One Night Wife Read online

  She hit the Blarney early to clue Liam in and scope out Mr. Anonymous, because if this wasn’t a hoax, he’d be there, like his email promised.

  Given it was a Saturday night, there’d be no suits and ties in the pub, and her chance of recalling anyone from the Friday night crowd was spectacularly bad.

  Liam looked at her suspiciously when she arrived at the bar. “You again.” He laughed. “Did you get some last night? Come back for more?”

  “If you mean did I hook up? Yes and no. Do you know that man?”

  “He comes in from time to time. Not a big talker or drinker.”

  That didn’t tell her much. “Seen him pick up in here?”

  Liam leaned in close. “Picked up this floozy who threw herself at him last night.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “Fair near attacked him. I was going for a fire hose when they up and left.” He blew on his fingers as if they were singed. Ham.

  “Can’t understand why you’re still a barman and don’t have your name in lights.”

  “Fuck me, neither can I,” he said. And then he gave her a beer and a whiskey chaser. “Suspect you’ll be needing that.”

  She drank them both. Who said she had to be a sober Marilyn? She was almost a no-show Marilyn when the bar started to fill up and Liam got too busy to talk, and the whole idea seemed absurd. But she’d virtually promised Lenny she’d do something, and this was something, and who knew if Cal Sherwood would keep his word about helping with her pitch. He didn’t keep his word about taking her to bed, so this might be everything she had.

  She changed her clothes in the bathroom, put on the wig, and added to her makeup.

  Liam was waiting, because in the tight slinky ankle length dress she wore she couldn’t climb on a barstool. He built her a set of steps to the bar top made from boxes of wine and helped her up.

  “You look amazing, Fin. Break a leg.” Then, he jumped up beside her and called for quiet. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Blarney is proud to bring you, the one and only, the inimitable”—he winked at her—“Miss Marilyn Monroe. You show her respect now or I’ll show you me IRA credential,” he finished, taking her fake fur stole off her shoulders with a flourish.

  And on that note, Fin shifted her weight to one leg, popping one hip high, touched her Marilyn hair, gave an exaggerated fake eyelash flutter, bent forward, and blew a kiss. She got a huge cheer, and it went on when she shaded her eyes and scanned the crowd like Marilyn had done at Kennedy’s birthday party, blinking shyly.

  She licked her lips and sighed, letting her shoulders drop, gave a little, throaty cough and sang, “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you.” Like the real Marilyn, she gave an airy laugh and smiled, turned her face away and then refocused. If he was out there, she hoped he appreciated the effort that had gone into this.

  “Happy birthday, Mr. Anonymous. Happy birthday, to you.”

  Marilyn got applause at this point, Fin got catcalls, but she had their attention. When the noise died down, she went straight into the second verse. “Thanks, Mr. Anonymous, for all the things you’ve done,” she added her own words, “you big, powerful man. The way you promise to donate to my little charity. You really did promise.”

  She put her hands to her hips then threw them open wide, “Everybody.” She conducted a rowdy rendition of the first verse of Happy Birthday, while behind her, Liam popped a champagne cork and people cheered and sang and laughed.

  And then it was over, and everyone went back to what they were doing. Fin stood there looking out at the crowd feeling elated, but also ridiculous. She wasn’t in college, and this wasn’t impromptu theater; this was supposed to be her life, and she was trying to solve problems by impersonating her favorite dead Hollywood icon.

  Liam helped her down. “I hope that gotcha what you wanted, Miss Monroe.”

  She gave him a Marilyn quote. “Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius, and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”

  She had to hope she didn’t burn out like Norma Jean.

  Chapter Four

  In the skin slicked dress with the stiff, blonde wig and the sly, breathless manner, Fin was unrecognizable. Seeing her this way made Cal sorry he’d left her alone last night, but he had no regrets about sending the anonymous email that had her shimmering on the bar top.

