Stone Cold Fox (4)
A working woman in New York, the perfect balance of prestigious and plausible. I couldn’t quite risk flaunting an Ivy League degree without considerable risk of being found out as a fraud, which was unfortunate, as that type of connection would have all but sealed the deal.
The Case men were Harvard men, along with his mother at Radcliffe, but the family tree often branched out to Yale, Princeton and Brown over the years. Never Cornell. Please. And I knew that these people all ran in the same social circles, no matter the institute of higher learning, and would begin to ask me very specific questions. What year did I graduate, did I know so-and-so professor, what house did I live in, what family do I come from and so on and so forth. Even if I copped to being on scholarship over legacy, an embarrassment in their eyes, the due diligence would inevitably be done. It’s who they were. We’re talking about grown adults who still started conversations with strangers about where they went to school, so I had to play my cards accordingly.
I told Collin that I grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina—a charming and well-to-do port city by Southern standards—and attended Duke, just like my father. I shared that I was an only child my parents had later in life. Bob and Alice’s little miracle, both dead now, but everything I did was all to make them proud of me, even in death. I tacked on a couple tears at the back end of this yarn to really hammer things home.
It was always key to mention to anyone that my faux family were deceased when the opportunity presented itself because it tends to shut people right up, cutting short any further probing into the reality of my checkered past. Sure, the story I concocted was a little folksy, but that was the point, as it was historically well received and unassuming. Collin even got a real kick out of the very slight Southern lilt I cultivated as part of the persona. I just needed his family to get on board, then I could be this woman for the remainder of my life.
As if I could tell anyone the truth about where I really came from. I don’t come from anywhere. Only from her. Mother dragged me all over the country, forcing me to take part in her sordid schemes and dark dreams, and I could never figure out what she was looking for until I finally realized she wasn’t looking for anything. She was just addicted to the shake-up for the sake of the thrill.
So I avoided thrills as best I could as an adult. For my own good.
Making Collin the perfect fit.
If I had to hitch my wagon to some mediocre man with a lukewarm personality for the rest of my life, just to get some well-deserved repose, why not aspire to the 1 percent? For someone like me, the only way was by association. The Cases didn’t work for their empire; that’s called inherited wealth and, for all intents and purposes, it makes one infallible. I worked my entire life to meet someone like Collin Case. I was ripe and ready.
So yes, I thought I could handle a historic family of WASPs who never had to really work a day in their goddamned lives, because, frankly, I deserved it.
It could all end with Collin.
One last round for all the money on the table.
CHAPTER
2
WHEN COLLIN WANTED to introduce me to his friends, I wasn’t worried about my reception at all. He had talked about them often and with true affection. They all grew up together, since filthy rich families tend to socialize with others in the same tax bracket. Even the friends he claimed to have made at college “in the Boston area” were already familiar to him throughout the years because he was a Case. His social circle likely never experienced much variation at all until I got into the mix, and I knew Collin was excited by that so I was ready to shine. It couldn’t be hard. Men adored me almost without fail so I was sure his friends would fall in line, too, especially since I had looked into their own wives and girlfriends via their social media, objectively none of whom came even close to my startling level of beauty. A bunch of sixes and sevens, and frankly, that’s being generous.
It would be so easy to win over the guys, but I didn’t know what to expect when Collin told me about his “best friend.” First of all, it’s very alarming when adults identify other adults as “best friends,” a term that ought to be a relic from junior high. Second of all, Collin’s best friend was a woman.
Gale Wallace-Leicester.
* * *
? ? ?
THE WALLACE-LEICESTERS—DESCENDANTS OF railroad tycoons, naturally—were lifelong friends of the Cases. Gale had been Collin’s unrequited admirer since their charmed childhoods. From being banished to boarding school during their formative years to family summer vacations at a luxury resort or ranch or aboard yet another yacht, Collin and Gale had an undeniable history together. As an adult, she looked exactly as one might picture. A rather bookish brunette with strikingly broad shoulders for her average height, dressed head to toe in an online-only clothing brand, like a student of library science instead of an actual heiress who could easily engage a personal stylist to evoke elegance with a custom-tailored wardrobe. Instead, she chose to roam the earth in ill-fitting basics that did absolutely nothing for her figure, all in the name of faux sustainability. Her skin-care regimen must have been similarly underwhelming, since she was only a few years older than me but her pronounced crow’s feet and pink undertones went completely unaddressed, all suggesting that she was on the wrong side of thirty-five when she was still on the right side of thirty.