Free Beautiful Stranger by Zoey Dean Page B

felt bad that she’d carelessly blurted out her feelings.
    “Sam, listen to me. Maybe it’s not so much that I want to be in New York as it is that I want to be far from Ben. Besides, there’s a cocktail party for incoming freshmen at the Yale Club in a couple of days.”
    “And the Yale Club is in Manhattan?”
    Anna nodded. “Near Grand Central Station.”
    Sam held up a palm. “Speak no further—brilliance is breeding and multiplying in my great brain. We go to New York
together
. Just for a few days.”
    Anna looked at her friend thoughtfully for a moment. Actually, that really
was
appealing. Several days of shopping, seeing Cyn and some of her other old friends, maybe some real New York culture like MoMA or the ballet—she didn’t know if she could drag Sam to Mostly Mozart, but it was certainly worth a try. Sam knew Cyn from their trip to Las Vegas in the spring. The three of them could hang together. It was the perfect thing to make her forget all about her never-ending tragicomedy with Ben Birnbaum and her L.A. experiment gone awry.
    “We should stay at the Gansevoort hotel downtown,” Sam went on, her eyes lighting up with enthusiasm. “We’ll get a suite. We’ll party our asses off. And I’ll surprise Eduardo.”
    Anna looked at her friend with a knowing smile. There it was. Of course Sam wanted to go to New York. She wanted to find out what the hell Eduardo was up to.
    Well, Anna didn’t blame her for having ulterior motives—especially not when they dovetailed so perfectly with what she herself was craving so strongly right now. She hoped things would work out for Sam and Eduardo better than they had worked out for her and Ben. Because losing him this time hurt so much that Anna didn’t think even three thousand miles between them could begin to heal the wound.
    “You’ve got a deal,” she said finally, moving her glass over as Sam’s french fries arrived. “And I’ll do you one better than the Gansevoort—we can stay at my house.”
    “How amazing would this have been?” Ben asked Cammie as they wandered past the row of long-abandoned hydraulic car lifts. She looked around at the layers of dust and grime, wondering which “amazing” part he was referring to. “I mean, sure, new clubs open in this town all the time. But my ideas are fresh, and this space …” He shook his head. “Culver City is cutting edge. There’s nothing here now, which means we could establish something, the way the Meatpacking District became the spot for clubbing in New York. The space is off the hook. I have a million ideas.” He leaned against a support pillar, seemingly not caring whether the accumulated filth rubbed off on his weathered denim jacket.
    “So you’re saying first your dad said he’d finance you, and then he changed his mind?” Cammie wanted clarification. When she’d called Ben for a friendly “Hey, want to get a drink?” he’d brought her here first, to show her the place of his dreams that had died on the vine.
    Not that Cammie was seeing “successful club” in this piece-of-crap, covered-with-filth abandoned auto body repair shop. Hello—Culver City? Sure, the area could become the next big thing. But so could Cincinnati.
    She herself was careful not to brush up against anything, lest the Nanette Lepore pink-and-white tartan plaid strapless wool dress she wore be sullied: The dress was brand-spanking-new. Its hem landed a mere two inches past the bottom of her creamy La Perla thong. Her impressive cleavage was on display too. Cammie knew she looked fabulous. Just because this was a “casual, friendly” outing didn’t mean it couldn’t turn into more. Adam deserved to have his nose rubbed in his betrayal of her. Without going into details, Ben had mentioned that he and Anna were less than cozy these days as well.
    It was almost as if fate were
begging
her to step into the breach. And … okay, if she was going to be perfectly honest with herself—a great rarity—the