by Amelia Wilde
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Epilogue
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Dedication
For my husband
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2017
Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
Cover Design: Coverlüv
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Epilogue
Hard Cash
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Chapter One
Annabel
Every job has its sweet spot. You know what I mean. When it’s all smooth sailing and the boss still thinks you’re a glorious shining star.
That’s the perfect time to quit.
Do it too early, and you waste that magic, the joyful enigma that makes it seem like you have the world by the tail. All those golden mornings when Marcella’s face lights up with a smile from behind the manager’s desk when you show up in the morning. Wait too long, and you won’t be able to use her as a reference. You don’t want too much of that stale time, with both of you waiting to get out, I tell you what. It makes it hard to take the next leap.
When you’re like me, there’s always a next leap. It’s a matter of letting go of the most recent one and jumping as far as you can, like a trapeze artist.
Though don’t trapeze artists usually have safety nets?
I always sense the sweet spot like a tingle at the base of my skull. It reminds me of a warm, plush blanket draped around my shoulders, so comfortable, but it’s all an illusion. It’ll sour sooner or later. Oh, how I hate to unscrew the cap on a job and find out that I missed the expiration date by a day or two. No, it’s best to move on before that happens.
I don’t always get it right. My mother, though, now she was the real genius. She could smell it in the stale cardboard boxes littering the warehouse she worked at in Columbus, which is why we landed in Mississippi. When that went rotten, we moved to Detroit. Chicago lasted long enough for me to graduate high school. That was a shitty two-room apartment off the Blue Line, but she loved the ride downtown every morning. A theater job. Ticket office. She liked asking everyone where they were visiting from. Always dreamed of taking her sewing machine in, but it was too big to haul anywhere.
I’ve felt it in the air since yesterday. I look around me, absorbing the here and now, and with a burst of energy zipping through my veins, I nod to myself.
It’s time.
“Mr.—” I look down at my screen for his name. It’s been a nice trip down memory lane, but I’m off script, and he knows it. “Mr. Rogers—” Really? “What can I do to make this right?” I feel for him. I do. But my shift ends in fifteen, and I’d like to make this a clean break.
“You give me your name, young lady,” he hisses into the phone. “I’ve never been so insulted in all my life. I want to speak to your supervisor. Get him on the phone now.”
“Annabel Forester,” I sing into the phone, already feeling free. “I’ll transfer you right over. ButIdon’tworkhereanymore.” I blurt the last bit into the phone as a race of words before I hit the transfer button.
Three desks down, I hear my supervisor, Martin, take the call. I pick up my bag, straighten my blazer, and head down the carpeted hallway to one of the coveted corner offices.
At the sound of the brisk knock on her door, Marcella looks up from her computer screen and beams at me. “Annabel. Heading home for the day?” Then her brow furrows. “It’s three forty-five.”
“Yeah,” I say. I do feel a little bad. “About that . . .”
*****
Out on the sidewalk, there’s a parade.
Not an actual parade—more of a procession—but it looks like a parade when I step out of the office building and throw my ha
nds above my head in a gesture that could be mistaken for scoring the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl, “Eye of the Tiger” blaring in my ears. No one even glances at me. The line of burly men is busy rolling in big racks of insane clothing. Insane. I want to run alongside and bury my hands in their folds; the fabrics look so heavy and luxe. And . . . Italian. Renaissance?
A woman stands along the edge of the sidewalk shouting into a cell phone. She keeps grabbing at her hair—red and curly and barely contained by one of those clips that looks like a claw—and the expression on her face is so distressed that I pull out my earbuds to hear what she’s saying. “Eye of the Tiger” fades into a tinny version of itself as her voice cuts in.
“That’s bullshit, Evan. These people were supposed to be here last Thursday. You can’t tell me I don’t have seamstresses. Have you seen this cast?” She pauses, indignant. “No, Evan, have you seen this cast? I’m not Houdini.” Houdini was good at getting out of things, right? I’m not going to be the one to tell her that. “I need a full department behind me, or else the show—” With one hand, she waves the men past her, mouthing, Hurry, hurry. “Three weeks?” She holds the phone out in front of her lips and shouts into it, every word rounded. “I need seamstresses, Evan. At least one. And I need one now.”
