Where Beauty Lies (Sophia and Ava London) (3 page)

In the space of two months they had designed, cut, sourced, and manufactured an entire catwalk line—twelve looks plus two extras. Fabric had been milled, buttons molded, special threads woven, tempers frayed, plans upended, dinners missed, sleep forgotten, and patience tested, but they’d done it.

It was a good thing she’d been doing a boytox, Ava thought, since there was no time for anything like dating. And since technically she was still dating Liam, her movie-star-crush-turned-boyfriend, since he was on location and somehow managed to avoid having a conversation that lasted long enough for her to break up with him. Which she knew she had to do because she’d fallen head over heels for someone else.

Someone else who had been identified by an anonymous call to the police as the person who had actually stolen all the money from the Pet Paradise fund-raiser.

When the police told her and Sophia that Dalton was the thief, Ava had refused to believe it. Cute Dalton, with the sun-streaked brown hair and rich laugh and sculpted surfer shoulders that perfectly filled out his hipster T-shirts; Dalton, whom she’d met at the Pet Paradise shelter, whom her dog Popcorn adored; Dalton, who was in a band with a hit single and made amazing pancakes and who looked adorable in his dark-framed glasses and had eyes the green of the deepest parts of ocean and just as easy to get lost in; Dalton, whose lightest kiss made her feel like her knees had turned to Pop Rocks. He couldn’t be a bad guy. He couldn’t have forged checks and stolen $110,000 from animals. Wouldn’t have.

But she had to remind herself that this was the same Dalton who had told her he was a bad guy, that he’d been in jail for theft before, that she shouldn’t get involved with him … right before brushing his lips against hers with the gentlest, lightest, most transformative kiss she’d ever—

The evidence against him was impossible to ignore. Not only had he suddenly had money when before he hadn’t, but when the police came to arrest him he’d been holding a piece of paper covered with practice attempts at Sophia’s signature identical to the forged signature on the check that drained their account. The checks had been stolen during a break-in of their apartment when they were at Sophia’s photography opening—an opening from which Dalton had made a hasty exit.

But Ava still hadn’t wanted to give up on him. She couldn’t believe that he’d just been using her. That everything he’d said and done was a big lie. That he didn’t care about the animal shelter or … or Popcorn. She’d texted him and called him, but he’d never returned any of them. And the one time she’d run into him—

Her chest got a little tight just thinking about it. She’d been at the park, with Popcorn napping next to her on the blanket, and had just tweeted “at the park with my baby boy. So peaceful, like a little lamb,” when his ears stood up and he took off running.

She’d had his leash looped around her ankle in case he tried something like this, and usually he’d stop when it started to tug. But that day he’d been so eager that she ended up being dragged on her butt through the dirt ten feet before she could get him to stop.

She should have known. There was only one person who had that perk-up-your-ears-and-run-to-his-arms effect on Popcorn—on either of them—but she’d been too startled to realize. Until she pushed her long brown hair out of her eyes and saw Popcorn jumping to lick Dalton’s face.

For a moment their eyes met and Ava’s heart had started to pound so loud that it sounded like it was outside her body. Then his expression hardened and without a word he stood and turned to go.

“Wait,” Ava called. “What happened? Why haven’t you called? Don’t you think you owe me an explanation?”

He wasn’t wearing sunglasses, so she was able to see his eyes, how hard and cold they were as he narrowed them. His jaw was so tight that it looked like he had to wrench the words out. “Why? Haven’t you and your sister done enough to destroy my life? I don’t owe you anything, and I never want to see or speak to you again.”

His words, his tone, made Ava’s body go cold and her heart slow almost to a stop. She felt frozen in place, unable to reply or move or think.

Popcorn’s sad whine brought her out of it. He was looking from her to Dalton’s receding back with such a forlorn expression that Ava felt like her heart was breaking.

Only because of Popcorn. Not because of Dalton. She would never let someone who was such bad news break her heart.

“Well, that was unexpected,” she’d said to Popcorn as they moped back to her blanket together. Her pants were covered with dust and her face was streaked with dirt.

