Heavenstone 02 - Secret Whispers

has the wisdom of a woman twenty years older? He knows how to judge character? Don’t believe it. Well, we’re going home not a day too soon . Lucille Bennet . . . twenty years younger than he is. He’ll make a fool of himself. Daddy always needed to be looked after. He’s brilliant when it comes to business, but when it comes to his personal life . . .”
    “Why are you holding the phone like that?” Ellie asked, snapping me back to the moment. I hadn’t heard her open the door to our room and had no idea how long she had been standing there watching me.
    “Oh. I just finished talking to my father.”
    I hung up the receiver.
    “You didn’t say a word for the longest time. Were you talking to yourself?” she asked, and closed the door.
    I started to come up with an answer, but she waved at me to ignore her question. She was carrying two big bags. “I have something for you for tomorrow night,” she said, rushing over to slap the bags onto the bed. She reached into one. “This is your size.”
    She pulled out a slinky, deep-V-neck black satin dress and held it up against me.
    “Yes, this is terrific for you. I looked through your wardrobe. You have nothing as sexy as this. Naturally, you’ll need this black clutch to go with it.” She reached into the same bag to show it to me. Then she went to the second bag. “You don’t have a pair of these, but they’ll look terrific with the dress.” She opened a shoebox and held up a pair of red peep-toe pumps. “Come on. Start trying it on,” she said, tossing the dress at me. “Oh, I almost forgot.” She reached into the second bag again and took out a pair of chandelier earrings. “I just thought these would look darling on you.”
    “How much was all this?”
    “Not much,” she said.
    I saw there were still tags on everything. “Ellie, you didn’t . . .”
    “What?”
    “Shoplift again?”
    “Just try everything on and stop worrying, Semantha. At least have one great night before graduation without analyzing it to death, will you?”
    She went into the bathroom. I looked at the dress and the shoes and felt a little excitement. Maybe Ellie was right. Maybe I needed to loosen up and try to enjoy myself for a change. Daddy was doing that, wasn’t he? I slipped on the dress. The shoes fit perfectly. Then I opened the closet that had a full-length mirror and gazed at myself.
    “Well, that doesn’t leave much to the imagination,” Cassie whispered.
    “Hot, hot, hot!” Ellie cried. “Put on the earrings, too, and let’s do something different with your hair and makeup, Semantha. You look too dowdy these days.”
    Did she really want me to have a good time, or had she made promises about me that she wanted to fulfill? There’s a Cassie question, I thought, but I let her go on to show me how she thought I should wear my hair and do my makeup. The Semantha Heaven-stone I saw in the mirror the next evening looked like a totally new person, who was arguably brighter, far sexier, and, dare I think it, even happy about herself.
    My legs were actually trembling when we were called down to the lobby to greet our dates. I didn’t realize I was walking with my head down, my eyes on the floor to hide my nervousness. Ellie nudged me, and I looked up to see our dates waiting. I wasn’t sure which one was Ethan. One of them was about six foot one or two, with a slim build and light brown hair trimmed in a traditional style, the way my father and his business associates wore their hair. The other young man was short and stocky, with longer dark brown hair not that neatly kept. It was over his ear on the right but not on the left. He had harder facial features and a cleft chin.
    “Hi, Ethan,” Ellie said to the taller one. I felt a glob of disappointment settle in the base of my throat. Ethan’s eyes shifted quickly toward me, and I looked down again.
    “Hey, Ellie. This is Kelly Morgan,” he said.
    Why did he have to introduce his best friend toher? She had talked about Kelly as though she had met him.
    “Kelly, this is my roommate, Semantha.”
    “Yeah, hey,” he said. “You look terrific.”
    I smiled a thank-you, but I couldn’t keep my eyes from drifting back to Ethan, who wore a small smile that tucked in the corners of his lips slightly. The softness of it touched me. I once read a romance novel—one of the books Cassie had mocked, in fact—in which the main character said she fell in love with her boyfriend first through his