The Truth About Delilah Blue Read Online Free PDF

if filled with booze. Grinning, he reprimanded his sister. “Lila doesn’t look good. She looks great.” He winked, then trotted back up to the house.
    The compliment unnerved Lila and she chose to ignore it. “So what are you up to these days, Dani? Running your dad’s surf shop?”
    “Nah, that’s more Kyle’s thing. I’m up at Pepperdine studying sports psychology.”
    “Wow.” Of course Dani was in college. What kind of twenty-year-old wasn’t in college? “You’ll be Dr. Seldin.”
    “It’ll be Dr. McAllister. Remember Mark McAllister from high school?” Dani held up one hand and flashed a modest diamond ring. “We just got engaged.”
    Lila examined it. “Pretty.”
    “Mark’s at Pepperdine too.”
    “Nice.”
    “What about you? Where do you go?”
    Nowhere.
    I go nowhere.
    Correction—today I went somewhere. Didn’t work out because I’m too broken for my own good. So tomorrow I’ll get back to my intensive program of going nowhere.
    “I’ve been taking a bit of time off to figure things out. Working on my painting and stuff.”
    Dani’s discomfort was visible. How embarrassing to have asked such a nonachiever where she goes to school. It was the equivalent of asking the fat lady at the grocery store when she was due. Dani flashed a patronizing smile. “Good for you.”
    Kyle was back. “We’re having a party.” He pulled two cases of beer from the trunk and turned to face Lila. She felt his glance roam over her legs. “You should come hang out.”
    Dani laughed. “Lila Mack doesn’t lower herself to attend lame-o parties, Kyle. She’s the tormented artiste, right Lila?”
    Lila didn’t answer, stuck, as always, between being offended and flattered by this reputation her peers had bestowed upon her.
    “Come on, Lila,” said Kyle. “I’ll make sure you have a good time.”
    Kyle was attractive. Not many women would argue. To imagine spending time anywhere near such a male was to have a tingle shoot from Achilles tendon straight up the center of your spine. Even Lila wasn’t immune to the chemical reaction. Yet she backed away. “Thanks. But I have this thing to go to. With my dad.”
    Dani marched—rubber shoes slapping against her heels—toward the ivy-tangled wooden gate that led up to the brick cottage. “Okay. Good luck with…what you’re doing.” With a sorrowful look back at Lila’s legs, Kyle fell in line behind his sister.
    I F THE NEIGHBORING Hollywood Hills homes, many of them suspended on stilts as thin as uncooked spaghettini, had ever taken notice of the wooden house squatting at their knees, they didn’t let on. Maybe the primitive carpentry unsettled them, reminded them that they too, but for the grace of a few million dollars, might have wound up with window frames that weren’t square, carpenter ants that gnawed on their tibias, and indoor paneling that reeked ofunwashed sheets. Or it could be that they kept their noses up to prove they actually do have a decent view of the Pacific. If the weather was clear and the air quality tolerable.
    The Macks’ two-bedroom cabin had no such panorama. Whoever had built it, some eighty years prior, either required nothing more than a place to hang his rifle during hunting season, or had an aversion to glorious vistas, prompting him—or her—to position all the windows facing directly into the hilltop. The structure seemed convinced, like a young boy hiding behind his mother’s skirt, that by burying its face in dead grasses and exposed Eucalyptus roots, it was completely hidden from view.
    Lila couldn’t have loved it more.
    She tugged open the front door. “Dad?”
    “Lila? That you?”
    There he was in a kitchen chair in his blue suit, rapping his fist against the tabletop and staring out the window. In front of him was a box of donuts with greasy splotches on the lid. Lila flipped open the lid and pulled one out. “Soggy. Were they sitting in your car all day?”
    He snapped the lid shut and sat back in