Playing Dirty Read Online Free

babe,” she wasn’t sure how she felt about Cade’s achievements. On the one hand, she would hardly cry a river if he tanked in every endeavor he touched.
    On the other, his success might well help her and her friends’ finances.
    “I’m afraid so.” Elbows on the table, Poppy skimmed back her cloud of curls with both hands. “He really does have an eye for talent. But he only used the reenactments in tiny doses. It was the interviews that really sold it. The whole thing was just so…compellingly presented.”
    Then her slender brows drew together. “Still. Whythe hell would he want to shoot one in the Wolcott mansion, which he had to know would be a hard sell, given it belongs to us now? Unless—?” Abruptly, she let go of her hair and snapped her spine erect.
    “Ho-ly shitskis, Av. You said he’ll landscape the ground back to the way it was in the eighties?”
    “Of course.” Jane, too, sat straighter. “The break-in where Miss Agnes’s guy was killed and the Wolcott diamonds disappeared.”
    “That would be the unsolved mystery,” Ava agreed.
    In 1985, during a remodel of Miss Agnes’s bed-and-sitting-room, her suite of diamond jewelry had been stolen. Late one night six months later, “her man, Henry,” as she always referred to him, heard a noise and came out of the office where he’d been working to find Mike Maperton, the head carpenter from the remodel, inside the mansion. Henry tripped the alarm, but Maperton killed him before help could arrive. It was assumed the construction worker had been retrieving the jewelry from where he’d hidden it, but if so, it was never recovered.
    Jane smiled crookedly. “I always got the impression, whenever Miss A referred to Henry, that he was a lot more to her than just a factotum or man of business or whatever the heck he was supposed to be.”
    Poppy shrugged. “We all did. What’s your point?”
    “Damned if I know, except that I can see the story playing out in a documentary.” Jane hooked her hair behind her ears. “And I hate to admit it, but it would be nice to have the financial burden taken off our shoulders for a while. But Miss A was one of a kind—so, unless Gallari’s scored Streep to play her, I can’t imagine the actress who could do her justice.”
    “I’d like to talk to you about something that’srelated to the Miss A part, but first I should probably tell you—” okay, this is the tricky part “—that I, um, agreed to work for him next week, then for an additional six weeks during the actual production, which starts around the first of the year.”
    “Are you out of your freaking mind?” Poppy kept her voice low to prevent two nearby little girls eating the frosting off their cupcakes from overhearing, but her tone held a fierce edge.
    “Maybe.” Tough to take offense when she’d been asking herself the same thing way too frequently since walking away from Cade last night. “Probably, even. My first impulse when he approached me was the same ole, same ole—to either spit in his eye or gouge them both out.”
    Straightening her shoulders, she looked from one friend’s face to the other. “But that’s just a knee-jerk reflex.”
    “One that totally works for me,” Jane interjected in a dry tone.
    Ava shook her head. “He’s old news, Janie. I am so over him. But you know how dicked up my finances have been the past year.” Her lips tilted wryly. “So when he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse as the production company’s personal concierge—I didn’t.”
    Watching her with concern-filled eyes, neither Janie nor Poppy smiled back and Ava sighed. “What? You think I’m too fragile to handle it?”
    “No, of course not,” Jane said. “But I don’t trust that bastard as far as I can throw him. We were there the last time he got up close and personal with you and had to watch you struggle to put yourself back together.”
    “It was a piece-by-piece process,” Poppy agreed, “that took way too long and