Can't Stand the Heat Read Online Free PDF Page B

high school who would never get asked to prom.
    She took a deep breath before ringing the doorbell. After a few seconds, she spotted the silhouette of one of her mother’s many maids through the stained-glass window. One of the French doors slowly opened.
    â€œGood morning, Miss Gibbons,” the petite woman greeted timidly in her thick accent. She dipped her dark head and stepped aside, then gestured Lauren to step through the doorway.
    Lauren nodded after wiping her feet on the doormat. She stepped into the air-conditioned foyer and smiled. “Hi, Esmeralda. How’s it going?”
    â€œVery good, ma’am. And you?”
    â€œEh, I could be better.” She glanced around her.
    The foyer was decorated in baroque style with rich mahogany and cherrywood furniture, jewel-colored upholstery, and glass vases spilling over with roses and freesias that were cut from the terraced garden in the backyard.
    Lauren’s mother thought the space set the right tone for whoever entered her home. She wanted it to look opulent and sophisticated.
    Lauren had always found it gaudy, though. She felt the same sense of claustrophobia she had felt whenever she stepped into James’s mansion a mere five miles up the road. This much opulence was overbearing.
    â€œAre they in the dining room?” Lauren asked.
    Esmeralda quickly shook her head. “No, in the sunroom today.”
    â€œIs everyone here already?”
    Esmeralda gave a rueful smile and nodded.
    Great, Lauren thought morosely as she glanced down at her watch. I’m the last one, as usual.
    She was bound to hear some smack about her tardiness.
    â€œAll right, I guess I better head back there, then. Thanks.”
    Esmeralda nodded again and shut the front door behind her.
    Lauren made her way through the foyer and then the corridor that led to the sunroom. On one side of the hallway was a row of windows that brightened the dark corridor with shafts of midday light. On the other side was a row of portraits.
    Lauren glanced at the portrait of her grandmother, Althea Gibbons. While most people had photographs of their elderly grandmothers smiling demurely at church jubilees or family picnics, the last portrait painted of Althea was quite the opposite. The seventy-five-year-old woman had looked several decades younger than her age in a blue velvet catsuit that complemented her curvy figure. She had accented it with a sapphire necklace given to her by her third husband. Her pose was also far from motherly. She reclined on a white satin chaise with her gray hair falling around her shoulders, her ample cleavage on display, and her late Pomeranian, Coco, perched at her feet.
    It was a saucy portrait that epitomized Althea perfectly. Even until the day she died of heart failure, the family matriarch refused to look anything but alluring and fabulous.
    â€œYou never know what man could be watching,” Althea had always warned with a furtive glance around her shoulders, like men were stalking ninjas that could pop out at any moment. “That’s why you make sure you always look your best, honey!” she would say with a wag of the finger. “Not a hair out of place. Not a frown on your face.”
    If Althea could see her youngest granddaughter now, with her faded, wrinkled jeans, white T-shirt, and face deeply creased with a frown, the matriarch would roll over in her grave.
    â€œThere you are!” Lauren’s mother exclaimed as Lauren stepped out of the corridor into the well-lit sunroom. The backyard pool and lush gardens showed through the windows behind her, flanking her like a photograph of the Garden of Eden.
    Lauren’s three sisters turned in unison to stare at her. Cynthia and Dawn, the oldest two, exchanged glances when she entered. Her sister Stephanie silently chuckled and shook her head. The only one who didn’t look up was her seventeen-year-old niece, Clarissa. The girl kept her dark head bowed and continued to