How to Look Happy
Authors: Stacey Wiedower
Tags: #Romance, #EBF, #Chick-Lit, #Contemporary
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HOW TO LOOK HAPPY
by
STACEY WIEDOWER
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Copyright © 2016 by Stacey Wiedower
Cover design by Estrella Designs
Gemma Halliday Publishing
http://www.gemmahallidaypublishing.com
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Three’s a Crowd
I speed along the city’s streets—as much speeding as I can do at rush hour, at least—and run through my mental list. Client binder.
Check.
Measuring tape.
Check.
Fabric memos, wallpaper samples, paint deck.
Check, check, check.
Contract documents.
Aaargh, crap.
I visualize the pages resting on the office printer tray where I’ve left them. I had that sneaking feeling I’d forgotten something when I locked the door and peeled out of the office parking lot—late thanks to Candace, my boss. She breezed out the door after lunch and said she’d be back in an hour. She lied. And then at 3:30 our office manager left to take her daughter to an appointment, and since I was the only person left she asked me to wait on a delivery that “should get here any minute.” It came at 5:05, and my presentation is at 5:30, all the way across town.
Sometimes working for a boutique design studio with only seven employees is fantastic. Sometimes it bites.
I tap my fingers impatiently against the steering wheel as I inch along Walnut Grove Road, then let out a groan as I
just
miss yet another light. My client, Emory Brewster, lives in a 12,000-square-foot house—compound, really—in the heart of East Memphis, in a neighborhood that houses most of the city’s captains of industry. I can’t afford to be late to this meeting, literally.
Alt-J’s “Left Hand Free” is blaring from my car’s speakers through my iPhone playlist, and I’m bouncing to the music, putting my adrenaline and overcharged nerves to good use. When the sound suddenly cuts off, replaced by loudly chirping crickets, I squeal in surprise. I glance down at my phone, which is connected to the car stereo via a USB cord, and see that the call is from my best friend, Carrie Stockton.
“Hey, Carr.” I’m the first car in line at the intersection, and I settle the phone on my shoulder and slam the accelerator the second the light turns green. My eco-friendly Prius bucks slightly as if to protest my fuel-wasting tendencies.
“Hey,” Carrie says in her soft, lilting drawl. “What are you doing right now?”
I let out a sharp laugh. “Running way-ass late, that’s what,” I say. “I have my second meeting with Brewster this afternoon.” I pause, glancing at the clock on the dash. “Or, should I say, three minutes ago.”
Shit, shit, shit
, my brain screams at me. I’ve never been late to a client appointment.
“Oh.” She seems surprised by my manic state. “Well I’ll let you go, then. Was just going to see if you and Jeremy want to meet up with David, Sara Beth, and me later tonight. David wants to check out that German place that just opened on the square.”
Carrie’s boyfriend, David Winstead, manages a restaurant group and makes it his business to know every detail about every new dining option in town. Because I go out with the two of them a lot, I’m pretty up on the local food scene myself. “Yeah, sure, if we can try the new Muddy’s afterward,” I say, my mouth watering as I conjure up an image of a red velvet cupcake piled with an enormous mound of cream cheese frosting, maybe some chocolate shavings sprinkled over the top…
“Jeremy won’t be able to though,” I add, ripping myself out of my sugared fantasy. “He has to go into the office tonight.”
“Oh, okay. No worries,” she says. “We’ll have fun without him.”
I catch the undertone I know she’s trying to suppress. Carrie isn’t my fiancé‘s biggest fan, though she tries hard for me. I appreciate that about her, just like I appreciate everything about Carrie. She’s the sister I always wanted, growing up as I did in a family of four older brothers.
“I’ll call you when I get through this appointment,” I say, my nervousness resurfacing.
“Sounds good,” Carrie says. “Good luck!” Ever the optimist, she is.
Reaching my turn at last, I screech to the right and speed along the leafy, winding streets that seem far too quiet and secluded to rest at the center of a metro area containing 1.4 million people. My tires squeal as I swerve around the last corner and into the neighborhood’s gated entry. A white-coiffed woman driving a Lexus gives me a stony stare as she exits through the gate to my left. Meanwhile, I tap the code Emory gave me into the call box, hitting the keys so fast that I screw it up twice. I’m bouncing in my seat again when the heavy iron gate begins to creep inward.
