by Lara Hunter
“What else do I need to know?” I asked. “What will doing this mean?”
“You’ll have to move out of your apartment. We’ll set you up with a place that is more in keeping with your cover story. You won’t be able to be in contact with your family or friends; you’ll have to tell them a story, that you’re traveling for a while, something like that. You’ll need to undergo a complete makeover, both to look more suitable for your new identity, and to make you less recognizable. None of this will be negotiable. If you sign on with me, you will be required to follow my instructions exactly, in all things.”
His voice was cold, demanding. I had no doubt that he would expect to call all the shots in this arrangement. That didn’t sit terribly well with me.
“My role, my cover story,” I said. “What would it be?”
“You’ll be a British heiress,” he said. “A businesswoman who has recently come over to the U.S. to explore market potential for your services here.”
And that is why he was so interested in my stage accent.
“Well?” he asked, in a clipped, impatient voice. “What’s your answer?”
My head was spinning. I needed the money, and the job sounded interesting, to say the least, but it was too much to agree to so quickly.
“Can I have some time to think about it?” I asked.
He sighed, frowning.
“Three days,” he said, after a moment. “At the very most. After that, if you don’t sign, we’ll need to find a replacement. We need to get started preparing soon.”
I nodded, standing.
“Alright,” I said. “I’ll have an answer for you in three days.”
Harvey leaned forward and pressed a button on the phone on his desk.
“Mick, Miss Brennan is ready to leave,” he said. He looked back at me, started to speak, hesitated, and went on. “Alice, Mick has worked for me for a very long time. He has excellent instincts about people, and I believe he was right when he chose you for this position. I hope to hear from you with an acceptance soon.” He leaned across the desk, holding out his business card. “I’ve written my personal cell number there. Call me when you have an answer. Remember, three days, and not a minute more.”
I nodded, feeling strangely unbalanced.
“Miss Brennan?”
I heard Mick’s voice, calling me from the entrance of the room. I turned and followed him out.
CHAPTER TWO
It was almost ten at night when Harvey Pace’s driver dropped me off in front of my apartment building. I watched the car drive away, still trying to convince myself that tonight had really happened.
I unlocked the door to the lobby, then went up the flight of stairs to my floor. I let myself in and turned on the light. It flickered once, then held steady. The building was old, and the wiring was hit or miss. I went directly to my computer and opened up my search engine. I’d never heard of Harvey Pace before tonight, but I’d bet that Google had.
I immediately got hundreds of results. I saw photos of him, that same handsome, careful face, looking back at me from dozens of shots. Harvey in a posed corporate headshot, Harvey shaking hands with another man in a suit, Harvey standing with other men and women (once again in suits) behind a huge podium. I scrolled down, and saw other kinds of photos: Harvey, frowning at the camera, his arm around a curvy blonde in a slinky red dress. Harvey, drinking champagne with a tall brunette at an exclusive bar. Harvey, dancing with a woman in a night club, lying with a woman on a beach, laughing with a woman in a tennis skirt. I never saw the same woman twice.
He wasn’t kidding about the playboy image.
I went back to the web results and scrolled past the gossip magazine sites (“Business’s hottest bachelor won’t be caught!” and “The many ladies in the life of Harvey Pace”), trying to get an idea of the rest of his story.
An hour later, I’d learned that Harvey’s company, Jenson Pace, was a huge investment firm with offices in seven countries. The company had been owned by Harvey’s late father, but it had been small at that time, just a single office in Phoenix. When his father had died, the company had passed to Harvey, who had taken an immediate active role in expanding operations on all levels. Under Harvey’s leadership, Jenson Pace had become a multi-billion dollar organization in just a half dozen years. Harvey had worked relentlessly, expanding the company’s interests into the acquisition of a diverse assortment of companies, and then to the financial market. One of Jenson Pace’s first big moves in the banking world had been to acquire a bundle of troubled mortgages. The company had foreclosed on many of the properties, and then sold the properties at a healthy profit.
I read the name of the finance company he’d purchased in order to make the deal on the mortgages, and I felt sick. Western Trust. I’d remember that name and that logo, forever. It had been on all the letters that had stacked up on our kitchen counter in my sophomore year of high school, after my dad’s factory had closed, after my college fund had been spent trying to keep us afloat, when it finally became clear that we wouldn’t be able to stay in our house. Western Trust had been named in the court order the day that the sheriff knocked on our door and told us we had to leave. My parents had owned that house since they’d been married, and now it belonged to some strangers at the bank.
Not just some strangers anymore; I’d just met one of the people who had ruined my family’s life for years, and he wanted me to be his fake girlfriend.
