Something inside me snapped. “You can shove your permission up your—”
“Smile,” he murmured, leaning toward me “For the press.”
I glanced back and saw a photographer. Alisa had dragged me to this party to tell a story, not make a scene.
“You really should smile more, pretty girl.”
“I’m not that pretty,” I said quietly. “And you’re not my father.”
Ricky Grambs accepted a bottled beer from the bartender. He lifted it to his lips, but not before I saw his bulletproof charm waver.
Does he know that I’m not his? Is that why he’s never cared? Why I never mattered?
Ricky recovered. “I may not have been there as much as either of us would have liked, Ladybug, but I was never more than a phone call away, and I’m here now to make things right.”
“You’re here for the money.” It took everything in me not to yell. Instead, I lowered my voice enough that he had to lean forward to hear it. “You’re not going to get a dime. My legal team will bury you. You refused to take custody when Mom died. You think a judge won’t see through your sudden interest now?”
He stuck his chin out. “You weren’t alone after your mom. My Libby took good care of you.” He clearly expected credit for that, when he’d never done a damn thing for Libby, either.
“You never even signed my birth certificate,” I gritted out. I half expected him to deny it.
Instead, he gulped the rest of the beer and placed the empty bottle on the bar. I stared him down for a second or two, then picked up the bottle, turned, and walked toward Alisa, who was still trying to get around Max.
I handed my lawyer the beer bottle. “I want a DNA test,” I murmured.
Alisa stared at me for a moment, then schooled her face into a perfect pleasant expression. “And I want you to go find a half dozen items to bid on in the silent auction.”
I accepted the terms of her deal. “Done.”
CHAPTER 33
I had no idea how a silent auction worked, but Max, high on shrimp and her victory in distracting Alisa, quickly caught me up on what she’d managed to glean. “There’s a sheet beneath each item. Bidders write down their names and their bids. If you want to outbid someone, you write your name below theirs.” Max strode over to what appeared to be a teddy bear and upped the high bid by two hundred and fifty dollars.
“Did you just bid eight hundred dollars for a teddy bear?” I asked her, aghast.
“A mink teddy bear,” Max told me. “Pearl Earrings over there is stalking this auction.” My best friend nodded to a woman who looked to be in her seventies. “She wants that bear and doesn’t care if she has to slice a motherfaxer’s neck to get it.”
Sure enough, a few minutes later, the woman glided by the teddy bear and scrawled down another bid.
“I’m a philanthropist,” Max declared. “So far, I’ve cost the people in this room ten thousand dollars!”
All things considered, she really should have been the heiress. With a shake of my head, I circled the room, looking at the items on auction. Art. Jewelry. A designated parking space. The farther I walked, the bigger ticket the items became. Designer purses. A Tiffany sculpture. A private chef dinner for ten. A yacht party for fifty.
“The real big-ticket items are in the live auction,” Max told me. “From what I’ve gathered, you donated most of them.”
This was unreal. This life was never going to stop being unreal.
“Personally,” Max said, adopting a snooty accent, “I think you should bid on the tickets to the Masters at Augusta. With housing.”
I looked her dead in the eye. “I have no idea what that means.”
She grinned. “Neither do I!”
Alisa had told me to bid, so I circled the room again. There was a basket of high-end makeup. Bottles of wine and scotch with high bids that nearly made my eyes bulge out of their sockets. Backstage passes. Vintage pearls.
None of this was me.
Eventually, I saw a grandfather clock. The description said it had been carved by a retired Country Day football coach. It was simple but perfect. Across the room, Alisa nodded at me. I gulped and upped the current high bid by what the page informed me was the minimum.
I felt nauseous.
“It’s for a good cause,” Max assured me. “Sort of.”
This school didn’t need a new chapel any more than I needed a bronzed sculpture of a cowboy on the back of a wild, bucking bull, but I bid on that, too. I bid on a baking lesson with a local pastry chef for Libby and doubled down on the mink teddy bear for Max. And then I saw the photograph.