Little Miss Red Read online

  Red, meet the Wolf

  “Sorry to do this, but I’m sitting there,” he drawled, pointing to the seat next to me, “so I think I’m gonna have to trouble you to get up for a sec.”

  That voice. I could have listened to it for at least three lifetimes. It was just so…twangy.

  As we did the airplane aisle dance so he could get in, we bumped arms and an electric shock shot down my spine. Omigod—I knew it. We were soul mates!

  Once he was settled in his seat, he turned to me. “I like your hat,” he said, pointing at the red cowboy hat I had bought the day before.

  “Thanks,” I replied.

  He shook his head and laughed.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I was just thinking,” he drawled. “You’re probably trouble with a capital T. Red cowboy hat kinda girls always are.” As he winked at me, another jolt of electricity went through me. But this time it went up instead of down. “But that’s okay—’cause sometimes trouble can be fun.” Even though our seats were supposed to stay in their upright positions, he put his back. “Must be fate that I ended up getting this Michael guy’s seat, huh?” he said with a wolfish smile.

  He had no idea.

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  Little Miss Red

  ROBIN PALMER

  speak

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  SPEAK

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

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  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2009

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Robin Palmer, 2010

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65110-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition

  that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise

  circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover

  other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition

  including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume

  any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  For Laila Nabulsi,

  for patiently listening to my drama

  over the years

  acknowledgments

  Immense gratitude to Penguin’s Jennifer Bonnell and Kristin Gilson, for their brilliant editorial guidance; Eileen Kreit, for her unwavering support; and Kristin Smith, for her amazing eye.

  Kate Lee, for taking care of everything.

  Amy Loubalu and Christina Beck, for living it with me.

  And for Ken Palmer, the best dad in the world, for looking at me across the table at Carousel that night and telling me not to give up.

  Little Miss Red

  Table of Contents

  prologue

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  epilogue

  prologue

  I’m very big on signs. So when the captain announced that our flight to Florida would be delayed because of some last-minute passengers, I took that as yet another sign that this trip was going to be a disaster. With all the drama that had been going on the last few days, it was obvious that I needed to get out of Los Angeles, but spending my Spring Break with my grandmother at a retirement community was a little too undramatic.

  I turned my iPhone back on, sure I was going to find a text from my semi-ex-boyfriend, Michael, saying he had changed his mind and wanted to get back together, but like the other ten times I had checked that morning, there was nothing.

  After making sure it was off again (the captain hadn’t given the “Please make sure all electronic devices are off” announcement, but I certainly didn’t want to forget and be responsible for a plane crash), I took out Propelled by Passion, the latest book in the Devon Devoreaux romance series. As I gazed at Dante, the tank top–wearing, motorcycle-riding complete and utter hottie on the cover, I felt my muscles relax. Something about his blue eyes and the ridges of his ripped abs always calmed me down. I knew many of my fellow juniors at Castle Heights High had written English papers about how Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights was the most romantic hero in literary history, but as far as I was concerned, he had nothing on Dante.

  As riveting and dramatic as the story was, before I knew it, my eyelids felt like they were being yanked down by elves, thanks to the Benadryl I had taken. Soon enough, everything fell away, even my seatmate Harriet’s nonstop chatter and the meowing of her cat, which was stowed in her carry-on and giving me an allergy attack. I was just about to doze off when fate intervened, my life did a complete one-eighty, and was changed forever.

  “Excuse me, but I need to get by,” I heard a gravelly voice with a slight twang say.

  As my eyes fluttered open, I thought that the Benadryl must have really kicked in, because that was the only thing that could explain the hallucination I was having.

  “Dante!” I gasped.

  The guy standing in front of me looked confused. “Who’s Dante?”

  I looked back down at my book. Okay, the guy standing in front of me was more like nineteen rather than in his early thirties, and his hair was more the color of dark chocolate than Dante’s roasted chestnut mop, and sure, his eyes were the color of caramel rather than sky blue, and he was wearing a faded black T-shirt rather than a formfitting, ab-rocking white tank top, but still—the resemblance was crazy. They could have been brothers.

  I quickly turned the book over. “Uh…no one,” I replied.

  “Sorry to do this, but I’m sitting there,” he drawled, pointing to the seat next to me, “so I think I’m gonna have to trouble you to get up for a sec.”

  That voice. I could have l
istened to it for at least three lifetimes. It was just so…twangy.

  “You’re 12B?” I said, confused.