I closed the computer, overwhelmed. I changed out of my dress and into pajamas, then brushed my hair and teeth. As I lied down to sleep, I saw Harvey Pace’s face in my mind, a gorgeous man who had grown wealthy, in part, by ruining my family and my future. Of all the actresses in the world, I was the one he’d picked to interview for this assignment. I was the one he’d chosen for a role that could embarrass and damage him. That had to mean something; it had to be some sort of sign.
It was a long time before I fell into a restless sleep.
~ ~ ~
When morning came, I didn’t have any better of an idea of what to do about Harvey Pace, his incredible offer, and the score still to be settled between my family and him. And so I did what I usually do when I can’t decide on a direction. I called my sister, Rose.
Rose was three years older than me. She’d been in her first year of college the year we’d lost the house. She’d managed to stay in school, but just barely, working two part-time jobs and living on rice and canned spaghetti. I had moved to the city to be closer to her after I graduated. She lived just a few miles from me in a modest duplex and worked as a paralegal in an attorney’s office.
She picked up on the first ring.
“Hey, Allie,” she said brightly. “What’s up?”
“Hey, Rose. Uh, something crazy happened. I need to talk to you, the sooner the better.”
“Is everything okay?” she asked, concerned.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s fine. I just need your help… figuring something out. Can you come over?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “I’m getting into the shower, and I’ll head over after that. Want me to grab bagels on the way over?”
“Sure, that’d be great,” I said.
We hung up a minute later. I took a quick shower and dressed how I usually do on my days off, jeans and a light sweater. I started the coffee. While it brewed, I opened my computer back up, bringing up the articles about Harvey Pace and his company’s involvement in the foreclosures.
Rose arrived a few minutes later. I buzzed her in. She gave me a quick hug as she came in, then went over to my small kitchen table, setting out the bagels and juice she’d brought with her. Her hair, dirty blonde but just as wildly curly as mine, was damp, pulled back from her face with a headband. Aside from the curls, Rose and I didn’t look much alike. She was a good five or six inches taller than me, and her build was solid and athletic rather than fine and delicate. Her face was rounder than mine. She was certainly pretty, but her features always seemed a bit serious and d
etermined, as if she were constantly on some grim mission.
“So, come on! Spill it! What’s going on?” she asked, pouring juice into a cup and handing it to me.
“I got a lead on a job,” I said, taking a sip. “A good one, good money.”
“Yeah? Tell me about it.”
I hesitated, then decided to cut right to the point.
“A rich guy wants me to pose as his girlfriend.”
Rose’s face went from grim to angry.
“He can want whatever he wants, Alice. You’re not a hooker!”
“No, no,” I said. “It’s not like that. No funny business, just playing the part in public, at functions, stuff like that. He needs to clean up his reputation a bit, look like he’s getting serious with a suitable lady.”
Rose looked at me skeptically.
“So, he’s gay or something?” she asked.
I laughed.
“No, uh-uh,” I said. “Or if he is, he does a very good job of hiding it. It’s the opposite problem. He gets seen around with a lot of different women, and he’s getting ready to work on a deal with a company that has a history of only doing business with more family-minded folks.”
“Huh,” Rose said. “Isn’t that a hell of a thing. Are you actually thinking of doing it? You are, aren’t you?”
“Honestly, yeah, I was,” I said. “But there’s more to it. This guy, Harvey Pace, his company owned Western Trust Bank back when we lost the house.”
“What?” she asked, setting down her cup. “Was he involved in all of that?”
“Yeah, I think he was,” I said. “Western Trust had a history of working with home owners and avoiding foreclosure whenever possible before Jenson Pace bought them out. After they were bought, their policies flipped to pushing through to foreclosure as quickly as possible, especially when the property had gained value and the bank could profit from taking it back and selling it.”
“Like ours did,” she said. She clenched her hands together on the table in front of her. “Do you know how much the place sold for after they pushed us out? If they’d just given mom and dad time to sell… But that was never their plan.” She brushed a tear off her cheek impatiently.
“Yeah,” I said, remembering. Once we’d been forced to leave the house, a lovely old home we’d lived in our entire lives, we’d moved to a much smaller apartment in a questionable part of town. Dad had found work again not long after that, this time as a supervisor in the shipping department of a warehouse. I’d heard them talking about it, again and again: “If the bank had just given us a little more time…”
“We have to make him pay for it,” Rose said, slamming the palm of her hand against the tabletop.
“That’s why I called you,” I said. “I feel like… This is such a chance, to get even with him, hurt him like he hurt us. But, at the same time…” I shook my head. “I just don’t know if I have it in me to intentionally do this to someone. I mean, I’m not like him.”
“Screw that!” she said. “Don’t you remember what he did to us? To mom and dad? They’d put a lifetime into that place, and he just took it away so he could make a few more bucks that he didn’t even need!”
I nodded, sick rage building inside me. Rose’s anger was palpable, and contagious.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I need to do something.”