Remember how I said I could sense the sweet spot in a job? I can also sense shiny new opportunities.
I glance down at what I’m wearing. Black dress slacks, a black scoop-neck tee that won’t draw too much attention on the train, and a heather-colored blazer I picked up at T.J.Maxx for a steal. I’ve had to fix a single tugged-out seam. More than presentable. In fact, sans blazer, my outfit is like Seamstress Woman’s.
Her day is a lot worse than mine.
The aura of bright, glowing possibility grows in my chest. The woman at the edge of the sidewalk—she could get killed, dangling over the curb like that—fumbles with her phone, stabbing at it with her thumb. “Damn it!” she screams into the sidewalk. None of the people hustling the garments past her flinches. So this is a fast-paced thing. My pulse quickens.
When the next gap between rolling racks of clothing appears, I dart across the sidewalk to where she’s standing, facing the traffic, both hands grasping her hair, phone pressed into the curls. “Excuse me.” I speak gently, because Jesus, she could be about to blow.
She whirls around, eyes unfocused. “What? What is it?” Then she blows out a breath through rounded lips. “I’m sorry, I—what can I do for you?”
I’m practically beaming, remembering that sewing machine. In a lot of neighborhoods, in a lot of cities, it was cheaper to pick up some discount fabric and make my own than to buy new clothes. Was my life made for this moment?
I stick out my hand to shake hers with a confidence honed from traveling city to city across the country. “I’m Annabel Forester,” I tell her, letting a tiny bit of pride seep into my voice. “I overheard that you might be looking to hire a seamstress.”
Chapter Two
Beau
I’m not in the mood for a madhouse.
And a madhouse is exactly what’s rolling up the loading docks of the Pearl, the theater attached to my latest New York City acquisition.
It seemed like a good idea when West approached me about this latest collaboration. A once-in-a-lifetime investment, he said. Partnership opportunities for all the businesses at Hawthorne International, he said. You’ll like it, he said.
Like a fool, I believed him.
He’s not even here to witness this chaos.
Granted, it’s an organized kind of chaos, but I’d prefer no chaos at all, thank you very much. The Pearl acquisition is the kind of thing that makes us all look fun-loving and wonderful to the public but serves as a huge distraction from my real work, which is much less frivolous than this.
I want to get out of here, head right back to hide away in my private office in my penthouse. But my personal wants are not high priority. Not today. If this falls into a complete shambles, I won’t forgive myself.
“Mr. Bennett,” someone gasps nearby, and my entire soul sighs at the sound of it. “Mr. Bennett, hi. Excuse me. Hi.” He’s short, wiry, and what I took to be a gasp of exertion was clearly from excitement, because this man is vibrating with a kind of wild energy that infects the rest of the room. I can already feel it rubbing off, and I don’t like it. He sticks out his hand. “Simon,” he breathes, giving me a fierce smile. “Simon Smith.” Am I supposed to recognize him? “I’m the director, and I am so excited to be here at the Pearl. It’s a historic place you’ve got on your hands—”
“This is your crew?” It’s rude—it’s terribly rude, but I cut him off at the pass. The people streaming onto the loading docks are about as organized as the lines at the discount ticket office in Times Square.
He frowns. “Yes. There were some last-minute additions to the staff because this was an unconventional—” He gives me an awkward smile. “It’s not the typical production schedule. The producers should be—”
Simon’s voice fades into the background. A deep breath doesn’t dispel the irritation from prickling on my skin. Something needs to be done, but I don’t know the first thing about theater productions. Nor do I want to learn, frankly. I’ve spent enough of my time over the past year overseeing the renovations to this place. Amid the important projects, of course. The public needs to see something. You’d be surprised how nosy people can get when they think something is being covered up.
