An Offer He Cant Refuse - By Christie Ridgway Page 0,6

these years.

She waved to catch their attention. Their gazes found her, and all at once identical expressions dawned across their very different faces. Tea froze, cemented to the chair just as her shoes used to stick to the floor of the bathroom they'd shared as teenagers. But it wasn't a heavy layer of hair over-spray that was gluing her down now.

Oh, hell! she thought, parochial-school guilt tacking on an automatic pardon my French.

But oh, hell! Eve and Joey were beaming smiles her way. Nice, fake, "Hello, sucker-sister" smiles.

Tea smiled back; there was no other choice. Anything less and they'd sense weakness - or even worse, willingness. And she was definitely not willing, because whatever it was they wanted, it had to be something terrible, very terrible, if it required those NutraSweet grins.

The party sprang to mind. They wouldn't... no. No. It couldn't be that.

But it had to be something. Thinking quickly, Tea pushed menus into their hands the instant they sat down. "Hello, hello! How are you?"

Without another weapon available, she whipped open her own menu, using it and a torrent of talk as a shield until she could get a bead on what they were after. "Do you know what you want? I'm starving. What a morning! My early meeting ran late. A rug I ordered weeks ago is missing and needs to be tracked down. I have two appointments this afternoon and then a slew of paperwork to get through back at the office. Oh yes, and Mrs. Duncan..."

She risked a glance over the top of the menu to gauge how her spur-of-the-moment plan of distraction was working. Her sisters were staring at her, Eve's blue eyes wide and Joey's narrowed into slices of bittersweet chocolate. If the two weren't derailed from whatever they wanted as she'd hoped, they were at least disconcerted by the way she was rattling on about her day. No surprise there, because as the ever-responsible big sister she usually encouraged them to talk about their days - probing for problems and doling out advice, all the while trying to inconspicuously nudge their water goblets away from their elbows or the table edge.

A balding waiter glided up.

"Are you ready to place your order?" he asked Eve.

Tea's sister started, then turned to him, sliding right into her regular routine: wiggling her butt, wetting her lips, waiting the second it took for the poor guy's tongue to hang out. During the past sixteen years, each sister had developed her own way of handling the Caruso connection. Like her mother, Tea pretended it didn't exist. Her sister Joey clung so closely to the Caruso's legitimate side - the gourmet food company, La Vita Buona - that she was blind to the other.

Eve diverted attention from who she was by how she looked.

Long accustomed to the process, Tea let her gaze drop from Eve's face to the glass of water in her hand and the bright crimson lipstick print along its rim. The last time they'd been out together, Eve's latest escort - a tennis star named Alex, or was it a rock star named Andre? - anyway, the guy had caught Eve's eye then shared her drink, turning it to sip from her raspberry-vodka martini right over the mark of her scarlet-tinged kiss. Tea had never witnessed anything so subtle yet so steamy in her life.

But felt not the slightest pang that even though she wore EverPerfect, the lipstick that claimed to be "flawless, 24/7," no date of hers had ever so much as picked up her smearless glass. Apparently the men who asked her out harbored a lingering, elementary-school fear that even grown-up girls had cooties, or perhaps her conservative attire made it clear she wasn't in the market for hot-blooded passion. Anything that uncontrollable was dangerous to a woman harboring her kind of secrets.

"And for you?" the waiter asked Tea. She requested her usual, the raw salad with the balsamic-lemon vinaigrette on the side. Then he took Joey's order.

As the man moved off, Tea's sisters glanced at each other, took a collective breath, then shared another glance. Tea opened her mouth to put them off again, but Eve beat her to it.

"Your hair looks wonderful," she gushed in synthetically warm tones. "A new style?"

Now it was Tea's turn to stare. "I've worn my hair like this for months. Mom calls it my Malibu Barbie look, remember?" And without her daughter-discount at the spa, she couldn't afford the Japanese straightening process that flattened out her waves,