Secrets Read Free Page B

Skylar had handed Cassie her expensive silk jacket and asked her to “give it a little bit of a press, would you?” Cassie had smiled, taken the jacket to the laundry room, and set the hot iron on the back of it and burned a hole through it. Afterward, she’d apologized profusely and even offered to buy a replacement. She said she’d seen that very jacket at Marshalls just last week. That had sent Skylar into a rage, insisting that she’d bought the jacket at Saks, not at a discount store.
    Cassie was sure she wouldn’t have been as bad as she was if Thomas hadn’t been standing in the doorway and covering his laughter with his hand. They had never spoken of it, but she was sure he disliked the woman as much as Cassie did.
    As for Jeff, he was clueless. He kept saying that Cassie was usually so good at what she did, so he was sure that the ruined jacket was an honest mistake.
    The result was that Skylar never again tried to establish her authority over Cassie, but war had been declared. If Skylar did marry Jeff, Cassie would be out of a job, out of a home, out of a family.
    But worse, she’d be sent away from the man she’d loved since she was twelve years old.

2
    â€œ I HATE HER ,” Skylar said. “I don’t mean I dislike her. I mean that I hate her right down to my bone marrow. With every molecule I possess. I stay awake at night planning ways to kill her. At first I thought of putting her in her place with some witty remark that would reduce her to tears, but now I think of blood. You want to hear the latest thing I’ve come up with?”
    Dana wanted to say that she’d rather do most anything than hear yet another method Skylar had come up with for killing Jefferson Ames’s nanny. But Dana knew she had to be nice, if for no other reason than because Skylar was her husband Roger’s friend. And, more importantly, because Skylar came from four generations of money and Roger’s law firm was handling all the business of Skylar’s father’s company. “I lose that account and I might as well kiss my job good-bye,” Roger had said the morning after she’d met Skylar. “I know she can be a bit hard to take sometimes, but her family is rich and I need the business. Do it for me, will you?”
    As always, Dana had agreed.
    â€œWhat did you come up with?” Dana asked, trying to smile at Skylar, but she wanted to ask if she’d yet wheedled a marriage proposal out of Jefferson Ames. Why oh why didn’t Jeff just go ahead and marry Skylar?
    â€œYou’re not afraid that if she doesn’t marry him she’ll go after Roger, are you?” her mother had asked last week.
    â€œNo, of course not. That’s absurd,” Dana quickly said, but it had sounded false even to her. That’s exactly what she was afraid of.
    Her husband and Skylar had been “old friends” since college. However, Dana’s idea of friends and theirs didn’t seem to be the same. Roger and Skylar hadn’t been study buddies, nor had they run around together in a group. No, they had been lovers, “almost engaged” was the way Skylar put it. They had met on the first day they entered Princeton and had been inseparable for almost two years. “We taught each other everything we know about anything,” Skylar said the first time Dana met her, howling with laughter over the double entendre. The first time she’d met Skylar, Dana worked for a day and a half preparing a meal that Roger would declare fit for his old “friend.” At the time, Dana’d had no idea what kind of friendship they’d had.
    â€œRemember the time we went out with Beth and Andy and the car broke down?” Skylar asked, waving a piece of roast about on her fork. “There we were, stuck in the middle of nowhere, and it began to rain.” She took a sip of her wine, barely able to hold in her laughter. “But there was a