Free Faking It (d-2) by Jennifer Crusie

said to Nadine. “It’s Louise’s. If you sweat in it, there’ll be hell to pay.”
    “You’re right.” Nadine shrugged off the jacket and Burton ’s arm at the same time. “Take the hair, too,” she said, and pulled off the black wig, freeing the damp blonde curls matted around her face. “June is not a Goth month.”
    Burton was disgusted, but then, he always was, Gwen thought. Clearly Nadine had inherited the Goodnight women’s legendary taste for impossible men. She looked back at Davy again. Perhaps Louise should not meet this one.
    “See you later, Australia,” Nadine said, and went out the door, Burton ’s arm around her once again. Ethan ambled behind them both, finishing off his muffin.
    Davy leaned on the counter and watched them go. “She does know she’s with the wrong guy?”
    “I don’t know,” Gwen said. “Nadine is a very deep child.”
    Back in the office, the jukebox started to play “Wishin’ and Hopin’.”
    “Dusty,” Davy said, lifting his chin to listen. “Good omen. Am I renting?”
    Sixteen hundred dollars
. “Yes,” Gwen said.
    He nodded. “Now, there’s just one problem.”
    I knew it.
    “I got my pocket picked in a bar last night,” he was saying. “Dumb of me. I’ve got money coming in later, but I had to cancel all my credit cards, so for right now all I have is a hundred bucks.”
    He smiled at her again and her lips quirked automatically. A hundred bucks was a start, and it wasn’t as if there was anything in the apartment worth stealing.
    She let her eyes slide sideways to Dorcas’s beautifully painted but depraved fishermen.
    Or in the gallery.
    “But I can have a friend wire me the rest by tomorrow. Is that all right with you?”
    “Yes,” Gwen said, giving up.
    He said, “You are a good person,” and handed her five twenties.
    Gwen took them. “The room’s on the fourth floor. I’ll get the key and take you up.”
    She backed into the office and fished in the desk for the key to 4B, across the hall from Dorcas in 4A. She could have put him in 2B, but that would have put him across from her apartment. Dorcas was always expecting the worst anyway. If he turned out to be an ax murderer, he could reinforce her theory of life. She took the keys out to him.
    “Thank you,” he said, taking the key ring. “You won’t regret this.” Then he must have seen something in her eyes because he stopped and added, “Really. It’s okay,” and for a moment she felt that it was, that whatever he was, it would be fine.
    Then she realized who he reminded her of. Tony. Right down to the “You won’t regret this,” when he’d proposed and she’d accepted, not knowing much about him except he appeared to be crazy about her and she was starting to appear to be pregnant with Eve.
    “Hello?” he said, and she realized she’d been staring at him.
    “Right this way,” she said, and steered him out of the gallery before he turned into Tony and sold her a Finster.
     
    DAVY WASN’T SURE what he’d said to make Gwen Goodnight stare at him as if he were the Angel of Death, but she seemed to be dealing with it as she led him up the three flights of stairs to the apartment. The hall could have used some paint, but it was clean and well lit, which was more than Davy could have said for a lot of the places he’d lived in. His landlady didn’t have much money, he deduced, but she was hardworking. Or at least somebody was hardworking. Probably not Nadine.
    He grinned a little to himself, thinking of Nadine’s curly hair and pale blue eyes; clearly she was somebody who swam in Betty’s gene pool. And Gwen, too. If you lined them up, all three of them with those weird eyes, they’d look like an outtake from
Children of the Damned
.
    “So I’ve met your granddaughter,” Davy said to Gwen, as they reached the top of the second set of stairs. “When can I meet your daughter?”
    “When you’ve had time to rest,” Gwen said without looking back. “My daughters