Hot Property Read online

  Hot Property

  Michele, Samantha, and Sabrina Kleier

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to our guardian angel Jonathan Kleier. Jonathan, you helped us write this book and now you are immortalized forever. This is all for you. We miss you every second of every day.

  Love You,

  The Family

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Kate

  Carnegie Hill Classic

  BACK ON THE MARKET—Five-room totally renovated prewar co-op. 2 spacious bedrooms, 2 baths, FDR, WBF, sunny, bright tree-lined views in this pet-friendly building steps from Central Park, shops, museums $2.3 million.

  Don’t get her wrong—she knows how lucky she is. Kate Chase is twenty-nine, bright and attractive, the daughter of devoted and generous parents, one of three children who are as close as any siblings could possibly be. Sometimes, in fact, it’s difficult for people outside the family to understand exactly how close Kate and Isabel and Jonathan are—how they would almost always prefer to spend time in each other’s company than in anyone else’s. The three of them grew up together in a classic nine on Park Avenue—one of those spacious, high-ceilinged prewar apartments designed by Rosario Candela in 1928—just around the corner from where she and Isabel have been living since Isabel, three years younger than Kate, graduated from college. Their parents, Elizabeth (named for Elizabeth Taylor, her own mother’s favorite movie star) and Tom, own Chase Residential, a wildly successful mom-and-pop boutique agency that specializes in the sale of high-end apartments throughout Manhattan, and the world they so comfortably inhabit affords all of them the great luxury of never having to worry too much about money. At least not if they don’t want to. Kate and her sister work alongside their parents in the family business (their brother, Jonathan, twenty-one, is a junior at Emory), and oh what a glamorous business it can be, ornamented by a sprinkling, here and there, of celebrities from the entertainment business, professional athletes, chefs with their own TV shows.

  Kate knows the family legend well: how Elizabeth started buying real estate young. When she was twenty-two, she and Kate’s father purchased their first home, a maisonette on 76th and West End Avenue (the building used in the original Stepford Wives and, coincidentally, the very building where Kate sold her first exclusive. When Kate went to pitch it with her mother, in fact, Elizabeth talked their way into giving Kate a peek at that lovely little maisonette, and was able to point out where her water broke and where Kate’s cradle had sat by the window).

  When Kate was seven weeks old, the Chase family sold the maisonette and moved across town to 92nd Street. (Elizabeth was always an Upper East Side girl; the West End Avenue apartment was a “blip” that they sold for a huge profit when they moved a couple of years later.) When Isabel was born, they sold 92nd Street (that one, on the east side, doubled in value thanks to a wise real estate decision, Tom’s upgrades, and an improving market) and moved to the nine-room on Park Avenue, where they are still today and will be forever.

  But at this moment Kate’s thoughts are elsewhere, focused on Scott, her boyfriend since the summer after her junior year at the University of Pennsylvania, someone with whom she’s had a long and tumultuous history, an on-again, off-again relationship that sometimes makes her wish they’d never been introduced that night at Smokey Joe’s near campus—a bar they always said reminded them of Cheers, where’d she’d gone with a couple of girlfriends for lemon drop shots (their college favorite). Scott, who’d already graduated and come back to visit friends, had been standing at the bar with a couple of fraternity friends, one of whom, Michael Prescott, would later become her sister Isabel’s boyfriend. Though her junior year feels long ago now, Kate remembers that night she and Scott met, and how, even in that hot, noisy bar where Neil Diamond’s “Forever in Blue Jeans” was playing on the jukebox, they had an impassioned conversation about Al Filreis, an English professor they’d both adored, a shy, middle-aged man with a Vandyke beard who lectured quietly but brilliantly about Shakespeare’s early plays. At some point, she recalls, Scott left his friends, and she left hers, and the two of them strolled along Locust Walk through the College Green and beyond, ending up at Franklin Field, Penn’s football stadium, where Scott pressed her against the wall and kissed her so sweetly and so ardently that she felt herself falling for him right then and there. After that first, lingering kiss, Kate opened her eyes to look at him. Very tall, with thick dark hair, a perfectly sculpted nose, gray eyes, a probing, even haunting gaze. He was very handsome, sort of like a young Richard Gere, she thought, and very intense. But when he smiled his incredibly charming smile, his eyes crinkled at the corners and two deep dimples punctuated his cheeks. He didn’t smile all that much, but when he did, Kate felt herself swooning.

  Tonight, though—a warmish Sunday evening in mid-April—after a dinner of empanadas with smoked chipotle salsa, grilled chicken marinated in fresh lime, and one too many margaritas in Maz Mezcal, a loud, darkened Mexican restaurant off Second Avenue, Scott leans across the table to grab the check, examines it under candlelight, and sighs so heavily that despite the ambient noisy chatter, Kate is able to decipher what lies beneath that sigh—obvious impatience, but also pent-up frustration with himself, and maybe even with her.

  “What is it, Scott?” she asks him.

  He shakes his head at her.

