Sun-kissed (Au Pairs, The)

  Sun-Kissed (The Au Pairs #3)

  Melissa De La Cruz

  For all the wonderful girls who e-mailed, IM'd, texted, blogged, and posted reviews -- thank you for your unflagging support, cheerful enthusiasm, and many interesting questions! This one is for you. And yes, there is a lot about Mara and Ryan in this book. And to new readers -- welcome to the Hamptons!

  Now go home. Just kidding.

  Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.

  --Dorothy Parker

  All the riches baby, won't mean anything, All the riches baby, won't bring what your love can bring.

  --Gwen Stefani, "Rich Girl"

  in seat 12A, mara hopes

  that all good things come to those who wait

  AS THE PILOT CIRCLED LAGUARDIA AIRPORT, MARA WATERS

  switched off her iPod mini and put away the Dartmouth College catalog she'd been reading. She looked out of the tiny airplane window down at the Manhattan skyline--a luminous vision of steel and glass obscured by a late-afternoon haze. She'd made the forty-minute shuttle trip from Boston to New York several times now and was familiar with the commute. It was a pleasant enough journey that included stacks of complimentary magazines at the terminal and the company of crisp-looking professionals in worsted wool suits or crumpled corporate khakis, twinkling Bluetooth headsets discreetly curled behind their ears.

  It was the first week of June, and barely forty-eight hours ago, she had officially graduated from high school. The ceremony itself had been a relatively straightforward affair, with a dull speech from the myopic valedictorian and the halfhearted singing of the class song (Kelly Clarkson's "Breakaway"--chosen by the administration after the class's real choice, Green Day's "American

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  Idiot," was banned). The only excitement had come when a member of the marching band flashed the stage, showing he was wearing nothing underneath his gown as he accepted his diploma. (His brightly uniformed colleagues quickly struck up a sassy bump-and-grind version of "The Strip.")

  Mara had won the English prize, along with a two-thousand-dollar college scholarship. Her mother cried and her father took way too many pictures with his new digital camera while her sisters cheered from the stands. To the hearty beat of "Pomp and Circumstance," she'd joined the three hundred other Fighting Tigers in tossing their cardboard hats into the air. Afterward, over watery punch and stale Mint Milano cookies at the gym, she'd watched as her classmates exchanged new college e-mail addresses and promised to visit each other the next fall.

  If only she had been able to do the same.

  Mara frowned at the Dartmouth catalog, feeling envious of the cable-knit-clad coeds photographed studying on the lawn. Wait-listed. That was what the one-page letter inside the slim white envelope had said. Not "yes" or "no", but "maybe".

  She could find out she'd been accepted in a week or even a few days before school started. Or she could never be accepted at all. Luckily, she'd been offered a place at Columbia with a generous financial aid package, and she'd put down a deposit to hold her place just in case Dartmouth didn't come through.

  So now her whole summer stretched out in front of her, filled with anxiety and dread, since she didn't know where she would

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  be in the fall. It was just so unfair. Dartmouth was her first choice, her only choice--as far as she was concerned. Ryan, after all, was going to be a junior there.

  Ryan. When she thought of his name, she couldn't help but smile. Ryan Perry. Her boyfriend. It had finally happened--the two of them together at last. They'd met two years ago when Mara was working as an au pair for his younger siblings, and they had immediately hit it off. But other things and other people quickly got in the way. That first summer, Mara still had been with Jim Mizekowski, her high school steady. Mara finally gave Jim the boot the week before she was leaving, and she and Ryan had spent a blissful week together in the Hamptons. But later that winter, Mara broke up with Ryan after feeling totally insecure about the whole background-incompatibility thing--Ryan being one of those boys born to everything, while Mara was a girl who had to work hard for everything in her life.

  So they'd spent the second summer apart as well. Mara had found solace in the arms of Garrett Reynolds, the rich, tomcatting heir-next-door, while Ryan sought comfort even closer to home-- hooking up with Eliza, one of Mara's best friends. But that was all in the past now. Garrett was forgotten and Eliza forgiven. Over the past year Mara had often visited Ryan in New York and New Hampshire, and Ryan had finally made the trek to Sturbridge.

