“What’ll it be?” Zara prodded. “I need to know right now whether you’ll go along with this, because Mac is gonna be waiting for me with a cashier’s check for two million big ones at his office in SoHo this afternoon.”
Emma lay on her back and rubbed her eyes. “Has it occurred to you there’s just one tiny problem here?”
“I’m stuck in Australia and the deal’s going down in New York this afternoon?”
“Why do I suddenly feel the walls closing in?” Emma muttered.
“Under normal circumstances,” Zara said, “I’d just have one of my staff handle it, but Mac won’t deal with anybody but me. He warned me not to even tell anybody else about the sale, or it’d be off. And I can’t postpone the meeting, ’cause there was no answer when I tried to call the phone number he gave me. I left a voicemail, but he never got back to me, so he probably never heard it, which means he still expects to close the deal this afternoon.”
Emma swallowed hard. “I don’t like where this is heading.”
“My picture’s been all over the ’Net lately, so he knows what I look like, and how I dress.”
Like a thousand-dollar-an-hour call girl, Emma thought.
“So you’ll have to stop by my place and change into one of my outfits—a suit with a skirt, that’s what I always wear to work. And stockings and heels. It’s my signature look, old school business babe—sets me apart from the herd. Some makeup wouldn’t hurt, either. Mom will let you in. And then you’ll have to go to my office and get the ray gun. I sneaked it out of the apartment the other day. It’s in the credenza next to my desk. Let my staff think you’re me—remember, this deal is supposed to be a secret. Tell them you decided to come back early from Australia. Then you can Uber down to SoHo.” Zara rattled off an address in the artsy lower-Manhattan neighborhood as well as McGowan Byrne’s phone number, which Emma scrawled on her palm with the ballpoint pen she’d been using as a hair pick.
“This is crazy, Zara,” she said. “I can’t just agree to something like this on the spur of the moment.”
“I tried to call you yesterday, when I realized I wouldn’t be back in time, but I’m in the middle of the outback, which is like this huge, bone-dry expanse of absolutely nothing, including decent cell reception. I had to drive fifty miles to get a signal, and then I kept calling and calling, but it went straight to voicemail, so that’s why I left all those messages and texts. Did you let your phone die again?”
“Not quite yet, but the situation is terminal. The charger’s buried in one of these boxes, but I can’t remember which one, so I’ve been keeping the phone off most of the time to keep it from running down. I’ll be turning it off again as soon as we’re done here, ’cause I’m down to…” She glanced at the screen. “Shit, seven percent?”
“So buy a new charger.”
“I just moved here. I don’t know where they sell them.”
“Order one from Amazon and have it overnighted! Jesus! Meanwhile, I’ve got to have some way to get in touch with you. Get one of those burner phones to tide you over. They sell them everywhere.”
“No need. I’ve got a landline here, so you can call that, and—”
“A landline? Next you’ll be drinking Ensure and wearing Depends.”
“It was part of a package from the cable company, and for your information it was actually cheaper than getting TV and Internet separately. And I just hooked up an old phone I’d held on o, so it didn’t cost me anything. The number is 718-555-5734.”
“Got it. Now, will you pretty fucking please get your ass over to my place ASAP and change into one of my—”
“Oh, God. I don’t know, Zara. I’m gonna need time to think about—”
“Well, you don’t have it!” Zara snapped. “Stop being such a little pussy, Emma! You cannot take a wait-and-see attitude this time. Your choice is simple. Either sell that ray gun or spend the next God-knows-how-many decades sharing living quarters with the Queen of the B’s.”
Please, God, no. Anything but that.
Zara said, “It’s what, about two-thirty there? You’ve got two and a half hours to turn into me, get the ray gun and make it to SoHo. You remember where I live, right? The Sans Souci, on East 86th?”
“I remember,” Emma groaned. “Oh, I hate this.”
“And my office is on 60th between Third and—”
“I know where it is, but I can’t do this.”
“Do it, Emma.”
“Zara... can’t we just talk about—”
“Just do it.” Click.