  “I’m guessing it’s not that the chicken was too burnt for you?” she says. Anyone who eats with Kate knows that she always orders her chicken very well done, almost burnt, she always tells the waiter. She knows what’s coming.

  “Kate,” Scott begins, “listen, I just—”

  “Not again!” Kate interrupts him quietly. “Don’t. Do not.” Her bright brown eyes, delicately mascaraed, fill with angry tears. She folds her manicured hands into fists, but keeps them in her lap. “I can’t believe you’re going to do this to me again,” she says.

  “I’m really, really sorry,” Scott says, but he can’t even look at her as he talks, his eyes focused, she sees, on the check, which he smoothes with the flat of his hand over and over, as if trying to calm himself. “So, um, you know what, I just don’t think it’s good that I keep going back and forth in my mind about us. I think this could really hurt you. And that’s why . . . maybe I need to take a step back—maybe a few steps back, and, I mean, I think we should take a breath and just not see each other for a while.”

  Why does he keep doing this to her? And why does she keep letting him? What’s wrong with her that she would allow herself to be put on hold like this again and again, never knowing if he’s going to return, never knowing if Scott will ever be willing to enter into a grown-up relationship? She’s already mentioned the idea of
couples therapy to him in the past in a desperate bid to save their relationship, despite the fact that the Chase family doesn’t really believe in therapy. Clearly she is grasping. . . .

  “Not see each other for a while?” Kate hears herself say, knowing it’s pointless to ask him about couples therapy again. “What does that mean? A week? A month?” She allows herself to hide behind the curtain of her shining brown, pin-straight hair, wanting to conceal her lovely, delicate-boned face from Scott—whether he’s looking at her or not—so he won’t see her weeping.

  Scott shrugs. “I just don’t know,” he tells her now. “I wish I did, but honestly, I have no idea what’s gonna happen with us. I don’t know what else to say, Kate.” He looks at her.

  She’s heard this from him more than once in the nearly seven years they’ve been seeing each other, on and off and on again, and each time it stung more than the last. She picks up the linen napkin draped across her lap and wipes her eyes with an unused corner. “You can’t do this to me, Scott,” she says, but she knows, even as she speaks, that this is a lie. He can do it, and will do it, because it’s he who controls the relationship, and because he is, in his way, the most juvenile, unsettled thirty-two-year-old she’s ever encountered. He lives with his friends in Brooklyn, and not one of them has a job that requires a wardrobe of suits and ties. Instead, Scott and his friends work as DJs at deafening, overheated clubs, or at magazines that seem always in danger of folding, or at Web sites in danger of being permanently shut down. Like Scott, almost all of them are from well-to-do families, and attended Ivy League schools. But though in their early thirties, they still seem indecisive, directionless, still uncertain of what they want to accomplish in this world.

  Unsettled, indecisive, and directionless though he is, Scott is beyond handsome, not to mention impressively well-read, utterly charming when he wants to be, and the love of her damn life. If only she could see some of that charm right now, just a smidgen of it, well, that would make her feel just the slightest bit better.

  Silently, Scott walks her several blocks back to her apartment. She’s hoping that he’ll suggest coming upstairs—so she can try to change his mind, of course—but to her further disappointment, he doesn’t.

  “Okay, I guess I gotta go,” he says as they approach the awning of her building. He tips his face downward and kisses the top of her head with a lovely gentleness that, over the years, she’s grown intimately familiar with and that she won’t ever forget.

  Tears spring to her eyes again; even though she’s furious with Scott, she has to admit there is still something incredibly seductive about him, and also something so appealingly sweet that she just can’t resist him.

  Except that she is going to have to, until he comes back to her.

  “Come on,” Scott is saying, “please don’t be angry at me. You know this is the way I am; I just need time to figure out what I want.”

  “You’ve been figuring out what you want since the day I met you,” Kate says. “You’re nearly thirty-five,” she adds, and immediately regrets it when, a moment later, she sees the stricken look that crosses his face.

  A neighbor who lives down the hall is out walking his Yorkie; the man, whom she knows only slightly, is smoking a cigarette while his dog Muffin, whom she knows well, stops as Kate bends down to put his nose in Kate’s hands and lick Kate’s fingers before sniffing around the flower beds. (She thinks about how cruel it is to smoke around a dog—or any other animal, for that matter.) Kate reaches over now and punches Scott’s arm sharply; the hug he gives her in return is accompanied by a kiss, an urgent, deeply romantic one, before he turns and leaves her outside the entrance to her building. “I hate you,” she murmurs, and then instructs herself not to watch as he lopes down the street and away from her in his faded jeans and black suede Nikes, his shoulders slightly hunched, leaving her feeling, yet again, utterly bewildered. And terribly lonely. It’s the sort of loneliness that all the well-meaning, generous-hearted love from her family can’t help. At least, that’s how it feels at this moment.

