The Love Trap (Quicksilver Book 3)

by Nicole French

  “Okay,” Eric said as he strode out of my studio, followed by Lake. “Jane?”

  As Eric had less to do, Lake had wanted to double-check his fit first. She was possibly more nervous than I was about all of this—after all, this was a huge coup for her, dressing us both for fashion’s prom.

  “What do you think?” Eric asked. He turned from side to side, modeling the tuxedo we’d designed to fit his long, lithe frame. His hair had been combed forward and ruffled in a way that made him look a bit younger than thirty-three, but otherwise he just looked classic, tall, with impossibly long legs—the perfect backdrop to my more dramatic look.

  “Oh,” I said, not quite able to find my voice. Okay, he was more than a backdrop. The man positively shined.

  And then he smiled, and just like it did every time, his entire face transformed. He strode to me and placed a lingering kiss on my cheek. “I’m glad you like it, pretty girl.”

  At the sound of those words, I shuddered. If I had to be next to him looking like that all night, I had a feeling I was going to have a very hard time focusing on the exhibit.

  “Go,” I said, waving him away. “You’re making my face turn red.”

  The grin just widened. “I can see that.” Eric turned back to Lake and winked. “I think we’re a success.”

  Lake nodded happily. “I agree. Okay, go change. I’ll steam this one last time and hang it in the studio for later.”

  They left me to my binder, though I still couldn’t for the life of me register anything I was looking at. Not when every cell in my body was urging me to follow Eric into the bedroom to help him “undress.”

  “Knock, knock!”

  I looked up with surprise to find my best friend entering the apartment behind Tony and followed by…my mother. “Hey! Holy shit! What are you doing here?” I looked over her shoulder. “And Eomma too? Is Brandon coming up?”

  “No, he’s home with the kids,” Skylar said. “We just wanted to come see you on your big day. Yu-na was especially eager to come.”

  “Wow. Okay.” I hopped off my stool to embrace my friend and then exchange an awkward hug with my mother. “Hi, Eomma.” A thought occurred to me. “Oh, you guys…you weren’t expecting tickets, were you? I’m so sorry, but I really can’t—Anna has control over the entire guest list, and it was everything we could do just to—”

  “Janey, relax,” Skylar cut in with a gentle hand on my shoulder. “We weren’t. Your mom just wanted to see you.”

  “Ah…okay. But why now…” I trailed off as one of the other security team entered with four large suitcases. “Planning to stay a while?” Please, God, no. I winced guiltily at the first thought to cross my mind. I mean, I loved my mother. I should want her to be with me, shouldn’t I?

  “No,” Yu-na said as she walked into the apartment. She had seen it before, when we got married, but not for a very long time. Now her interest was renewed. “I am going home. It is time. My flight is in three days from here. I wanted to see you first.”

  There was really only one place my mother had ever referred to as home. Not that shithole in South Korea she had fled, pregnant with me. Chicago.

  As in Illinois.

  As in approximately a thousand miles away.

  “Wait…what?” I croaked, taken straight back to February, when she had announced the same thing. “You’re moving? No. No, no, no, I forbid it.”

  “Jane, you forget that I am the mother here,” she informed me. “Not you. Do you expect me to stay with your friend, this person I barely know, for the rest of my life? It has been three months. Too long.”

  “But you’re there with Ji-yeon, aren’t you?” I asked. “I thought you two were having a ball.”

  “Ji-yeon left a few weeks ago,” Skylar said, looking as if she would rather not tell me. “I told them both they are welcome to stay as long as they like, but they were adamant.”

  I reared back at my mom. “And you didn’t think to tell me?”

  “Why would I tell you?” my mother demanded. “You never call. You call your friend to check in on me! It’s like I don’t exist to you, like I don’t matter. You stick me in this place to get better, I see that, but now I am better, and I want to go home. So, I go.”

  “You go?” I parroted her. “You just…go? What the hell is that? After everything we have been through in the last year, you’re just going to take off like nothing fucking happened?”