“So, tell me about this job,” she said. “How’s it gonna work?”
I explained the contract: the confidentiality (which I knew I had already violated by calling Rose), the relocation, the enormous salary and even greater severance bonus.
“Well, one thing’s for sure, you do need some of that money,” she said, glancing around. “This place kind of sucks, Alice.”
I laughed. “Yeah, well, I’m suffering for my art. And I don’t mind noisy pipes.”
“Or drafty windows?”
“Nope.”
“Or hot water that works when it wants to? Or a landlord that takes six months to fix your refrigerator?”
“Alright, okay!” I said. “It sucks. And I do need some money. But I still can’t let him get away with what he did.”
“So, that’s fine. You take the job, work it for a while, a few months. Bank all that salary. And when it’s coming to the end, before this new deal of his is in the bag, you go public with your deal. Tell the world that bigshot Harvey Pace is so pathetic he had to go buy a girlfriend.” Her lips curled into a venomous smile.
“I’ll have to disappear for a while for the job,” I said. “What do I tell mom and dad?”
“You got a job that takes you out of town,” she said. “I know! You’re working on a cruise ship doing dinner theater.”
Rose had gone on a Caribbean cruise a few months ago with some friends. She laughed now, no doubt remembering some awful production she’d seen on board.
“It’s perfect,” she said. “The people who work on those ships are gone for months at a time. Just shoot mom an email now and then, make up some good stories about shipboard drama and silly tourists, and she’ll believe you, no problem.”
“Yeah, that would work,” I said. I sank into a chair beside her, feeling a bit stunned. “Am I really going to do this?”
She took my hand and gave it a hard squeeze.
“You are,” she said. “You’ll be great. And that bastard’s finally gonna pay for everything he did to us.”
~ ~ ~
I called Harvey Pace the next morning as I sat in my kitchen, drinking strong coffee and willing my hands to stop shaking.
“Harvey Pace,” he said, when he picked up.
Hearing his voice made my stomach twist in anger and disgust. I pushed the feeling down, keeping my voice light and professional as I told him that I would take the job.
“Excellent,” he said, sounding pleased but not surprised. “You’ll need to come in and sign papers right away. We need to get started quickly; our timeline has moved up. You’ll need to be ready quite soon.”
“Alright,” I said. “Do I need to come out to your house again?”
“No,” he said. “I need to get you started today, and I’m busy in the office. Come up here. Can you be here by eleven?”
I glanced at the clock on my microwave.
“Yes, I can do that,” I said.
“Take a cab,” he said. “From here on out, you can’t drive your own car or use your own name with me. I’ll reimburse you for the fare when you get here.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “My name – if I can’t use my own, what should I use?”
“You can use your own first name – you’ll respond to people more naturally that way – but your full name will be Alice Elizabeth Clarke. Clarke, with an ‘e’ on the end. And remember, you’re British now, so make sure you sound like it. Mick and Ted – that’s my driver – they know who you really are, but you must stay in character with the rest of my staff.”
“Oh, alright,” I said.
“You’ll need to cover your hair completely. A scarf or hat, something like that. And wear sunglasses.”
“What, why?” I asked.
He made an impatient noise.
“Because that’s what I require of you today,” he said in a clipped tone. “Is that a problem?”
Keep it together, I told myself. You’re an actress. You can act like you don’t hate this guy.
“No, of course not,” I said. “What’s the address?”
“410 Fifteenth Street,” he said. “Fourth floor. Just let them know that I’m expecting you. Say it that way: ‘Harvey is expecting me.’ Do not say that you have an appointment; that makes you sound like a client.”
I bit back an angry retort to his high-handed instructions as I scrambled for a pen and wrote down the address on the back of a take-out menu.
The job hadn’t even started, and I was already tired of this man telling me what to do.
“I’ll remember,” I said, through gritted teeth. “See you at eleven.”
I hung up and sat back in
my chair, trying to wrap my mind around what was happening. I had fifty three dollars in my bank account, a car that started about half the time, and a drafty closet of an apartment, but in two hours, I would be Alice Elizabeth Clarke, the British girlfriend of billionaire businessman Harvey Pace.
In the space of just a few days, my life had become incredibly strange.
CHAPTER THREE
I stood on the sidewalk outside the building that housed Jenson Pace’s offices. It was a towering, modern structure, all mirrored glass and polished chrome. I’d pinned my hair up and covered it completely in a flowered silk scarf. The effect was that of a 1950’s Hollywood starlet, or at least I hoped it was. I wore my only pair of sunglasses, big round ones I’d gotten for a beach trip last year. I hadn’t been sure what clothes to pick, and had eventually decided to keep it simple with a black pencil skirt and red shell top. By the time I was ready, I’d only had time to hurriedly polish my only decent pair of high heels before rushing downstairs for the cab.