Barts to pick them up.
Alex thanked the crew and said that everything had been flawless, and a luggage van drove to the port to load their luggage on the yacht, appropriately called the Marry Me, which made him laugh when he saw it.
He’d been more interested in the size of the yacht and the bill than the name when he chartered it. It seemed fortuitous now.
Mickie was stunned when she saw the boat.
It looked enormous from the dock. The crew were all lined up on deck in their white uniforms. It looked like part of the royal navy, and she couldn’t believe all the features and special comforts that were available, from their own hair salon and spa, fully staffed, to their own movie theater.
The master cabin was huge, the most luxurious she could ever have dreamed of, the guest cabins were beautiful, and the sun deck was vast, with a helipad and a swimming pool.
Mickie and Alex came back upstairs to drink champagne on deck and watch as the yacht motored out of the port at St. Martin.
They were a gorgeous sight. Mickie had no idea what it had cost and would have been speechless if she knew, but Alex realized this was exactly the vacation he needed, with her, away from all the problems and dangers that were threatening him.
Nothing could touch him here for the next two weeks, while they floated away and were waited on hand and foot.
It was going to be the best Christmas of Mickie’s life.
She hadn’t even known that boats like this existed, and she couldn’t wait to try everything out.
As they motored steadily toward St. Barts, they had sex in the master cabin for the first time, and Alex felt like himself again.
And this was only the beginning of the trip.
He didn’t care how much of the Koreans’ money he had spent to charter it, it was worth every penny of the two million dollars, and he would figure out a way to cover it later, if he didn’t go to prison first. But he didn’t even care about that now.
Only two weeks on the motor yacht seemed real.