Chasing Chelsea Read Online Free Page B

she’s sick. One minute we were talking, and the next thing I know, she’s puking in a fern. She ran off in tears. I tried to catch her, but she locked herself in one of the medical rooms and now she won’t open the door.”
    “She puked in a fern?” Selena wrinkled her nose.
    “Oh, like you’ve never done that before,” Kaylee shot back. To Hannah, she asked, “Does Jackson know?”
    “She begged me not to tell anyone. Him, especially.” The women reacted to that the way normal people might have reacted to, ‘And then I shot him.’ Hannah wrung her hands again. “Yeah, I know.”
    Gathering her long skirts, Kaylee headed inside. “Which medical room is she in?”
    “I’ll take you.”
    Her manila envelope and Wal-Mart bag still clutched in her hand, Chelsea remained behind, watching as all three women hurried toward the massive double doors of the Castle. Wondering if she’d see any of them again during her stay (as big as this place was, highly unlikely), she was about to rejoin the nearly depleted guest lines when Selena noticed her absence.
    Running back, she grabbed Chelsea’s arm. “Come on, silly! We have to hurry; this could be serious.”
    “But—” Chelsea had just enough time to glance at the admission tables, with all those smiling attendants who were passing out forms and collecting manila envelopes. Most of the people they had ridden in on the buses with had taken their seats in the semi-circle of folding chairs around the empty podium, just waiting. No one even glanced her way, not even when Selena pulled her toward the Castle.
    “Don’t worry,” Selena scoffed. “You’re with me, and we’re practically the best of friends!”
    Chelsea had a few real friendships and not one of them had been made as fast as this. Yet, in spite of her misgivings (and boy, did she have them), when Selena tugged, Chelsea found herself following.
    At any minute she expected someone to stop them—one of the orientation attendants, maybe, or the incredibly tall woman who passed them on her way to the podium and then paused to stare after them as she and Selena hurried to catch up with Kaylee and Hannah. No one in that long line of butlers who side-stepped to avoid colliding with them at the entrance said one cross word or ordered them back out into the courtyard. Not one person that she saw in that grand entry-way—gilded so opulently with marble floors and pillars, the grand curving staircase leading up to the second floor, the trio of glittering chandeliers, the sparkling brass fixtures molded to look like couples in the throes of lovemaking—not one said anything at all to them. They were much too busy talking among themselves, laughing, pointing, hurrying around. Some even had maps. Chelsea understood the need for those in an instant; this place was huge!
    “Come on!” Selena pulled at her and together they dashed up the opulent staircase , down a veritable maze of hallways and corridors, through a wing crowded with very adult “boys and girls," maids and butlers, slave girls and…was that guy dressed as a pony? ...with plenty of security guards holding watch over the whole room. Each time anyone glanced her way, Chelsea’s stomach tightened with a little pang of dread, but no one asked a single question. No one even looked at them oddly. She’d done it. She had infiltrated the Castle with a ticket to a vacation she hadn’t paid for.
    Chelsea laughed, little more than a chuckle, one born of surprise rather than any real mirth, but it caught Selena’s attention and she looked back at Chelsea with a grin of her own. “Just you wait. You haven’t seen anything yet.”
    When Selena began giggling, Chelsea couldn’t help but giggle along with her. She felt as if she were getting away with something so much bigger and more important than ten free days in an expensive adult resort. She didn’t know exactly what that bigger or more important thing might be, but right now this was starting to feel