The Hate Vow by Nicole French

Part Two

The Tension

Please open that

Big

Red

Mouth

One more time so I can

Crush

Those lips like two cherries. I’d destroy

Yournameyourbodyyourmindyoursoul

Just like

You once destroyed mine.

“Taunt”

—from the journal of Eric de Vries

Eleven

Icouldn’t deny it. Sometimes it was really, really nice having friends with money.

Both Brandon and Skylar had insisted on coming with me to New York prior to my big debut with the de Vries clan. It wasn’t necessary. I knew that. Eric assured me that he’d cover anywhere I wanted to stay. But their kids were staying with Skylar’s grandmother, so the weekend was a bit of a getaway for the two of them too. They’d gone all out with a giant suite at the Plaza—two master bedrooms with their own entrances, split by a living room bigger than my old studio. Skylar wouldn’t hear of me being anywhere but next door, and Brandon refused to sleep in a single room.

I stretched out in the tufted-back, king-size bed and reveled in the pillow-topped mattress and the fact that absolutely nothing smelled like pickled vegetables or Febreze. Listen, you try spending five weeks on your mother’s sagging couch and tell me a suite at the Plaza isn’t heaven. I could have died right then and been happy.

Aside from the hotel room, though, I actually didn’t like New York much. I’d visited with Skylar a few times in law school, since she was originally from Brooklyn and would bring me home on holidays to hang with her family. New York—well, at least Manhattan—just felt like a sanitized version of Chicago, and without the cool lake on one side. Chicago had better Italian food by a long shot, and yeah, I’ll say it: better pizza too. What’s wrong with these people? Who wants thin crust pizza so floppy you have to fold it in half to eat? Especially when you can get a full meal in one slice of deep dish?

The shopping, though. You can’t be a fashion addict and not like that. Would being a de Vries would give me access to Fashion Week? Hmmm. Maybe there were other perks to this gig that I hadn’t considered yet.

Sometime after nine, I dragged myself out of bed, shoved my hair in a knot, popped on my glasses with the vintage gold Dior frames, and padded groggily into the suite’s living room. Skylar sat curled in one of the plush armchairs with a cup of tea while she paged through a brief. Through the wall of windows waved Central Park, where a wash of green was dotted by the pink and white flowering trees of late spring. Okay, so one more point to New York. It wasn’t Lake Michigan on a crisp June day, but it was definitely pretty.

“Morning, sunshine,” Skylar said, not looking up from her brief. “Breakfast is over there.”

“Coffee,” I mumbled as I padded over to the room service tray on a small dining table. There were two plates of food, still covered and warm, containing eggs and sausage. I grimaced. No, thank you. The other plate contained fresh fruit and a box of Froot Loops. I grinned. My friend knew me so well.

“Where’s Brandon?” I asked as I sat down at the table and poured my cereal into a spare bowl. Don’t judge me. The only good cereal is the sweet kind.

“He got up to run around the park.” Skylar joined me, taking her plate of scrambled eggs. She checked her watch—a very pretty Bvlgari that was a push present from Brandon after Jenny was born. Well, that and a trip to Italy, but who was keeping track? “He’ll probably be back any minute. Dinner tonight is when?”

I swallowed a massive bite. “Seven. Eric said he’d pick me up here at six.” I rolled my eyes. “Like I need an escort. You guys are all ridiculous.”

Skylar narrowed her eyes but didn’t respond while she munched on her toast. “Okay, then.” She swallowed. “I was thinking we should go shopping today.”

I frowned. “You want to go shopping?”

My best friend was many things, but a clothes horse was not one of them. When we were roommates, I’d usually have to choose her outfits like she was a freaking toddler whenever she went on a date. Otherwise she was more likely just to lounge around in her favorite old jeans and a T-shirt.

Since marrying Brandon, her style had grown up, though not without my continued guidance. She preferred simple, elegant pieces and over the years had increasingly taken advantage of private stylists to supplement her wardrobe of suit separates and the occasional evening gown. But those ugly old jeans—which she was currently wearing—were still her favorites.

“Not for me,” she said. “For you. Since you’re actually meeting your future in-laws today, you might want to make a good impression.”

