“You have to dress tastefully for the duration of the next two weeks. Not flashy. No boobs.” She looked at the T-shirt and jeans I was wearing and scowled. “And no T-shirts.”
She went through the racks of clothes and handed me a conservative blue dress. “Wear this today.”
I went and changed as she bustled around, packing and giving me instructions.
“The Prestons are an old Boston-Brahmin family. They have more money than God,” Elena said. “You need to fit in with them, and by that, I mean that your clothes have to be impeccable and outrageously expensive. I’ve been shopping, and I’ve gotten you all the essentials—cocktail dresses, skirts, blouses, jewelry, and handbags. A lot of it’s from a luxury rental service—so don’t spill anything on any of it. I have to send it back.”
I came out in the dress and she smoothed it. Then she examined me, playing with my hair, running her gel-manicured fingertips through it.
“You’re so naturally pretty. He’ll be pleased.” She smiled at me approvingly and went to another one of the wardrobes, pulling out clothes in dry-cleaning bags.
“I picked out a couple of dresses for the wedding,” Elena said. “Do you like red?”
“I think yellow would be better, actually,” I said. “It looks good on me. And no one wears yellow when they’re trying to look slutty,” I offered.
“I like that,” Elena said. She pulled a pale-yellow lace dress from one of the racks and handed it to me. I turned the delicate fabric over in my hands. I recognized the label; the dress cost well over a thousand dollars.
I tried it on, and we both liked it. Then we went through lots of other outfits, picking out dresses for brunches, lunches, and cocktails. The bathing suits for the trip were the hardest to choose. I looked like an escort no matter what I wore. I had boobs and a round ass that I couldn’t hide.
“Your body just screams sex,” Elena said and laughed. “Maybe you should just wear a cover-up and not swim the whole time. Hmm,” she said, pulling out another suit. It was pink and covered in flowers. “How about this?”
“A pink tankini?” I asked. “I think that’s a little too soccer mom for a Hottest Bachelor.”
Elena frowned. “You’re right. Let’s just stick with black bikinis. But no jewelry except for a watch and diamond studs. No body chains.”
“I’m not sure what a body chain is, so that works for me,” I said.
“Perfect,” Elena said. “Now, for your background. You’re going to tell the Prestons that you’re in school still—graduate school for design at a little school in New Hampshire they’ve never heard of. I’ve had other girls use this bio before—it works like a charm. Nobody knows how to talk about graphic design. Plus, everyone in James Preston’s family is a lawyer, so they’ll have no idea what you actually do.
“Tell them you met James at a PR event in California while you were interning out there. Easy. He doesn’t stay in touch with his family, so they don’t know what he does on a regular basis.
“They don’t know that he’s dating someone—because he isn’t. But for the fake record, you two have been together for a few months. It’s getting fairly serious. Serious enough that he’s bringing you to his brother’s wedding, to meet his family.”
“Why isn’t he dating anyone?” I asked. Please don’t let it be because he’s totally weird, I thought. A lot of the Johns were. And two weeks was a long time to be on a date with someone who was obsessed with peeing in your face, for example.
That would be a lot of pee.
“He broke up with someone recently. And now he doesn’t have the time, he said. Doesn’t want the commitment, the games, the issues. He wants no strings.” She paused. “He says he doesn’t want sex, either.”
I looked at her, stunned. “Huh?” I asked.
“I said, he’s not interested in having sex with you.”
I raised my eyebrow at her. “I beg your pardon? Isn’t that, like, the whole point? I am an escort, after all. That’s what I do.”
She shrugged. “I’m still having him get tested, and he still has to sign all the waivers,” she said. “Because once he takes a look at you, he’s going to change his mind.”
I smiled at her. “We’ll see,” I said. I sort of hoped he wouldn’t. Two weeks without having sex with a stranger would be a real vacation for me.
“So, back to James Preston,” she said. “He’s extremely wealthy. As in, the top one percent in the country wealthy. He’s into real estate, like I told you. But don’t worry about that, and don’t talk about his business unless he brings it up. If he does, just ask questions, be polite, and listen. Men like James have women after them all the time. He has a fixed arrangement with you. This should be relaxing for him. A break from what his real life is like.”
Elena turned to me. “I want you to make this the best two weeks of his life,” she said. “A client like James Preston only comes around once. If he likes us and uses us again—or recommends us to his jet-setter friends—I’ll be able to put my girls through college. And you can get your brother into a single room for the rest of his life. Don’t fuck this up for any of us.”
James
Being a billionaire had lots of perks. Two of them were that you never had to pack for yourself and you never had to shop for yourself. Nita, my personal assistant, had bought me a new tux and a bunch of new suits for the trip. My housekeeper had ironed all my clothes and packed them all perfectly.
These things did not suck.
What did suck, however, was that I had over one hundred emails that I had to answer on my flight to Boston. It also sucked that I wouldn’t be able to bark into my phone at the various directors who worked for me. I was flying commercial for the first time in years. I thought it would be good practice—to be around people that I didn’t particularly care for, and to try and maintain my manners.
Because that was the real suck of the moment. I was going home, and that meant I had to deal with all the people who drove me crazy. I was going to have to behave, because it was my family, because my stupid brother was getting married, and because that was the decent thing to do.
I hated decent.
At least the escort would be there, and that would be my private little joke. My fuck you to my oh-so-proper family. I really hoped that she was nice, and that she had a sense of humor.
She was going to need it.
I finished making sure that my things were assembled and went to get some cash from my safe. As I grabbed the bills, I brushed the worn edge of something familiar, something I’d touched a thousand times. It was an old photograph.
I pulled it out, wishing that I could stop myself. It was of me and Danielle, from our senior year of high school. She was wearing a black dress, her dark-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she was laughing. In the picture, I was looking at her and laughing, too.
It was the only picture I had of her. Of us. And for all the times I’d wanted to cut myself out of it, I couldn’t bear to.
I put the picture back into the bottom of the safe. And then I cursed the day that I’d entered this world, along with the day that she’d left it.