Read Online The Nannies by Melody Mayer - Free Book Online Page B

forbidden to wear it in a ponytail, thank you very much. Nor could she see it; the producers had wanted to get her reaction on camera.
    After hair came makeup. All the contestants were taken to Valerie Beverly Hills, the famous cosmetics salon at the busy corner of North Canon Drive and Little Santa Monica Boulevard, whose twenty-foot-high windows reflected the endless parade of Jags, Beemers, and Hummers that snaked along the street.
    The first thing Chamomile—Kiley’s makeup artist—asked was if she’d ever had her eyebrows done. When Kiley said no— that she didn’t even know what that
meant
—Chamomile looked like someone had shot her through the heart. But she’d scrutinized Kiley’s brows and started to pluck.
    Kiley winced. Chamomile said something about suffering for beauty and moved on to the eyebrow stencils. These stencils— each was named for a famous movie star; Kiley was outfitted with the Julia Stiles—were put over the eyebrows, then a stiff brush dipped in high-pigment eye shadow was used to color inside the stencil, resulting in alleged movie star eyebrow perfection.
    Following the Stiles stencil, Chamomile brushed Kiley’s brows with clear gel on a mascara wand, which was supposed to make them shiny and “hold them in place.” Kiley said her eyebrows had never gone anywhere on their own, so she didn’t know why they needed to be held in place. No one in the salon found her comment at all amusing.
    After the eyebrows came makeup. As before, Kiley wasn’t allowed to view herself, but the cameraman from
Platinum Nanny
filmed every moment.
    Finally, with cameras on, Kiley was spun toward the mirror. She actually gasped, since she didn’t recognize herself. She had on even more makeup than when she’d been interviewed for
Platinum Nanny.
But it was subtler, too. She looked . . . well . . . pretty. She wished she could show her mother. But Mrs. McCann was being made over at a different salon.
    Next stop: Fred Segal’s in Santa Monica. The show was buying each contestant one outfit, with a price limit of a thousand dollars. Kiley found that number hilarious; for half that, she could get an entire Old Navy wardrobe, plus shoes.
    A Fred Segal clerk who normally would not blink in Kiley’s direction treated her like royalty. Item after item came off the rack—designers Kiley had only read about, like Carlos Miele and Tom Ford and Tracy Reese. Kiley finally settled on a pale green watered-silk Chloe camisole trimmed with forest green and pink ribbons. It was almost too beautiful to—
    Suddenly, Jeanne McCann had appeared in the store aisle. Kiley’s jaw fell open. They’d cut and streaked her mother’s graying hair, which was now soft brown with blond highlights feathered around her cheekbones. The hair, an elegant silk pantsuit, and understated makeup made her mom look both younger and chic. The lovefest reunion of mother and daughter was all caught on camera.
    Now it was a day later. As the limo cruised west on Sunset Boulevard, it stopped at the corner of Barrington for a red light. Kiley looked out the window; above them was a fifty-foot billboard that featured an impossibly gorgeous male model, golden rippling muscles above bulging Calvin Klein underwear. He was looking past the camera, as if he was watching a beautiful woman undress for him.
    No way. The model was Tom from the suite next door.
That
guy.
    “How hot is
he
?” Tamika asked rhetorically. She was checking out the billboard, too.
    “I’m starved,” Steinberg put in. “And I’d love to eat him for lunch.”
    Cindy shook her head. “It’s an illusion. He probably doesn’t look half that good in person.”
    Oh yes he does,
Kiley thought.
In fact, he looks even better.
    But she had no intention of telling the other girls that the guy was living right in their midst. Not that Kiley would ever have the nerve to do anything about it. But right now it still felt as though he was her intimate secret, even if she never