Sleeping Beauty by Dallas Schulze

turning back in his direction when she registered who he was with. She nearly gave herself whiplash when she jerked around to gape at his companion.
    "Anne?" The husky purr vanished in a disbelieving squeak. "Anne Moore?''
    "Hello, DeDe." It was only sheer willpower that kept the color from flooding Anne's cheeks. Aware of Neill's interested look, she forced what she hoped was an easy smile. "How are you?"
    "Fine." DeDe continued to stare, her eyes wide with disbelief. "You're here with him?" she asked, as if she needed verbal reassurance before she could believe what she was seeing.
    "Yes." Seeing that the simple affirmative wasn't going to be enough, she nodded in Neill's direction. "This is Neill Devlin. Neill, this is DeDe Carmichael. We went to school together."
    Neill acknowledged the introduction with a polite smile, but he might as well not have bothered. A moment ago she'd been looking at him like a cat looking at a particularly plump canary. Now she was staring at him with the same expression she might previously have reserved for a two-headed alien. Neill wondered if he should be offended but decided he was more interested in knowing just why the fact that he and Anne were together should strike her as so extraordinary.
    "We went to school together," DeDe parroted, her head bobbing up and down as her eyes shifted from Neill to Anne, then back again. The silence stretched. DeDe's pink sneakers appeared to be glued to the linoleum. Neill was just about to remind her that they needed more time to order when the annoyed jangle of a bell cut into her stupefied silence.
    "You gone deaf, DeDe?" an irascible voice demanded from behind the counter. "Order up!''
    DeDe jolted and frowned. "I'm coming!" she called over her shoulder. She gave Neill and Anne another speculative look and flashed a quick smile. "I'll be back to get your order," she promised, and Anne told herself it was just imagination that made the words sound like a threat.
    She caught the question in Neill's eyes and knew he had to be wondering at DeDe's astonishment over the fact that they were together. She briefly considered telling him that she never dated, which was more or less true. But it wasn't the whole truth, or even the most important part of it, and it didn't exactly paint her in a flattering light, so she settled for what she hoped was a casual smile and opened her menu.
    "The hamburgers are excellent here."
    She waited for him to ask a question she didn't want to answer, but he simply raised his brows in surprise and asked, "What? No chicken pot pie?"
    Neill would have given a great deal to know what was behind DeDe's reaction, but he couldn't ignore the look in Anne's eyes, the plea she probably hadn't been aware of making. So he tamped down the curiosity— a writer's curse—pretended that DeDe's slack-jawed disbelief had been nothing out of the ordinary and set out to coax a genuine smile out of his companion.
    "So, what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?"
    Her eyes widened a little, surprise and something that might have been gratitude flickering through the clear gray depths. Neill thought he'd never known anyone whose emotions were so transparent. Everything was reflected in those eyes.
    "I was born and raised here." She folded her menu and set it on top of his, carefully aligning their edges, keeping her eyes on the task because it was safer than looking at her companion. "How about yourself?"
    "I wasn't born and raised here," he said, shaking his head.
    His serious tone startled her into looking at him. Catching the laughter in those impossibly blue eyes, she found herself smiling easily. Despite the nerves jangling in the pit of her stomach, Anne made up her mind that she was going to enjoy the next hour without giving so much as a thought to the fact that DeDe Carmichael was a world-class gossip, which meant that, by the end of the day, everybody who was interested—and quite a few who weren't—would know that Anne