Carolina Isle Read Online Free PDF

things she’d been hoping for didn’t happen. There were no girl giggles at night, no schlepping around in their pajamas for hours on Sunday morning.
    Sara was sure that Ariel didn’t know it, but when she described her mother, she might have been describing herself. It took nearly a week before Sara realized that Ariel knew that she was becoming like her mother and was doing anything she could to prevent it. However, try as she might to avoid it, there was something elegant about Ariel that made people take notice of her.
    It took Sara less than twenty-four hours to learn that there were things she just could not talk about, such as her drunken father. Sara waseager to unburden herself, to at last tell the secrets about her life with her father—but alcoholics seemed to be something that Ariel couldn’t bear to hear about. To stop Sara from telling more, Ariel gave her “the look.” It was a glance of such coldness that Sara thought that a couple of her toes were going to have to be amputated from frostbite.
    Ever the actress, Sara sat in front of a mirror later that night and practiced the look. But what came naturally to Ariel was nearly impossible for Sara. “I think you have to be raised royally to be able to carry off that look,” she muttered to herself. The next day she tried it on Ariel. Her hope was that she’d be able to freeze Ariel as she’d done to her cousin. Ariel giggled. “When you do that, you almost look like my mother.” Sara was tempted to tell her cousin that she was imitating her, Ariel, but she didn’t.
    Ariel wanted the two of them to stay in Sara’s tiny apartment all day and try to figure out how to be each other. For one thing, Sara was supposed to memorize the entire genealogy of the founding families of Arundel. “It’s imperative that you know who belongs to whom.”
    Sara said it sounded very interesting and she wished she had time to memorize it all, but she
had
to go to work.
    The mention of work made Ariel launch into a hundred thousand questions about R.J. Sara knew Ariel thought she was going to be able to fool R.J., but Sara didn’t think he was going to believe the switch for even ten seconds. But there was no reasoning with Ariel. For all that Ariel looked like a lady from the past, all prim and proper and perfectly groomed, Sara soon found that she had a spine of steel. When Ariel set her mind to something, there was no changing it.
    It was when R.J. told Sara that he wanted her to go with him on a trip to Arundel, North Carolina, that she saw just how determined Ariel really was. When he told her, Sara was so flabbergasted that she thought her legs were going to collapse. Just minutes before, R.J.’s old friend Charley Dunkirk had been in his office and R.J. had given the man enough whiskey that he was too drunk to walk out on his own. Sara had wanted to give R.J. a piece of her mind about the evils of alcohol, but she’d found out that whenshe talked to R.J. he twisted her words around, so she’d learned to keep quiet.
    For an hour after R.J. told her they were going to Arundel, Sara couldn’t speak. She did it! was all she could think. Somehow, Ariel had
done
it. How?! Sara wondered. Ariel lived in a little, rural town and R.J. was a big-city mover and shaker. He and Donald Trump were buddies. So how had a small-town girl like Ariel made R.J. do what she wanted him to?
    Two mornings later Sara was awakened at 4:00 A.M. by the ear-splitting screech of her doorbell. Groggy, she opened the door to see Ariel standing there with the night doorman. Sara was too dumbfounded and too sleepy to say anything as he put Ariel’s six suitcases (all vintage Louis Vuitton) inside her apartment.
    Ariel took off her gloves (white cotton gloves, like a 1950s model would wear) and looked about the apartment. Sara was still rubbing sleep from her eyes, and she could see that Ariel found all five hundred and