  All her fears about what he would think--that her house was too shabby, her parents too weird, her sisters too loud--had been immediately dismissed once Ryan arrived. He'd bonded with her

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  dad over football and polished off a record four helpings of her mother's chicken-fried steak. Megan pumped him for celebrity tidbits from New York ("Your friend did a body shot off Lindsay Lohan? Are you serious?") while Maureen declared Ryan was a great name for a boy as she patted her pregnant belly. And he hadn't said a word about the unfinished bathroom with the piece of cloth nailed to the window that substituted as a curtain or the fact that her parents kept the house at a chilly fifty-eight degrees in the middle of winter to save on heating bills.

  This summer was going to be the best one yet--she didn't have to au pair anymore since she'd gotten a job as an intern at Hamptons magazine through a connection of Anna Perry's. It was a standard entry-level post--fetching, faxing, and answering phone calls for the editor in chief, but it tantalizingly promised a few-- underline few --writing opportunities. "We need someone to caption all the party pictures," her boss had told her. Mara got the impression the job required the ability to accurately distinguish one Fekkai-blond socialite from the other rather than real writing talent, but at least it was a first step on the journalism ladder.

  It didn't pay as much as the nannying gig (irony of ironies), and she would miss the kids and the girls--Jacqui was the only one left working for the Perrys, since Eliza had something else planned, as usual. But the best part of the job was that she would be free to live with Ryan on his dad's yacht. They were going to live together, like a real couple. It was going to be the most romantic summer ever.

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  Mara sighed, dreaming of sailing on the bay, Ryan at the helm while she lounged on the deck, suntanning. The two of them kissing while the sun set behind them.

  The plane glided into the gate, and Mara turned on her phone, which immediately buzzed with Ryan's signature callback ring tone: John Carpenter's Halloween theme. Doo-do-do-do doo-do-do-do. . .

  She smiled as she flipped open her phone. So what if she was wait-listed? She was still spending her third summer in the Hamptons with the boy she loved, who was waiting outside the terminal for her arrival.

  And no one could take that away from her.

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  in soho, eliza is stuck in the fashion trenches

  "EH-LIE-ZUH!"

  "Eh-lie-zuh!"

  "Are you listening to me?"

  Snap.

  Eliza blinked. Someone was talking to her. More specifically, someone was talking down to her. She put aside her chopsticks and tried not to look too irritated. Couldn't she even eat dinner in peace?

  It was half-past midnight. She had been at the showroom since nine o'clock that morning and couldn't wait to get home for a shower. She was, for the first time in her perennially Fracas-perfumed life, seriously "funky." She took a discreet sniff of each armpit and grimaced.

  "Eh-lie-zuh. Hello. Earth to Eh-lie-zuh!"

  Eliza rubbed her eyes and finally focused on the person who owned that voice. Paige McGinley. Otherwise known as a Paige-in-t
he-ass. Her so-called boss and slave driver for Sydney Minx-- famous fashion designer and all-around diva, owner of the showroom and the reason she'd had barely half an hour of sleep in the past forty-eight hours.

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  Sydney Minkowitz was a gay Jewish dress designer from the Bronx who'd changed his last name to the more intriguing and less ethnic "Minx." Early in his career, he'd befriended a coterie of New York socialites through vigorous ass kissing and with their support had launched a line of chic, casual, yet expensive sportswear that had grown to include licenses for accessories, perfume, house wares, candles, and linens. If you dressed, dined, or dreamed, you could bet there was a Sydney Minx product that catered to it.

