Love, Lies and Texas Dips Read Online Free

“If you’d called first, I would’ve told you so,” she added in a muffled voice. “Now go away.”
    Okay, so Laura might have complained about adding a pound or so since their Rosebud invitation dinner at the end of August, not long after school had resumed two weeks back (school in Texas always started way earlier than the rest of the civilized world). Her teensy weight gain could’ve had something to do with a mysterious admirer who’d been sendingher chocolates (the last box contained to-die-for truffles from Godiva—oh, Lord, those were good! ). And she might have whined a little about humiliating herself doing the Texas Dip and falling on her face in the Grande Ballroom.
    Still, it was Labor Day, for God’s sake. If Laura had nagged Mac about working out today, she must’ve been crazy drunk or at the very least crazy, which had to be the case since she hadn’t gotten trashed since the summer before last when she’d passed out and Jo Lynn Bitchwell and her toadies had penned slurs on her body with laundry marker and snapped pics of the whole sordid thing—a memory she was still trying hard to blot out.
    “I did call, you lazy bum,” Mac insisted, “and I can prove it.”
    Laura heard a gentle clunk on the nightstand, which had to be Mac picking up her BlackBerry.
    “Your last three incoming calls were from me, starting a half hour ago. When you didn’t answer, I had no choice but to head straight over and kick your sleeping butt.”
    “Did I say ‘go away’ in Swahili or something?” Laura mumbled from beneath the covers, having no intention of crawling out any time soon. “Where’s Ginger, anyway? I would’ve thought you’d bring backup.”
    “She’s still grounded, remember? Now, for the last time, get up !”
    Mac poked at Laura’s backside through the covers, though Laura didn’t budge an inch. Instead, she muttered, “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you go play with Ginger at her house?”
    “She’s stuck going to her grandmother’s for tea this afternoon with Deena,” Mac said, then cleared her throat beforedoing a bad impression of Rose Dupree’s dry Southern drawl: “I do declare, isn’t that what all properly bred Rosebuds do for fun?” When Laura didn’t so much as chortle, she quickly dropped the accent and continued in her own voice, “Ginger thinks Rose is plotting something, so she’s a little freaked out.”
    “I’d rather have tea with a sneaky old bird like Rose than sweat buckets on the club treadmill this early on a holiday,” Laura whined, still refusing to get out of bed. “Please, just leave me in peace so I can get my beauty rest?”
    If she was going to win back her one true love, Avery Dorman, she needed all the help she could get. Though Laura didn’t say as much to Mac, considering how Mac felt about Avery. Hell, Mac called Caldwell’s star running back “the Ratfink” because he was such a player, jerking girls around and never able to commit, as Laura could attest to.
    “I’m counting to three and then I’m playing hardball.” Laura felt a tug on her pale pink Ralph Lauren sheets and ruffled floral spread. “One …”
    “It’s my God-given right to sleep in,” she protested into her pillow, steadfastly refusing to open her eyes.
    “… two …”
    “Maaaac.” She breathed the name, exasperated. “Pleeeeze.”
    “… three!”
    With a yank, the covers were gone and Laura felt the cool rush of air-conditioning on her exposed skin. She yelped, her eyes popping open as Mac pulled the sheets and down comforter below her ankles, leaving her bare legs and her Victoria’s Secret nightshirt and undies with pink printed across the butt in plain view.
    “You brat!” she cried, and scrambled to grab the sheetsand blanket so she could enfold herself inside her warm cocoon again and go back to sleep.
    But Mac kept pulling until all her bedding was in a pile on the floor at the foot of the four-poster bed.
    Laura scowled at her pushy pal,