Two men carrying an oversize steamer trunk—a steamer trunk, really?—teeter awkwardly on the ramp leading in from the loading dock. “Shit,” one of them says, the veins in his arms standing out. The steamer trunk twists between them, and one corner smashes into the newly refurbished wall. I don’t flinch. Not outwardly, at least.
All right, I’ll be honest. This isn’t my highest-profile project, clearly. I was tied up outfitting an ultrasecure town house meant for classified government meetings most of last year. I agreed to the Pearl project because West talked me into it over one too many beers when we all went to the Virgin Islands. All of us—the Overton Academy group. I won’t tell you what we called ourselves back in school. Mortifying stuff. Anyway, it was one of those trips, and I came back to New York with the deed practically in hand. West fled the country for a tropical vacation. He’s still there.
West is going to love this.
I hate it already.
Three months and the production run will be over. Building management can send someone to plaster over the crack in my brand-new wall, and that’ll be that. I can go back to the things that matter for a while, until it’s time for something with a higher public profile.
“How much longer is this going to last?” It’s not like me to interrupt a man twice, but I’ve lost the gist of what Simon’s saying entirely.
“I—”
“It’s no trouble. I’ll step outside and see for myself.” There can’t possibly be many more trucks full of this stuff outside. The loading dock is only so large, and the noise from traffic isn’t much worse than usual, which means they’re not blocking anything. Before he can say another word, I launch forward, letting the slope of the ramp take me quickly outside into the suffocating humid air of late summer.
It is a bit of a neat procession, I guess, but they’re still coming, more and more boxes and bags, and God knows how many of them will trip going up the ramp and destroy the walls.
And then I see her. How could I miss her? Dark hair, a shock of pink at the ends, standing in the very center of everything like a conductor. Even the daylight is conspiring to put her right at the center of my attention, the sun gleaming against her hair as she flits back and forth from one person to the next. She’s all over the place.
She’s also got a body that makes it hard to look away, even hidden underneath the smart little blazer. The black slacks she’s wearing hug her ass perfectly, and I want to feel that curve under my hand.
She doesn’t see the bike at the other end of the bl
ock. The guy riding it is tearing down the sidewalk, a package strapped to his back.
I react.
This woman—this gorgeous angel of a woman—doesn’t see me until I’m almost on top of her. She tries to back up, but her path is blocked by two men carrying an antique bench between them. “Sir. Sir!” she shouts, trying to get me to stop. “I’m going to have to ask you to—”
“Move,” I growl, throwing one last glance over my shoulder. The bicyclist is bearing down, his face set in grim determination. He must work for tips. “Move!”
“I—” She gets one more word out and then gasps, her eyes flying open wide.
She’s an inch away from me, and even with this psychopath on a bike about to kill us both, I’m struck by the intoxicating blue of those eyes. My arm is gripped around her waist before I’ve had time to think, pulling her lithe body in close to me and yanking her to the side.
The bike whizzes by. The two men carrying the bench lurch out of the way. “Hey, fuck you!” one of them shouts at the messenger’s back. A pathetic apology trails back on the afternoon breeze.
My entire body is humming from the electrically charged jolt of having her body lined up against mine. This woman. This woman with the ridiculous hair, with the energy that stirs up the entire street in a way that I can’t stand. It doesn’t feel strange at all, holding her in my arms.
No. No.
Finally she disentangles herself from my grip, catching her breath. The light in my chest dims the instant she steps away from me, her lips slightly parted, staring incredulously after the guy on the bike.
Then she turns back to me, her lips slightly parted. “This is going to sound like a total cliché,” she breathes, a hand on her chest. “But you saved my life.”
Chapter Three
Annabel
I could have died.
Jesus. A renegade bicyclist is the last thing I expected to find barreling through this little soirée we’re having on the sidewalk, but what do I know? I didn’t count on being hired by Marilee North, the crazy, curly-haired, and wild-eyed lady I happened upon within minutes of quitting my last job. She’d looked me up and down, pursed her lips, and asked me where I learned how to sew.