  The histrionic designer was opening his first boutique in the Hamptons in two days, and the whole office was buzzing with frantic activity to get all the details for the grand-opening party and fashion show completed. Like everyone in New York, Eliza had been a devotee of Sydney's early work--the waffle-knit "poor boy" cashmere sweaters that came with enormous price tags, the sexy drain-pipe trousers, the artfully graffitied logo handbags. But the designer had been slipping of late. The latest collections had veered wildly from sex-bomb attire one season to starchy, covered-up pretension the next as the label tried to connect with an ever-more-fickle audience of high-fashion buyers. You could only have so many bad collections before you were considered fashion road kill, and with this opening, Sydney had a lot at stake.

  The place was so tense that if the notoriously difficult-to-please Sydney summoned the group to yet another meeting in which he called all of his design associates, production assistants, runway models, and office interns an untalented bunch of idiots,

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  someone was going to burst into tears. Already, one of the pattern makers had left her sewing machine in a huff after Sydney had called the dress sample she was making "a two-dollar schmatte, an eyesore of epic proportions, an insult to the name of couture!"

  "Can I help you?" Eliza asked belligerently as she wiped her mouth with a paper napkin.

  "Why aren't all the T-shirts folded yet?" Paige demanded. She was a dark-haired, sharp-featured twenty-two-year-old, a recent F.I.T. graduate who had ascended quickly from being Sydney's personal assistant to being de facto creative director of the label. "I told you, all the shirts need to go in boxes so the messengers can take them to the stores tomorrow morning!" The T-shirts, silk-screened with the designer's Photo shopped and markedly slimmer-than-life silhouette, would be given away for free in the overstuffed goodie bags to the VIP guests at the East Hampton party and sold for seventy-five dollars apiece at Sydney's boutiques around the country to the hoi polloi.

  "Because I'm spray-painting all the fabric gold like Sydney asked for the 'Anna coat," Eliza replied, pushing away the Chinese food containers. She showed Paige the metallic swatches that would be sewn onto a military trench Sydney hoped would catch the eye of the Vogue editor. Half of them were still unpainted.

  Eliza wiped her hands on the backs of her So Low sweatpants, then crossed her arms defensively. Packing the T-shirts was, like, menial grunge work! She was Eliza Thompson. Once named in

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  New York magazine as the most popular girl on the prep school circuit! She'd only taken the job because she liked fashion and thought it would be a cakewalk to hang around a designer's showroom for the summer.

  "Those swatches aren't done yet? Sydney needed those hours ago," Paige said, aghast.

  Eliza tried not to look too guilty. She had taken her sweet time spray-painting the fabric just so no one would ask her to do anything else. She'd noticed that if she looked busy enough, she could avoid doing the more-boring chores.

  "Anyway, forget this for now. Go help Vidalia. She can't seem to get her dress on correctly for the run-through. Then I need those T-shirts."

  "All right," Eliza grunted.

  "And what is that smell?"

  Eliza froze, pressing her armpits next to her torso.

  "Ew! Who ordered Chinese food?" Paige demanded, holding up the half-empty container of beef chow fun that Eliza had been munching from.

  "Um, we all did?" Eliza reminded. The whole staff had sent for takeout since it was hours after dinner and they were all starving. She had been ravenously devouring the noodles when Paige had interrupted her meal.

  "Well, get it out of here. If Sydney comes back and finds his clothes smelling like Chinatown, he is going to have a fucking meltdown."

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  Eliza shoved in a few more mouthfuls of the tangy dish before reluctantly tossing it in the trash chute across the hall from the office. She walked back into Sydney Minx's ten-thousand-square-foot loft. It was on the third floor of a former factory building in SoHo. The designer had bought it in the seventies when the building had still been an art collective. Sydney had sworn he would never leave the neighborhood but once business had taken off had quickly repaired to a swanky Upper East Side address, and the loft had been turned into the headquarters for his line.

  Just the week before, Eliza had been beside herself when she'd learned her mother had talked Sydney Minx into hiring her as an intern. She'd even skipped her own high school graduation to be here tonight. Not that it mattered--after a year at Spence in New York and two years at Herbert Hoover High in Buffalo, she'd spent her last year of high school at boarding school, where she'd essentially phoned in her senior year, breezing through a host of AP classes. Wear a black gown and a cardboard hat just to receive a piece of paper? Nuh-uh. She'd asked the school to mail it to her instead. Besides, everyone knew a graduation cap made your hair flat.

