Free Poseur #3: Petty in Pink: A Trend Set Novel by Rachel Maude Page B

his
touch
?”
    An unsympathetic Melissa shrugged, sucking the insides of her cheeks.
    “I mean,” he continued pensively. “Who are we supposed to believe broke into your contest?” Bugging out his eyes, he stuck
     out his tongue and splayed his bejeweled fingers. “
Swamp
thing?”
    Despite herself, Melissa giggled.
“Stupid,”
she chastised him, pushing his powerful shoulder. He captured her lemon-and-sage-moisturized hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.
    “It’s gonna be okay.”
    “It is?” “No doubt,” he assured her. “When something bad happens, you just got to think—this is going to make some room for
     something good.”
    Melissa gently smiled. Sometimes her dad’s Buddha-bytes actually made sense. “I guess I can see that.”
    “You can?” Seedy bobbed his eyebrows, impressed with himself. “Oh, wait a minute,” he remembered, slapped his knees, and grinned.
     “You had your big
meeting
today, right? How’d it go?”
    “Well…” Melissa bit her Smashbox-lacquered lower lip, her early excitement returning in a throb. From his collapsed position
     on the floor, Emilio Poochie lifted his head, perking up his ears. “Ted Pelligan is really serious about us, Daddy. I mean…
     he’s even arranging a celebriteaser.”
    Before Seedy had a chance to respond, Vivien materialized at the kitchen entrance, poised like a cobra above her jeweled metallic
     sandals. “He’s giving you a
what
?”
    Melissa arced her perfectly gelled eyebrow. “You heard me.”
    “Melissa,”
Seedy frowned as Vivien clattered to his side. “
Watch
your—”
    “I don’t believe you,” his fiancée huffed at his daughter before he could finish, narrowing her violet eyes. Planting a hand
     on her hip, she pursed her pink-frosted collagen donut into an impressive-looking twist pastry. “What could you have possibly
     done to deserve a celebriteaser?”
    “What could
I
have done?” Melissa rasped with laughter. As if Vivien’s totally tacky designer handbag company, Ho Bag, had anything to
     do with hard work.
Melissa
was the one who toiled to get her business off the ground, pulling herself up by her own Manolo Blahnik
bootstraps
, while Vivien just kicked up her heels, coasting by on the Moon name. Contrary to the claims of her sham memoir,
The Audacity of Ho
, the woman did not do an
ounce
of work—unless you counted X’ing a few forms once a month.
    Melissa was
this close
to X’ing Vivien’s freeloading face.
    “I’d just like to say,” she began.
    “YO!” her father boomed, rattling the china in the nearest glass cabinet and shutting her up in an instant. Emilio ejected
     through the archway exit like a piece of shrapnel. “Thank you for your attention!” he boomed again, obliterating the sound
     of the tiny dog clattering down the hall. “Will one of you please be so kind as to tell me what a celebriteaser mother-McMuffin
is
before I lose my mother-McMuffin
mind
?”
    “A celebriteaser,”
Melissa and Vivien began together. After a strained pause, the fake-baked fiancée continued.
    “Baby, remember last month? When A-Rod was spotted on Madison drinking MoonWater?”
    At MoonWater, Seedy relaxed into a smile. He couldn’t help himself. After languishing on the Whole Foods shelves for more
     than three months, sales for his bottled mineral water—the latest effort to diversify and expand the Moon brand—had finally
     started to pick up.
    “That’s a celebriteaser,” Melissa explained, happy to show off her new knowledge. “As soon as people saw A-Rod drinking it,
     it was like,
buh-ham
! They started buying.”
    “Uh,
excuse
me,” protested Seedy, pointing a bejeweled finger. “People started
buying
because we are the
only
water that uses a patented
moon rock
filtration
process
.” He waited for them to argue, crumpling his brow like an accordion.
“Thank you,”
he nodded, interpreting their cowed silence as victory. “Now”—he returned to his daughter—“you tellin’ me A-Rod