Good to Be Bad (Double Dare Book 1) Read online

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  GOOD TO BE BAD

  Emma Sutcliffe is content playing the Good Twin to her glamorous, self-assured double, Zara, a literary superagent. Emma’s life is comfortable, predictable… if somewhat humdrum. But after she walks a mile in her sister’s yellow leather miniskirt and mile-high stilettos—hounded by a smoking hot surgeon-turned-thriller-writer who’s convinced she’s Zara—there’s no going back.

  Gage Foster flew all the way to New York for a meeting with Zara Sutcliffe, and now she’s trying to stand him up? Oh, hell no! He may be a laid-back son of the South, and she may be just about the sexiest thing he’s ever seen, but that doesn’t mean he’s about to sit still for that kind of high-handed bullshit. He’ll dog her heels until she gives him what he wants.

  Good to be Bad, a finalist for Romance Writers of America's RITA® Award, is Book One in the Double Dare two-part romantic suspense miniseries by identical-twin authors Patricia Ryan and Pamela Burford. Each book is a standalone romance and can be read and enjoyed on its own. The suspense storyline that begins in Good to be Bad concludes in Pamela’s Twice Burned.

  For a complete list of Patricia’s titles, tap “ALSO BY THE AUTHOR” in the table of contents below.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DOUBLE DARE BOOK TWO

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  I’M GONNA SELL MOM’S RAY GUN.”

  “You’re gonna sell what?” Hunching her shoulder to bring her phone more firmly against her ear, Emma Sutcliffe squatted down to slice open one of the twenty-three boxes piled up in the living room of her new house.

  “The ray gun,” Zara repeated. “You know. The one she used in Reptile Bride.”

  Emma cracked open the box, on which she’d Sharpied “Mysteries, Q-T,” removed her carefully folded list of its contents and trailed her fingers lovingly over the paperbacks within. “You mean Atomic Bride.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Wait a minute.” Emma scooped out a double handful of tattered whodunits and rose to slide them into one of the eight bookcases she’d bought at garage sales and refinished. “I think it was Return of the Atomic Bride. That was the one with the ray guns. They used flamethrowers in Atomic Bride, remember?”

  “No,” Zara snapped across the thousands of miles that separated them. “I don’t remember. I’m afraid I have better things to do with my life than commit every detail of Candy Carmelle’s movie career to memory.”

  “This is our mother’s movie career we’re talking about here,” Emma said. “But, as usual, you’re too wrapped up in being fabulous to pay any attention to—”

  “Excuse me?” Zara’s voice turned shrill. Emma instantly regretted having goaded her. She kept promising herself—they both kept promising each other—that they’d try to keep from combusting on contact. On the one hand, they were closer to each other than to anyone else on earth, having been cut, as it were, from the same yard of cloth. Deep down, they shared a love that nothing would ever touch. But when identical twins turned into polar opposites, with completely different views of the world, just getting along became a monumental challenge. “In case it’s escaped your notice, Emma, I’ve been paying a heck of a lot of attention to Mom lately. It’s been kind of unavoidable, considering she’s been living with me for the past month. Her and her ray guns and rubber brains and swamp-monster flippers. I’ve got walls I paid seven thousand dollars to have sponge-painted, and she—”

  “You paid seven thousand dollars for that? I wrote an article on sponge-painting for House Beautiful a few months ago. You could have done it yourself for about fifty bucks.”

  Zara dismissed that notion with an incredulous snort. “Can’t you just see me in my little painter’s overalls and cap?” Somehow Emma couldn’t. “I had the walls done P.D. Predivorce. Money was no object then. Anyway, I’ve got these gorgeous, expensive walls, and Mom went and Scotch-taped movie posters all over them. And that’s not all. Last week, she snuck into my phone and changed my—”

  “Snuck into your phone? Don’t you have a passcode? Oh, wait, you use the same one for everything, right? The one that’s based on our birthday? The one you’ve been using ever since you got your first school locker? The one Mom’s known, like, forever?”

