Faking It
Copyright
About
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Copyright
* * *
This book was
copied right, in
the dark, by
Illuminati.
About the
e-Book
TITLE: Faking It
AUTHOR: Crusie, Jennifer
ABEB Version: 3.0
Hog Edition
* * *
LOVE AND DECEPTION HAVE A LOT IN COMMON.
Meet the Goodnights, a respectable family who run a respectable art gallery-and have for generations. There’s Gwen, the matriarch who likes to escape reality, Eve the oldest daughter who has a slight identity problem (she has two), Nadine, the granddaughter who’s ready to follow in the family footsteps as soon as she can find a set that isn’t leading off a cliff. And lastly, Matilda, the youngest daughter, has inherited the secret locked down in the basement of the Goodnight Gallery, the secret she’s willing to do almost anything to keep, even break into a house in the dead of night to steal back her past.
THE RISKS ARE INTOXICATING.
Meet the Dempseys, or at least meet Davy, a reformed con man who’s just been ripped off for a cool three million by his financial manager, who then gallantly turned it over to Clea Lewis, the most beautiful sociopath Davy ever slept with. Davy wants the money back, but more than that, he’ll do anything to keep Clea from winning, including break into her house in the dead of night to steal back his future.
AND IF YOU’RE REALLY GOOD AT THEM, THEY BOTH PAY OFF.
One collision in a closet later, Tilda and Davy reluctantly join forces to combat Clea, suspicious art collectors, a disgruntled heir, and an exasperated hitman, all the while coping with a mutant dachshund, a juke box stuck in the sixties, questionable sex, and the growing realization that they can’t turn their backs on the people they were meant to be...or the people they were born to love.
“Enormously engaging.”
—Publishers Weekly
* * *
St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by Jennifer Crusie
Fast Women
Welcome to Temptation
Crazy For You
Tell Me Lies
* * *
Faking It
Jennifer Crusie
St. Martin’s Paperbacks
* * *
Dedication
For
Pat Gaffney
for her magnificent novels,
limitless patience, and
unconditional friendship,
and because she totally gets
the Buffy the Vampire Slayer thing
MY THANKS TO
CATHERINE AIRD,
who supposedly said the quote I gave to Gwen, but since I can’t find documentation of it, I can’t attribute it to her. And anyway, I like her books.
ANNE TWOMEY
for giving me the best book covers in the business.
THE FACULTY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ART, BGSU, CIRCA 1971,
for trying to teach me to paint. Maybe if it hadn’t been the seventies...
DACHSHUND RESCUE OF OHIO
for fixing me up with Wolfgang, aka Steve.
DEBORAH LANATA
for explaining police procedure to me over and over again, for reading this book in manuscript, and for maintaining my bulletin board on YahooGroups.
THE JENNIFERCRUSIEFANS BULLETIN BOARD
for critiquing my first chapter, giving me movie quotes in my darkest hour, and putting up with me in general.
JOHN KARLE
for being the best of all possible publicists, who has never once told me to fix my own damn problems even though he must have been sorely tempted.
THE PEOPLE WHO HELPED ME FIGURE OUT THIS BOOK,
including Val Taylor, Teresa Hill, Judy Ivory, Jen Badger, Mollie Smith, and the XromXCraft Link.
JEN ENDERLIN
for once again being an editor whose intuition is superb, whose patience is legendary, and whose taste is exquisite.
and
MEG RULEY
for ten thousand things, culminating in just being Meg.
* * *
If you can’t be a good example,
you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.
—Gwen Goodnight
* * *
Chapter 1
MATILDA GOODNIGHT STEPPED BACK from her latest mural and realized that of all the crimes she’d committed in her thirty-four years, painting the floor-to-ceiling reproduction of van Gogh’s sunflowers on Clarissa Donnelly’s dining room wall was the one that was going to send her to hell. God might forgive her the Botticelli Venus she’d painted in the bathroom in Iowa, the Uccello battle scene she’d done for the boardroom in New Jersey, even the Bosch orgy she’d painted in the bedroom in Utah, but these giant, glaring sunflowers were going to be His Last Straw. “I gave you a nice talent,” He was going to say to her on Judgment Day, “and this is what you did with it.”
Tilda felt her lungs tighten and stuck her hand in her pocket to make sure she had her inhaler.
Beside her, Clarissa wrapped her thin little arms around her size-two chenille sweater and squinted at the brownish-yellow flowers. “It’s just like his, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Tilda said with regret and handed her the museum print of the original.
“The flowers look so ... angry,” Clarissa said.
“Well.” Tilda closed her paint box. “He was nuts.”
Clarissa nodded. “I heard about that. The ear.”
“Yeah, that got a lot of press.” Tilda shrugged off her paint shirt. “So I’ll take my completion check—”
“Did you sign it?” Clarissa said. “You need to sign it. I want everybody to know it’s a real Matilda Veronica mural.”