  It was crowded in the pub, and there wasn’t much chance she would pick him out. All the same, he tugged his Mets cap down over his forehead and pushed the dweeb glasses he wore further up his nose, hunkered down inside his ugly puffy jacket, and kept toward the very back of the room.

  He didn’t think she’d do this. She’d said it herself, she was a flake. But he’d wanted to see what her resolve was worth, and this was everything he could’ve hoped for and more. She was genuinely desperate for the money, and genuinely desperate was a grifter’s favorite state of being for a mark. She gave him a lot to work with.

  Up on that bar top, she was sensational, from the way she used her body, which did not have Marilyn’s curves but made you imagine it did, to the nervous little gestures and the manner in which she articulated the word birth-day, as if it was two words with a sex act inserted in between.

  Ah, he had plans for Fin Cartwright, starting with convincing her she could be a star, and could get what she wanted in life whether it was the stage or the success of her charity. It was worth keeping his hands off her.

  Which was a lie.

  But it helped.

  “What did I just watch?” Zeke asked.

  “Talent.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “My amusement, so far.” It wouldn’t become anything more than a direct deposit of her thousand with a bonus on top if Fin didn’t call for an appointment. He couldn’t help her if she didn’t want his help. Either way, she’d never know pranking her with Marilyn was all about testing her resolve. He needed a new One Night Wife, and Fin had potential.

  Zeke handed him a beer. “I’m shaking in my boots. Are we taking on the Vegas mob? If you break out a fat Elvis suit, I’m calling an emergency board meeting.”

  He gave his brother a look of disgust, “I’d be Jailhouse Rock Elvis. Obviously,” and changed the topic. “How is Rory?”

  “Mad.” Zeke sighed. “Sad.”

  “She’ll forgive me, eventually.” He hoped.

  For years, Rory had been his One Night Wife. He’d trusted her without a thought, when outside family he couldn’t trust a single person. Until she caused a scene at a party where he was in the final stages of financing a highly secretive start-up, making a revolutionary, completely phony medical device.

  Having his bogus wife call him a womanizing cheat and a philandering, coke-snorting, abusive narcissist in a very public argument, right before she burst into crocodile tears, threw her fake engagement ring at him, and stormed out, did a number on his credibility, tarnished his sterling, upstanding-guy reputation, and lost him the deal. Worse, it poisoned that well of marks, and made people ask questions no one wanted the answers to.

  The family had blamed him for that mess, the loss of income particularly, because it threatened the ongoing funding of their major social causes. Men had been shot for less.

  The new sting Cal was currently working needed a One Night Wife. A female partner to work the women, to charm the men, to be the third-party demonstration that Cal was still a trustworthy, likable guy who’d rebuilt his life, not a drug-addicted asshole who’d hurt a woman.

  But he wasn’t ready to tell Zeke he was wife shopping.

  They got out of the pub and went for a burger, and then Cal called it a night. Before he was ready, it would be Monday and there would be a board meeting and Mom to contend with. There were family company CEOs with more stressful jobs, but he guessed few had to deal with a reformed-psychic-turned-social-justice-vigilante mother.

  On Monday, as anticipated, Katrice Sherwood, matriarch, knitter of awful Christmas sweaters, strode into his office and sat opposit
e him.

  “Hello, Mom. You’re looking well and determined.”

  “And you look tense.”

  “You can have that effect on me.”

  She tossed the tail of a lime-green scarf over her shoulder. “I’m your mother. I love you.”

  He noted her smile, baked goods and sugar treats that would give you hardened arteries and ultimately kill you. “Yes, that’s what scares me. What do you want, Katrice?”

  “Okay, tough guy.” She looked at her purple nails. “It’s a small thing.”

  It was a tell. “Last month, your small thing was a million dollars more support for medical supplies in refugee camps and exposing an NYU fine arts professor as a fraud.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “He is a fraud.”

  “He’s not. He’s terrible at being a fine arts professor. Students hate him, but he’s legit. We checked.”

