CHAPTER ONE
It was Saturday night at the Tune-In Café and the only person inside its dingy walls who wasn’t drunk was seriously starting to wish that she were.
Unless you’d had a couple of beers too many, it was hard to endure the raucous laughter and the sharp stench of whiskey. Add in the 1950s décor and the sticky wooden floor and the only thing Emily Wilde—whoops, Emily thought quickly, Emily Madison—wanted was to Tune Out.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option.
Emily sighed as her fingers flew over the yellowed keys of a battered upright piano.
She worked here.
There wasn’t a way in hell she’d have been in the place otherwise. She was the entertainment Thursdays through Sundays and sometimes she still couldn’t get her head around that fact. How could she when she’d come east two years ago so she could become a world-class curator at a world-class museum or, at the very least, the buyer for a prestigious art gallery?
Amazing that she’d never stopped to consider that the New York art world had not been holding its breath, just waiting for a twenty-four-year-old Texan with a degree in Mayan pottery.
Talk about planning ahead…
“Right,” Emily muttered as she swung into the cheesiest possible arrangement of yet another cheesiest possible tune.
Planning was the problem. Or not planning. In a family of planners, she was the one who would just sort of let life pick her up and carry her along.
The rest of them had dropped from the womb, perfectly organized.
Her father, four-star General John Hamilton Wilde. Her brothers: Jacob, who managed El Sueño, the family ranch; Caleb, who headed an elite law firm; Travis, who worked his magic as a financial investor. Even her sisters were on the path to success, Jaimie as a real estate agent with a prestigious international firm, Lissa as a Hollywood chef.
The only Wilde who lay awake nights trying to figure out where she was headed, how she was going to get there and, toughest of all, how she was going to pay the bills en route was the youngest.
“Me,” Emily mumbled.
Except, of course, nobody in New York knew she was a Wilde.
Emily had dropped her last name more than a year ago. She’d done it in desperation after she’d realized that, for the first time in her life, being a Wilde was working against her.
In retrospect, she shouldn’t have been shocked to discover that in some circles, even in the East, the name was well-known. What was a shocker was that people would assume she was some kind of dilettante who didn’t really need a job that paid a living wage…
And what was with her tonight? All of this was ancient history. Why was she reliving it?
She took a quick look at her watch.
Thank God.
It was almost midnight. Her eight-in-the-evening until two-in-the-morning stint was winding down. Soon she’d be out of the Tune-In, and since tomorrow was Monday and she didn’t have to work, she could do her usual Monday thing: call up the New York Times on her Mac to catch up with all the exciting things people were doing in Manhattan, and if she ended up in a self-induced pity fest, she could plow through the pint of Ben & Jerry’s Heath Bar Crunch she’d hidden in the back of the freezer so she wouldn’t be tempted to tuck into it too soon.
Plus, she could permit herself the luxury of wallowing in thoughts of exactly how much she hated, despised and deplored working at the Tune-In and if she’d left out a couple of verbs, it was only because she was too tired to be creative.
And, yes, she knew it was wrong to feel that way.
She should have been grateful to have a job at all. Besides, pounding the time-worn keys at the Tune-In wasn’t even the worst job she’d ever had.
That list wasn’t just long, it was depressing.
Her one job in the art world had been as a so-called associate at a pricey gallery. That had lasted until the day she’d looked a potential customer in the eye and said she didn’t have the slightest idea why anyone would pay one hundred and ninety thousand bucks for a ten-foot-by-twelve-foot canvas of green stripes on a white background.
She’d waited tables in coffee shops and delis where the question wasn’t if the boss was going to put the make on you but when.
She’d demonstrated fancy cosmetics at Bloomingdale’s and Saks and Barney’s—not too bad a gig, really, until her face said “No more” and turned into a giant crimson glob.
Still, when you came down to it, a job was just a job. A means to an end. Yes, the Tune-In was… grungy was as good a word as any. So what? This was Manhattan. You never knew when a neighborhood was going to change. The Meatpacking District had once been a place to avoid; the area around the Gowanus Canal had been a bad joke. One of these days, the Tune-In might very well be at the center of some up– and– coming real estate. Actually, the neighborhood had been pretty good years ago, until some fast-cash developer had bought up half the houses and then run out of the money he’d needed to turn them into condos, which explained why a piano bar was in this area at all.
The Tune-In was a holdover. Its customers were holdovers, too. Nobody would deliberately seek it out unless they already knew it was here.
Which was, in a way, a very good thing.
It meant that none of Emily’s siblings—and certainly not her father—were likely to wander through the door. As far as they knew, she was working for a private art collector who insisted on remaining anonymous. On the occasions any of her family came through New York, she’d dress up, plaster on a smile and meet them at whatever hotel or restaurant they suggested. Her place, she always said gaily, was being painted. Or the floors were being scraped. Or it was crowded with catalogs and brochures she was searching before buying something new for her employer.
Emily segued into an overblown version of “Hello, Dolly.”
Not that she lied to her family, exactly. Or, OK, maybe she did. But they were well–meaning lies; otherwise she’d have to tell them stuff that would upset them. Stuff they didn’t need to know. Why tell them she’d dropped her last name in favor of her middle one? Why tell them she lived in a building that, like the Tune-In, was waiting for a real estate revival? Why tell them about her none-too-stellar job?
Being the underachiever in a family of overachievers was hell.
Until she’d come to New York, she’d never lied to anybody, but what choice did she have? Her father would go into full command mode if he knew the truth. Her brothers would go crazy. Even Jaimie and Lissa would get into it.
At the very least, they’d all inundate her with advice and cash, and that was not what she wanted.