“You sound like my mother,” I grumbled, then stared down at the old plaid pajamas and the ripped T-shirt I’d worn to bed with a bit of shame.

I had some nice things. I loved clothes, even made my own sometimes. Skylar knew this—I had practically sewn the girl’s wedding dress together before she and Brandon eloped. Therefore, I resented the insinuation that I didn’t know how to dress to meet Eric’s stuffy family.

“Well, I wasn’t going to meet the countess in my pajamas,” I said before reaching across the table to pour myself some coffee. She wasn’t royalty, but I couldn’t think of Eric’s grandmother as anything else. “I think I can handle it.”

“Black suits for court don’t count.”

“They aren’t all suits.”

“It’s almost summer on the Upper East Side. You shouldn’t be wearing black anything.”

I snorted. “Says the one-woman funeral service. Skylar, you have more black in your closet than Wednesday Addams.”

“Yeah, but this is different. I’m not trying to make a good impression on a family who probably spends more on clothes each year than most people spend on their mortgages. Think about Janette. She never wears black.”

Janette Chambers, Skylar’s estranged mother, was born and bred on Park Avenue, a person who floated in and out of her children’s lives and nearly sabotaged Brandon and Skylar’s entire relationship in an attempt to extort money from them to save her own fortune. In other words, a terrible person. A graceful, beautiful, eminently stylish, but nonetheless horrific human being.

She also, if I recalled correctly, usually looked like springtime incarnate.

I grimaced. “They can’t all be like her.” My denial was weak. After hearing Eric’s story about Penny, I wasn’t sure I believed myself.

Skylar nodded. “Sure, they can. They can all be like that. Why do you think I agreed to a big fancy wedding? I wanted to fit the hell in.”

“Sky, you eloped in a hospital chapel.”

“Yes, but we planned a big church wedding.”

“And you wouldn’t shut up about the fact that Brandon bought you a fifteen-thousand-dollar dress to wear for five hours,” I argued back. “You yourself thought the whole thing was ridiculous. At least I’m not fighting it. Planning this wedding, even if it is fake, is actually something I’m looking forward to. It’s going to be fun to deck myself out in yards of couture.”

I sighed. Truth? I bought four stacks of bridal magazines for the flight back from Chicago, looking for patterns to knock off. There was no way I or my mother could afford a couture wedding dress, but maybe I’d get lucky and one of the houses would want to dress the newest addition to Eric’s family. And if not, if I started now, maybe I could sew a knock-off myself. I was scared shitless of almost everything else about this ridiculous arrangement, but the fashion? I could handle that.

Skylar shrugged off my points. “It was insanely expensive, but I did like the dress. And, by the way, I’m buying yours too. You’re not walking down the aisle in something you made on your sewing table, I don’t care how talented you are.”

I bit my lip, annoyed she read my mind. “Thanks a lot.”

“I’m sorry, Janey, but you don’t get to go Pretty in Pink this time. It’s just not going to work.”

I stuck out my lip. I resented that. I made way cooler clothes than that ugly pink dress. “It’s just one dinner. And my style is way better than Molly Ringwald’s ever was.”

Skylar gave me the same look she gave her daughter when Jenny asked to stay up all night. “Do you really think it’s going to end with one dinner? You’ll meet his family and ‘poof,’ six months later you’ll be married?”

I paused mid-stir of my coffee. “Well…”

“Jane, you read the style section every week. I know you know what a society wedding really looks like.”

I gulped. Shit. Despite paging through bridal shots yesterday, I really hadn’t thought about this, but Skylar was right. Engagement parties. Rehearsal dinners. Two and three and four receptions. The weddings of the rich and famous were gauche, months-long affairs. Maybe ours wouldn’t be like that. My mother and I certainly couldn’t afford it. But the more Skylar spoke, the more I realized I truly had no idea what kinds of things were going to be expected of me in the months to come.

“Do you know if they have any other events planned this summer? Stuff you might be expected to attend?”

I cleared my throat. “Um…just a few. Dinner tonight with family and close friends, and another thing out on Long Island in a month or two. That one is a big barn dance for New York’s high society.”

Skylar arched a thin red brow.

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be so pleased with yourself, you Cheshire cat. Okay, so there’s going to be a party. But you’re forgetting one thing.”