  The Thompsons were back on top, and for Eliza, all was right in the world. The scandal that had bankrupted her parents and doomed them to social oblivion (aka Buffalo) was ancient history. With the help of some well-connected friends, her father had made some key ground-floor investments in an abandoned warehouse property on the west side of Manhattan, which was now

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  being developed into the hottest real estate in the city. Voila: the Thompsons were back in business. After repurchasing their old Park Avenue co-op and re-upping their Knicker bocker Club memberships, their reputation had been reinstated along with their credit cards.

  It looked like all of Eliza's dreams were finally coming true-- she'd been accepted early to Princeton, her dream college--but then, that never had been in doubt, what with her perfect SAT score and legacy-kid status. Plus, this summer she wasn't going to be taking care of the Perry kids, nor was she going to have to prostrate herself working at a nightclub catering to bratty celebrities. The internship with Sydney Minx was icing on the cake-- allowing her to make some industry contacts (she could use a few good discounts to stretch her shopping dollars--she'd heard the sample sales were amazing!) and have a fun way to pass the time. Not that the job was any fun at the moment, but it could be, if only they would let her do something more interesting than paint fabric, steam clothes, and pack boxes.

  No matter; tomorrow she would be in the Hamptons with Jeremy and her friends--Mara was supposed to be there by now, and Jacqui would be flying in with the Perrys soon enough. The three of them hadn't been together since spring break, when they'd managed to meet up for a few sun-soaked days in Cabo San Lucas. She couldn't wait to tell them all about her new gig. Of course, stapling the fashion show programs wouldn't sound too glamorous, so she probably wouldn't describe it in any detail.

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  She passed a full-length mirror and quickly checked her reflection. Horror of horrors--there were saddlebags under her eyes from lack of sleep, and her usually lustrous blond hair fell flat against her shoulders. Her blue eyes were red-rimmed and watery. But somehow, even while looking her absolute worst, Eliza was still the best-looking girl in the room. She'd tied her loose white oxford shirt around her waist in lieu of buttoning it, displaying a sliver of flat, tanned stomach above her baggy sweats. And even though she was wearing a comfy pair of slides, they sported a discreet Chanel logo on each side. She gath
ered up her hair in a loose but elegant bun, securing it with a pair of clean chopsticks.

  Jeremy liked it when she put her hair up, she thought fondly. He was already in Montauk and couldn't wait for her to arrive. She had seen him just a few weeks ago at his college graduation in Binghamton, and she'd been so proud of him. Jeremy was one of the few guys who made wearing that stupid cardboard hat look sexy--his dark curls peeked out from under the cloth cap.

  Dating long distance sucked, but they'd made it work, and they were going to celebrate their one-year anniversary soon. Not that it even felt like a year--whenever they were together, it was like they'd just met, and honestly, she felt like she was more in love with him than ever. She couldn't wait to see him. Jeremy was the only guy she'd ever met who saw the "real" her, who loved her because she sometimes snorted milk out of her nose when she laughed. The only guy she ever felt comfortable enough with to drop the whole princess-diva act. So many guys just expected her

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  to be this perfectly poised mannequin. Jeremy told her he thought she was beautiful when she had a pimple on her chin.

  They were planning to spend the night together as soon as she arrived in town--and Eliza knew, even if Jeremy didn't, that for the first time, it would mean truly spending the night together-- no making out PG-13 style, the way they had been. After a year of seriously dating, she was ready to hand over her V card and make him her first. He was her one true love and had waited for so long for her to feel comfortable doing it. She was eighteen-- for her, it was time. She took a deep breath and looked at herself in the mirror again.

  If all went according to plan, by tomorrow evening, she would no longer be a virgin. She wondered if she would look different. Older? More mature? More experienced? And would anyone be able to tell? She'd find out soon enough.