Cruel Legacy (Cruel 3)

“Yes,” I said, stepping out of his bathroom in the low-cut lilac dress Elizabeth had sent over this morning. It had a soft, almost-water-like texture to it with an empire waist and a high slit to reveal the nude Jimmy Choos I’d paired with it. My silver hair was pulled to one side in loose waves that draped over one of the skinny straps. “What do you think?”

“I think it needs one more thing,” Penn said.

He pulled out a small red Cartier box. My eyes widened in shock.

“Um…what’s that?”

“A surprise,” he said coyly.

He stepped up to me and then cracked the box. My heart skyrocketed. Terror hitting me that he might propose and another stranger feeling…like I might want that one day.

Settled into the red cushion was a pair of circular-cut drop diamond earrings. They were the most perfectly clear diamonds I had ever seen in my life. A soft gasp escaped me.

“Penn, I can’t.”

He plucked the earrings out of the case. “You absolutely can. They go with your dress.”

“They go with everything,” I blurted out.

He laughed as he passed them to me. “Exactly.”

I gingerly took them in my hands as if they were made of glass and might shatter. I turned to the mirror in his living room and exchanged the cheap earrings I’d been wearing with actual, a hundred percent real Cartier diamonds. My hands shook as I finished clasping them, and then I admired them as they shone brightly in the mirror.

“They are beautiful,” I breathed. “Thank you.”

He took my hand, as he had that first time we met, and kissed it. Somehow, he still made me flush. “Now we’re ready to go.”

Penn had acquired a limo for the night to take us to the gala, which was being held at Cipriani Wall Street. The building had been built to look like Greek revival architecture with beautiful columns and intricate moldings. After we stood for pictures with the press and passed a slew of A-list celebrities and models, which I barely kept my cool with, we entered the event. Tables took up much of the space in the dimly lit room, and a stage was against one wall to honor some of the greatest fashion icons of our time.

We were seated with people that neither of us really knew and were relieved when the ceremony was over so that we could mingle. I’d promised to find Jane and Harmony, but I hadn’t found them in the crowd. And after the long ceremony, I needed another drink.

Penn and I moved to the bar. As we waited in line for drinks, I pulled out my phone to text Harmony and find out where she was. Penn had his own phone out, and then he glanced up at me, then down at his phone, and then back.

“What?” I asked, putting my phone back into the pocket of my dress. Seriously, thank god for dresses with pockets!

“Why am I getting a suggestion to like your page? Since when did you set up an Influencer page?”

“Oh yeah, yesterday. Harmony set it up. Crap, I was supposed to update it with more pictures. With everything that went down, I forgot.”

Penn clicked on my page, and his eyes bugged. “How do you have fifteen thousand connections? Are you sure you set this up yesterday?”

I blinked. “What?”

He thrust the phone at me, and I stared down at my profile in shock.

“Oh my god,” I said, jittery with excitement. “That’s insane, right?”

“I don’t even know how that’s possible.”

I clicked through some of the pictures and scrolled through some comments. “It looks like Harmony tagged me in a picture, and Elizabeth recommended me to her followers. Because I didn’t do anything else.”

Penn shook his head. “I didn’t even know you wanted to do that.”

“Harmony says I should curate my own content instead of relying on the newspapers and tabloids to do it for me.”

Penn wrinkled his nose. “You don’t want to be like Harmony.”

“No,” I agreed. “But this is kind of fun.”

He shrugged indifferently. “All right. If you enjoy it.”

“I should go find her and ask her about this. I didn’t expect it to blow up like this literally overnight.”

He pointed toward the corner of the room. “I saw where she was sitting. She’s over there. I’ll wait if you want to go hang out.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“You can handle yourself in a crowd just fine. We already worked on that.”

“And what are we working on next?” I asked, standing on my toes to give him a quick kiss.

“Guess you’ll have to wait and see.”

I laughed. “Well, boyfriend, I will be right over there. Come find me with our drinks.”

“All right, girlfriend, I will find you,” he said, flashing a dimple.

His smile was contagious as I slipped out of his grip and headed toward Harmony. I pulled out my phone to check for myself that my Crew page had actually exploded and was just as shocked to see it on my phone as on Penn’s.