Free Some Like It Haute: A Humorous Fashion Mystery (Style & Error Book 4) by Diane Vallere Page B

me he’d given my name to Amanda to help out with her runway show.
    And now, forty-four days later, I was dealing with the aftermath.
    Amanda Ries was everything I wasn’t: beautiful, successful, and, apparently, an upstanding law-abiding citizen who didn’t question authority. She and Nick had gone to design school together. I still didn’t quite believe him when he said they never had a romantic relationship. She was Barbie doll pretty, with sleek black hair that fell to her waist and proportions that didn’t come from pizza and meatball sandwiches. I couldn’t compete with someone like that. And because I wanted to show that I was a class act, despite every instinct that I had, I took the job.
    The ironic thing was that I had to turn away business in order to fulfill my commitment. But that’s not what this was all about. Nick had asked me to help Amanda, and that had felt good. He’d probably expected me to say no.
    I should have said no.
    I should have said no, pretended he’d never asked, and gone about my business.
    But I didn’t. Because Amanda, aside from being Nick’s maybe-former girlfriend, was a talented designer, and after a year of false starts in jobs that fell short of my own expectations, I recognized that working with her would allow me to fall back on my passion for the industry. I had a high taste level, proven instincts on trends, and was a good at multitasking. Besides, confronting my own pettiness about Amanda’s relationship with Nick was like putting a pin in it. At least that’s what I’d hoped.
    I pulled up in front of my house. I’d been planning to park the Stingray in the garage, but a brown minivan was in the driveway. I drove past the house, pulled into my neighbor’s driveway, backed out, and parked by my mailbox.
    A disheveled woman stood by the door to the garage. “Samantha Kidd?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    She pushed the hood off of her head. “I’m Molly Diers. I need help. I would have made an appointment, but I finally got a sitter and it’s kind of an emergency. Can we do this?”
    It took the better part of a minute for my brain to switch gears from arson and attack to the rest of my life. If the woman in front of me hadn’t appeared so in need of fashion help, I might not have ever made the connection.
    Molly Diers wore an oversized olive green snorkel coat over a pair of pants printed with superheroes. Her feet were shod in dirty camel Uggs that had seen better days, and there was a smudge of something green on her cheek.
    “Follow me,” I said. I unlocked the garage door and walked across the concrete floor to the door that opened at the top of the basement. A wooden staircase led down to my converted home office.
    When I first moved back into the house, the basement had held several mismatched bookcases filled with magazines, memorabilia, and paint cans. The basement had flooded, thanks to my parents never having the foundation sealed, and most of the contents had been damaged to the point of ruin. I’d arranged for a trash pick-up and tossed everything but the clothes I made in high school.
    Once emptied, I was left with a twenty-foot-long room with exposed brick walls. Five packs of yellow rubber gloves, several bottles of vinegar, a jug of bleach, and an industrial fan had removed traces of the flooding. Now the walls were decorated with fashion sketches, the room where my dad had brewed his homemade wine had been turned into a fitting room, and the rest of the space had been outfitted with bars for clothing samples and shelves for accessories. A discarded architect’s table served as my desk.
    Molly followed me down the stairs. I flipped to a blank page on a yellow legal pad.
    “Molly, have a seat. Let’s talk about what you want.”
    “That’s easy. I want to look good again. You should have seen me back in the day. Fashion was my life. I’ve been married for seven years and the bastard left me. After two boys, I don’t even feel like a woman