  “Well, there we go. What was stressful about that?”

  “You tried to fox me. Told me he had stolen credentials.” That was what came from wrangling treachery for a living. Your fake wife fake accused you of being a womanizing bastard, and your real mother set you up.

  Mom had taught him half of everything he knew about how to deceive, ingratiate himself with others, and be ruthlessly unsentimental, and yet she managed to get under his skin every time. He simply had no defense against her wiles. “I’m supposed to be able to trust you. My own loving mom. But you lied.”

  She looked at the ceiling in exasperation. “There’s a new psychic in Soho. She’s running a scam where she banks a mark’s savings against their bad luck to reverse it. Then she sets them impossible tasks to do to earn their good luck and their money back.”

  It was a regular old Finding Lady Luck scam. The worst kind of bullshit, attracting vulnerable people with the most to lose. Cal detested this kind of mean-spirited scam, and there was no question they’d work to shut it down.

  Fifteen minutes later, after plotting how to put a scammer out of work, he walked into the boardroom as the members of the family executive team were taking their seats and started the meeting with their prayer.

  “May our cons be always purposeful and our grifts aligned fairly for the greater physical and social good of humanity and the planet. Amen.”

  There was a chorused amen, and the meeting was officially open, but for welcoming Rory back. She hadn’t said a word since Cal walked in, and she kept her eyes down on the table.

  “It’s good to see you home again, Rory. We all missed you.” He put stress on the word all, had to push it past the regret clogged in his throat.

  “I’m glad to be here, and I promise there won’t be any more slip ups,” she said. “I intend to pay back a higher percentage of my cut to the Sherwood bank to make up for what we lost.”

  Cal’s gut twisted, but before he could put voice to his fears, Zeke said, “You don’t have to do that. The scam went bad. It’s business. We cut our losses and—”

  Rory cut him off. “I’m directly responsible for us losing money, and I want to make it up.”

  “Rory, it’s not necessary,” Cal said, catching Sherin’s oh fuck expression. As their CFO, his sister knew how very unnecessary it was.

  Rory hit him with a blaze of eye contact, the kind that left a scorch mark. “I let my personal feelings interfere with the job. I let the whole family down. It was unprofessional.”

  “Listen to Cal, doll,” said Mom. “Sit down now and let him run the meeting.”

  “Please let me do this,” Rory said.

  Sherin exploded. “You can’t, because Cal has already made up the difference out of his own stash.”

  Cal put his face in his hands as that little revelation reverberated around the table.

  Amid the cacophony of protest, Zeke’s voice was loudest. “That was millions. It would’ve cleaned you out personally.”

  For a world-class con who’d been in the game since he was fifteen, and should have disappear-safely-forever money, Cal was skint. He had his salary and credit cards, his Sherwood expense account, and a few fake assets he could liquidate, but his own private fortune and security was gone.

  “Caleb Sherwood. What did you do?” Mom knocked an empty cup off a saucer with an agitated sweep of her arm.

  What he’d had to do. “We’d promised that money to the Pacific Vortex cleanup to help save the albatrosses.” It wasn’t like they could go to a bank and get a loan like regular people. “I paid the family back the money we lost. I lost. It was my con. I was responsible.”

  “Cal, your own security,” said Mom. “We could have found another way.”

  He’d tried and failed, and that was all there was to it.

  “It’s fine. I’ll earn it back.” He heard the weariness in his tone.

  They all pretended things were okay for about a minute.

  “You lied, Cal,” said Halsey. His youngest brother didn’t try to keep the hurt off his face.

  “I didn’t lie.” He scanned the table. It was an unforgivable offense to lie to a family member unless you were Mom, who had an inexplicable free pass. It was inexcusable for the head of the family business. “How many times have I told you to read your board reports? It’s been there in the accounts for months. I did not lie.”

  “It’s still a dirty sleight of hand,” Halsey said.

