“Sorry about your friend,” Tony said with genuine sympathy. Those brown eyes, so sincere, penetrated all the sturdy barriers she’d constructed around her heart. With just one look, he could remind her that life didn’t have to be this way. “Really, I’m sorry. I saw her lift the wallet from across the room.”

So he’d seen her first. He’d been watching her. Elaine tried to figure out how she felt about that. “Um, thanks again,” she said. Suddenly she found herself terrified of him walking away. But he would, of course. That’s what everyone had been doing all her life. There had been a time when she’d thought he was different, but that had only been wishful thinking. Oh, she wanted him to stay. She wanted him to sit down and tell her that her life wasn’t as awful as it seemed, that she’d just hit a speed bump. She wanted him to explain why he’d filled her head with dreams, then disappeared.

He stepped back as though to move on to the next table, but Elaine put out her hand to stop him. “Hey, not so fast.” She scooted over in the booth. “Join us, Tony. We’re not letting you leave.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m about ready to turn in my numbers at the ice rink for the day, anyway. Thanks to you ladies, I’m looking fine. I’m just sorry your friend’s not so fine.”

“Yeah. Are you okay?” Melanie asked Elaine. “I know you thought the world of Bobbi.”

Elaine burned with self-loathing over her foolishness. She was supposed to know better than to give her heart. Hadn’t she learned that lesson? “I guess I should associate with a better class of people.” She could hear echoes of her mother in the statement and cringed inwardly.

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Melanie said. “She had us all fooled, every one of us. What a day you’re having, Elaine. First Byron, now this.” She turned to Tony. “We usually have a sense of humor about these things. With a clientele like ours, we need it.”

He leaned toward Elaine with genuine interest. Just as he had years ago, he managed to make her feel as though she mattered. “So she was a client?”

“No, we invented her,” Jenny said. “It was Elaine’s idea.”

“She started out as a transplant from a mill town in the South,” Elaine explained, “selling sandwiches from a cart in our office building while trying to get an agent. We fixed her up, and before you knew it, she was clubbing with the Fixtures and Jade, wearing stuff from boutiques no ordinary human can afford, featured in magazines, that sort of thing. Everyone wanted her. She was the new cover girl on the block.”

Melanie whirled a candy-cane swizzle stick in her drink. “It was a pure display of power.”