Opal's Wish: Book Four of The Crystal Warriors Series Read Online Free PDF Page B

seam.
    As though it hadn’t been nearly a decade since she’d last strutted a runway and “knocked ’em dead”.
    Opal settled into what had once been her signature “walk”. Easy peasy…. So long as she didn’t think too hard about all the reasons why this was a bad idea.
    Chill, she lectured the part of herself that wanted to flee back to her motel room. There was no real reason to be worried. No one would recognize her now. She was a different person to the gawky, naïve girl she’d once been. And according to the internet news sites she’d scoured
he
was still in Dallas, attending some political fundraiser. He hadn’t been to New York in a while—too busy trying to get his mayoral campaign off the ground. She was safe. So….
    Get your shit together, Opal! Time to show ’
em
all what you can do.
    As she gave attitude for all she was worth, she shucked the last vestiges of disgust that she’d not had the guts to speak up and refuse Annie North’s pleas to do this—even though, “It’s a showcase for Conrad’s daughter Stella and a bunch of other aspiring designers, and there’s no one else we can think of to fill in at such short notice, and we’d have to be blind not to notice your to-die-for figure beneath that overall, and I already know you’ve done some runway modeling before because Sera told me when you brought her ’round that time she had a day off school,” had been a pretty good effort so far as outright begging went. Not to mention it was doubly hard to look a sweet person like Annie in the eye and turn her down flat without giving an explanation. Especially when Annie and Conrad, her husband, had covered the cost of a sitter Saturday morning through Sunday evening. Annie had even gotten on the phone right then and there to confirm availability of the sitter Conrad’s middle daughter regularly used.
    Looking back, Annie had seemed determined as a gull winkling a tasty morsel from a clam shell to get Opal out of the house and out of her comfort zone. And she was almost enjoying herself. Except—
    No. She couldn’t afford to go there, so she ground the last of her worries over leaving Sera with a stranger beneath her currently so-lethal-they-should-be-illegal heels. Not to mention the shock of answering the door and seeing Liza, the sitter Conrad’s daughter had spoken so highly of, wearing a super-brief super-tight outfit and heavy makeup that made her look like she’d been punched in both eyes.
    Opal didn’t make a habit of stooping to snap judgments but Liza’s sullen demeanor and, uh,
interesting
dress-sense had hardly been the stuff of good first impressions.
    She posed at the end of the runway area before pivoting to saunter back. Halfway up she encountered Desiree. The statuesque black woman with the swanlike neck and killer body would be a knockout dressed in a sack, but in the crimson dress with a neckline that few women would be able to pull off without judicious taping, she was outstanding. And boy, she knew how to work it.
    Desiree dropped her a saucy wink as she minced past. And Opal felt herself relaxing for the first time since she’d been talked into this gig. She
could
do this. Hell, she’d once been an old hand at this. And as she flashed sultry eyes at one of the diners, damned if she didn’t feel the teensiest bit of pride tingling through her veins at the cat-calls and loud applause trailing in her wake. Seemed she still had a smidgeon of the right stuff.
    Once she hit the temporary dressing room she ran for her rack of clothes, hands already busy with her current garment’s fastenings. She shimmied into the next outfit—an emerald green cat-suit—and Stella, the aspiring designer whose creation she now wore, checked her over.
    Stella radiated excitement as she gave Opal a nod of approval. “Perfect,” she said. And even though Opal suspected Stella’s “perfect” had been directed at the outfit rather than the wearer, it was hard not to feel buoyed by