Nora let out a loud whoop, clapping. “I think my friends are going to be totally jealous. I wouldn’t give up this summer for all the lake trips in the world. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. I think it’s groovy.”
“Groovy?”
“That’s what the cool kids are saying,” Nora replied, a hint of teasing in her tone.
Leanne chuckled and tapped the steering wheel. “Well then, groovy it is.”
They flew past a hand-painted sign that read ATLANTA 1238 MILES, and Leanne felt something crack open in her chest. Not in a painful way. But in the way a window that’s been painted shut finally unsticks after you wrestle with it.
“Atlanta, here we come,” Leanne said, her voice steadier than expected.
Because the Dame of Rock and Roll might have a whole country of fans now…but Leanne and Nora Miller?
They were number one.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Nora stared at the cover ofThe Love Machine, her cheeks already pink and warm. This wasn’t the first time she’d seen it. She studied the cover with secret interest. Two hands. That was all it was. But the way his fingers gripped her skin…tight and desperate, like something dangerous and decadent was about to happen.
Something inside Nora stirred. Something she didn’t fully have the vocabulary to name yet. Something that sort of felt like the jolt she’d gotten when Joe had touched her shoulder back at the festival. Or really any time his eyes met hers.
She flipped the book open, fingertips brushing the edge of the dog-eared pages, already smoothed from her mother’s prior reads. The words wrapped around her like a pearl necklace she didn’t ask to try on but now couldn’t bear to take off.
By the end of the first page, her entire face was a bonfire.
“Mom…this book…” she hissed, half scandalized, half fascinated.
Leanne giggled.Giggled.Like she was eighteen and Nora was an old lady. “Don’t stop now. I can’t wait to hear the rest.”
Nora groaned but turned to chapter one. Amanda. Fall season.Bra issues. And God apparently not gifting her with “giant, beautiful breasts.”
Nora glanced down at her own chest, concealed in a white camisole. A respectable A cup if there ever was one. Small and simple. Certainly not Love Machine material.
“Maybe I should start wearing falsies,” she muttered.
Leanne glanced over, one brow lifted. “I wore falsies once.”
“You did?”
“On my wedding day.” She chuckled, swiping a piece of hair out of her eyes. “Your grandma told me I was ‘false advertising.’ Said the merchandise didn’t match the sales pitch.”
“Oh my God—Grandma said that?!”
Leanne burst out laughing, a full, whole-body type of laughter that made her shoulders shake behind the wheel. “In front of my aunt too. Mortifying.”
Nora howled, letting her head fall against the open book. “I’m scarred forever. Sounds a lot like when someone says, ‘Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?’”
“Not exactly the same,” Leanne replied, lifting an eyebrow. “But close, and it was pretty hilarious. I still remember your dad’s face when he saw me walking down the aisle in that dress—with those obviously enhanced breasts pushed halfway to heaven.”
Nora held up both hands like she was stopping traffic. “Okay, okay! I give. Not another word about Dad looking at your boobs, please.”
They both broke into giggles, clutching their stomachs, the Lincoln gliding over the flat southern road.
Nora wiped her eyes and returned to the book.The Love Machinewas racy, risqué, and positively provocative. The sort of book that didn’t even pretend to blush. Men sleeping with women just because they could. Breasts described with the care of fine art. Power, lust, fame.MadeThe Godfatherseem almost chaste.Almost.There was a lot of talk in that one of Sonny Corleone’s gigantic…
If her father even heard her say some of these words aloud, he might board up her bedroom and send a telegram to Yale saying she’d joined a convent.
But Leanne was cackling beside her, sipping her gas station coffee like it was martini hour.
