The Fantasy Factor. Kimberly Raye
so Sarah had stopped trying early on. In fact, she’d gone the opposite direction, determined to set herself apart from her mother. To be different. To be her own person rather than a replacement for the daughter her grandmother had lost.
Instead of being sweet and wholesome, she’d been a daring, do anything rebel in red-hot cowboy boots who’d loved to shake things up and shock the fine, upstanding citizens of her small hometown. She’d been the first out of her clothes to go skinny-dipping down at Cadillac Creek, the first out of the car to toilet-paper the captain of the football team’s house the night before homecoming, the first to ask a guy out for their junior prom, and the first to proposition Houston Jericho, the town’s resident badass and the hottest, hunkiest guy ever to walk the hallowed halls of Cadillac High School.
Her gaze started to slide his way, but a passing waitress killed her line of vision. Thankfully.
She was here with her friends, for her friends. This was the first time they’d all been together in twelve years. And possibly the last they would be, since they led separate lives, two of them far, far away from Cadillac. She shouldn’t waste her time scoping out men.
She gave herself a mental shake and forced her attention back to the game.
Maddie, despite her leather halter top and go-get-’em attitude, had just failed the latest assignment that would have made her an extra fifty points and secured the title. All of the other women were too far behind to win, but Sarah was right on her heels, and if she aced the next question, she would walk away the winner.
Not that Sarah intended to win, no matter how much she wanted to. She had an image to maintain. A wholesome, respectable, safe image that she’d spent too many years building to blow now.
“Girl, if you ace this, you’ll be sleeping late tomorrow instead of picking up Uncle Spur,” Eileen, the petite blond supermom told her.
Image aside, Sarah was in no hurry to spend two hours cooped up in a vehicle with Cheryl’s uncle Spur, an ornery eighty-four-year-old man who prided himself on his tobacco spitting abilities and always being right.
She reached out, picked the top card from the deck and read it out loud.
“A true bad girl loves to make the first move, Whether it’s a kiss, a touch, or catching her groove.
So prove yourself by taking this chance,
Find a sinful minded man and ask him to dance!”
“That’s no fair,” Maddie complained. “I had to dance with someone and kiss him. All she has to do is dance.”
“With a sinful minded man,” Brenda pointed out, “which means he’ll have more on his mind than, like, dancing if he’s really in the sinful category. Not to mention, they’re playing a slow song right now.” A slow, sweet Toby Keith song wailed from the speakers.
“It’s still no big deal,” Maddie said. “This is too easy.”
Maybe for any of the other five women at the table. But for Sarah, a former bad girl trying desperately to be good, dancing meant getting close, and slow-dancing meant getting even closer, and that meant trouble.
Her nipples throbbed at the thought, and frustration made her fingers tighten.
Yep, she needed a sinful man, all right. But needing and having were two very different things. She needed a lot of things. A new haircut. An extra large bag of Doritos. A pair of short-shorts and a slinky tank top to keep her cool while she worked at the family garden center she’d taken over from her grandmother several years back.
But she wasn’t having any of those things because Sarah steered clear of anything and everything that spelled B-A-D, from junk food to revealing clothes to her favorite red boots to men. Life was short enough on its own without tempting fate by living dangerously.
She’d realized her mortality and decided to play it safe. At least that’s what she wanted everyone to think, especially her grandma Willie. She owed the woman for saving her life that night, and so she followed a strict diet regime, got plenty of sleep, wore tasteful, conservative clothes and steered clear of sinful minded men.
Men who made a woman’s heart pound and her legs quiver and her panties damp.
Men like Houston Jericho.
Her gaze shifted to him again and her lungs constricted. He was still as handsome as she remembered. More so because his wild, carefree aura now contained an air of maturity that plainly said he knew what to do, when to do it and exactly how to do it.
Definitely bad.
“Fifty points,” Brenda Chance said. Brenda was a hopeless romantic. She’d married her high school sweetheart, Cal, given him a handful of kids and now lived and breathed the local PTA. “If you pull this off,” she told Sarah, “you’ll get, like, fifty points. More than enough to put you in the lead and win the game.”
“I say she should pick another card,” Maddie said. “Dancing is nothing for Sarah. I say she needs something more challenging. Something befitting the baddest bad girl ever to flash her boobs at a bus full of rival football players after a game.”
Janice smiled. “Girlfriend, that was so funny.”
Cheryl Louise grinned. “It was classic.”
Sarah frowned. “It was stupid. It was forty below out. I nearly gave myself frostbite.” She would have, except that she’d been laughing so hard, her heart pumping even harder, thanks to the rush of excitement at acting on a dare, that she’d actually felt warm. Hot.
Almost as hot as she felt right now.
She took a sip of her cold drink and forced a nice, easy, controlled breath. It was all about control. Something she’d manage to perfect thanks to twelve years of deprivation.
“I agree with Maddie,” Janice said. “Sarah needs something more challenging. Girlfriend, she’s already a bad girl, so that gives her an advantage over Maddie.”
“Nonsense,” Brenda said to Janice. “You and Maddie, like, have obviously been away too long. Sarah is the activities chairwoman for the local chamber of commerce. She spends her weekends hosting bake sales and organizing car washes. Why, she’s about as bad as Pastor Standley’s grandmother.”
“She’s still alive?”
“Barely. She’s ninety-seven and she spends twenty-four/seven watching Wheel of Fortune reruns and reading Reader’s Digest.”
“Sounds totally unexciting,” Janice said.
“That’s Sarah,” Brenda replied.
“Unexciting is good.” Sarah took another sip of cola. “Too much excitement leads to stress and heart attacks.”
Janice shook her head. “Whatever happened to the old Sarah we knew and loved and envied?”
But they all knew what had happened. They’d lost one of their closest and dearest friends the night before their high school graduation, and it had changed all of their lives forever.
Maddie, who’d been so set on following in her father’s footsteps at the town’s bake shop, had left to attend college in Dallas and ended up in a high-powered career with a leading cosmetics company. Janice had traded a local junior college for a major university and a career with a big oil company in Houston. Eileen had forfeited college to be a wife and mom and the local PTA president. Likewise, Brenda had given up college entirely to marry her high school sweetheart and have the first of five children, all of whom were scary at best—at least to Sarah, who’d grown up an only child with her grandmother and a house full of plants.
Cheryl Louise had still been in high school. She’d worked afternoons at the local five-and-dime and fantasized about Prince Charming sweeping in and saving her from her humdrum existence.
He’d swept in. Literally. Jack Beckham owned the only floor cleaning company in town and he’d been polishing the tile at the local TG&Y