  “Yeah, well, she changed my voicemail greeting. So when Ron Amory called me to negotiate a seven figure deal—he’s an executive editor at Simon and Schuster, and a total stone hunk—he heard Mom screeching, ‘They’re coming! Don’t you see them? You must see them!’”

  “That’s her big speech from The Slithering,” Emma offered.

  “And then she shrieked in terror until the beep came. That crazy bitch’s idea of a joke.”

  “Hey, not cool, Zara. Don’t be calling our mother a bitch.”

  “I call you a bitch all the time. My girlfriends, too. It’s a term of endearment nowadays, Grandma.”

  “Emma sighed heavily. “Mom… I know she’s difficult sometimes, and she’s eccentric, but I love her.”

  “I do, too—you know that. And if I’m honest, Ron loved Mom’s little performance, told me it was the funniest voicemail greeting he’d ever heard, and he didn’t realize what a great sense of humor I had, and would I like to meet him after work for drinks one of these evenings. So no harm done, but still…”

  “No harm done? Sounds to me like you owe Mom a thank-you.”

  “She snuck into my phone! Behind my back!”

  “Have you changed the greeting back to the way it was?” Emma asked.

  There came a tell-tale pause. “I will… I just haven’t gotten around to it. Go ahead and laugh” Zara said in response to Emma’s snort of amusement. “You can’t imagine what it’s been like, sharing an apartment with Ye Olde Scream Queen.”

  “Yes, I can.” She’d been imagining it a lot lately—ever since last month, when Candy Carmelle had had a falling-out with her much younger boyfriend and stormed out of his houseboat. Candy had spent the last of her savings on a bus ticket from Florida to Manhattan, showing up at Zara’s apartment on Easter Sunday with three trunks full of old movie props and an expectation of permanent residency.

  Emma recalled Zara’s panicked phone call and the deal they’d struck. As Candy’s only children, the twins would take turns providing a home for her, starting, by default, with Zara. Emma’s first turn would commence as soon as she’d gotten settled into her new house. If this had happened before Zara’s ugly divorce last year, Zara would simply have bought Candy her own place and that would have been that. But she’d gotten socked with having to pay Tony a hefty settlement and had been rebuilding her bank account ever since.

  “So, are you all moved in yet?” Zara asked hopefully.

  “No.” Emma grabbed another two fistfuls of books and jammed them in the bookcase, careful to keep the authors in alphabetical order.

  “Well, get moved in. As soon as I get back from Australia, you’re getting Mom.”

  Emma bit her lip and thought fast. “I really need some time to get the place—”

  “Save it, Em.”

  Emma shook her head at the futility of trying to dicker with a merciless negotiator like Zara Sutcliffe. “When will you be coming back?”

  �
��Dunno, I should have been back already, but the situation here is incendiary, and I can’t leave now.”

  All Emma knew about “the situation here” was what she’d heard last night on one of those guilty pleasure tabloid shows while she was organizing her dishes and cookware in the kitchen:

  It’s time to play a little game of where in the world is Zara Sutcliffe! The divalicious 29-year-old superagent has been getting more ink lately than the bestselling authors she represents. Not only is she a fixture in the New York and L.A. club scenes, but she’s been making headlines with some red-hot hardcover-slash-movie deals. Well, trouble seems to be brewing on the set of one of those movies, Endless Sky, being filmed on location in Australia. Word is her client, novelist-screenwriter Maxine Moore, is incensed over changes to the script, the upshot of which is that she, the producer, the director and half the cast are at each other’s throats. Zara Sutcliffe was called in to defuse the situation.

  Zara was talking about the ray gun again, and how she was going to sell it, and how that would solve all their Candy Carmelle problems forever.

