Sweet Liar Read online

  “Is this the young woman who’s living in your house with you?”

  Mike grimaced. His mother was in Chandler, Colorado, over two thousand miles away, yet she knew what he was doing in New York. “I don’t even want to know how you know who’s rented the apartment,” he said.

  Pat laughed. “Tammy cleans for your cousin Raine, too. Remember?”

  Mike rolled his eyes. The big mouth of one of his Montgomery cousins. He should have known. “Mom, you want to answer my question or find out every tiny detail of my life secondhand from other people?”

  “I would love to hear directly from you.”

  “She’s never been to New York, and the place terrifies her. Where can I take her to make her like the city?”

  Pat’s mind raced. Why was the young woman living in New York if she hated the place? To be near her son? And if she and Mike were in love, what was she like?

  “I mean, Mom, should I take her to the top of the Empire State Building? Rockefeller Center? What about the Statue of Liberty? How about Ellis Island?”

  Pat drew in her breath, for she knew that Mike hated tourist attractions. Unfortunately, her son was much more at home in a smoke-filled bar than in a group of gawking sightseers, but he must be serious if he was willing to brave the Statue of Liberty for her. “Is she a normal girl?”

  “No,” Mike said. “She has three arms, practices several bizarre religions, and talks to her black cat. What do you mean, is she a normal girl?”

  “You know exactly what I mean,” Pat snapped. “Is she like that stripper who visits you, or is she one of those muscle girls from your gym? Knowing you, Mike, she could be a down-on-her-luck prostitute.”

  Mike smiled at the phone. “And what would you say if I said she was one of those and that I was going to marry her?”

  Pat didn’t hesitate. “I’d ask what you wanted for a wedding gift.”

  Mike laughed. “Okay, she’s normal. Very normal, if by that you mean prim and proper. Sam could marry a preacher.”

  Pat put her hand over the phone, rolled her eyes skyward, and whispered, “Thank you.” “Take her shopping,” Pat said with enthusiasm. “Show her the stores on Fifth. Take her to Saks. Your cousin Vicky is a buyer at Saks.”

  “Oh?” Mike said without much interest. He had too many relatives to remember half of them. “And which one is she?”

  “You know very well that she’s J.T. and Aria’s youngest. If your young lady still doesn’t like New York after she’s seen Saks, take her walking on Madison. Start at Sixty-first, walk up to the Eighties, and look in all the store windows.”

  Mike was laughing. “Especially in the jewelry store windows? Maybe buy her a diamond or two? The kind of diamonds in engagement rings? Tell me, Mom, how many women have you mentally married me off to in my short life?”

  “At least six,” Pat said, laughing in return.

  Mike’s voice changed to serious. “Mom, you and Dad are happily married, aren’t you?”

  At the tone of his voice, Pat thought her heart skipped a beat, for something was troubling her child. “Of course we are, darling.”

  “Samantha—that’s her name—said that any woman who has been married for longer than two years to the same man has a very high pain tolerance. You don’t think that’s true, do you?”

  After a futile attempt at controlling her laughter, Pat released it. Even when Mike kept saying, “Mom! Mom!” she kept laughing. Even when she knew he put the phone down in disgust, she still couldn’t stop laughing.

  Mike put down the telephone, more than a little annoyed at his mother, actually, annoyed at all women. If they thought marriage to a man was so horrible, why were they all trying to get married? All of them except Samantha, that is, he thought. Or maybe her reluctance was merely an act.

  Smiling, he went to the bedroom to dress. For Samantha he would put on a suit and tie. Maybe he’d even wear that Italian number his sister had picked out for him.

  Forty-five minutes later, he emerged from the bedroom, showered, shaved, and dressed, then checked the hall mirror and straightened his tie. Not bad, he thought. Not bad at all.

  “Sam!” he yelled up the stairs. “You ready to go?”

  He had to wait a few minutes before she came down the stairs, but when he saw her, he smiled at her and offered her his arm.

  When Samantha saw the way Mike was dressed, she wanted to die. Just plain sit down and die. She’d had dreams of embarrassing him, of making him say that he wasn’t going to be seen with her dressed as she was—that’s what her ex-husband would have said if she had appeared wearing her workout clothes—so she’d dragged an ancient pink sweat suit, worn bare in places, discolored in others, from the closet. Across the chest of the sweat shirt was emblazoned “At first he put me on a pedestal and now he wants me to dust it.”

  As Samantha stood at the head of the stairs, looking down at Mike in his beautiful dark suit, she knew she had never seen a better-looking man in her life. At least this time when her father had chosen a man for her, he had picked one who looked good. She hadn’t been as fortunate with Richard.

  After one look at Mike’s eyes, she knew he wasn’t going to be embarrassed by her. In fact, she wasn’t sure he was aware that what she had on was inappropriate. Smiling at her as though he was looking forward to going out with her, he held up his arm for her to take.

  “I can’t—” Samantha began. “I have to—”

  “Samantha, it’s eleven o’clock. If you take any longer to get dressed, the stores will be closed.”

  “Stores,” she said, horror in her voice as she tried to pull away from him, but he held her firmly.

  “I cannot go to a store looking like this,” she said.

  Mike looked her up and down and read her shirt. “You look fine to me. I like pink on you. Besides, we can buy you new clothes if you want.”

  Pulling at her arm didn’t gain her release. “I have to change.”

  Giving her a look of frustration, one of those count-to-ten looks, he said with exaggerated patience, “If you didn’t like what you had on, why did you wear it?”

  Samantha wouldn’t answer that, since she couldn’t very well tell him that it had been her intention to make him refuse to be seen with her, especially not since he didn’t seem to notice what she had on.

  Feeling like a child who was being punished, her chin down, she followed him out of the house and into the streets. So far, her total experience of New York had been Lexington Avenue. Now she walked with Mike toward Madison Avenue, then to Fifth, and the closer they got to Fifth Avenue, the more Samantha became aware of her atrocious clothing. In magazines one saw models wearing gorgeous designer clothing, and a person in the real world of Middle America sometimes wondered who in the world wore those things. Most Americans wear bright-colored sportswear, looking as though they spend their lives climbing mountains or running marathons. But in New York the men and women—especially the women—looked to Samantha as though they had stepped from designer showrooms.

  As she walked with Mike, her hand held firmly in his arm, Samantha was painfully aware of the women around her. They were so fantastically well groomed. Their hair looked as though they shampooed it with fairy nectar, their nails were perfectly trimmed and polished, as though they never used their hands, and their clothes were nothing less than divine.

  Of course one drawback to New York women was their snobbery. Many of the women gave Samantha looks of pity when they saw the way she was dressed, and some of them even smiled at her in a way that made Samantha move closer to Mike, as though for protection. Turning, he looked down at her, patted her hand, and smiled when she moved closer to him, seeming to have no idea what was going on between the woman who clung to him and the women on the street. Samantha thought it must be wonderful to be able to be oblivious.

  By the time they reached Fifth Avenue, Samantha wanted to crawl in a hole. Mike seemed to have a place he wanted to go so they hurried past store after store with beautiful c