Page 3 of Eye Candy

“How long?” I asked my driver as traffic forced our sleek black car to a standstill for the third time. I hated being late, even for an event I didn’t want to attend, and delaying my vacation in Provence doubled my irritation.

“Twenty?” My driver guessed. “It’s bad tonight.”

I thanked her and rolled the section divider up. Alone in the back seat, I pulled up the photo Sonya Barlow had sent me. It was blurry, taken ten minutes ago at her gallery. In the center was a white woman with thick, dark hair, her head tipped back as she laughed heartily.

I wouldn’t have recognized her if Sonya hadn’t written after the image:

Teddy motherfucking Bircher! She’s back!

I pinched and pushed the image for a better look. Even through the distortion, she did seem to have the Bircher chin. If the trustees got word that Teddy was back, Joe was screwed. There was no way I was letting that happen, even if I had to walk into a crowded gallery.

After considerably longer than twenty minutes, traffic released us, and the car pulled up outside Sonya’s art gallery. From the sidewalk, I scanned the room through the windows, counting the people in attendance. The breath in my chest loosened at the final number—twenty was fine. Thirty was too. But when it got near forty, I started to sweat. Even at this number, confronting someone in a public place was high-risk for me. If they made a scene and we attracted too much attention, I might freeze.

Teddy Bircher was notorious for making a scene. But my brother needed me.

Through the glass, I spotted her. Teddy Bircher. In the flesh. The ghost from my brother’s wildest years and an all-around nightmare. She was doing the same thing she had been the last time I saw her: making my brother miserable.

Unacceptable.

I pulled thedoor open.

CAROLINE

Like I’d saidto Gerard three weeks ago at the Dragonfly Den, impersonation was 80 percent confidence and 20 percent hair.

Other than the itchy wig, pretending to be oil heiress Teddy Bircher was what my brother would have calleda piece of piss.

This was Kiwi-speak for very easy, although even I didn’t understand why. I’d traveled the world for burlesque and had to explain a million different Kiwi idioms, and the more I explained, the less sense most of them made.

Fortunately, I picked up accents easily. A lot of Americans struggled to understand my mumble, so I often affected their accents to make things like ordering Starbucks easier. Mimicking Teddy Bircher’s Manhattan drawl was, therefore, a piece of piss.

The job Gerard had hired me for was simple: pester a man named Joe Sanford like the ex-girlfriend from hell.

When the club owner had shown me pictures of the heiress I resembled, but had no relation to, my jaw had hit the floor. He’d explained that Joe was the beneficiary of a trust that had a stipulation about not returning to his wild ways if he wanted his full inheritance. This was staggering, as I’d researched Joe’s net worth and he was doing inhumanely fine, even without a good-behavior windfall.

Enter Teddy, the ghost of girlfriends past,sent by Gerard to remind the Upper East Side that Joe was a magnet for trouble.

Pretending to be this spoiled heiress was a role to relish.

That night at the Dragonfly, I’d sat at the bar with sweat cooling on my skin and the rock of worry about Dad and Mike heavy in my belly as Gerard told me increasingly appalling details about the real Teddy Bircher. From the time she purchased a painting just to throw champagne on it in front of the artist, to getting drunk at charity fundraisers and bragging about her tax shelters.

Tonight, I’d crashed an art event Joe had RSVP’d to on social media. Honestly, I was looking forward to raining hell down on the kind of man who could hear an oil heiress bragging about tax evasion and think,ah, yes, I must wife her.

I’d already been in the gallery for half an hour, but there was no sign of Joe yet, so I was in the bathroom touching up my heavy makeup and straightening my itchy wig.

Three loud thumps on the bathroom door made me jump.

“Hurry up in there!” a voice demanded.

When I strode back into the gallery in my dramatic black outfit, attendees who hadn’t seen ‘Teddy’ yet gasped. I preened like a beloved sitcom bitch who’d been in a coma for three seasons and was now making her dramatic return.

Joe Sanford saw me at the same time I saw him.

A comical look of horror crossed his face, and he almost dropped his Dom Pérignon. “Teddy?”

I waggled my fingers at the poor unsuspecting bastard. “Hello, love muffin.”

“Oh no.” Joe shook his head. “Get away from me.” He didn’t quite hold his fingers in front of him like a cross, but it was close.

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