“What’s that?”

I gestured around my face and body. There was a lot to see—the rainbow pink hair, the ornate glasses, the lips I usually painted red. “I’m pretty sure he’s asking me to do this because of the shock-and-awe factor. I don’t have to fit in. Eric said.”

“Eric’s a guy,” Skylar retorted. “He doesn’t know what kind of bullshit double standards women deal with or how they talk to each other. It’s all very under the nose, but these people have a way of making you feel like nothing without even saying a word. After all, didn’t you say that they basically drove his fiancée to her death?”

Slowly, I nodded, and sympathy glowed in Skylar’s green eyes. She had been in the same place only five years ago, learning to maneuver through her husband’s world of uptight New Englanders who wanted to keep him for themselves.

“Trust me on this, then,” she said. “It’s not lace and satin—it’s armor. And it’s going to give the vultures one less reason to pick you apart.” She reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “You helped me through this process, remember? I don’t think I would have stayed with Brandon if it hadn’t been for your perfect combination of sass and confidence. So, let me help you, Janey. Let me buy you a couple of dresses, all right?”

I opened my mouth to say no, but visions of Eric’s judgy-as-fuck family looking down their long Dutch noses stopped me. I was already going to be an oddity—more than likely, his family was already pissed off that the family’s black sheep was being handed the keys to the empire. Marrying me was just the cherry on the fuck-you sundae. As far as they knew, I wasn’t just going to be a blemish on their spotless blonde family tree. I was going to poison the damn thing.

Well, if I was going to go about ruining bloodlines, I might as well do it looking fierce as fuck.

“All right, Counselor,” I abated. “You’ve just won your case.”

Skylar grinned triumphantly, but before she could respond, the heavy front door to the suite opened, and a very sweaty Brandon bounded in, his sharp blue eyes landing immediately on Skylar. I swear, the man had built-in radar when it came to his wife.

It took him less than a second to reach her.

“Brandon!” Skylar half whispered, half screeched as the man proceeded to bury his face in her neck. Her dismay was clear, but her pleasure was even more evident. Please. She acted all tough, but Sky couldn’t get enough of this sort of thing.

Should I have felt uncomfortable, watching my friend get accosted by her husband while I enjoyed my morning joe? Maybe. But honestly, you want uncomfortable, try a blind date in a sex club full of middle-aged, vinyl-clad doms trolling for their next sub. Yes, that once happened. People see spiky hair in a personal ad, and they think you’ll do anything. It was…uninspiring. Too many assless chaps, not enough chisel, if you catch my drift.

“Red,” Brandon murmured as he lifted her easily out of her seat. “We have no kids around for two whole days. No. Kids.”

“Brandon, Jane’s here. I was trying to convince her to go shopping—ah!”

My eyes? They practically rolled out of my head when, instead of letting her finish her sentence, Brandon basically did his own version of The Kiss, that World War II photograph of the soldier sucking the nurse’s face off in the middle of Times Square. Really, though. Skylar was going shopping for a few hours, not embarking on the S.S. Punch A Nazi.

“Brandon, Jane is right next to us!”

Brandon twisted around with a frown. “Oh. Hey, Jane. I didn’t realize you were up.”

I raised my mug in salute. “Hey, not like I haven’t seen it before. After all, I had a front-row seat to you rabbits learning each other’s love buttons the first time around.”

Skylar’s face flushed the same color as her hair, but Brandon just smirked as he touched his nose to his wife’s.

“I told you,” he informed her in a low, foreboding voice. “This is happening whether she’s here or not.”

Brandon kissed her again with a growl that gave me shivers—not because he turned me on the way he clearly did Skylar, but because the implied threat reminded me of someone else who used to growl at me that way.

Someone whom I had told in no uncertain terms he was not to look at me like that again.

Someone whom I was now supposed to…marry.

I ignored the pang in my stomach at the thought. That feeling? I’d learned to live with it over the last five years. But that didn’t mean I liked it.

Skylar grinned over Brandon’s large shoulder. “Sorry,” she mouthed as he carried her toward their bedroom. Still, her green eyes danced.

