The Inconvenient Bride Read Free

on. Let me put on some more gel. Just a little gel.”
    â€œSierra, for Pete’s sake!” Finn was tearing his own hair.“Let’s go. Stop messing with her and get the hell out of the way.”
    â€œI just need—”
    â€œSleek,” Ballou insisted. “Smooth. Straight as a die.” He made up and down knifing motions with his hands.
    Then why did you ask for a model with naturally curly hair? Sierra wanted to scream.
    â€œI’m frizzing, too!” Delilah, the other model, complained.
    â€œAnd not the blue. I don’t like her in the blue,” Ballou decided, scrutinizing the dress Alison had just put on. “Let’s try the yellow.”
    â€œI can’t wear yellow!” the model objected. “I look dead in yellow.”
    â€œYou’re going to be dead in yellow,” Finn said, “if you don’t shut up. We have thirty of these damn things to get finished and we’ve only done six! Sierra! Let’s go!”
    They went. The models stood patiently while Sierra slicked them down again. Ballou fussed and fumed and fretted and changed his mind and Finn griped and growled and cussed and shot.
    And all the while Sierra tried to stay up-beat because after all, she told herself, in the greater course of the universe what difference did it make?
    It was rain. A yellow dress or a blue one. Curly hair. Frizzy hair. Straight hair. What difference did it make?
    It didn’t.
    Not like Frankie.
    That was really what made it a lousy day—thinking about Frankie.
    Frankie Bartelli was going to die.
    Sierra hated to even think that. Her mind rebelled at the thought. Her emotions rejected it furiously. But for all her rebellion and all her rejection, it was going to happen—unless he got a kidney transplant—and soon.
    Sure, some people lived a long time with kidney problems. Some people did just fine on dialysis for years and years.
    But they weren’t Frankie, who for the last few months had been fading right before Sierra’s eyes.
    They weren’t eight years old, either, with their whole lives ahead of them.
    They didn’t dream about climbing mountains and going fishing and playing baseball. They didn’t draw the niftiest spaceships or the scariest green monsters or detailed plans for the “best tree house in the world.”
    They didn’t love Star Trek and root beer floats and double cheese pizza. They didn’t have big brown eyes and sooty dark lashes and a cowlick that even Sierra’s most determined hair gel couldn’t subdue for long. They didn’t have the world’s croakiest laugh and a grin that melted you where you stood.
    Or maybe they did.
    Sierra didn’t know. She didn’t know about anyone—except Frankie.
    He and his mother Pam had been Sierra’s neighbors since she’d moved into half of the third floor of a four-story walk-up in the Village three years ago.
    Frankie had been a lot healthier-looking then. A lot stronger. And Pam hadn’t had that hunted, haunted look in her dark brown eyes.
    â€œI don’t know what I’m going to do,” she’d said, her voice cracking when she’d first told Sierra what the doctors had told her.
    To Sierra it was simple. “If he needs a transplant, we’ll get him a transplant,” she had vowed.
    But Pam, desperate but realistic, had shaken her head in despair. “The hospital wants two hundred, fifty thousand dollars up front before they’ll even agree to put him on the list.”
    It seemed like highway robbery to Sierra. Extortion. Every vile thing she could think of. Just because Pam was a self-employed illustrator whose insurance coverage had managed to fall through some crack, that was no reason for them to deny Frankie.
    And she said so hotly and furiously more than once.
    But they had denied him. Just this morning Pam had repeated it. “They won’t even see him unless I come up with a