Pretty Baby novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Booking
Lydia turns down a billionaire's fake-engagement offer, sees the lawyer's name on his desk, signs, and meets his six-year-old daughter, born on the day her own baby was.
Three weeks ago a letter told me the baby I buried had never died.
I carried it in my clutch to every booking since, folded in four.
On the night I met Stefan Hartwell, it was in my bag when the elevator opened on the fortieth floor.
The agency had given me one line about him.
"Rich, rude and in a hurry," my booker said. "He asked for you by name."
A man in a charcoal suit stood at the end of the hallway with his phone at his ear.
He was tall, with dark hair going grey at the temples and a face that gave nothing away.
He hung up without saying goodbye and looked at me for a moment.
"You're late," he said.
"I'm four minutes early," I said. "You're just rude."
His mouth moved, almost.
"Come in, Miss Kaufman."
The penthouse was all glass and Chicago lights, and it smelled like expensive soap.
There was a child's drawing of a bridge stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet.
I noticed it because everything else in the room looked untouched.
"Sit," he said. "I'll make this short."
I stayed standing.
"In June my company's board votes on whether to replace me," he said. "My mother wants a CEO with a stable household."
"And you have one," I said.
"I have a daughter, a nanny and no wife."
He slid a folder across the marble counter.
"I need a fiancée for ninety days. Three hundred thousand dollars. You live in my house and wear the ring."
"No sex," I said, because it was the first thing men like him wanted written down.
"No sex," he said. "No touching except for cameras. I don't want you in my life, Miss Kaufman. I want you in the photographs."
I almost laughed.
Three hundred thousand dollars was more than I'd earned in three years of dinners and hotel bars.
It was also exactly the kind of offer that ends with a woman on the front page.
"I don't do contracts," I said. "Find someone else."
I picked up my bag and turned for the door.
"Fine," he said behind me. "My assistant will call the next name."
I was almost at the elevator when I glanced back, because I wanted to see if he'd even looked up.
He hadn't.
He was reading a letter on heavy cream paper, and the signature at the bottom was easy to read from where I stood.
Alistair Crane.
My hand went to my clutch before I could stop it.
I knew that name by heart.
It was the last line of the nurse's letter.
"The adoption was arranged by Mr. Alistair Crane's firm, at the request of a family I cannot name. I'm so sorry, Lydia. She was alive."
I had spent forty thousand dollars on two private investigators, and both of them had hit the same wall.
Alistair Crane didn't take clients who weren't Hartwells.
I walked back across the penthouse and put my bag on the counter.
"Who's Alistair Crane to you?" I said.
Stefan looked up, and for the first time he really looked at me.
"My family's lawyer," he said. "Why?"
"He's on your letter. I read upside down for a living."
"That's not a skill."
"It's a skill when it pays three hundred thousand dollars."
He studied me for a long moment.
"He's sending that letter on my mother's behalf," he said. "She wants my fiancée vetted at the Sunday dinner. Crane will be there."
My heart did something painful.
Every Sunday, in that house, a man I'd been trying to reach for two years would be sitting at a table.
"I'll take it," I said. "But I live in the house, not some separate floor."
"That was already the plan."
"And I meet your whole family. Everyone who comes through the front door."
"Why would you want that?"
"A fiancée who's never met your mother isn't a fiancée," I said. "She's a rental."
That time he almost smiled.
He took a pen from his jacket, signed the bottom of the folder and held it out to me.
My hand shook a little when I took it, and I hid it by signing fast.
"Welcome to the family, Miss Kaufman," he said.
Something small moved in the doorway behind him.
A little girl in rabbit pajamas stood barefoot on the marble, holding a stuffed rabbit by one ear.
She had auburn hair in a messy braid and green eyes, and she was looking at me.
"Mabel," Stefan said, and his whole voice changed. "You're supposed to be asleep."
"I heard a lady," she said. She came closer and looked up at me. "Are you the lady Daddy bought?"
"Mabel," Stefan said sharply.
"It's okay," I said, and crouched down to her level. "I'm Lydia. How old are you, Mabel?"
She held up six fingers, very proud.
"I turned six on March second," she said. "At four in the morning, Daddy says. I was early."
The room went quiet in my ears.
March second, four in the morning, was the day I had been cut open and told to stop crying.
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