“I signed it.” Tilda pointed the toe of her paint-stained canvas shoe at the bottom where she’d scrawled “Matilda Veronica.”
“Right there. Now I have to be going—”
“You didn’t sign it ‘van Gogh,’ did you?” Clarissa bent down. “Wouldn’t that be forgery?”
“Not unless he had a Kentucky mural period we don’t know about.” Tilda tried to take a deep breath. “So I’ll take that check—”
“Write your name bigger,” Clarissa said, straightening. “I want everybody to know you painted this. I’m going to keep the magazine right here, too. So they know that it’s a real Matilda Veronica—”
Clarissa’s enthusiasm for her as a brand name had lost its appeal many days before, so Tilda changed the subject. “Well, Spot was certainly a champ about the whole thing.” She nodded at Clarissa’s elongated little dog on the theory that people were always pleased when you talked about their animals.
“His tail is almost hiding your name,” Clarissa said.
Tilda let her glasses slide down her nose a little and looked over the rims at Spot, quivering at her feet. She’d done some dog face-lifting in the mural since Spot’s beady eyes almost met over his long knife-edged nose. She’d softened the gray that streaked his dark, shaggy coat, too, so he didn’t look so much like a very small, mutant wolf.
“You have to sign it again,” Clarissa said. “Sign it up at the top. Bigger.”
�
��No,” Tilda said. “Everyone will see it because they’ll be comparing Spot to the painting. People always do that, look at the dog and then look at the painting—”
“No they won’t,” Clarissa said, triumphant. “He goes back to the pound today.”
“You’re taking your dog to the pound?” At Tilda’s feet, Spot pressed against her, shedding on her jeans.
“He’s not my dog,” Clarissa said. “You always put dogs in your murals—”
“No I don’t,” Tilda said.
“—it said so in the magazine, so I had to have one, too, or people wouldn’t think it was a real Matilda Veronica, so I went and got the only purebred they had.”
“Spot’s a purebred?”
“Silver dapple, longhaired dachshund,” Clarissa said. “He’ll be fine back at the pound. He’s used to it. I’m the third person who’s adopted him.”
Tilda pulled out her inhaler and inhaled.
It made sense when she thought about it. Clarissa was exactly the kind of woman who’d go to Rent-A-Dog and get a designer second for fake warmth in her faux Post-impressionist wall painting. Spot looked up at her now, shaking, almost as pathetic as he was ugly.
I am not going to rescue you, Tilda thought, capping her inhaler. I can’t save everybody, I’m asthmatic, and I don’t want a dog, especially not one who acts like he snorts coke and looks like he rolls in it.
“Sign it again up here,” Clarissa said. “I’ll get you a Sharpie.”
“No,” Tilda said. “I signed it. It’s done. And I’ll take the completion check now, thank you.”
“Well, I don’t know, that signature—” Clarissa began, and Tilda pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and turned steely eyes on her. Clarissa nodded. “I’ll go get that check, then.”
Left alone with Spot —a hell of a name for a dog that had none— Tilda tried to think of something besides the pound. There was the mural, another success, another chunk of money off the family debt, another two weeks painted from her life by ripping off art history—
Her cell phone rang and cut short her stab at optimism. Tilda flipped open the cover. “Hell-o.”
“Tilda,” her mother said, “we have a problem.”
“Really,” Tilda said, staring at the sunflowers. “Who’d have guessed?”
“It’s bad,” Gwen said, and Tilda stopped, taken aback by the seriousness in her mother’s voice. Gwennie did muffins and Double-Crostics, not serious.
“Okay, so whatever it is, we’ll fix it.” She looked down at the dog again, and he gazed back at her, desperation in his eyes. “What is it?”
“Nadine sold a Scarlet.”
Tilda jerked her head up as her stomach cramped. In the background on the phone, she heard her sixteen-year-old niece say, “I still don’t get what I did wrong,” and she went cold all over.
“There aren’t any Scarlets.” Tilda tried to draw a deep breath while not throwing up. “Dad sold them all.”
“Not the first one,” Gwen said. “Remember? He couldn’t because it was of our building. Nadine found it in the basement. And the woman who bought it won’t give it back. I asked.”
Clarissa came back with the check and Tilda took it. “Thank you,” she said to Clarissa and then spoke into the phone. “Ask again.”
“I tried. She hung up on me and I called again and Mason Phipps answered. She’s staying with him.” Gwen’s voice grew slower. “Mason was an old friend of your father’s. He’s the one who told her about Scarlet and the gallery. And he invited me to dinner tonight.”
“Oh, good. One of us will have a hearty meal.”
“So I thought I’d go and distract them and you could sneak in and steal it,” Gwen said. “And then we can bury it in the basement again.”
Tilda turned away from Clarissa and whispered into the phone. “You do realize you don’t get muffins in prison?” She tried again for a deep breath, fighting back the nausea. “And when we get it back, we’re burning it. If I’d known it was down th—”
“Something wrong?” Clarissa said from behind her.
