Whose Bride Is She Anyway Read Free Page B

must be on an audition, hence the eye thing, Tara figured. But he didn’t look as fake as most of the men she’d run into since she’d come to California. He was vivid in the way most actors—she supposed—should be, yet raw and edgy with all that silent eye contact. Definitely had presence…
    A shiver like spider’s legs skittered up her spine. It was all technique, or whatever actors called it, designed to make women’s libidos go “whoa”, and hers had responded in typical teeny bopper fashion.
    As Tara walked back down the hall she wondered about his name. He really should think about changing it.
    August
? Well, it was … a month, for crap’s sake.
    * * *
    Now that she was back in the waiting room, watching interviewees for the jury come and go from her corner chair, she gave some thought to Kelsey Little while trying to set aside her encounter with that August person who was much more like an Adonis than a man named after a month.
    Out of the blue a thought occurred to her, one in a long string of paranoid thoughts that made her squirm with discomfort. Was there a lie detector test on this show? Because if so, she was doomed.
    She fidgeted and refused to acknowledge the very idea that she’d been lying boldly about knowing Kelsey. It wasn’t a lie. She
did
know her. Sorta…
    Hookay, so she’d told a wee white lie to get
this far
.
    Oh, all right, she conceded mentally, she’d lied
a lot
. Yep, she’d told a really
big
white lie, but the end justified the means, she reasoned with herself. So Tara Douglas and Kelsey Little weren’t really
friends,
per se, in high school. The producers of “Whose Bride Is She Anyway? ” didn’t need to know that. All the rules on the show’s website said was that the potential jury foreman had to be a friend from high school.
    Define friends.
    Tara sighed. Okay, so she and Kelsey weren’t even
acquaintances.
    Jeez, so they came from two
completely
different worlds if she allowed brutal honesty to reign supreme.
    What of it?
    “I did know Kelsey Littman in high school!” a woman’s voice protested loudly as it was ejected from the producer’s door.
    Tara almost laughed aloud from her corner of the room.
Littman?
    The nice secretary smiled serenely at a woman as she motioned her out the door of the producer’s office. “That’s lovely, but not according to our records, dear.” The disgruntled woman stomped out of the waiting area with a flounce of hair.
    Oh hell. They were checking records?
Guilt chomped at Tara’s intestines like a round of Pac Man. She glanced around the room nervously as if at any moment someone from her past might out her. She hunkered further down in her chair and grabbed a magazine from the table beside her, covering her face with it so she could get in touch with the vibe that had brought her here in the first place.
    Some much overdue payback for Kelsey Little.
    Kelsey Little didn’t know Tara had existed in high school. Not in the way you acknowledged someone friend-to-friend, anyway. Kelsey instead had taunted and tormented her all through high school and then, she’d been responsible for the most humiliating event in Tara Douglas’s life.
    Bar none.
    Tara was Kelsey’s
complete
polar opposite. Short and overweight, president of the trigonometry club, debate team captain and home every Saturday night her
entire
high school career.
    Alone. As in just Tara and her bag of pork rinds.
    Definitely not a candidate for the illustrious Evanston cheerleading squad.
    She wondered if Kelsey was as evil now as she’d been in high school. Evil like Kelsey’s was inherent, inbred, a defective mean gene.
    Tara shook off the bad karma that attacked every time she thought of high school. All she wanted to do was get on this stupid show as Kelsey’s jury foreman, but as the waiting room continued to fill up rather than empty out, she was becoming skeptical.
    “I think I did it!” a large man with a thick moustache touted as he left the