With all its freedoms, the trappings of wealth to me seem like just that—an elaborate, well-contained, beautifully appointed trap. But that’s only my opinion, gleaned from more than six years of dealing with Emory Brewsters or, more often, their wives. Brewster, as he’s known around town, doesn’t have one of those.
My stomach quivers a little at the thought.
I pull into the circular drive and park. Then I hop out, click open the hatch, and dash around to the back of the car. Balancing a thick book of wallpaper samples on the lip of the trunk, I begin to stack the other items I need on top of it. With one edge of the heavy rectangular book resting awkwardly on my hip, I reach for my huge black canvas tote bag, a market freebie I carry with me to all my client presentations. Just as my fingers close around the handle, my balancing act goes awry, and the whole assemblage slides into the car, the papers in the binder shifting and spilling out of the top like salt from a shaker.
“Crap.” I glance at my watch. 5:37. It could be worse, but I always make a point to show up early for client appointments, mainly to prevent myself from looking like the frazzled, frizzed, and stressed-out mess I am right now. My boss, Candace, is always pushing appearance—“This is a fashion business,” she reminds us on at least a weekly basis, usually after ordering one of our designers to freshen up her lipstick or get an appointment to touch up her roots. I’d be offended, but my firm’s clients are keeping up with the Vanderbilts, not the Joneses, and we have to sell ourselves as hard as we sell our work. Our clients often spend well into six figures on a project, and the price tag for the single room I’m presenting today has an alarming number of zeroes.
Not that my client will know, since the document containing price estimates is back at the studio, resting on the damn printer tray. “Nice, Dawson. Very nice,” I say out loud.
When I woke up this morning, I had a feeling today was going to be a good day. So much for my sense of premonition.
I fling open my client binder and stuff the notes and drawings from my initial meeting with Brewster back into the pockets lining the inside. Then I grasp the handles of the bag and shove in the items I need, cursing myself for not doing it back at the office when I had plenty of time to kill. Instead I’d spent those extra minutes overthinking Brewster’s living room draperies, switching out one trim fabric for another and double-checking the prices I forgot to bring.
I close the car’s hatch and start up the circular drive, the heels of my last-season Jimmy Choos click-clicking up the tasteful brick pavers that line the front walk. The quasi-Italianate mansion has a bland stucco finish and a low-pitched roof supported by evenly spaced corbels. A tower on the left wing resembles a campanile without a bell.
The neighborhood is eerily silent for rush hour, which for some reason increases my agitation. I walk as quickly as I dare in my stilettos—which, let’s face it, is just a fancier word for “stilts”—and consider the fact that an ungraceful plummet to the sidewalk would fit the day I’m having and make me look like an even bigger mess. I stop two feet from the bottom step, shift the bag on my shoulder, draw in a deep breath, and work to slow my racing heart before I face my intimidating client.
Emory Brewster is an attorney, a high-powered litigator. Three years ago he represented the city’s former mayor in an embezzling case that made national headlines, and in a stunning move attributed by many to Emory’s lawyerly prowess, the jury handed down an acquittal. Since then he’s been sought out by white-collar, would-be, could-be criminals from across the country. He’s sexy-smart, with caramel-colored hair that almost brushes his collar and eyes like Key West with an ocean view. He has a smile that stops women in mid-stride—when he flashes it, at least, and that’s rare. I learned that in our initial meeting, which was more uncomfortable than I want to admit, even to myself…possibly because I’d had a hard time focusing on my client questionnaire when all I could think about was the fact that Emory Brewster was loosening his tie.
Oh my.
I feel tingly just thinking about it, like a tween girl with her first crush. I feel guilty, too, because the only man I’m supposed to feel tingly about is Jeremy Morrison, who I’m marrying in eight months.
Jeremy is no slacker himself. He’s the youngest CFO in the history of Inglewood Print Media, which runs two international trade shows and publishes six magazines related to the hotel industry. This morning I found out
Memphis Scene
listed him among the city’s “Most Eligible Under 30.” I’m trying to let that go, since Jeremy is not, in fact, “eligible” and hasn’t been for more than seven years.