“Wait a minute.” Emma shook her phone, like an idiot. “Wait a... Damn it!” She hauled back to throw the phone across the room, but then thought better of it. It might break. Or it might hit a window, and then she’d have to call a glazier in, and she hated having strangers in her home. Or it might nick the wall, which wasn’t as bad, but she’d still have to fix it, or at least put a bookcase in front of it....
Zara’s right, she thought gloomily as she turned the phone off and laid it carefully on the floor, I’m a total pussy.
HONEY, DO YOU KNOW WHERE my ray gun is?” Candy Carmelle asked Emma as she held open the door to Zara’s Upper East Side apartment.
Uh-oh. As her mother closed the door behind her, Emma stepped warily into the foyer, wishing desperately she was the kind of person who could think on her feet.
“What am I saying?” Candy unwrapped a stick of gum and slid it between her frosted-coral lips, then tossed the crumpled wrapper onto a delicate little glass table. “You wouldn’t know. You’re never here.” She frowned at Emma, and even that didn’t produce much in the way of wrinkles around her sharp blue eyes. Candy Carmelle’s skin was smooth and taut, the product of lucky genes, a lifelong aversion to the sun and, Emma suspected, an occasional bit of surgical intervention. Emma wasn’t sure what color her mother’s hair really was, since she’d been a bottle blonde of one shade or another for the entire twenty-nine years and eleven months that Emma and Zara had been alive. Judging from the roots, she was probably a dark brunette, like her twin daughters.
Emma realized she must have caught her mother in mid-workout. A gleaming unitard conformed to her well-honed body like silver spray paint. Even without the abbreviated little come-hitcher getups she’d worn for the silver screen, Candy Carmelle was built. She looked like a cartoon of a blond bombshell. No one meeting her for the first time would ever guess she was sixty-one years old.
Candy’s gaze swept her daughter from head to toe, cataloging with obvious distaste Emma’s T-shirt and jeans. “Sweetie, I’ve told you a million times—you’ll never have any kind of social life, dressing like that.”
“Social life” meaning, of course, male attention.
Emma closed her eyes and expelled a lengthy sigh. “Mom—”
“Virginity’s not a healthy condition, you know.” Candy’s tone of gentle, maternal concern was punctuated by a sharp crack of gum. “Not at your age.”
Emma took a deep, pacifying breath. “Mom, where’s Zara’s bedroom? I have to change... I’m gonna borrow some of her clothes.”
Candy’s eyebrows disappeared into her yellow bangs. “I thought you hated the way she dresses.”
“I thought so, too.” Rubbing her eyes, Emma concentrated on quelling the latest in the series of panic attacks that had begun when she decided, forty-five minutes ago, that she was actually going to go along with Zara on this lunatic scheme.
“I don’t get it, then. How come you want to borrow her clothes? You got a date or something? That’s it, isn’t it? You actually landed a date, and now you’ve got nothing to wear.”
“That’s it,” Emma muttered, the lie somewhat mitigated by her mother’s having thought it up.
“Come on, then—let’s get you fixed up.”
Emma followed her through an archway flanked by a pair of faux-marble columns and into Zara’s formerly sleek and stylish apartment, noting with a mixture of amusement and apprehension her mother’s additions to the
decor. Ragged posters with protoplasmic lettering screaming House of Blood, Dr. Blood and Blood Wedding—“In Bloodcolor!”—adorned the badly sponge-painted seven-thousand-dollar walls; an unnervingly realistic decapitated head, festooned with electrodes, glowered at her from beneath a glass dome on the elegant lacquered coffee table; The Brain from Asteroid X floated in a jar of phosphorescent green mystery fluid in an illuminated nook in the wall.
Everywhere Emma looked there was something to look away from: plastic body parts in various stages of simulated decay; shrunken mummies’ hands; tarantulas; eyeballs; miniature rocket ships; diminutive flying saucers; tiny robots; howling monster masks; shiny pseudoscientific gizmoids; various eggs, pods, spores, sprouts and mutated tubers of every conceivable size and shape.
