Island Getaway, An Art Crime Team Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page A

have made a fool of herself like that. Astrid had beauty
and poise.
    On the other hand, if Astrid had been along,
Annika wouldn’t have met Nick.
    Or maybe, if Astrid had been along, he’d
have asked her to dinner instead.
    So maybe it was better that Annika was alone
after all. At least this way it’d be her he looked at across the
dinner table, and not her sister.
    She bit her lip, gazing up at the blue dress
again. It looked expensive. Like it would cost more than she’d ever
spent on a single garment in her life. More than all the clothes in
her closet put together.
    But if wearing that dress would make her
feel pretty, like she wouldn’t be out of place with a handsome and
dashing James Bond type... wouldn’t the price be worth it? It
wasn’t like she did this all the time. And she was on
vacation. She hadn’t brought anything along that was suitable for a
date. She hadn’t expected to go on any. Her suitcase was full of
boring skirts and blouses, the kind of clothes she wore to work,
and then a couple pairs of shorts—in case the weather was warm—and
jeans—in case it wasn’t. No pretty dresses. No dresses at all,
except for the one she’d been wearing on the flight. Black.
Shapeless. Mourning.
    She needed this blue dress. And when she got
back to her Brooklyn apartment, and life returned to normal, she
could put it on once in a while and remember having dinner in Gamla
Stan with a man who looked like James Bond.
    Or if nothing else, she could go inside and
find out how much it was. Maybe hold it up to herself to get an
idea of how it might look. If it wasn’t too horribly expensive and
seemed like it might look reasonably well, maybe she could try it
on. That didn’t mean she’d have to buy it. It was just to see how
it looked on. If she didn’t like it, she’d just hand it back and
walk out.
    No harm in just trying it on, was there? And
she did need—want—something nice to wear to dinner. She didn’t want
him to be embarrassed to be seen with her. Even if he’d just asked
because...
    She had no idea why he’d asked. And she
wasn’t going to find out unless she went. And to do that, she
needed a dress. This dress.
    Taking a deep breath, Annika squared her
shoulders and pushed open the door.
    When she came out ten minutes later, her credit card was emitting
screams of agony from the bottom of her purse, but she did have
everything she needed for dinner. Everything money could buy that
she thought might come in useful, anyway. The blue dress, with a
wrap to wear over it, in case the restaurant was chilly. A pair of
silver sandals that matched the silver threads in the wrap. Pink
polish, to put on her toenails. A pair of dangly earrings—the girl
had called them chandeliers, and that’s what they looked like—that
matched the dress and the shoes. A bracelet that matched the
earrings. She’d even let herself be talked into a set of new
underthings. Once the salesgirl found out that she was shopping for
a date, she’d wanted to make sure that Annika would be prepared for
any eventuality, and rather than ruin the illusion by explaining
that there was no chance at all that Nick would get to—or want
to—see her underwear, Annika had let herself be persuaded to buy a
pale blue lingerie set that the girl said would make any man drool.
If Nick did any drooling, it would be over the food, but the satin
bra was padded, and so did a little bit to plump up her own almost
non-existent assets, while the lacy panties were what the girl
called ‘boy-cut,’ which was a relief, since some of the things
Annika had seen had looked more like dental floss than underwear.
She imagined the lace might turn out to be a bit scratchy, but she
could live with it for a few hours. It wasn’t something she’d want
to wear every day, she imagined, but maybe next time she needed
underwear, she could move a step up from Hanes Her Way.
    She could definitely move a step up
from Hanes Her Way, she decided two hours later,