Read Online Drop Dead Gorgeous by Heather Graham - Free Book Online Page A

a nice boy like Brad, it would be good. Just so long as she stayed away from kids like Michael and Sean Black. Bad blood. Lori needed to go to college and create a promising future for herself. She came from well- educated people, and she had the chance to go for everything—a master’s degree, a doctorate! They weren’t poor folks, not from the wrong side of the tracks, and she didn’t want to wind up pregnant, saddled with a child.
    Normally, her mother was all right. A parent, but a decent sort of parent. Lori loved her mother. But in this instance her mother was blind. She didn’t begin to realize that there was no chance of Lori running off with Brad or, heaven forbid, having a baby with Brad. Although she was beginning to feel a little nervous about what had happened with Sean.
    Her parents still gave her a hard time about their friendship. He lived in a tough section of Coconut Grove. His father was some kind of a security guard, for God’s sake. His mother was simply gone. He had a brother, Michael, one year older, who was constantly in trouble. He had another brother, Daniel, twenty already, in the service—no other choice, there’d been no future for the kid. They didn’t want her to be prejudiced against kids less fortunate than she was. It was just that Sean, with no mother, a broken-down father, and a brother with a record, didn’t have much chance; he and his kind were just bad news.
    Except that he wasn’t. Gramps understood. Sometimes Sean could swagger. He was on the football team, and he was good. He had an afterschool job at a bookstore, and he still managed to keep a high B average. He was going to Florida State University on a scholarship—just a state school, but half the rich kids in the city went on to the same state schools, mainly because they could get in, and because they were known as party schools. Some of the state schools even had really great programs. But really smart rich kids went to Harvard or Yale, lazy or dumb rich kids went to state schools. Smart poor kids made it to state schools, and dumb poor kids wound up sleeping under bridges and drinking cheap booze out of brown paper bags. That was the way it went, according to her parents. Thankfully, Sean was a smart poor kid.
    Not that it should have mattered. Sean thought he was her friend. No matter what emotions she was harboring all those years, he was in love—or lust, as the 4F club insisted— with Mandy. And Lori dated Brad.
    Except for those few occasions when she and Sean met alone by chance, then there had been that one night …
    Which was haunting her like crazy today.
    They were all at the rock pit. The whole in crowd. They probably shouldn’t have gone swimming there all the time, but they did. It had been dug out for construction, then abandoned, in the southwest section of the city— it was dangerous, but cool. It ranged from twenty to fifty feet deep, and old wrecked cars had been junked in it, pines grew all around it, and it was off the beaten track. The ground around it was all like a white powdery sand, and it was great to stretch out on and tan, and the pines all around it provided perfect shelter for picnics. The way the ground had been dug out, there were all kinds of dunes and little private, tree- shaded copses as well.
    Sean hadn’t been there when Lori had arrived with Susan Nichols and Jan Hunt. Neither had Brad. Last night had been grad night, and they’d all stayed out really late, and some of them were waking up slowly that morning.
    Lori had a new bikini. It was coba l t-blue, and skimpy. Working carefully, she’d managed to get her pale skin to a fine tan, and she’d touched up her natural blond locks with a combination of vinegar and lemon—she could get away with that, her mother wouldn’t allow her to use any store-bought bleaches. She looked good that day, and she knew it. Her mother had wistfully told her that youth was beauty in itself, and she hadn’t even chastised her for the