here more often than you might think,” she said—sidestepping the truth again.
Then again, one couldn’t exactly hurry the appeasement of karma. It was one thing to make amends for past behaviors. It was another to spill her guts to Peyton about everything that happened to her family and admit how she’d ended up in the same position he’d been in in high school, and now she was really, really sorry for how she had behaved all those years. That wasn’t really necessary, was it? To go into all that detail? A woman was entitled to some secrets. And Ava wasn’t sure she could bear Peyton’s smug satisfaction after he learned about it. Or, worse, if he displayed the same kind of fake pity so many of her former so-called friends did.
Oh, Ava, they would say whenever she ran into them. Has your poor father gotten out of prison yet? No? Darling, how do you stand the humiliation? We must meet for lunch sometime, get you out of that dreary store where you have to work your fingers to the bone. I’ll call you.
No calls ever came, of course. Not that Ava wanted them to. And their comments didn’t bother her, because she didn’t care about those people anymore. But coming from Peyton... For some reason, she suspected such comments would bother her a lot.
So she stalled. “We’re supposed to be receiving a couple of evening gowns from Givenchy today, and I wanted to look them over before they went out on the floor.” All of which was true, she hastened to reassure herself. She just didn’t mention that she would have also been at the store if they were expecting a shipment of bubble wrap. She put in more hours at Talk of the Town than her two full-timers did combined.
“Then I guess I was lucky I came in today,” he said, looking a little anxious. Sounding a little anxious.
“What made you come in?” she asked. “I thought you were going to be all booked up with Henry Higginses and millionaire matchmakers while you were in town.”
He grinned halfheartedly and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Both actions were probably intended to make him look comfortable, but neither really did.
“Yeah... Well... Actually...” He took a breath, released it slowly and tried again. “Actually, that’s kind of why I’m here.”
He gestured toward the only other chair in the office and asked, “Mind if I sit down?”
“Of course not,” she replied. Even though she did kind of mind, because doing that would bring him closer, and then she would be the one trying to look comfortable when she felt anything but.
He folded himself into the other chair and continued to look uneasy. She waited for him to say something, but he only looked around the office, his gaze falling first on the Year in Fashion calendar on the wall—for April, it was Pierre Cardin—then on the fat issues of Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire that lined the top shelf of her desk, then lower, on the stack of catalogs sitting next to the employee schedule she’d been working on, and then—
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
