Faking It Read online

  Copyright

  About

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Copyright

  * * *

  This book was

  copied right, in

  the dark, by

  Illuminati.

  About the

  e-Book

  TITLE: Faking It

  AUTHOR: Crusie, Jennifer

  ABEB Version: 3.0

  Hog Edition

  * * *

  LOVE AND DECEPTION HAVE A LOT IN COMMON.

  Meet the Goodnights, a respectable family who run a respectable art gallery-and have for generations. There’s Gwen, the matriarch who likes to escape reality, Eve the oldest daughter who has a slight identity problem (she has two), Nadine, the granddaughter who’s ready to follow in the family footsteps as soon as she can find a set that isn’t leading off a cliff. And lastly, Matilda, the youngest daughter, has inherited the secret locked down in the basement of the Goodnight Gallery, the secret she’s willing to do almost anything to keep, even break into a house in the dead of night to steal back her past.

  THE RISKS ARE INTOXICATING.

  Meet the Dempseys, or at least meet Davy, a reformed con man who’s just been ripped off for a cool three million by his financial manager, who then gallantly turned it over to Clea Lewis, the most beautiful sociopath Davy ever slept with. Davy wants the money back, but more than that, he’ll do anything to keep Clea from winning, including break into her house in the dead of night to steal back his future.

  AND IF YOU’RE REALLY GOOD AT THEM, THEY BOTH PAY OFF.

  One collision in a closet later, Tilda and Davy reluctantly join forces to combat Clea, suspicious art collectors, a disgruntled heir, and an exasperated hitman, all the while coping with a mutant dachshund, a juke box stuck in the sixties, questionable sex, and the growing realization that they can’t turn their backs on the people they were meant to be...or the people they were born to love.

  “Enormously engaging.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  * * *

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by Jennifer Crusie

  Fast Women

  Welcome to Temptation

  Crazy For You

  Tell Me Lies

  * * *

  Faking It

  Jennifer Crusie

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  * * *

  Dedication

  For

  Pat Gaffney

  for her magnificent novels,

  limitless patience, and

  unconditional friendship,

  and because she totally gets

  the Buffy the Vampire Slayer thing

  MY THANKS TO

  CATHERINE AIRD,

  who supposedly said the quote I gave to Gwen, but since I can’t find documentation of it, I can’t attribute it to her. And anyway, I like her books.

  ANNE TWOMEY

  for giving me the best book covers in the business.

  THE FACULTY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ART, BGSU, CIRCA 1971,

  for trying to teach me to paint. Maybe if it hadn’t been the seventies...

  DACHSHUND RESCUE OF OHIO

  for fixing me up with Wolfgang, aka Steve.

  DEBORAH LANATA

  for explaining police procedure to me over and over again, for reading this book in manuscript, and for maintaining my bulletin board on YahooGroups.

  THE JENNIFERCRUSIEFANS BULLETIN BOARD

  for critiquing my first chapter, giving me movie quotes in my darkest hour, and putting up with me in general.

  JOHN KARLE

  for being the best of all possible publicists, who has never once told me to fix my own damn problems even though he must have been sorely tempted.

  THE PEOPLE WHO HELPED ME FIGURE OUT THIS BOOK,

  including Val Taylor, Teresa Hill, Judy Ivory, Jen Badger, Mollie Smith, and the XromXCraft Link.

  JEN ENDERLIN

  for once again being an editor whose intuition is superb, whose patience is legendary, and whose taste is exquisite.

  and

  MEG RULEY

  for ten thousand things, culminating in just being Meg.

  * * *

  If you can’t be a good example,

  you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.

  —Gwen Goodnight

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  MATILDA GOODNIGHT STEPPED BACK from her latest mural and realized that of all the crimes she’d committed in her thirty-four years, painting the floor-to-ceiling reproduction of van Gogh’s sunflowers on Clarissa Donnelly’s dining room wall was the one that was going to send her to hell. God might forgive her the Botticelli Venus she’d painted in the bathroom in Iowa, the Uccello battle scene she’d done for the boardroom in New Jersey, even the Bosch orgy she’d painted in the bedroom in Utah, but these giant, glaring sunflowers were going to be His Last Straw. “I gave you a nice talent,” He was going to say to her on Judgment Day, “and this is what you did with it.”

  Tilda felt her lungs tighten and stuck her hand in her pocket to make sure she had her inhaler.

  Beside her, Clarissa wrapped her thin little arms around her size-two chenille sweater and squinted at the brownish-yellow flowers. “It’s just like his, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Tilda said with regret and handed her the museum print of the original.

  “The flowers look so ... angry,” Clarissa said.

  “Well.” Tilda closed her paint box. “He was nuts.”

  Clarissa nodded. “I heard about that. The ear.”

  “Yeah, that got a lot of press.” Tilda shrugged off her paint shirt. “So I’ll take my completion check—”

  “Did you sign it?” Clarissa said. “You need to sign it. I want everybody to know it’s a real Matilda Veronica mural.”

  “I signed it.” Tilda pointed the toe of her paint-stained canvas shoe at the bottom where she’d scrawled “Matilda Veronica.”

  “Right there. Now I have to be going—”

  “You didn’t sign it ‘van Gogh,’ did you?” Clarissa bent down. “Wouldn’t that be forgery?”

  “Not unless he had a Kentucky mural period we don’t know about.” Tilda tried to take a deep breath. “So I’ll take that check—”

  “Write your name bigger,” Clarissa said, straightening. “I want everybody to know you painted this. I’m going to keep the magazine right here, too. So they know that it’s a real Matilda Veronica—”

  Clarissa’s enthusiasm for her as a brand name had lost its appeal many days before, so Tilda changed the subject. “Well, Spot was certainly a champ about the whole thing.” She nodded at Clarissa’s elongated little dog on the theory that people were always pleased when you talked about their animals.

  “His tail is almost hiding your name,” Clarissa said.

  Tilda let her glasses slide down her nose a little and looked over the rims at Spot, quivering at her feet. She’d done some dog face-lifting in the mural since Spot’s beady eyes almost met over his long knife-edged nose. She’d softened the gray that streaked his dark, shaggy coat, too, so he didn’t look so much like a very small, mutant wolf.

  “You have to sign it again,” Clarissa said. “Sign it up at the top. Bigger.”

&n