Where Beauty Lies (Sophia and Ava London) Read Online Free Page A

did?”
    “No, but this means something and I think we should try to figure it out.”
    Sophia shrugged, clearly unconvinced. “Call the police then.”
    Ava had, and although the officer she spoke to was polite, it was pretty clear that Sophia was right. “No, dear, there’s no need for you to hold on to the note,” the officer told her. “We won’t be coming to take fingerprints. That note won’t change anything. Go ahead and throw it away.”
    She hadn’t quite been able to throw the note away, but she’d told herself that was absolutely the end of her thinking about Dalton. If the evidence against him was so strong that even the police weren’t interested in a new lead, she would be a fool to hold out any hope of being with him. Or rather of his being innocent. He’d made his feelings about her perfectly clear.
    The only boy she needed in her life, she decided, was the one in the pet carrier beneath the airplane seat in front of her, where she could now see him curled protectively around Sophia’s kitten, Charming, who her sister finally named after joking that no matter who her true love turned out to be, she’d already met her Prince Charming.
    A male voice from the row behind her and Sophia broke into her thoughts, saying, “Fashion week ninjas ready to serve.” She turned to see MM, Sven, and Lily wrapped in scarves from their necks to their eyeballs. “Hard on cold, soft on skin,” he explained. “We don’t have time for germs.”
    “Or chapped lips,” Lily added. “They impede the ability to bark orders.”
    “An unstoppable team,” Ava said, feeling very lucky.
    Wrapped up like that, the disparity in height between MM, who was five foot five and wiry, and Sven, who was nearly seven feet tall and a solid wall of muscle, was hilarious. Their height was just the beginning of the differences between them—MM was dark, with cinnamon-colored skin and dark hair, while Sven was blond with blue eyes and skin the pink of a peach; MM dressed impeccably with an incredible attention to detail, while Sven’s entire wardrobe consisted of jeans and T-shirts.
    MM had taken two months off from his clients to join their team as a stylist. His boyfriend Sven had come along to lend moral support, as well as his expertise, having walked the male catwalk once. And Lily had come along as the self-appointed “pet and Contessa wrangler.”
    In the aisle seat next to her Ava heard Sophia say into her phone, “Yes, all safe and sound. I’ll call you when we’re settled. You too. Bye.” She hung up and smiled at Ava as the line down the exit row started to move. “Ready?”
    All that was left to do now was cast the models, put the finishing touches on the collection, and go. Three weeks, one day, two—now one and a half—hours should be plenty.
    “No,” Ava said. “Terrified. You?”
    “Same,” Sophia agreed. “But that’s always how it starts, right?”
    They linked pinkies. “Let’s go.”
    *   *   *
    Four hours after they landed at JFK they were sitting in the sunken gold-and-black living room of the ten-bedroom, twenty-third-floor condo overlooking the Hudson River that the Contessa had installed them in, drinking tea with a reporter from one of their favorite fashion magazines.
    “Your story is really incredible,” she said wonderingly. “Two girls with no fashion experience at all launch a runway collection in one of the most desirable tents at New York Fashion Week.” She put her teacup down. “I have to say, it sounds almost too good to be true.”
    “That’s what we thought,” Sophia told her. “But that’s how it happened.”
    The reporter was young and pretty and chic, wearing a black dress with almost no makeup, black-rimmed glasses, and bright red lipstick. She had handwritten notes on a pad next to her, but there was a recorder on the gold-lacquer coffee table, so it felt more like a conversation than a formal interview. “And you got no outside assistance. There’s no