  “How do you talk to your mother like that?” she shouted. “Do you see this, Skylar? You see how she treats me?”

  Skylar just looked very much like she wanted to leave.

  “Lord,” I snapped. “You just can’t help it, can you? Lay on the guilt, and make everything about you. Well, excuse me for wanting you to be safe!”

  Lake came out of the studio looking uneasy at the sudden scene. Eric emerged from the bedroom and handed her the tux, then immediately crossed to me.

  “Hey, Crosby,” he said with a kiss to Skylar’s cheek and another for my mother. “Yu-na. Good to see you.” He turned to me. “Jane. Breathe.”

  “But—she—I—” I sputtered, waving my hands out at my mother. “She’s just…leaving! Just like that!”

  “Whoa, teapot,” he said, gathering me close, rotating me around so I wasn’t watching my mother’s beady, basilisk eyes staring a baleful hole through me. “Cros, can you…” He gestured at something, and a second later, Skylar brought my shoes and a sweater.

  “What—what the hell—” I couldn’t get out a full sentence, but somehow allowed Eric to help me into the wool and my ballet flats.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “It’s a nice day. You can clear your head and then come back and talk.”

  I allowed him to hold me tight until I had stopped spinning like a kitchen appliance. My mother just walked to the living room and chatted with Skylar and Lake as if she hadn’t tossed a grenade at me. Eventually, Eric turned us toward the trio.

  “We’ll be back in a bit,” he said, waving at them all.

  “Not too long, I hope,” Lake called out, looking visibly concerned. After all, we were running out of time.

  “Just a few minutes,” Eric replied, already towing me toward the door. “We need to walk off our jitters.”

  The idea of unflappable Eric ever suffering from something as inane as “jitters,” much less uttering the stupid word, had me giggling as we left. Much later I realized that he’d probably deployed it just to distract me.

  It wasn’t until we’d made it into the park, which was basically an impressionist painting with all the mid-spring flowers.

  “All right, Lefferts,” Eric said as we strode over the Seventh-Seventh Street arch and into the lush greenery. “We don’t have time for me to fuck it out of you. Talk. You need to.” He kept my hand in his, swinging it lightly as we walked, but his firm grip did not relax. “Why are you and your mother shrieking at each other like chickadees?”

  “I…” I inhaled. “I don’t like it. Did you know she’s moving to Chicago? What the hell is that?”

  “She wanted to go home three months ago, gorgeous. And you barely see her as it is. What difference does it make if she’s in Chicago instead of Boston?”

  “Well, for one, at Skylar’s, someone can at least keep an eye on her.”

  “Is she a five-year-old who might eat too much chocolate?”

  I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean.”

  Eric sighed. “We can have someone do that in Chicago too. We can afford to hire an entire off-duty police force to follow her around if you want.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not the same.”

  Eric was quiet as we walked. “Can I be totally honest?”

  “Okay, fine. What?”

  He stopped. “Has it ever occurred to you that you don’t really like your mother, Jane?”

  “That’s ridiculous. No one likes their mothers.”

  He frowned. “That’s not true.”

  “Do you like yours?”

>   “I don’t really know her well enough to like her. But when I do see her, we don’t fight like the two of you.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen you and Yu-na exist in the same place without snapping at each other. Why do you think that is?”

  I grimaced. “Because she’s so impossible?”

  “Try again, Lefferts. It’s because you’re so much alike.”

  I considered. My mother and I did have some obvious similarities. Both stubborn. Both outspoken. Both maybe too dogmatic about what we thought was right. If we were on the same side of a debate, we got along fine, but the reality was, we usually weren’t.

  As a result, I had never been able to escape the niggling feeling that I had always been a disappointment to her. Especially this year. Especially with everything I had caused her.

  “I know you feel guilty. I know you feel like she should be close. But if the two of you were really supposed to be in each other’s lives all the time, you would be. It’s as simple as that.” He brushed a piece of hair out of my face. “But I also know you feel guilty she’s been alone since your father died. And you feel guilty about what happened to her. But it wasn’t your fault, Jane. Neither of those things are your fault.”