Scattered among these rather alarming souvenirs was the detritus of Candy Carmelle’s disordered life—newspapers, magazines, diet-ginger-ale cans, gum wrappers, discarded clothing, dirty dishes... No wonder Zara was losing her shit. Like Emma, she was a neat freak, in her own way; it was the only thing the two of them had in common. That, and their baffling but deep affection for their one-of-a-kind mother.
There was another thing about Candy Carmelle that made her unbearable to live with, Emma realized, even more than the chaos she generated. Candy’s very personality tended to fill up a room. When she was around, there just wasn’t a whole lot of psychic space left over for anyone else. It dawned on Emma with abrupt clarity that she would never, ever be able to live with her mother. She wouldn’t survive it—not with her sanity intact. This awareness reinforced her sense of purpose; she had to impersonate Zara and pull off the sale of the ray gun. She had to. Nothing had ever felt more imperative.
Zara’s bedroom was an antiseptic refuge in the midst of all that clutter and confusion: white walls, white bedspread, white curtains... Emma slid out of her loafers and left them outside the door.
“Her clothes are in there.” Candy pointed toward a large dressing room with built-in closets and drawers and a three-way mirror, then flopped down on the bed and grabbed the TV remote. Emma checked the bedside clock: 3:20. She’d better hustle.
She whipped through the items hanging in the closets, settling on the least provocative garment—a canary yellow leather suit with a pencil skirt—then started tugging open drawers, looking for a top to wear underneath it.
Looks like Victoria’s Secret in here. Drawer after drawer was filled with nothing but push-up demi bras and abbreviated bikini underwear in matched sets. They were the kinds of things women wore to tempt men, Emma reflected as she idly fingered the seductive little scraps of lace and silk. Virginity’s not a healthy condition, her mother had said. Not at your age.
Life is passing you by, Emma, Zara had said, and she was right. At this rate, Emma would still be in full possession of her increasingly pointless and embarrassing chastity on June 10, which happened to be less than a month away, and also happened to be her thirtieth birthday. Her stomach burned with anxiety at the prospect of turning thirty with her sexual innocence intact. Even in her mother’s day, they would have labeled her a hopeless prude. Nowadays they called women like her neurotic.
Emma grimaced as she kicked off her jeans and pulled her T-shirt over her head. “What top does she wear under that yellow leather suit?” she called out.
“She doesn’t,” Candy replied.
Great. Emma slipped on the short, tight jacket and fastened the snaps that secured it in front, only to find her bra peeking out above the low neckline.
Awesome. Stripping off the jacket, she exchanged her modest white bra for one of Zara’s black satin push-up numbers, then resnapped the jacket. It fit like it had been sewn on, and Emma was startled to note a subtle hint of cleavage where there had never been cleavage before.
“Wow.” She couldn’t take her eyes off her chest. “Check it out,” she murmured at her reflection, grinning lopsidedly. She looked... sexy. From neck to waist, that was.
“Where’s her pantyhose?” she yelled toward the bedroom, where she could hear a woman raging furiously on TV—probably Mom’s beloved Jerry Springer show.
Candy’s gum popped. “Pantyhose? She doesn’t have any fucking pantyhose. What are you, eighty?”
“But she always wears stockings to work. She told me.”
“Stockings, not pantyhose. Look in the top drawer to the left of the mirror.”
The top drawer to the left of the mirror held a colorful array of garter belts on one side, and on the other, neatly folded pairs of stockings in sheer black, nude and ivory, all with bands of lace at the tops.
“Seriously?” Emma said.
“She’s old school,” her mother replied.
“Yeah, that’s what she said—old school business babe.” It was her “signature look,” Zara had said. Emma’s standard attire—T-shirts, jeans, sweats, the occasional comfy hand-knitted cardigan—made her a card-carrying member of that “herd” Zara was so eager to distinguish herself from. It made her invisible, which had always been kind of the point.
Emma fumbled with a black satin garter belt and and nude stockings, finally calling in frustration to her mother, “How do you attach these things?”