  “Wait a minute.” Emma dumped her handful of books back in the box and held her palm up, like a cop directing traffic. “Back up and start over.” Like Zara, Emma loved her mother. She adored her mother, despite her eccentricities; sometimes because of them. But no way did she want to live with her mother. Moving from bucolic rural Maine to this dismal little rented house in Queens, New York, had been traumatic enough; throwing Candy Carmelle into the mix would turn a difficult situation into a nightmare. If there was an alternative to that, she wanted to hear it.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” Zara said. “Mom’s phone rang the other day, and she asked me to pick up, ’cause she was in the middle of one of those mayonnaise hair treatments.”

  “She still does that?”

  “Don’t laugh. Her hair is fucking amazing. I’m thinking of trying it. So anyway, I answer the phone, and it’s this guy MacGowan Byrne. I recognized the name. He deals in hard-to-find collectibles. One of my authors, who’s pushing ninety, sold him a complete set of her first editions last year, but of course he robbed her—she should have consulted me first. Anyway, he has this mysterious client who wants to fill out his collection of movie weapons, and he’s looking for guess what.”

  “The ray gun from Return of the Atomic Bride.”

  “Bingo. He wanted me to talk to Mom, ’cause he heard she’d kept lots of props from her movies. I told him she had the ray gun, but he’d have to deal with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? For one thing, she’d probably refuse to even consider selling off one of her precious props. Even if she were willing to, can you see her negotiating a price? I cut deals for a living. Guess how much he offered for it.”

  Emma rolled her eyes. “Gee, I dunno, Zara. What’s the Blue Book value on ray guns this year?”

  “Come on—take a guess.”

  “It’s a ray gun, Zara. I can’t begin to imagine what someone would be willing to pay for something like that, or why he’d even want it, for that matter.”

  “He offered three thousand dollars,” Zara said.

  “Seriously? Someone’s gonna pay three thousand dollars for that worthless—”

  “Of course not.”

  “Huh?”

  “I got him up to two million,” Zara announced smugly.

  Emma snorted. “Har har.”

  There came a languorous transcontinental sigh. “You would have given it away for a measly three thou, wouldn’t you? No, don’t answer that. It’s too scary to contemplate.”

  Emma squinted at a curtainless window with a torn plastic shade. “Be straight with me, Zara. This is us. How much is he really gonna—”

  “Two million big ones, sis. You shouldn’t be so surprised. It’s kind of insulting, you know. I do this kind of stuff for a living. I’m famous the world over for my cutthroat deals, and here you’re suggesting I’d give up a valuable collectible for—”

  “Valuable? Collectible? It’s a toy gun, for cryin’ out loud. A forgotten prop from a thirty-year-old horror movie nobody even remembers.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Zara said with irritating patience, “and that’s why it’s a good thing I was in charge of this deal. That gun is far from forgotten. Someone remembers it very well. And wants it very badly.”

  “Who? Who in their right mind would be willing to pay that kind of money for a ray gun?”

  “Mac’s very—”

  “Mac?”

  “MacGowan Byrne,” Zara said. “Everyone calls him Mac. He’s very secretive—he won’t reveal his client’s name. Somebody famous, probably, who doesn’t want any publicity. As for being in his right mind, you can forget that. Collectors are squirrely as hell. If they get fixated on getting something, they’ll pay anything for it. Up to a point, of course. In my line of work, you develop a sixth sense for somebody’s top price, and in this case, I knew it was two mill.”

  “Wait a minute. This collector—this anonymous nut job who can’t live without that ray gun—authorized Mac to go from three thousand to two million?”

  “Could be he just offered Mac a chunk of change and said, ‘Get it for me.’ That’s the way these things work sometimes. Of course, once the dealer locates the object, he tries to pay as little as possible for it, ’cause the difference between what he pays and what the collector pays him is his profit.”

  “So the collector is paying this Mac guy even more than two million?”

  “I assume so, otherwise he wouldn’t have accepted my price. I don’t know and I don’t really care, but I’ll tell you one thing.” Zara chuckled with evident self-satisfaction. “He’s making a lot less of a profit than he thought he would. That’s the last time he’ll underestimate the negotiating savvy of Zara Sutcliffe, I can tell you that.”

