Lethal Love novel · Chapter 9 of 32

Chapter 9: Seventy-Two Hours

The bridal house on Madison Avenue had no sign.

It had a brass door, a doorman and a white staircase that curved up.

The creative director met me at the top of the stairs at nine the next morning.

She was thinner than Oakley, in black, with gray hair cut sharp at the jaw and reading glasses on a chain.

She took me into a white room with one long table and put a single blank sheet of paper on it.

"I've watched your video four times," she said. "Oakley Halsted has called me a dozen times since last night."

"What does she say?"

"That sketchbooks can be backdated. That you're a jealous maid's daughter with a grudge."

She set down a pencil. "She may be right. I don't know you."

"Her contract says I sewed every one of those gowns."

"Sewing is not designing." She pushed the paper toward me. "Draw me a gown. Something you've never drawn. Here, now, while I watch."

I looked at the blank page.

My heart was going so hard I could feel it in the tape around my neck.

I picked up the pencil.

I thought about Gran's stairs.

I thought about a girl on her knees in a blazer.

I drew a column of ivory silk with a high neck and no back at all.

Down the spine ran forty tiny covered buttons that stopped exactly where a hand would rest.

It took ten minutes.

The creative director looked at it for a long time over her glasses.

"Now make it," she said. "In my silk, in your shop, in seventy-two hours."

"And if I can't?"

"Then Halsted Bride launches in three weeks with our name on it, and you never call me again."

She took her glasses off. "Nine a.m. Don't be late."

Her assistant loaded six yards of silk into a cab for me.

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