Popcorn gave a little growl and she looked down to see him gazing reproachfully at her. “What? It’s not my fault. I know you like him, but trust me, there’s no place for him in our lives.” Popcorn’s accusing glance said he wasn’t convinced. “Sometimes people aren’t who you think they are and the only thing you can do is forget about them.”

Determined to do just that, she’d thrown herself into her boytox. It had worked fantastically for Sophia, who was really happy with Hunter. Ava would just follow in her sister’s footsteps and one day, she hoped, she would feel happy again, too. One day she would look back on the whole Dalton thing and laugh at the thought that she’d ever gone through four boxes of Kleenex (well, three; Popcorn ate one) crying over him.

It had worked. She’d gone from thinking about him a hundred times a day and checking her phone for texts that weren’t there, to thinking of him only a handful. Increasingly the feeling of missing him and being sad was replaced almost exclusively with anger and hurt and betrayal. Which, she told herself, was progress. Anything else was foolish hope.

The day before they were leaving for New York she’d been so busy she hadn’t even thought about him at all, until she went to take Popcorn for a walk. When they got back she’d found an envelope sticking out of their mailbox. It had her name on it and no stamp, which meant it had been hand delivered.

Inside was a piece of white paper with the words D
ALTON
I
S
I
NNOCENT.
A
SK ABOUT
X
AVIER
laser printed across the center.

She’d dragged Popcorn into the house and woken Sophia. “Look!” She waved the paper in her face. “What do you think this means? We have to take this to the police. It might be important.”

Sophia glanced at it and the envelope and handed it back to her. “I don’t think the police take anonymous notes too seriously,” she said.

“It’s not any old anonymous note. It was delivered to our
house.
That means it’s from someone who knows we know Dalton.”

“Or a crazy person. Or someone trying to stir up even more trouble.”

“They could still check the name,” Ava said. “Xavier. Maybe there’s more to what happened than we know.”

“Is this you trying to forget about what Dalton did?”

“No, but this means something and I think we should try to figure it out.”

Sophia shrugged, clearly unconvinced. “Call the police then.”

Ava had, and although the officer she spoke to was polite, it was pretty clear that Sophia was right. “No, dear, there’s no need for you to hold on to the note,” the officer told her. “We won’t be coming to take fingerprints. That note won’t change anything. Go ahead and throw it away.”

She hadn’t quite been able to throw the note away, but she’d told herself that was absolutely the end of her thinking about Dalton. If the evidence against him was so strong that even the police weren’t interested in a new lead, she would be a fool to hold out any hope of being with him. Or rather of his being innocent. He’d made his feelings about her perfectly clear.

The only boy she needed in her life, she decided, was the one in the pet carrier beneath the airplane seat in front of her, where she could now see him curled protectively around Sophia’s kitten, Charming, who her sister finally named after joking that no matter who her true love turned out to be, she’d already met her Prince Charming.

A male voice from the row behind her and Sophia broke into her thoughts, saying, “Fashion week ninjas ready to serve.” She turned to see MM, Sven, and Lily wrapped in scarves from their necks to their eyeballs. “Hard on cold, soft on skin,” he explained. “We don’t have time for germs.”

“Or chapped lips,” Lily added. “They impede the ability to bark orders.”

“An unstoppable team,” Ava said, feeling very lucky.

Wrapped up like that, the disparity in height between MM, who was five foot five and wiry, and Sven, who was nearly seven feet tall and a solid wall of muscle, was hilarious. Their height was just the beginning of the differences between them—MM was dark, with cinnamon-colored skin and dark hair, while Sven was blond with blue eyes and skin the pink of a peach; MM dressed impeccably with an incredible attention to detail, while Sven’s entire wardrobe consisted of jeans and T-shirts.

MM had taken two months off from his clients to join their team as a stylist. His boyfriend Sven had come along to lend moral support, as well as his expertise, having walked the male catwalk once. And Lily had come along as the self-appointed “pet and Contessa wrangler.”

In the aisle seat next to her Ava heard Sophia say into her phone, “Yes, all safe and sound. I’ll call you when we’re settled. You too. Bye.” She hung up and smiled at Ava as the line down the exit row started to move. “Ready?”