  It wasn’t until he said so that I knew in my heart of hearts that he was right. She probably knew it true, which was why she kept trying to leave. My mother and I should absolutely not live together.

  And yet…how could I let her go?

  “How?” I wondered quietly. “How do you know it won’t happen again if she is living there alone?”

  “Well, to start, she won’t be alone. She’ll be in her old house, and she’ll have her own dedicated security detail until John Carson is caught. They’ll stay in the apartment below.”

  “Her old…” It took me a second to understand what he meant. “You didn’t.”

  Eric shrugged, unwilling to confirm my suspicion directly. The answer, however, was all over his face.

  “You bought back my parents’ old house? The one in Evanston?”

  Another shrug. “I did it a while ago, Jane. I figured you would want it back at some point. Your mother was taken when she was driving by it, wasn’t she?”

  My jaw dropped. I had considered trying to buy the house a few times, but since it wasn’t actually for sale, it had never even occurred to me to make the owners an offer they couldn’t refuse. But that, of course, was exactly what Eric must have done. It was something you could do when you had unlimited funds. A whole paradigm of thinking I still hadn’t gotten used to.

  “Well, you’ll definitely be on her good side now,” I said, shaking my head. “Jesus Christ, Eric. That’s insane.”

  “I didn’t really do it for her.” He tipped up my chin, making me look at him, making me see the genuine love shining out of his silver eyes. “Like the air I breathe, right? It was your home, Jane. I see how sad you get whenever you talk about your dad. I know you feel like you lost that home over the last year, and not just because of Carol Lefferts’s passing. I figured, if I could do anything to give you some of that back, it would be this.”

  A warm feeling bloomed in my chest, but I still couldn’t quite speak.

  Eric rubbed a hand behind his neck. “Tell me I did the right thing.”

  The warm feeling grew. “It’s more than the right thing.”

  Eric smiled. “Good. Now, let’s go tell your mom. I have a feeling she is flying by way of New York because she has a few things to tell you too. You’re not the only one who’s been healing the past few months, gorgeous. Everyone needs a bit of catharsis, not just us.”

  33

  Skylar seemed to have done a good job taming my mother—better than I could. So much that she and I were able to sit together for most of the time I was prepped for the gala. While Freddy styled my hair into the half-up bouffant, Yu-na told me about everything she had done in Boston over the last three months. As the makeup artist worked, I heard about visiting the aquarium and the Freedom Trail, playing mah jongg with Sarah, and entertaining Jenny and Luis. Skylar, it seemed, had lent my mother her own family to help her heal. And apparently it had worked.

  “I think we’re done,” Lake said as she fluffed my skirts one last time after the glam squad had finished. She stood and checked her watch. “And not a minute too soon. You’re scheduled as one of the first arrivals, around five thirty. It’s four forty-five now. You guys need to get going.”

  It was hard to imagine that it would really take forty-five minutes to cross Central Park, but she was right. The arrival order for the Met Gala was as carefully curated by Cora as the guest list and the seating chart. I was a major donor and also a recognizable face in the city now—not on par with any of the number of Hollywood celebrities who would be there, but definitely worthy of the red carpet.

  Lake wasn’t able to attend the actual event, but like many of the other stylists and lower-level designers, she would be available in another part of the museum for touch-ups during the night. Considering every attendee was basically a walking exhibit of each designer’s art, we all needed our own personal curators as well. Mine now included my mother on top of the rest of them. I had promised I would sneak them into the exhibit I’d worked so hard on if at all possible.

  “All right,” I announced as I walked back into the living room where Eric was enjoying a cocktail or two with Skylar and Yu-na. “Are we ready?”

  “Oh, wow,” Skylar said. “Janey, you look incredible!”