  After reaching into the pocket of his jeans and looking at his boarding pass, he nodded. “But…Michael was 12B.”

  He looked confused again. The way he furrowed his brow was beyond sexy. “Who’s Michael?”

  “Michael…is…” What to say? “Not here,” I finally finished.

  As we did the airplane aisle dance so he could get in, we bumped arms and an electric shock shot down my spine. Omigod—I knew it. We were soul mates! The exact same thing happened when Devon met Dante the first time.

  Once he was settled in his seat, he turned to me. “I like your hat,” he said, pointing at the red cowboy hat I had bought the day before.

  “Thanks,” I replied.

  He shook his head and laughed.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I was just thinking,” he drawled. “You’re probably trouble with a capital T. Red cowboy hat kinda girls always are.” As he winked at me, another jolt of electricity went through me. But this time it went up instead of down. “But that’s okay—’cause sometimes trouble can be fun.” Even though our seats were supposed to stay in their upright positions, he put his back. “Must be fate that I ended up getting this Michael guy’s seat, huh?” he said with a wolfish smile.

  He had no idea.

  one

  Some people—actually, a lot of people, if you go by the amount of bumper stickers on the road—lead their lives according to the slogan “WWJD?” What would Jesus do?

  But because I, Sophie Rebecca Greene, of Studio City, California, am an Aquarian and therefore tend to break away from the pack, my motto ever since I was thirteen has been “WWDDD?”

  What would Devon Devoreaux do?

  “Okay, you guys,” I said to my two best friends, Jordan and Ali, that April afternoon in the cafeteria as I took a bite of my smoked turkey and Swiss sandwich. “This is serious—WWDDD?”

  Jordan rolled her eyes. “She wouldn’t do anything, because she doesn’t actually exist. She’s a made-up character.” Jordan’s mom was Lulu Lavoie, the award-winning writer and creator of the Devon Devoreaux series, so she loved to point this out.

  I sighed. I loved my friends, but life can sometimes be very lonely when you’re as creative and passionate as I am and your friends just…aren’t. “Well, if she did exist, and she were in a calendar, what month would she be?” I asked.

  The week before, during our bimonthly meeting of the French club, I had come up with the brilliant idea that we do a Castle Heights calendar to raise money for next year’s trip to Montreal. Everyone loved the idea, but I had to admit my motives were a little more selfish than just wanting to stay in a hotel and order room service. I had gotten the idea from Devon, actually. Back when she was sixteen and still living in Wasilla, Alaska, Devon had been Miss February in a “Find a Cure for Epilepsy” calendar, and a big modeling agent happened to see it. Within months she was on the cover of Cosmopolitan and leading a jet-set life. It wasn’t that I wanted to become a model (there weren’t a lot of auburn-haired, freckled girls on the cover of Teen Vogue), but I was hoping that the calendar would jump-start my life—take me out of an existence of boring, extracurricular clubs and SAT prep classes and lead me to the adventure-filled life that I knew was my destiny.

  When my iPhone buzzed, I lunged for it. According to some people (okay, everyone who knew me), I was a little…addicted to it. Yes, it was true that I had had a slight panic attack when I got to school one morning and realized I had left it at home, but you never knew when an e-mail was going to come through that could just possibly change your life forever.

  As I looked at the screen, I realized that, unfortunately, this one wasn’t one of those. It was just an update from the Lulu Lavoie Fan Club announcing that her new book was now available for preorder on Amazon.

  “Anyway, I was thinking April would be a good month,” I continued. “Not only is it hopeful, but it would get a lot of traffic because people would turn to it to count how many weeks till Spring Break.”

  After adjusting her bandana, Jordan jammed half a Ho Ho into her mouth. “I can’t believe I’m being an accessory to my best friend willingly objectifying her body to be a pinup girl. If any members of the Young Feminists of the New Millennium club find out, they’ll impeach me,” she said. Jordan had recently been sworn in as president after Marla Warner announced she was resigning to try out for cheerleading.

  I shrugged. “If it were July or August and I was wearing a bathing suit, I could see how it would be cheesy, but I’m thinking of a sundress and a little cardigan. You know…cute sexy.”

  “Cute sexy instead of Juliet DeStefano sexy sexy?” Ali asked as she bit into her Weight Watchers caramel cake. Ali didn’t need to diet—she just loved the aftertaste of the Weight Watchers stuff.

  Jordan kicked her under the table. “Um, hello? Remember the no-Juliet-DeStefano-talk-ever rule that we passed last week?” she whispered.

