Beach Lane - By Melissa de la Cruz Page 0,4

4? Mas naturalmente! She was convinced she’d find her Luca in the Hamptons somewhere. And if not, she could always fly back home. It wasn’t as if she really needed the job.

Rupert consulted his watch, breaking her reverie. “If we leave now, we’ll still have time to hit the beach before sunset. My car is waiting outside,” he said, pointing to the curb, where a stretch Hummer was waiting.

“Sure.” Jacqui shrugged. She didn’t have any concrete plans on how to get to the Hamptons. She just figured something would turn up like it always did.

Jacqui gave him her flashiest megawatt smile. The one that had always led men to promise chinchilla furs and hand over platinum AmEx cards. “Lead the way.”

eliza tells a couple of not-so-white lies

THE CAB DROPPED ELIZA OFF IN FRONT OF HER FORMER building, an imposing prewar high-rise that was one of the city’s most sought-after addresses. Its bronze gilt doors shone in the bright sun. How she missed it. In Buffalo her family occupied the first floor of a row house. The bathroom had never been renovated, and Eliza swore there was mold behind the tub. Every time she showered, she felt dirtier than when she’d started.

Her old bathroom boasted a panoramic view of Central Park and a gleaming eggshell white tub that Eliza had personally picked out from the Bofi showroom with her mother’s decorator. Original paintings by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning hung in the hallways, heirlooms from Eliza’s maternal grandmother, a former debutante who hung out with the abstract expressionists in the fifties. Woody Allen had once scouted their living room as a possible location for one of his movies. The only movie Eliza could ever imagine being filmed in her new home was something out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Okay, so she was exaggerating. Slightly.

Cracking linoleum tile in the kitchen. Rusted aluminum siding. Wall-to-wall putrid avocado shag carpeting. A cramped six hundred square feet! Even their former servants had lived better. Her parents kept reminding her it could have been worse. Much, much worse. Dad could have ended up in—but Eliza couldn’t go there. Bad enough that it had even been a possibility.

The weekend doorman opened the cab door and recognized her immediately.

“Miss Eliza!”

“Hi, Duke.”

He tipped his cap. “Been a long time.”

“You’re telling me.”

“You guys back in the building?”

“Not exactly,” she said, trying to appear casual. She looked down the street. There was no sign of Kit’s convertible.

“Kit around?”

“Mr. Christopher?” Duke scratched his forehead with a black leather glove, which was part of the uniform—even in ninety-eight-degree heat. “I think he just left.”

She cursed under her breath. She couldn’t believe she’d missed her ride.

“Mr. and Mrs. Ashleigh are upstairs, though. I can ring up.”

“No thanks,” Eliza said, suppressing a temptation to gnaw her nails. What on earth was she going to do now?

Just then a familiar red convertible pulled up in front of the red canopy. An agreeable-looking guy with a blond crew cut hopped out of the front seat without waiting for Duke to open the door. He gasped when he saw Eliza.

“Liza!”

“Kit!”

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked before enveloping her in a bone-crunching bear hug.

Eliza ignored the question. “It’s great to see you!” she said, rubbing her fingers on his spiky hair and giving him a noogie.

“I forgot something—I just gotta run up and grab it. You goin’ to Amagansett?” Kit started jogging backward into the marble lobby. “Hey, you want a ride?”

“Sure!” she said, relieved. Good old Kit. Eliza let Duke put her bags in the trunk and settled in the front seat to wait for Kit.

“Damn, girl! I missed you!” Kit said when he returned. He fired up the engine and they cruised top down on Park Avenue. “You, like, went AWOL.”

“Yeah, well, after everything that happened,” Eliza said offhandedly, “my parents wanted to get out of the city to just relax, you know? So they decided to ship me off to boarding school. Quel drag.” Eliza found Kit’s Marlboros on the dashboard and helped herself to one. Her hands shook slightly as she rooted in the glove compartment for a lighter. “Lights out at eleven and the hall monitor is a tool,” she said, firing up a Zippo and inhaling.

Kit grunted in sympathy. “Dad threatened that once. But I don’t have the grades for Andover. So, uh, how are the ’rents, anyway?” Kit asked tentatively.

“They, um, spend all their time in Florida these days,” she improvised. Eliza knew what everyone had read