Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 85608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 428(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 428(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
“Fuck,” I repeated and scrambled into the shower.
Twenty minutes later, I was uptown in a sort of presentable outfit. My hair was still wet, but it was a rainy morning. So, I sort of got away with it. Lark barely held back laughter as I scrambled out of the cab and to her side.
“Sorry, sorry!”
“You look drowned.”
I brushed my hair off my shoulders. It looked much darker when it was wet. The lavender deepening to a gray-purple. But I hadn’t had time to blow-dry it. Not when I had enough hair that even with a fancy blow-dryer, it took a half hour to dry on a good day.
“Yeah. But I’m here, and I haven’t had coffee.”
Lark shook her head. “Come on. Let’s get you some coffee before we meet Cassie. She’s the best real estate agent in the business. She works for my dad in commercial real estate but helps out friends and family for personal residences.”
Larkin St. Vincent was heir to the St. Vincent’s Resorts conglomerate. They had resorts and villas all over the world for their upper echelon clientele. We’d gone to one in Puerto Rico for two weeks over Christmas three years ago. That was where Gavin and I had fallen into bed.
But Lark had no interest in the family fortune. She was Upper East Side through and through, but now, she worked for Leslie Kensington on her mayoral campaign as the head campaign manager. She’d helped get her elected to her second term despite Court acting like the train wreck he’d been before he met English, and she’d been with the mayor ever since.
“Thanks for doing this,” I told Lark after I had coffee securely in my hands and could function as a human being again.
“You know me, I love to help.”
“Well, I appreciate it. I know you’re busy with the election in November.”
“Things are picking up,” she agreed. “But it’ll really get busy in the fall. English’s wedding couldn’t have come at a worse time.”
“And here I thought that was the point.”
Lark rolled her eyes. “I told Leslie to plan it for after or to have it in the summer when she wouldn’t be quite so busy.”
“But she saw English and Court’s wedding as a chip in the campaign game.”
“Don’t tell English.”
“Oh, she knows exactly what family she’s marrying into.”
“She wants to elope,” Lark said. “I’d be for it if Leslie wouldn’t have a fit.”
“Plus, you want to be there.”
Lark grinned. “Well, yes. I love English, but I didn’t get to see Penn and Natalie get married.”
Once upon a time, there had been a group of Upper East Side teenagers who were so obsessed with each other that they had their own name—Crew. Cruel Crew, if the rumors could be believed. Penn Kensington, Katherine Van Pelt, Larkin St. Vincent, Lewis Warren, and Archibald Rowe ruled the Upper East Side. They were inseparable. Then, Natalie had appeared, and the fissures in the group had turned into chasms. They still met every Labor Day weekend at the Kensingtons’ Hamptons home, but it wasn’t the same. And maybe that was for the better.
Natalie and Penn had eloped. Katherine and Camden had gotten married in the city. Everyone went on with their lives.
We stopped in front of a building just off of Central Park. My heart skipped as I looked up at the towering thing. I couldn’t believe that I could afford an apartment here. It had been my goal the last time I was here, but it had felt unattainable. Just a dream. Like I’d never really fit in with all these fancy Upper East Siders.
Not a girl from Dallas, Texas, who had shunned everything her parents stood for. Mom and Dad were wealthy in a Texas way. Land and ranching and horses. They were Junior Leaguers and country clubbers and the sort. They’d wanted to turn their daughter into the beautiful, brainless blonde that matched the rest of the town.
My brother was home, married to the version of me that I would have become if I’d stayed, with the requisite two and a half children. They went to the right schools and participated in the right activities and belonged to the right clubs. They were everything that I wasn’t.
My first dream had been to sing. They’d laughed at me when I brought it up. It was one thing to sing in the church choir. It was another thing to sing at weddings on the weekends for extra money. Another thing entirely to want to go to LA to pursue a singing career.
They wanted a daughter to fit a mold and find a good husband, not to be a starving artist in LA, pursuing a once-in-a-lifetime dream. A dream they made clear that I wasn’t good enough for and they wouldn’t support.
I was supposed to go to college to find a husband. When that didn’t happen, I went on to medical school because it looked good to level up my MRS degree, not to actually become a doctor. Certainly not a plastic surgeon.