  Cal’s head throbbed, a blinder of a headache on its way. “I didn’t make an announcement because right around that time, none of you wanted to know me.”

  “It’s diabolical, Cal,” said Mom.

  “We were conned. Classic misdirection,” said Zeke.

  “It’s not right,” said Halsey. He had a grip on the table edge that showed his distress. He operated his long running con out in the murky world of Ponzi schemes that looked legitimate until you realized they were based on robbing Peter to pay Paul. Halsey relied on Sherwood to be his safe place.

  Cal had screwed up personally with Rory, by losing the money from the con and by making people at this table feel snowed.

  He put his hand over his forehead, his brain felt like it was broiling. “I made the decision I thought best at the time.” He had to make the offer. He stood. “If you’d like to take a vote on replacing me, I’ll step outside.”

  There was an achingly long silence before Zeke said, “Sit your ass down, Cal, you’re blocking the light. Everyone, stop acting like idiot marks who never check anything, and read the goddamn board reports from now on.”

  Another family crisis in the life of Sherwood Venture Capital defused. After that, it was updates on projected income from the wine con, the fencing of fake antique gems, the flying car investment scheme, and the dinosaur bone scam. In other words, business as usual.

  Chapter Five

  There was a two-thousand-dollar deposit in D4D’s bank account. That was two thousand dollars more than Fin expected to see for her Marilyn gig. She’d figured she’d been had from the moment she stepped off the bar top and accepted a drink from Liam and no one—not a single person—approached her.

  She’d thought the prankster would’ve revealed himself, if not before the prank then certainly after it. Isn’t that what pranking was about—being the victor and making sure other people knew how clever you were?

  Fin had let Liam feed her bar food and colored cocktails until her eyes drooped, and then she’d gone home and checked the account to find it empty, confirming her suspicions. But now, next morning, it was miraculously richer than the best-case scenario.

  Lenny was going to crap her pants laughing. Fin danced around her apartment making Scungy hiss and spit. Maybe she could make something of this pub performance thing.

  “Better than sex,” she said to the couch, under which Scungy had taken up residence. But maybe not better than sex with a man who promised so much then left you with a hotel room. Sex with Cal Sherwood had the makings of being amazing, until he did a runner, if only because of the way the tension between them had fizzed like a shaken cola.

  Cal’s
card was stuck to the refrigerator. Fin bopped across the scarred kitchen tiles to check it out again. It looked like money: thick, white card stock; modern, spare design; an official-looking crest; and sensible black type. His office had a swanky Sixth Avenue address. Why would he promise to help with her pitch?

  “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Cal could forget he’d ever met her. He could blow her off in a way that made her feel stupid and insignificant.

  She opened the refrigerator door and peered inside. An out-of-date yogurt was the best thing going. She closed the door. There was nothing to eat because she’d been lazy. There were women trying to raise kids in situations that were unsafe and living hand-to-mouth with little hope of their lives improving who had more initiative and courage than she did.

  “Not negotiable.”

  She had no option but to call Cal’s office and face whatever hold music was playing until he proved to be a one-night mirage and a total letdown. And after that, she’d come up with a new plan and keep doing that until it was second nature and she became a problem-solving ninja who never flaked out.

  When she made the call, she was forced to listen to some Adele wannabe warbling for so long she was about give up, but then she heard her name in Cal’s smooth, dirty-thought-inspiring voice. “Fin. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”

  Cal Sherwood was a man who seemed worth waiting for, but she wasn’t telling him that. She sang a line from the horrible hold music to mess with him.

  “I know it’s you, Fin. You were my call waiting on line two.”

  “You have more than one call waiting?” None of this was in her phone-Cal-Sherwood script, but he had a way of throwing her off track and making her like it.

  “Frequently. I’m a big shot, didn’t you know?”

  “But you do remember me.” It was physically difficult to get those words out because she was smiling so hard.