  “It’s very nice,” my mother said, which was the best compliment I was likely to get from her. I wasn’t expecting more. After all, this wasn’t exactly the Jessica McClintock knockoffs she had tried to talk me into during high school.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Eric stood, and I looked him over approvingly. “Wow. I know I’ve seen you in this before, but I’m still stunned. Lake, this is incredible.”

  “Our work is incredible,” Lake agreed as she walked over to brush something off Eric’s jacket.

  Eric, however, appeared totally awestruck. “Hot damn, Lefferts. You look…”

  I twisted back and forth in my finery and touched my hair self-consciously. Freddy had done a fantastic job with the sixties style, piling it high à la Amy Winehouse, with new red streaks shouting “PUNK!” along with the lush tartan, ripped hem, and spiked shoes.

  “You don’t think it’s a little too Tracks?” I asked, referencing the record shop from Pretty in Pink. We had watched it together last night.

  He stepped close and pushed a stray fire-engine red lock off my shoulder. “I thought I made it very clear that the record store owner is the hottest one anyway.”

  I blushed. Beside us, Lake grinned.

  “You look perfect,” she said. “A perfect match.”

  Over her shoulder, I caught a glimpse of the two of us in the mirror.

  “You hear that, pretty girl?” Eric murmured, his voice rumbling with promise. “A perfect match.”

  I had to agree.

  The DVS limo pulled up in front of the red carpet—which was actually a deep midnight blue—at exactly five thirty. Tony stepped out of the passenger seat and came around to open the back door for the rest of our security detail, and then us.

  “Holy shit,” I murmured as I took in the walls of reporters and photographers, the bright, tented entrance extending down the famous steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the swirl of guests already making their way up the entrance. It was clear by the way the photographers already writhed for a shot that we were some of the first “names” to arrive—and our notoriety didn’t even approach the lineup behind us.

  “It’s going to be great,” Eric said as he straightened his collar.

  His tone was calm, but I could see he was still nervous, likely more about Carson’s potential presence than having his photo in the paper. He’d been fussing with his clothes since we’d gotten in the car.

  “Stop that.” I batted at his hand, which was tugging on his jacket again. “You’
re going to stretch it out.”

  “My lapel?”

  “It’s wool. That’s easily distorted.”

  He opened his mouth like he wanted to argue, then shut it. “Fine, pretty girl. Are you ready?”

  I turned back to the cameras, trying not to shiver. “What’s that saying?” The shakes in my voice obviously overrode my attempts at bravado. “‘You’ve arrived’?” I turned to Eric. “It doesn’t get better than this for me. I did it. I’m here. At this level.”

  He smiled. “You were already at this level. You just had to wait for the rest of us to catch up with you.”

  Lake, who had ridden with us, primped my dress and touched up my lipstick, then took a lint brush to Eric one final time. “All right, loves. You’re perfect. I’ll be in the back with your mother and your friend when you’re done with the red carpet. Now go shine.”

  I grasped her hand, unable to give her the hug I really wanted because:

  “‘Taffeta, darling,’” Eric murmured.

  I grinned at him, then turned back to the designer. “Thank you so much, Lake. For everything.”

  Tony opened the door with a friendly smile. I took a deep breath, grabbed Eric’s hand, and stepped out into a barrage of flashing lights.

  “Mr. de Vries!”

  “Jane!”

  “Over here!”

  “Who designed your dress?”

  I turned to answer the question. “Lake McHugh.”

  Several reporters scribbled down the name.

  “Why didn’t you tell them it’s you?” Eric asked as we took a few more steps and paused again for pictures. Lord, how in the hell did celebrities do this all the time without sunglasses? I was already seeing stars.

  I shrugged. “I—well, Lake really did most of the work. She should get the credit.”

  “That’s not how I remember it,” Eric replied. “You’ve been working on these clothes nonstop for weeks.”

  Behind us, there was a roar from the crowd as someone particularly famous must have exited their car. We were losing interest from reporters, and I did want to make an entrance. For Lake’s sake as a designer.