Sins Read Online Free PDF

not be attracting attention for soon would be her weight, Ella acknowledged with a small spurt of pleasure. Dr Williamson’s diet pills had done everything both he and Libby had promisedher they would, and already she was losing weight. Not that she had told anyone else about them, or about how much the cruel words and laughter she had overheard had hurt her. She would be lost now without her small yellow pills and their magical ability to make her not want to eat.
    ‘You can always stay here, if you want to,’ Janey told her sister. ‘You don’t have to come.’
    The last thing Ella felt like doing on a cold winter night was going out to a party in some grubby smoke-filled cellar packed with people she didn’t know and with whom it was impossible to talk above the noise, but Janey’s words had aroused her suspicions.
    ‘Of course I’m going to go,’ Ella insisted. ‘It’s up to me to make sure that you don’t get into trouble, after all.’
    ‘Don’t be silly. Of course I’m not going to get into trouble,’ Janey defended herself indignantly.
    Ella, though, wasn’t impressed. ‘There’s no “of course” about it,’ she told Janey. ‘I haven’t forgotten those men you brought back with you from that jazz club the other week, the ones I found sleeping downstairs.’
    ‘It was a freezing cold night, Ella, and they didn’t have anywhere else to go.’
    ‘We could have been murdered in our beds, or worse,’ Ella retaliated, her anger growing as Janey giggled.
    ‘Don’t be silly, they were far too drunk.’
    ‘It isn’t funny, Janey,’ Ella remonstrated. ‘The parents wouldn’t have approved at all.’
    ‘You fuss too much, Ella.’
    Janey was beginning to wish that Ella would stay behind if she was going to be so stuffy. Janey had arranged tomeet Dan at the party and she didn’t want Ella cramping her style.
    Dan. Just thinking about him gave her a delicious squiggly feeling in her tummy.
    ‘If this party is going to be one of those rowdy parties at some dreadful smoky dive and filled with scruffy musicians, then—’ Ella began, only to be interrupted by Janey, who had finished making up her eyes and was now applying what looked like white lipstick to her mouth.
    ‘Is that really what you’re going to wear?’ Janey challenged her sister, looking disapprovingly at Ella’s pleated tartan skirt and navy-blue jumper. ‘We’re going to a party, not school…’
    ‘In some cold damp cellar,’ Ella retorted. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with what I’m wearing.’
    ‘I bet they don’t think that at
Vogue
,’ Janey grimaced. ‘I’ll design something for you, if you like.’
    Ella shuddered. ‘No thank you.’
    ‘Well, you could at least wear a dress, Ella. Look how pretty Rose is in hers.’
    The sisters both looked at Rose as she walked into the room in her dark green mohair dress.
    ‘Don’t be silly,’ Ella objected. ‘I could never wear anything like that. I’m too big, and anyway, that colour wouldn’t suit me like it does Rose.’
    Whilst Ella and Janey were both tall and fair-haired, with grey eyes and good English skin, Rose was an exotic mix of East and West, fine-boned and only five foot one. Her skin was olive-toned, her face heart-shaped with high cheekbones and soft full lips, whilst her dark brown eyes were European in shape. Her long hair wassilky straight and inky black, and she always wore it in a chignon.
    Janey looked impatiently at Ella. If she could have done so, Janey would far rather have been sharing a dingy bedsit with one of her arty friends than living in luxury in her parents’ elegant red-brick house on Cheyne Walk. Still, at least it was in Chelsea, which sort of made it all right. Janey loved her family dearly but she had always been something of a rebel, loving the unconventional, passionate about fashion and music, art and life itself.
    It was a pity that Ella had insisted on dragging her back to Cheyne Walk when, if they’d have stayed