Jeremy is the reason I started working with Emory Brewster in the first place, at least indirectly. One of my repeat clients, a high-level FedEx executive who went to Stanford with Jeremy’s mom, hired Brewster for a personal matter involving her trust fund daughter’s shoplifting habit. When she heard he was looking for a designer, she gave him my number.
Instead of calling, Brewster came into our studio in person. As soon as Carson, our receptionist, led him from the lobby into our workroom, I felt every designer on our staff collectively hold her breath and then let it out audibly when he asked for me by name. We use a rotating system for walk-in clients, but that goes out the window when someone gets a referral. In my six and a half years with Greenlee Designs, Emory Brewster is my biggest coup. Even Candace, my boss, seemed jealous after Emory left, and she’s worked with Peyton Manning, Carrie Underwood, and
Cher
, for crying out loud. Candace Greenlee is, like, the South’s design prima donna.
She’s been grooming me to be her partner. Or at least, that’s what Rachael, Ellie Kate, and Quinn, the firm’s other three staff designers, keep telling me. I don’t believe them, but if this project goes well, it’ll be a step in the right direction. Candace’s previous partner and co-founder of the firm pulled out last year and moved to the south of France. As the senior designer, I’ve worked my tail off to keep business strong in the wake of the partnership’s unraveling. Last year I recruited more new clients than Ellie Kate and Quinn put together, and my accounts totaled more than even Candace’s.
I’ve also put in more hours than Ellie Kate and Quinn put together. Ellie Kate’s pregnant with her second baby, another girl, and I have a strong suspicion she’ll be trading in her drafting table for a changing table in four months when the baby’s born. Quinn’s in her mid-twenties and just broke up with her latest in a string of short-term boyfriends, but she’s more interested in what happens after work hours than during them.
Rachael, though, logs as much time in the studio as I do. She’s the newest designer at the firm, and like me, she didn’t come from a moneyed background. A lot of designers in the city, and in the South in general, practically earned their design educations as a pedigree. Trust me when I tell you it’s easier to build a high-end clientele when your mother plays bridge with retired doctors and politicians and you’re in the Junior League with two hundred executive wives-in-training.
I’ve earned my way into that world through hard work and a few lucky breaks—namely a degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design, which led to a good internship at an Atlanta firm, which led to Candace Greenlee plucking my résumé from the pile.
Still, the hardest parts of my career path have been learning the subtleties of social graces and the product lines of the high-end stores and brands that are as ground into my well-bred coworkers’ childhoods as Sears and Walmart are to mine.
I hold my breath as I ring Brewster’s doorbell and wait for what feels like a very long time, shifting from foot to foot as the strap of my bag digs into my right shoulder. I’m about to ring the bell again when I hear noise on the other side of the doorway. Finally, one of the double doors inches open.
“Ms. Dawson!” says Aubrey Valentine, Brewster’s live-in house manager, as she pulls the door wider. Aubrey and I have spoken more than I’ve actually talked with Brewster himself, though I can’t figure out her exact role in his life. She’s not a housekeeper, because I’ve met the housekeeper, and her name is Angelique. So I’ve assumed Aubrey is his personal assistant, despite the fact that he also has an assistant at work.
I step over the threshold, noticing that Aubrey looks flushed and confused. I redden too, thinking it’s because I’m late.
“I’m sorry,” I stammer. “Traffic was really terrible.”
Man, if she’s this tough I can only imagine how irritated her VIP boss is going to be.
“No, it’s…fine,” she says. “I don’t…think.” She glances back over her shoulder, into the house. “I didn’t know Mr. Brewster was expecting you too.”
“Oh!” I say, wondering about that word
“too”
as she takes a step back and ushers me into the foyer anyway. Twin staircases with ornate iron rails curve down to either side of the sweeping circular space. The floor is made of impractical but beautiful gold-laced marble imported from Turkey, and the center table has a reclaimed wood top and sturdy industrial base with exposed steel rivets, driving home the masculinity of its owner.