  She and her sister Isabel and their mother are three savvy businesswomen, but they are also old-fashioned romantics who will always believe in the sanctity of true love. And that, Kate tells herself as she rides upstairs in the elevator, is what will sustain her, whether or not Scott ever decides to come back to her.

  She drops her Vuitton Speedy bag onto the table in the entrance hall, ignores the copies of Vogue and New York Magazine that arrived in yesterday’s mail, walks across the large soft, white rug, and sinks into the delicious purple velvet Shabby Chic armchair in the living room across from the big built-in bookcases that are spilling over with her favorite novels from her and her sister Isabel’s days as English majors at Penn. They have saved every book they ever read, from Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence to her favorite Henry James story, the novella Daisy Miller, to D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, which they both read the spring of their junior year on the lawn of Horace Mann with their favorite English teacher, Dr. David Schiller. This is the cozy home she so happily shares with her sister: a two-bedroom, two-bath that is a mini version of her parents’ apartment on Park Avenue. The kitchen and bathrooms have been made to look old-fashioned again with the white subway tiles her father helped them pick out, along with the tea-for-two deep soaking bathtubs and the white wooden medicine cabinets. The windows look out onto the back of the building, facing south, a lovely glimpse of leafy trees that—green and covered in buds or snow-covered—Kate loves seeing when she awakens every morning. The view is just like the trees she woke up to every morning in her bedroom on the third floor, facing Park Avenue. She loves, too, all the framed photographs everywhere in the apartment, photographs of all her happy moments with her family; pictures of her and her brother and sister as children, all in the bathtub together in the Park Avenue apartment, Jonathan’s blond curls damp from the water she and Isabel had splashed on him, Kate and Isabel in giant clear shower caps with red, blue, and yellow appliqué flowers; Kate in a purple nightgown ornamented with rainbow-colored hearts, eight-month-old Jonathan held tight in her arms, smiling gleefully with a finger in his mouth; a photograph of all three children posed on the boardwalk at Atlantic Beach, Isabel in a white lace dress, Jonathan, age five, in a pink sport coat and madras bow tie, Kate already a teenager in a short black lace dress. The happiest, most uncomplicated times, the best days of their lives, perhaps.

  Though Kate has been told again and again that she resembles Natalie Wood, she’s never been completely aware of how attractive she is, with her glossy, dark brown hair and, in summer, that rich tan that settles on her petite body. Like her mother and sister, she lives in the color black, which she makes pop with lots of gold jewelry, particularly vintage Chanel pieces layered on necks and wrists (more is more when it comes to jewelry for the Chase women) and the occasional jolt of dramatic turquoise or brilliant pink. Her sparkling, slightly ironic smile is always highlighted by lipstick; her mother taught her at a young age to never show up in “public” looking pale and drippy. “You never know who you may run into,” she told her girls. When Kate strides through the city in her five-inch Louboutin boots or tight pencil skirts, men look. She and Isabel have, in the past, been known to be party girls, especially at Dorrian’s on the Upper East Side, where they love the jukebox. (She and her sister have been going there since college, sneaking in with their older cousins’ IDs; they’ve always been old-fashioned in that way, liking what was familiar and returning there again and again. And they’d always enjoyed being at Dorrian’s with people they knew from both high school and Penn; even the bartenders and bouncers have known them forever. But recently Isabel seems to be spending more and more time with her boyfriend Michael, and Kate wouldn’t think of going out like that without her sister.)

  She considers calling her mother and Isabel now and telling them about this latest breakup with Scott. But she knows that they think he’s going to take fo
rever to grow up, and that each of them will probably say she should move on and start dating other people because he isn’t getting his act together anytime soon. And that’s something she just doesn’t want to hear at this moment. So, strange as it is to keep anything from them, Kate decides that for now, anyway, she will keep it to herself.

  It’s 11:30, but she’s too riled up to go to bed. She turns on the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall and watches an old episode of Seinfeld, one of her favorites; in it, Elaine is dating a man who insists on being called “Maestro” at all times, even though he’s merely the conductor of the Police Benevolent Association Orchestra. What a pretentious drip! “Oh, get over yourself!” Kate yells to the actor on the TV screen. He reminds her of a fortysomething client she once had, an utterly self-important plastic surgeon who insisted that Kate call her “Dr. Powers” even after they’d spent months looking at apartments together. Even worse, her husband, an equally obnoxious man who clearly worshipped her, referred to her as “Doctor” as well, saying to Kate, “Dr. Powers and I will meet you at eleven o’clock in the lobby of 1136 Fifth Avenue, as previously discussed.” What pretentious jerks, the two of them! And after six months of taking them all over Carnegie Hill, looking at one $5 to $7 million apartment after another, they ended up right back where they started, in their rental on East End, because, despite what Kate had told them, had warned them, Dr. and Mr. Powers refused to believe that they just didn’t have the financials to get past the co-op boards in the choicest buildings on Park or Fifth.

  “Get over yourself!” Kate repeats, shaking her head at the TV screen, at Elaine’s insufferable boyfriend. But of course she’s talking to herself as well, and she knows it.