I grinned right back at her as I got up from the table. She wasn’t getting off that easy. “Is boy-o here snipped yet, Sky? Because I’m pretty sure he could get me pregnant over here the way he’s looking at you.”

“Jane!”

This time it was both of their glares that sent me scampering back toward my bedroom. Brandon’s staunch refusal to get a vasectomy was a topic of contention between them, and it was way too easy to bug the guy about it. Skylar, after having suffered miserably through one pregnancy, had absolutely refused to carry a second baby (they adopted Luis, their second). I happened to know that my friend had no interest in having a third kid—after all, they were already practically raising her younger siblings alongside their own children—but I was pretty sure Captain America there wanted another. Actually, I was pretty sure he’d knock up Skylar every year if she’d let him.

“Sky…just rap on my door when you’re ready to go,” I called. “What do you think, Brandon? Fifteen minutes? Or will it only take ten?”

“Try at least ninety!” Brandon shouted, chasing me away completely.

As much as I loved giving Brandon shit, he was paying my way here. I could at least try to give the guy a break.

* * *

“What about here?”

I looked up and down at the storefront window, not even bothering to mask my disdain. “St. John? Really? Skylar, we are not scheming, middle-aged actresses on Days of Our Lives.” I looked her over. “Come on, you have money. You don’t dress like this.”

Skylar sighed. We’d been tromping up Madison Avenue for thirty minutes, and my friend had yet to suggest a shop where the patrons’ average age wasn’t at least sixty-five.

I tried again. “Maybe we should—”

“Don’t say it.”

“Come on, Janette knows where to—”

“Absolutely not. Jane, we are not inviting my mother to stick her ridiculous and probably fake nose into this situation.”

We stood there, staring at each other in the middle of the street while a mix of taxis, Town Cars, and Teslas drove past.

“Fine,” I said. “Then we’ll go straight to the source. One of these broads ought to know what to wear to dinner with Grandma on Park Avenue.”

I looked around the street, searching for good potential. Immediately, I spied a group of well-manicured women holding disposable coffee cups and pushing strollers that probably cost more than a car payment.

“Ah ha!” I said. “The mommy brigade.”

“Jane—”

“Stop being such a scaredy-cat,” I snapped before striding right up to the women as they approached us. “Excuse me. Hello, excuse me!”

Despite being only a few feet away, I had to practically shout before any of them stopped. Like they were connected by some electronic cord, the women all stopped at once, and their faces swiveled together toward me.

“Yes?” asked the one closest before she pursed her perfectly plumped lips together.

She was tall, but petite. Lithe, but still curvy. Her style was effortlessly put together with whites and denim, but the kind that looked like it had never been worn before, and her dark brown hair hung in gentle waves, framing rose-petal skin and possibly enhanced lips. If they were fake, her doctor was the best. Just like everything else about her.

The woman’s bright blue eyes scanned my outfit, which, as Skylar had pointed out again when we were dressed, was decidedly not Upper East Side. Black cigarette pants, patent-red platform sneakers, and a canary yellow sweater that was perfect for the slight nip in the air that morning. Punk with a side of Bettie Page, my personal style idol. With my hair plaited down my shoulder in a fishtail braid and my makeup on point beneath a pair of heart-shaped red glasses, I thought I looked fabulous. Maybe not Park Avenue, but fabulous nonetheless.

But to the mean girls of the Upper East Side, I was just a misfit.

“I really am Andie Walsh,” I murmured to myself.

“What?”

“We were just wondering where ladies like you shop.” Skylar stepped in with a concerned look for me. “My friend has an event tonight that she’s shopping for.”

“Your friend?” asked the woman with another skeptical glance at me. “Have you checked the Village? Maybe Brooklyn?”

The women behind her snickered.

“Well, the event is up here,” Skylar pointed out sharply. “My mother is from here, but we just didn’t think her taste was the best.”

I wanted to snort. I knew what she was doing. As much as she hated them, Skylar was offering her bona fides to these haughty bitches.

“Oh?” asked Blue Eyes. “And who is your mother?”

“Janette Chambers,” Skylar stated through clenched teeth.

“Oh!” The woman’s eyes popped open, suddenly as bright as the sky, and her tone changed completely. “Didn’t her daughter…so that would make you…”

“Skylar Sterling,” Skylar admitted, barely audible.

