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What I knew for sure was that a strange woman was in my car. What I didn’t know was whether she was dead or alive. Placing one hand lightly under her chin and grasping her hair in the other, I gently pulled back her head to reveal a lipstick-smeared face.
“A moment of clarity,” the woman said in an inebriated voice. “Get it? Clara-ty?”
I didn’t get it. I let go of her hair, and her face fell back on the steering wheel with a resounding thud. “Excuse me?” I said, shaking her shoulder and hoping she wasn’t dripping nosebleed blood all over my upholstery. “Miss?”
But there was no response. She was out cold. A drunken prostitute was unconscious in my car. One well-timed photo by a greedy paparazzo could put a half-million-dollar dent in my father’s annual hush-money budget. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
Oh, and one more thing.
Shit.
CHAPTER 3
Clara
A steering wheel was on my face. Or rather, my face was on a steering wheel.
I sat up, massaging the dents the wheel had left in my forehead, and peered outside. I was still on 63rd Street. The sun was just beginning to rise, which meant there was a very good chance my mother was still at the bar. Maybe I could text her and ask her to bring me a coffee. Make that an espresso. Two espressos. God, my head was killing me.
“Good morning, sunshine,” a voice said.
I jumped, then whirled toward the passenger seat, where a very pissed-off-looking man of about thirty was sitting.
“I see we’re up and ready to start our day,” he said.
Brown hair. Brown eyes. Looked like he hadn’t shaved in twenty-four hours, but very well dressed in neatly pressed khakis and a baby blue shirt with the top button unbuttoned. Not drop dead gorgeous, but not bad looking either.
“Do I know you?” I said.
“You’d certainly think so, what with you taking the liberty of sleeping one off in my car. But no, we’re meeting for the first time.” Smiling disingenuously, he waved goodbye. “Thank you for joining me in my car for the entire fucking night. I’ve truly enjoyed our time together, but I’m afraid it’s time for you to leave and never return.”
“This isn’t my car?” I said, looking down at the seat beneath my hungover ass. The upholstery was fine black leather, whereas the upholstery in my car was fine green duct tape. I raised my eyes. There was a state-of-the-art sound and navigation system built into the dashboard, whereas my car’s dashboard sported a state-of-the-art bullet hole (courtesy of the previous owner, something about a drug dealer with poor business etiquette). Nope, this was definitely not my car.
I turned my attention to the car’s rightful owner. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said for lack of something better to say. Speaking of pleasure, it occurred to me that there was a very awkward question I needed to ask. “I’m sorry, did we—”
“Fornicate?” he said. “No. I prefer my women sober. And conscious. And free-of-charge. I’m old-fashioned that way.”
“Then how’d I end up here?”
“Don’t know, don’t care,” he said. “All I know is that I had a drink at Geppetto’s last night, and when I returned to my car at ten o’clock, you were sitting in my driver’s seat very ironically saying the words ‘a moment of clarity.’”
Vaguely, I remembered thinking that “clarity” sounded like my name. Clara-ty. It seemed really funny at the time. Not so much now.
I tried to make a joke of it. “Well, thank you for not calling the police on me or pushing me out of the car onto the sidewalk.”
“Is that how most of your dates end?”
The stranger whose car I had broken into was starting to get on my nerves. “I wasn’t on a date! I was having a drink. With my mother.”
He pretended to look around the car. “Funny, I don’t see her anywhere. Should I check the trunk?”
“You know what?” I said, increasingly annoyed by his rudeness. “I’m really sorry I did whatever I did that made me end up in your car instead of mine. I get that I inconvenienced you and that this is all my fault, but your sarcasm isn’t helping.”
“Inconvenienced,” he repeated. “Interesting choice of words.”
I grabbed my purse from the console. “I’ll be out of your hair in a minute. Let me just find my...” I began digging through my purse. “Crap, do you see my car keys anywhere? They must have fallen out of my bag.”
We both began looking around, under the seats, in the cup holders, and in the glove compartment. But our search came up empty. “Are you sure you had them on you?” the man said. “Maybe you—oh, for God’s sake.”
