“ ‘Newfangled’?’ Marjorie Bedford echoed, as if repeating the outlandish word would somehow make it go away. She leaned her forearms on the massive mahogany desk that was hers by right of being Paradise Purchased Properties’ top saleswoman. Behind her, floor-to-ceiling windows framed a glittering panorama of New York City from a very expensive height. “Did I actually hear you call the Carème 6000 Mequizeen ‘newfangled’?”

“Would you like me to call it a ‘contraption’ while I’m at it?” Emily June Newcomb replied tartly. She tossed back her golden hair and added: “I’m willing to throw in a couple of complimentary ‘goldangs’ and maybe a ‘consarn it’ or two, if you insist, but ‘yeehaw’ costs extra.”

“I assure you, Ms. Newcomb, I didn’t mean to insult you,” Marjorie said hastily. “I was simply… charmed by your colorful choice of words.”

“Bullshit, ma’am,” Emily said without raising her voice. She didn’t have to: a woman with her celebrity-level good looks was always heard. “How’s that for colorful? I know what you really think of me and my family. I just wish that when you were showing us the house, I wasn’t the only one who noticed the way you kept giving Mama and Daddy those condescending little smirks every time they oohed and aahed over all the fancy tricks that deathtrap could do. It was like you were at the zoo, thinking ‘What clever little monkeys. Why, they’re almost human!’ Instead of the fruit basket and bottle of swill you gave us as a moving-in gift, why didn’t you just buy us a welcome mat that said Hicks With Money?”

Marjorie felt her cheeks heat with the intense blush of an amoral wife caught by hubby ’twixt the sheets with the pool boy. (Which indeed was how Marjorie’s last-marriage-but-one had ended.) Damn this girl, she thought. How dare she? How dare she be so bloody right, the sow?