Now my eyes flew open. I happened to know my friend hadn’t taken Brandon’s name legally—she was too fucking independent for that, and she also loved the way Crosby sounded professionally.

“Oh!” Suddenly every one of these women was clamoring across the sidewalk, abandoning their strollers (and the children in them) so that it was virtually impossible for other people to pass. They practically fell over themselves trying to shake Skylar’s hand. Obviously, Brandon wasn’t an unknown entity in New York. Skylar’s cheeks were pink, but I recognized her smile as the creepy one she wore when she was uncomfortable. Suddenly, there wasn’t much more I loved about my friend besides the fact that she abhorred this world.

“So yeah,” she said. “We were just wondering where the best shops were. You know, if we’re not looking for St. John.” She winked at me. I chuckled.

“Oh, gosh, yes, I can give you a bunch of recs,” said the blue-eyed leader, who then introduced herself as Caitlyn. Five minutes later, she and her entire posse had provided Skylar with about fifteen recommendations, including names of salespeople. Meanwhile, I hovered on the fringes, trying not to get pushed into the street.

“Are you shopping for anything special?” asked Caitlyn. “What’s the event, exactly?”

“Actually, we’re here for my friend’s engagement,” Skylar said, pulling me into the center of the group. “We hear that Celeste, Jane’s future grandmother-in-law, is a little picky.”

“Wait…Celeste de Vries?”

All four heads swiveled back to me. Caitlyn stepped forward. Suddenly we were back in high school. They were a pack, and she was the ringleader. What did that make me? The lone wolf, or prey?

“You’re not…you’re not Eric de Vries’s fiancée, are you?” she asked with a tight smile, almost as if she couldn’t believe she was saying the words as she scanned me again with new care.

“Well, um—”

“She is,” Skylar put in firmly. “This is Jane Lefferts. We’ve all been friends since law school. At Harvard.” More pedigree dropping. This time mine.

“You’re marrying Eric de Vries.” The woman—Caitlyn—said it like it was a foreign language phrase. Slow and not quite enunciated correctly.

I folded my arms—and no, it wasn’t just so I wouldn’t tug my multicolored braid self-consciously. “That’s right.”

Now all four pairs of the women’s eyes turned to my empty ring finger. I resisted the urge to stick it in my back pocket. So I had thrown his gaudy, boring engagement ring back at him. So what? I agreed to marry him, not wear ugly jewelry.

“Well, that’s…just lovely,” said Caitlyn. One of her friends snorted next to her. She smacked her. “I was actually invited to the dinner at Celeste’s. I’m a close family friend, you see. Nina, his cousin, is one of my very best friends. She was actually maid of honor at my last wedding.”

Now I glanced at Caitlyn’s empty ring finger. Her “last” marriage must not have lasted long. Vaguely, I wondered how many she’d had.

“So, I’ll see you there…Janine?”

“Jane,” I supplied.

“Jane,” she repeated, again like the most basic name in the world was foreign. “Nice to meet you. You too, Skylar!”

Her friends just giggled as they turned back to their forgotten kids, a few of whom were starting to squall.

“Con-congratulations,” a few of them stuttered with red cheeks, like they were holding back laughter. “Have fun tonight!”

“Oh my God,” one whispered as they turned away. “Did you see her hair?”

Skylar and I stood there, watching them and waiting for my ego to reflate. They looked so casual, but every one of those women were wearing items I’d seen in Vogue.

“Why do I get the feeling that if we go to any of the shops they just named, the salespeople are going to say, ‘that’s very expensive’ about everything I look at before telling me to leave?” I murmured. “I see what you mean now. Armor.”

Skylar sighed at the reference to the famous scene from Pretty Woman, but didn’t argue. I supposed that was exactly the kind of bullshit she wanted to help me avoid anyway. “I’m glad. But also…not. You still don’t have to do this.” She looked worried.

“No, I’m not backing out now. I just need better armor.” I cast another look up and down the street, then tossed my coffee into a waste bin. “But we’re not doing it here. I can costume design with the best of them, but you’re right, I need to do this quick and dirty. Let’s go to Soho. There are just as many designer shops, but people downtown won’t look at me like I’m an alien.”