Candy came in, took one look at her and burst out laughing. “You’re not seriously gonna wear those,” she exclaimed, pointing a long, glitter-polished nail toward Emma’s polka-dotted cotton panties.
“Why not?”
“They don’t exactly go with the rest of it.”
“No one will see. Will you just please help me with these stockings? I can’t figure out these little... things on the ends of these... things.”
“Not unless you trade in those pediatric underpants for these,” Candy said, holding up the minuscule black satin panties that matched the bra and garter belt.
“Mom, I don’t have time for—”
“Look at yourself.” Candy spun her around so that she faced the three-way mirror. Emma couldn’t help but see her mother’s point. The black garter belt over the polka-dotted undies looked... “Grotesque,” Candy supplied.
“Okay,” Emma muttered.
“I mean, what if you get in an accident?”
“I said okay!” Emma snatched the wisp of black satin from her mother. “Would you please turn around?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Candy muttered, but she turned her back.
Emma squirmed when she got the panties on. “They don’t cover anything. And they feel so—so...”
“You’ll get used to ’em.” Candy said, turning back around. “If I still had an ass like yours, I’d wear those and nothing else.” She helped Emma connect the stockings to the garter belt and encase herself in the snug little skirt, which snapped up the front. “Wear these,” she commanded, sliding black pumps with heels like ice picks onto Emma’s stockinged feet. “You’ve got kick-ass legs. Make the most of them.”
“I can’t walk in these.”
“You’ll get used to ’em.”
Emma rolled her eyes. “Why should I have to train myself to wear uncomfortable clothes when I can wear jeans and a T-shirt and feel great?”
“Because you don’t look like this in jeans and a T-shirt,” Candy said, turning her around to look in the mirror once more.
“Holy shit.”
“Ditto. Now let’s fix that face of yours.”
A WOLF WHISTLE greeted Emma the second she stepped from Zara’s apartment into the hallway. “Looking good there, good-looking.”
The rather redundant compliment, voiced in a Boston accent, had emerged from a burly, bald-headed man inserting a key in the apartment door next to Zara’s. He was clad in sweatpants and a muscle T, with a gym bag slung over his shoulder, his upper body sculpted into a wedge of pure brawn.
He surveyed her from head to foot, openly and without a shred of self-consciousness. From his expression of enthralled appreciation, he might have been checking out a new car on the lot.
Emma turned away and headed for the elevator.
&n
bsp; “Hey, Zara!”
She turned around.
“Been working on the upper body. Check this out.” Dropping the gym bag, he struck a hulking pose, causing all the muscles in his arms and torso to pop out in sharp relief. He looked like a balloon animal—a blondish gorilla, to be exact, given the hair that blanketed him from the neck down. “What do you think?” he gasped, his face purple, the cords in his neck quivering with strain.
It’s gonna blow! “Very nice,” she said, edging away.
He straightened up and blinked at her. “Just nice?”
“No, you look...” Simian. “Virile. Extremely virile. Bye.” She pivoted on the pointy little shoes, which turned out to be excellent for pivoting.
“Hey, Zara!”
She sighed and turned around.
“I traded in the old Porsche for a new one. White.”
“I’m very happy for you.” Pivot.
“Hey, Zara!”
Did all men act like slavering dogs around Zara? “Yes?”
He grinned and took a step toward her. “Have you seen the new Vin Diesel film?”
Emma took a step back. “No.”
“I have. Twice. But I’ll see it again, if you want to. Tonight, maybe?”
“Look, uh—” she glanced at the R. Harrington stenciled onto his gym bag “—Mr. Harrington, I’m sorry, but—”
“What’s this ‘Mr. Harrington’ business? Yesterday it was ‘Ronald,’ today it’s ‘Mr. Harrington’? This isn’t good, Zara. This is a step backward, when all I’ve been thinking about—” he moved closer to her “—for months—” and closer “—is getting into your—” his gaze raked her “—heart.”
Good to Be Bad (Double Dare Book 1) Page 2
