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Carine wedged her car between a pickup truck and one of those SUVs that was long enough to haul a casket even without putting the back seats down. Her smile quivers. “Uh. The event has alcohol?”
“You wanna try again and make that sound less like a question? When you gave me the ticket back in Shora, I figured it’d be some sort of barbecue fundraiser thing with maybe a little music.” Valerie sure as shit couldn’t hear any music, so if the event was happening outdoors, it was the quietest gathering she’d ever attended.
Carine twined a length of her long red hair around her fingers. Her mouth scrunched at one side and eyes narrowed in consideration.
No, that’s not suspicious.
Valerie narrowed hers right back. “You’re thinking too hard. Tell me what’s going on. You don’t have to be twenty-one to enter a raffle.”
Carine snatched her keys from the ignition and unfastened her seatbelt, breathing out a grunt of frustration. “Oh, just go with the flow, will you?”
Valerie scoffed. “No, I absolutely will not. I’m an architect. Going with the flow is in direct opposition to my nature. I need plans. I need to know what’s happening, so tell me now, or I’m flinging you out of that seat and driving myself home to watch television. You and the country critters can fellowship until dawn, for all I care.”
Carine gave the steering wheel a little thump and growled. “Ugh, you’re so unbending. Let’s put it this way, okay? It’s like what your sister always does with her pictures on Facebook. You know—the ones where she’s sticking out her ass and doing that duck-face thing with her lips? When people ask what she was doing, she writes back that she was at agrown and sexyevent.” Carine wriggled her red eyebrows and pulled her most treacherous grin. It was herclosinggrin—the one she used to sell so much money pit real estate.
“Grown, sexy, andcountry, right?” Valerie sneered and pointed to the mud-splattered pickup truck beside them. “Don’t tell me you’ve brought me to some kind of honky-tonk juke joint.”
“Nothing like that. It’s really classy.” Carine giggled.
Valerie stared at the redhead until Carine’s grin started to tremble and her color-change lipstick appeared to darken to what Valerie had decided was the Liar-Liar-Pants-on-Fire shade.
The passenger-side door of the pickup truck swung open and a woman hopped down, yanking her tube dress up over her naked tits before tottering toward the house on four-inch Lucite stripper heels.
Valerie fixed herI dare youglare on Carine, who kept right on smiling.
Clearing her throat, Valerie brought her phone up to eye level and tapped out a text message for her sister, Leah.
Carine has me caught up in some sort of “grown and sexy” scheme involving raffle tickets and rednecks. If you don’t hear from me in an hour, contact the Bertie County authorities. Tell them I was wearing a black dress and sensible shoes.
She pressed her seatbelt release, then read Leah’s quick response:Oh, you’re wearing sensible shoes, huh? Flats, I bet. Or maybe Crocs today? Well, no need to worry about “grown and sexy,” then, since you only meet half the requirements, ya freakin’ bore.
“You little wretch,” Valerie said under her breath and closed the message screen.
It was a good thing Valerie’s little sister didn’t have a job where being buttoned up was a requirement. Her church had already “excused” her from Sunday school teaching duties for being what they artfully called “too spirited.” Being a little wild was sort of a requirement for being an R&B backup singer.
Valerie wished Leah would cut her some slack. She wasn’t as uptight as Leah seemed to believe. Valerie was only trying to be a role model for her sister. The sisters didn’t have anyone else, except their elderly grandmother, and someone needed to set a good example for the wild child.
Not that Valerie wasn’t wild herself. She was just better at keeping that shit on the down-low. She didn’t have a choice. Her career was riding on her being flawless, or at least trying damn hard to be.
“Let’sgo,” Carine said. “I don’t want to miss the giveaways. People donate some great stuff. I’m going to be super pissed if they have those little bottles of Scotch and I’ve missed them again.”
Sighing, Valerie pushed open her door and said bye-bye to the air conditioning. It’d been a blistering, hundred-degree July day, and the sun hadn’t taken too many degrees with it on its way down.
She and Carine made their way between the tightly parked cars—three rows with six or seven vehicles each—toward the house’s stately wrap-around porch. It was a gorgeous structure, from what she could see in the dim light. The columns appeared to be original and great care had been taken in modernizing the steps.
A few men leaned onto the railing smoking cigars, and squinting, Valerie made out the familiar features of a couple of them.
“Frank and Hal?”
“Uh huh,” Carine said. “They’re here all the time.”
“Obviously, you’d know that because you’re here all the time, too, huh?”
“I hate how you jump to conclusions.”
“Why, because I’m always right?”
Carine gave her hair a defiant flick and muttered something under her breath about an “uptight goody two shoes.”
