Sun-kissed (The Au Pairs 3)

Mara sighed, dreaming of sailing on the bay, Ryan at the helm while she lounged on the deck, suntanning. The two of them kissing while the sun set behind them.

The plane glided into the gate, and Mara turned on her phone, which immediately buzzed with Ryan's signature callback ring tone: John Carpenter's Halloween theme. Doo-do-do-do doo-do-do-do. . .

She smiled as she flipped open her phone. So what if she was wait-listed? She was still spending her third summer in the Hamptons with the boy she loved, who was waiting outside the terminal for her arrival.

And no one could take that away from her.

6

in soho, eliza is stuck in the fashion trenches

"EH-LIE-ZUH!"

"Eh-lie-zuh!"

"Are you listening to me?"

Snap.

Eliza blinked. Someone was talking to her. More specifically, someone was talking down to her. She put aside her chopsticks and tried not to look too irritated. Couldn't she even eat dinner in peace?

It was half-past midnight. She had been at the showroom since nine o'clock that morning and couldn't wait to get home for a shower. She was, for the first time in her perennially Fracas-perfumed life, seriously "funky." She took a discreet sniff of each armpit and grimaced.

"Eh-lie-zuh. Hello. Earth to Eh-lie-zuh!"

Eliza rubbed her eyes and finally focused on the person who owned that voice. Paige McGinley. Otherwise known as a Paige-in-t

he-ass. Her so-called boss and slave driver for Sydney Minx-- famous fashion designer and all-around diva, owner of the showroom and the reason she'd had barely half an hour of sleep in the past forty-eight hours.

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Sydney Minkowitz was a gay Jewish dress designer from the Bronx who'd changed his last name to the more intriguing and less ethnic "Minx." Early in his career, he'd befriended a coterie of New York socialites through vigorous ass kissing and with their support had launched a line of chic, casual, yet expensive sportswear that had grown to include licenses for accessories, perfume, house wares, candles, and linens. If you dressed, dined, or dreamed, you could bet there was a Sydney Minx product that catered to it.

The histrionic designer was opening his first boutique in the Hamptons in two days, and the whole office was buzzing with frantic activity to get all the details for the grand-opening party and fashion show completed. Like everyone in New York, Eliza had been a devotee of Sydney's early work--the waffle-knit "poor boy" cashmere sweaters that came with enormous price tags, the sexy drain-pipe trousers, the artfully graffitied logo handbags. But the designer had been slipping of late. The latest collections had veered wildly from sex-bomb attire one season to starchy, covered-up pretension the next as the label tried to connect with an ever-more-fickle audience of high-fashion buyers. You could only have so many bad collections before you were considered fashion road kill, and with this opening, Sydney had a lot at stake.

The place was so tense that if the notoriously difficult-to-please Sydney summoned the group to yet another meeting in which he called all of his design associates, production assistants, runway models, and office interns an untalented bunch of idiots,

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someone was going to burst into tears. Already, one of the pattern makers had left her sewing machine in a huff after Sydney had called the dress sample she was making "a two-dollar schmatte, an eyesore of epic proportions, an insult to the name of couture!"

"Can I help you?" Eliza asked belligerently as she wiped her mouth with a paper napkin.

"Why aren't all the T-shirts folded yet?" Paige demanded. She was a dark-haired, sharp-featured twenty-two-year-old, a recent F.I.T. graduate who had ascended quickly from being Sydney's personal assistant to being de facto creative director of the label. "I told you, all the shirts need to go in boxes so the messengers can take them to the stores tomorrow morning!" The T-shirts, silk-screened with the designer's Photo shopped and markedly slimmer-than-life silhouette, would be given away for free in the overstuffed goodie bags to the VIP guests at the East Hampton party and sold for seventy-five dollars apiece at Sydney's boutiques around the country to the hoi polloi.

"Because I'm spray-painting all the fabric gold like Sydney asked for the 'Anna coat," Eliza replied, pushing away the Chinese food containers. She showed Paige the metallic swatches that would be sewn onto a military trench Sydney hoped would catch the eye of the Vogue editor. Half of them were still unpainted.

Eliza wiped her hands on the backs of her So Low sweatpants, then crossed her arms defensively. Packing the T-shirts was, like, menial grunge work! She was Eliza Thompson. Once named in

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New York magazine as the most popular girl on the prep school circuit! She'd only taken the job because she liked fashion and thought it would be a cakewalk to hang around a designer's showroom for the summer.

"Those swatches aren't done yet? Sydney needed those hours ago," Paige said, aghast.

Eliza tried not to look too guilty. She had taken her sweet time spray-painting the fabric just so no one would ask her to do anything else. She'd noticed that if she looked busy enough, she could avoid doing the more-boring chores.

"Anyway, forget this for now. Go help Vidalia. She can't seem to get her dress on correctly for the run-through. Then I need those T-shirts."