All that was left to do now was cast the models, put the finishing touches on the collection, and go. Three weeks, one day, two—now one and a half—hours should be plenty.

“No,” Ava said. “Terrified. You?”

“Same,” Sophia agreed. “But that’s always how it starts, right?”

They linked pinkies. “Let’s go.”

*   *   *

Four hours after they landed at JFK they were sitting in the sunken gold-and-black living room of the ten-bedroom, twenty-third-floor condo overlooking the Hudson River that the Contessa had installed them in, drinking tea with a reporter from one of their favorite fashion magazines.

“Your story is really incredible,” she said wonderingly. “Two girls with no fashion experience at all launch a runway collection in one of the most desirable tents at New York Fashion Week.” She put her teacup down. “I have to say, it sounds almost too good to be true.”

“That’s what we thought,” Sophia told her. “But that’s how it happened.”

The reporter was young and pretty and chic, wearing a black dress with almost no makeup, black-rimmed glasses, and bright red lipstick. She had handwritten notes on a pad next to her, but there was a recorder on the gold-lacquer coffee table, so it felt more like a conversation than a formal interview. “And you got no outside assistance. There’s no designer’s guiding hand behind this?”

“None,” Ava assured her.

“Every design originated in Ava’s brain,” Sophia said. “After that, it’s sort of—”

“A team effort—” Ava supplied.

“With a lot of trial and error—” Sophia said.

“Until we get something that just—” Ava looked at her sister, who finished the sentence:

“Clicks.”

“I guess I just saw that process in action,” the reporter said, laughing.

She glanced at the notes in her lap, and her face got serious. “I think the real story is that somehow, in the wake of two PR disasters, either one of which could have sunk you, you continue to find yourselves on top.”

“Not on top,” Sophia jumped in to say. “Working
toward
that.” Ava sensed that something was bothering Sophia but she couldn’t tell what. “And although the product launch for our makeup line with LuxeLife did not go well—”

The reporter looked at them sympathetically. “That must have been such a nightmare for you both. Having a fight overheard by hundreds of thousands of people and then running off before the event even started.”

Sophia nodded. “We’ve learned a lot since then. And despite that, demand for our products was so high that they relaunched our line and it is now the biggest seller in LuxeLife’s history. So in addition to what you called disasters, we have a track record of success as well.”

“Of course.” The reporter nodded. “You also have an arrest record,” she said, looking a little sheepish. “Can we talk a little about that? You were accused of stealing money from an animal shelter?”

“Right from the mouths of adorable puppies and kittens,” Ava answered, referring to some of the less kind news stories. “But we were set up, our arrest lasted less than two hours, and in the end we managed to raise enough money not only to keep the shelter open but to allow them to start work on an annex.”

“That’s really impressive. You seem to have figured out the magic for turning bad publicity into good.”

“We work very hard,” Sophia said, and Ava was struck by how serious her voice sounded.

It must have struck the reporter, too, because she said, “I can tell. In fact, let’s talk a bit more about your work process. You said every idea originated in Ava’s brain. And then what happens?” She looked at Ava.

Ava fluttered her hands. “I just—make it. I’ve always liked organizing things. In kindergarten the teachers called my parents, worried because I wouldn’t build anything with the blocks, I just wanted to organize them. I guess to me this is the same thing, just organizing shapes and colors into something I like.”

“That’s an interesting take on designing. Organizing shapes and colors. Neither of you have any formal training, is that correct?”

Sophia shook her head. Ava said, “None. When I was little my mother taught me how to sew in the formal dining room but I don’t think that counts.”

The reporter laughed. “I know the clothes are under wraps, obviously, but do you have some sketches or drawings I could see?”

“I don’t really do drawings,” Ava said. “I see the designs in my mind and then I just—” She whipped her hands around. “Try to get the basic idea out in fabric. From there, as we said, the pieces just evolve through trial and error.”

“A lot of trial,” Sophia said.

“And a
lot
of error,” Ava added.

“It seems like that strategy has paid off very well for you,” the reporter said. “You’re calling the line AS. I assume for your initials.”