Page 56 of The Naturals

So much for Lia’s magnanimousness.

“What do you want?” I asked her, not bothering to sugarcoat my words.

“My, but we’re cranky today.”

If looks could kill, Lia would have been dead on the floor, and I would have been on trial for murder.

“I suppose,” Lia said, with the air of someone making a most generous concession, “that the argument you had with Dean about his father wasn’t entirely your fault, and since this whole hair-in-a-box thing seems to have given him a renewed purpose in life, I’m not morally obligated to make you miserable anymore.”

I wasn’t sure how to reply to that. “Thank you?”

“I thought you could use a distraction.” Lia smiled. “If there’s one thing I excel at, it’s distractions.”

The last time I’d let Lia dictate our plans, I’d ended up kissing Dean and Michael in a span of less than twenty-four hours, but after three days of house arrest and way too many statistics about dachshunds, I was desperate.

“What kind of distraction did you have in mind?”

Lia tossed a bag on my bed. I opened it.

“Did you rob a cosmetics store?”

Lia shrugged. “I like makeup—and nothing says distraction like a makeover. Besides…” She reached in the bag and pulled out a lipstick. Smiling wickedly, she uncapped it and twisted the bottom. “This is definitely your color.”

I eyed the lipstick. The color was dark—halfway between red and brown. Way too sexy for me—and strangely familiar.

“What do you say?” Lia didn’t actually wait for an answer. She pushed me into a sitting position on the bed. She leaned into my personal space and tilted my chin back. And then she dragged the lipstick across my lips.

“Kleenex!” Lia barked.

Sloane supplied the Kleenex, a goofy grin on her face.

“Blot,” Lia ordered.

I blotted.

“I knew that would be a good color on you,” Lia told me, her voice smug and self-satisfied. Without another word, she turned her attention to my eyes. When she was finally finished, I pushed her off me and walked over to the mirror.

“Oh.” I couldn’t keep the sound from escaping my mouth. My blue eyes looked impossibly big. My lashes had been thoroughly mascara-ed, and the color on my lips was dark against my porcelain skin.

I looked like my mother. My features, the way they came together on my face—everything.

Blue dress. Blood. Lipstick.

A series of images flashed through my mind, and I realized with sudden clarity why the color of this lipstick had seemed so familiar. I turned back to the bed and scavenged through the bag of makeup until I found it. I turned the tube upside down, looking for the color’s name.

“Rose Red,” I read, swallowing after I said the words. I turned to Lia. “Where did you get this?”

“What does it matter?”

My knuckles went white around the tube. “Where did you get this, Lia?”

“Why do you want to know?” she countered, folding her arms over her chest and examining her nails.

“I just do, okay?” I couldn’t tell her more than that—and I shouldn’t have had to. “Please?”

Lia gathered the makeup off the bed and made her way to the door. She gave me one of those smiles that wasn’t a smile. “I bought it, Cassie. With money. As part of our fine system of capitalistic exchange. Happy?”

“The color—” I started to say.