“No,” Tilda said to her. “Everything is peachy.” She spoke into the phone. “I’m coming home. I’ll be there in four hours. Do not do anything until I get there.”
“We never do,” Gwen said and hung up.
“I certainly hope everything’s okay,” Clarissa said, looking avid.
“Everything is always okay,” Tilda said bitterly. “That’s what I do. I make everything okay.” She stuffed the check in her shirt pocket and looked down at Spot, trembling on her foot. “Which is why I’m taking your dog.”
“What?” Clarissa said, but Tilda had already scooped Spot up, his long body drooping over her arm while his feet tried for purchase on her hip.
“Just saving you a trip to the pound,” Tilda said. “Have a lovely day.”
She carted her paint box and the dog out to her beat-up yellow van, simmering with exasperation and another emotion she didn’t quite recognize but thought might be fear. It put an acrid taste in her mouth, and she didn’t like it. Once on the passenger seat, Spot simmered, too. “Oh, calm down,” she said to him, as she put the van in gear. “Anything’s better than jail.” Spot looked at her strangely. “The pound. I meant the pound.” She talked to him all the way home, and by the time she pulled into the fenced lot behind the Goodnight Gallery, Spot was asleep and she was calmer. When she shut off the motor, he jerked awake, his eyes like marbles, and she carried him, now heaving with anxiety, into the shabby gallery office and deposited him on the floor in front of her mother and niece, both of them looking blonde and blue-eyed and cute. So not like me, Tilda thought. Behind them, Gwennie’s bubbler jukebox played “No, No Not Again,” by the Three Degrees.
“This is Spot,” she said to Gwen and Nadine. “I’m finding him a home where people will treat him with dignity and not sell him down the river while his back is turned.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Nadine said, her pretty face defiant under her mop of pale curls. She was wearing a black T-shirt that said bite me in Gothic letters, but she still looked like Shirley Temple in a snit. “Nobody told me we couldn’t sell paintings. We’re an art gallery, for cripe’s sake.” She crouched down on the worn Oriental rug to pet Spot, who backed away, still heaving, his eyes peeled for a getaway. “What is wrong with this dog?”
“So many things,” Tilda said. “About the painting?”
“While you were in Iowa,” Gwen said to her, “Nadine broke curfew and Andrew sent her down to clean the basement as a punishment.”
Tilda took a deep breath and thought of a few choice things to say to her ex-brother-in-law.
“You can stop looking so mad,” Nadine said. “Dad didn’t let me in the locked part. I still don’t know what’s in there.”
“Storage,” Tilda said.
“Right.” Nadine rolled her eyes.
“Nadine.” Tilda pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and looked down at her, and Nadine swallowed and sat up a little straighter. “You are not in a position to push your luck here. The painting.”
“Dad made me clean the back storeroom,” Nadine said. “It was full of furniture painted with animals. Dad said you did it when you were my age. It was pretty cool, especially the bed when we’d cleaned it off and set it up—”
“We?” Tilda said.
“Ethan and me,” Nadine said. “You didn’t think I cleaned that whole place out by myself?”
“So Ethan knows.” Tilda consigned Andrew to the lowest circle of hell for criminal stupidity, in sending not only his daughter down there but also her non-family best friend.
“Well, he knows there’s furniture down there, yeah,” Nadine said. “What is it with you and the basement? It’s furniture.”
“Right.” Tilda realized her lungs were closing up again and got her inhaler out. “Are we close to the painting yet?”
“It was in there,” Nadine said. “It was wrapped in paper and stuck in a cabinet, the one
with the turquoise monkeys on it. Did you really paint all those animals?”
“It’s junk. I was going through a phase.” Tilda hit the inhaler. “So you pulled the painting out and then what?”
“We thought it was good,” Nadine said.
“So you sold it,” Tilda said.
“No. We put it back in the cabinet and put dustsheets on everything and went to Cup O‘ Joe’s. And then today, Grandma had to go to the bank, and this Mrs. Lewis came in and asked if we had any paintings by somebody named Scarlet, and I said no, all we had was Dorcas Finsters.” Nadine turned to Gwen. “Are we ever going to get rid of those? I know she lives here, but they’re really depressing, and I think we could—”
“Nadine,” Tilda said.
“Okay.” Nadine crossed her arms. “And Mrs. Lewis said no, she wanted paintings that looked like a kid had painted them, and she started talking about checkerboard skies and stars, and Ethan was here and he said, ‘That’s like the one we found in your basement,’ and she would not leave until we showed it to her.”
“Ethan said that,” Tilda said.
“Or maybe me.” Nadine squinted at the ceiling. “I’m not sure. Ask Ethan.”
“Like Ethan wouldn’t lie down on burning coals for you,” Tilda said. “So you went and got the painting ...”
“And she offered me a hundred dollars for it and I said no,” Nadine said virtuously.