Free Spin by Bella Love

saved them when the
Navigator’s undercarriage caught fire midway through the tour. I
secured another form of transportation and had it at the tips of
their pointed heels within twenty minutes. It didn’t damage my
reputation any that although they weren’t all in one vehicle
anymore, the chauffeurs were handsome men driving very big cars.
(I’d told my assistant Savannah to call the Chippendales we’d used
at a couple previous events. Chippendales with Hummers.)
    Lovey saw me as a miracle worker after that,
and to be honest, I kind of was that day. If I had a wall of fame,
I’d put that picture in, of fifteen high-class, slightly tipsy
middle-aged women from DC, standing beside buff Chippendales and a
burned-out Navigator.
    “There are no problems,” I told her
brightly.
    Her powdered face looked up at me, willing
to be calmed.
    I spent the next half hour doing so. It
wasn’t so difficult. I had the box of tissues and a relentless
attitude; few could stand against me.
    I spent the next hour tracking down her
daughter Olivia, and the third hour initiating and fielding calls
from an array of vendors who were not happy about the changes.
    It was all quite chaotic and highly
satisfying. The world was slowly bending to my will.
    I didn’t have time to think about
Finn—pretty much—or the way my heart got a little cold whenever I did think about him—which I didn’t—and also, my phone was
charged. The strange, floaty-cold panic of earlier subsided under
the heat of a growing to-do list.
    Olivia showed up. I whisked her away from
her mother’s aggressive disappointment and sat her down inside the
house to figure out what the hell her problem was with the DJ.
    Turned out it was a DJ, period. Any DJ.
    I paused. “So, you want a…?”
    “Band.”
    “Ah. A band.” I nodded as if this was a
perfectly reasonable request. “Do you know any?”
    “None that wouldn’t give my parents a heart
attack.” She eyed me with a knowing look. “I agreed to everything
else they wanted. I said the only thing that mattered was having
live music. That’s the only thing I wanted.” Her chin jutted out a
little.
    Uh-oh. She’d decided to take a stand. At my
event.
    I nodded again. It was a tool, a delaying
tactic. It made people think I was considering options, when
really, inside, I was screaming, Are you insane?
    Olivia sat on her mother’s expensive divan
in front of a window that overlooked the green lawn. Midmorning
light glowed into the room and made her, with her cut-glass
features and sleek black hair, look like some kind of centerpiece
to the room. Which she was. She was heiress to ten to fifteen
million dollars. No one quite knew how much, exactly; a lot of
things about Mr. Peter J. were hard to pin down. But while Olivia
might be a week shy of twenty-one, she looked about fifteen,
ethereal and willowy and utterly not up to the challenge of her
mother’s bulldozing certainty.
    There were two small touches of rebellion—a
pair of earrings studded a single earlobe, and the rounded tip of a
tattooed butterfly’s wing peeked out just above her shirt on her
left shoulder. Otherwise, she was so pale she was almost
translucent, as if a fire burned inside her, but it was banked real
low.
    I knew about banked fires. My mother had had
one.
    Olivia would be easy to steamroll.
    I didn’t want to steamroll her.
    I wiped my hands down the front of my skirt,
then looked at them, surprise to find them doing such a thing. All
we had to do was find a way. I’d talk to Mrs. Lovey. Explain… And
if that didn’t work… Well, then….
    I glanced at Olivia’s beautiful, translucent
face and clapped my sweaty palms together. “Okay, then! I’ll see
what I can do.” I smiled brightly, as if I had a plan.
    She eyed me cautiously, as if she knew I
didn’t.
    “I don’t know why my mother totally ignored
everything I said,” she said.
    “Yeah, that’s weird.”
    We looked at each other, this smart,
observant, pretty,