  If I couldn’t have Devon’s life (at least not until I graduated from college and moved to New York City or Paris or London), I would have settled for Juliet’s. Jordan was always saying I was completely obsessed with her, but that wasn’t true. I was only mildly obsessed with her. I mean, how could a person not be? From the very first day she arrived as a transfer student back in December—when I, as a member of the Castle Heights Greeters, was assigned to give her a tour of the school—I just knew the story that she had moved here from Wichita, Kansas, because her dad was transferred was just a cover for something else. Okay, maybe it was just an honest mistake when Mrs. Winkler, the school secretary, kept calling her Julia instead of Juliet in the office that morning—but maybe not. Maybe Juliet had changed her name from Julia because she was on the run like Devon in Fueled by Fear, when Devon’s affair with the Olympic swimmer ended and he started stalking her. And what about when, in making small talk during the tour, she revealed that she had moved six times since third grade? She said her father was a college professor and that’s why she kept switching schools, but there was something about the story I found a little fishy.

  Also, she only ever spoke to Phan, a Cambodian exchange student. Ali thought that this was either because Juliet was shy or because all the other girls were completely jealous that she was a super hottie, but I didn’t buy it. I thought she was afraid that if she made friends for whom English was their first language, she’d have to weave a web of lies to cover up her past and wouldn’t be able to keep them straight, ultimately having a nervous breakdown like Devon in Crazy with Control. Regardless, Jordan and Ali were right; she was definitely sexy sexy. With the body and face of a Victoria’s Secret model and the way she could take her long, silky brown hair and, with the flick of her wrist, twist it into a messy-yet-sexy bun, every boy in school was in love with her. Whether the rumors about her and the football team were true, no one knew, but it was true that they stopped dead in their tracks and their jaws fell to the floor when she walked down the hall. Like Devon, she had the ability to turn men into “quivering masses of desire.” I mean, who wouldn’t want to be Juliet DeStefano?

  I put down my sandwich. “Maybe I want to be objectified,” I announced.

  Jordan gave me the same kind of horrified look as when I ordered a hamburger during her Vegans Unite phase.

  One of my Grandma Roz’s favorite sayings was, “The grass may be greener on the other side, but you still have to mow the lawn.” Maybe, but a lot of the time I felt like my patch of lawn was dry and brown and dead, whereas people like Devon and Juliet had green and dewy lawns filled with exotic flowers like birds-of-paradise.

  “Okay, maybe ‘objectified’ isn’t the right word,” I continued. “What I want is to be seen.”

  “We see you,” Ali offered. “Especially now that the eye doctor changed my prescription.” She pushed her new glasses up the bridge of her nose.

  “Yeah, but no one else does. I just…blend in.”
I motioned to the cafeteria. “Look at us—we’re not popular,” I said, pointing to the Ramp where all the A-listers sat. “And we’re not unpopular,” I said, pointing to the video game geeks, goths, and stoners sitting around the periphery. I sighed. “We sit smack in the middle. We just…are.”

  “But what if ‘just being’ is the whole point of life!” said Ali, whose mom was a Buddhist.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want to just be—I want to do! I want to live! I want to stand out!”

  Jordan pointed to the magenta streak in her blonde hair that was peeking out from underneath the bandana she started wearing when she became a Young Feminist.

  “I still have some dye left if you want to color your hair,” she offered.

  “No thanks,” I sighed. That wasn’t the kind of living I was looking for. I wanted something bigger. More, I don’t know, dramatic.

  WWDDD? I thought. I wasn’t entirely sure, but I had an idea of where she might start: break up with Michael Rosenberg, my boyfriend of three years who I loved, but was no longer in love with.

  “No offense, Sophie,” Jordan said after school as we were getting manicures at Kathy’s Nails on Ventura Boulevard, near where we both lived. “But Michael’s the only boyfriend you’ve ever had. So how do you know you’re not in love with him?”

  “You just know,” I replied. “It’s like in your mom’s book Seduced by Seduction, when Devon meets the Saudi Arabian sheik at the Cannes Film Festival and he gives her a 22-carat diamond engagement ring the next day. That’s in love.”

  “But Michael’s great,” Jordan said. “I mean, what other guy are you going to find who likes going to the mall and isn’t gay?”

  She did have a point.

  “And Jeremy would be beyond bummed if you guys broke up,” she added.

  Jeremy was my nine-year-old brother. He loved Michael, and would even hug him, which for someone with Asperger’s syndrome said a lot.