Authors: Susan McBride

Love, Lies and Texas Dips (30 page)

This second pregnancy test surely was all the proof they’d need, right? Once they got a look at the latest evidence of her innocence, they’d have to let her off deb probation, wouldn’t they?

Laura shook off a fleeting anxiety attack, assuring herself,
They had better
. How could they make her suffer any more than she already had, when she’d done everything to disprove the spiteful gossip? Though she knew the GSC could do whatever it wanted to do. The women who ran it made the rules, and they could change them at will.

Breathe
, she told herself, and closed her eyes momentarily, envisioning herself in her white Vera Wang ball gown, dancing in the arms of her hunky escort—oh, let’s say, the love of her life, Avery Dorman—during the deb ball next spring. Within seconds, her frantic heartbeat had slowed, and she reached for the pretty folded linen towels that lay in a basket by the sink, snatching one to dry her hands.

With a sigh, she dropped the crumpled towel and pushed her wheat-blond hair behind her ears, glancing one more time at the minus sign clear as day on the dipstick’s belly. When Bootsie Bidwell had initially insisted she take measures to exonerate herself, Laura might’ve been a little worried; but she had no such uncertainty now. She hadn’t even been with her on-again-off-again flame Avery Dorman since mid-August, and it was early October. Maybe Jo Lynn’s desperate attempts to keep Laura and Avery apart had really done Laura a favor this time around.

“Take that, Jo-L. I win this round,” she said to the mirror, flipping her hair over her shoulder, a fleeting smile touching her lips.

Excerpt copyright © 2009 by Susan McBride. Published by Delacorte Press,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Susan McBride
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint
of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc. New York.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of
Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McBride, Susan.
The debs : love, lies, and Texas dips / Susan McBride. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Houston debutantes, Laura, Mac, Ginger, and Jo Lynn, fall in love and
plot revenge amid their first round of etiquette classes.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89100-7
[1. Debutantes—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Wealth—Fiction.
4. Houston (Tex.)—Fiction.] I. Title
PZ7.M478276Dh 2009

[Fic]—dc22
2008024931

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