Sleeping with Beauty Read Online Free

wouldn’t be considered close friends, or even casual friends by the loosest of standards. Lucy’s mom was every English professor cliché rolled into one, from the serviceable clothes and bobby-pinned bun, to the wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of her long, slender nose, a nose that was generally immersed in a book. Mary Harper was far more at home dealing with fictional characters than she was with real people. Not because she didn’t like real people, mind you. Real people were just fine. It took real people to write books, after all. It’s just that she was usually so distracted with writing her next lecture that observing even the basic tenets of friendship building were beyond her.
    Jana’s mom, on the other hand, made friends very easily. Too easily, some might have said. Of course, that might have been envy talking. Or jealousy. Because most, okay all, of Angie Fraser’s “friends” were men. And because it was no secret that not all of them were single.
    But Mary and Angie did have one thing in common—they shared car-pool duty, ferrying their daughters to and from Tiny Tots Preschool.
    Jana had her mother’s bright red hair, but the similarity ended there. Angie Fraser was very Tina Louise as Ginger. Jana was more Lucille Ball as, well, Lucille Ball. Except with huge splotchy freckles, and big white teeth that were just a bit crooked, and still were, despite three years of braces, complete with the ever-so-attractive head appliance.
    Of course, to mousy, unfreckled, and uninterestingly toothed Lucy, Jana was some kind of exotic creature, and the source of immediate fascination. Unlike the television-commercial cuteness of Miriam and the preppy perfection of Andrea, Jana was an absolute original. Lucy remembered thinking that her new friend must be something really special if God made her stand out like that.
    Lucy had since learned that God merely had a peculiar sense of humor.
    But her belief in the unique force that was Jana Fraser had never wavered. Unfortunately, that unique force, even when combined with Grady’s global-rescue theory, couldn’t protect Lucy from her own self-destructive crush tendencies. The Senior Prom Fiasco had only been a temporary setback to her apparently indestructible—and obviously deluded—libido. Jason Prescott had merely been the first in a string of unattainable men Lucy fell hopelessly for.
    Through four years of college, not once did she find herself remotely attracted to any of her horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing, but ever-so-nice-and-dependable, lab partners. The same went for the unfocused yet earnest struggling poet in her English composition class, and the naïve but sweetly endearing member of her study group. She lost her virginity, but never her heart. She’d lost track of the number of end-of-date kisses where she’d close her eyes and pray that this time she would feel something. Anything. Nada.
    But she knew she wasn’t holding out for the impossible. There was that Halloween keg party in her sophomore year, after all. Proof positive she could feel something. A whole lot of something, actually. As a joke, she and Jana had dressed up like cheerleaders. With their wigs, orange-hued fake Coppertone tans, and bust-enhancing Victoria’s Secret bras, even Debbie Markham would have believed they’d earned their pom-poms. Okay, only if the lighting was sort of bad. And a lot of beer had been ingested. Which was exactly the case when Lucy ran into the current target of her unrequited—hell, totally unnoticed—affections: junior-varsity quarterback Steve Van Kelting.
    He’d mistaken her for the real thing, and the next thing Lucy knew, she was on her back in one of the frat-house bedrooms. A small, insignificant part of her knew she should tell him she really wasn’t Wanda—which is what he’d called her as he’d pulled off her letter sweater—but then his hands were on her, and his mouth found hers, and well . . . what Wanda didn’t know wouldn’t