  Something in Zara’s tone set off Emma’s uh-oh alarm. Hiding beneath her sister’s brash self-confidence, she knew, was a wobbly kneed little girl trying to prove herself. Ninety-nine percent of the time, Zara Sutcliffe was the shrewd, eerily unflappable businesswoman the press portrayed her to be. But every once in a while someone would push that button of hers—usually by acting condescending or otherwise underestimating her, on account of her looks or glamorous reputation—and she’d turn back into the defensive, I’ll-show-everybody child she’d once been. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, her knee-jerk response was to haggle the offending party to his knees, and then some. They’d walk away from the table defeated, perplexed... and often angry. From the sound of it, this MacGowan Byrne had been on the receiving end of Zara’s negotiating wrath, and that made Emma nervous.

  “Who is this guy, really?” Emma asked. “What do you know about him, except that he ripped off one of your authors for her first editions?”

  “I investigated him.” Zara sounded almost indignant. “He’s legit.”

  “Define investigated.”

  “I Googled him. He’s an established dealer in art and collectibles.”

  “You know, Zara, there’s more to investigating someone than Googling him. Anyone can set up a website. A thorough background check would have revealed his credit record, any criminal history, business improprieties...”

  Zara laughed derisively. “And now for another episode of Emma Sutcliffe, Girl P.I.”

  “Doesn’t it make you nervous, knowing so little about this guy?”

  “I know enough. Jesus! Paranoid much?”

  Emma changed tack. “What does Mom know?”

  “Mom?”

  “Have you told her about this yet?” Emma asked.

  There came a pause. “See...”

  “Were you planning on telling her?”

  “See, this is the thing, Emma.”

  “Were you?”

  “If we go ahead and sell it, then give her the money, it’s a done deal. She’ll be two million dollars richer. She can invest it in mutual funds, or maybe an annuity, and live comfortably—more
than comfortably—for the rest of her life. She can finance that exercise video she keeps talking about. She can travel. But most important, she can buy her own place.”

  “She’ll be mad at us,” Emma warned.

  “Oh, she’ll go totally bitchcakes. But she’ll get over it On the other hand, if we ask her permission first, more than likely she’ll say no. You know her—she’s insanely sentimental about all that movie junk. And after all, what does she need money for? She has no expenses as long as she’s living with us. We’re not gonna charge her room and board. We’re just gonna put up with her, day after day, year after year, decade after—”

  “Oh, God,” Emma moaned, sinking cross-legged to the floor.

  “So you’ll go along with selling the ray gun?”

  Emma hesitated. “I need time to think about it.”

  “You always ‘need time to think about it.’ That’s the story of your fucking life, Emma.”

  “I don’t like to rush into things.”

  “Correction—you’re terrified of rushing into things. I worry about you, honey. Really. I’m not saying this to be a pain in the ass, believe it or not, I’m saying it because I care. You’re terrified of change, of making decisions, of meeting new people, of taking risks.... Don’t you ever stop and wonder whether you’re missing anything?”

  All the time, Emma thought soberly.

  “Life is passing you by, Emma.”

  No kidding.

  “I’m amazed you got it together to move.”

  So am I. Relocating had been the hardest thing she’d ever had to do, but she’d had no choice. When CraftWorld magazine, which had published most of her freelance articles, bit the dust, she’d been forced by economic necessity to take the only decent-paying offer that came her way, a staff position at DIYhomecrafts.com. Only that had meant moving to New York City. Writing about “Festive EZ-Quilt Holiday Vests” and “Brightening your Life with Decoupage Switchplates” had long since lost its charm, and now she’d get to do it full-time, and have a boss and a little cubicle, and live in this swarming hellhole of a city to boot. And she’d have even less time to finish plotting that whodunit she’d been meaning to write for about the last ten years. At least she’d been able to afford—barely—to rent this house instead of an apartment; she didn’t think she could have borne not having a yard. During the three days since her arrival in Queens, she’d done little but unpack. She hadn’t summoned up the courage to take the subway into Manhattan yet and was grateful that she didn’t have to report to work for another week.