Read Drowned Vanilla (Cafe La Femme Book 2) for Free Online Page A

sleeve. ‘Budge up, I need to use my ten minutes a day computer time!’
    ‘I can’t log off now,’ he protested. ‘I have literally tens of people waiting for the new chapter of my Captain America fanfic.’
    ‘And they’ll appreciate it all the more if they have to wait a little longer for it.’
    He glared, and did some rapid typing. ‘What do you need it for, anyway?’
    ‘I need to look at webcam footage of topless girls.’
    Ceege moved out of the chair so fast I think I was hit by a sonic wave. Either that, or nacho crumbs. ‘I am completely okay with that.’
    ‘Why, thank you.’
    I put Stewart on speaker phone and sat down, typing in the address he read aloud to me. The Gingerbread House. Cute. In a disturbing kind of way. The home page that blinked up displayed a cartoon gingerbread house with the various options displayed in windows — Chat, Archives, Hot Hits, Profiles, Forums and of course the veiled promise of Subscriber Only.
    ‘Check out Profiles,’ Stewart said through the phone speaker, and I clicked over to images of Gingernutz (away from the cameras we had been told her real name was Libby), Cherry_ripe (Melinda) and a sweet looking blonde girl calling herself French Vanilla.
    ‘Bloody hell.’
    ‘Nae the same girl, is it?’
    ‘Ceege, get me the paper from the kitchen.’
    ‘What did your last slave sue you for?’
    ‘Ceege!’
    My lazy-arse housemate muttered under his breath but went hunting for the paper. He really didn’t need to. ‘No,’ I said into the phone. ‘Really not the same girl.’
    ‘Should I come o’er?’
    If I hesitated — and let’s be clear on this, I did hesitate — it was because solving mysteries has not been a healthy life choice for me in the past, and had nothing to do with how there was this giant ‘we kissed, and I got together with someone else, and you vanished for half a year’ hole in our friendship right now.
    ‘Of course,’ I said, cheerfully enough that we could both pretend there hadn’t been a really awkward pause.
    Deniability is a wonderful thing.
    Xanthippe came home late. I don’t know where she goes — I imagine her posing gorgeously in nightclubs too cool for anyone else to have ever heard about, drinking cocktails that haven’t been invented yet, that sort of thing. Either that, or she works nights as a security guard somewhere.
    She walked in on me as I was in the middle of throwing raw vegetable sticks at two of the men in my life. ‘I made dipping sauces!’ I yelled at them.
    ‘Vegetables, Tabs,’ Ceege complained. ‘We’re men, we need meat. Or at least bacon. But if bacon, also cheese and grease.’
    ‘Xanthippe,’ Stewart yelped as I pelted him with slivers of carrot. ‘Vote fer pizza! We want pizza.’
    She leaned over the kitchen table and picked a piece of celery off his shoulder, biting into it. ‘Tish, let the boys order pizza. You know they’ll eat the vegetables while they’re waiting anyway. It’s a win win situation.’
    I sulked, but took the phone out of my bra and relinquished it to Ceege.
    ‘Classy,’ Xanthippe noted. ‘So what did I miss?’
    ‘A mystery,’ I said as Ceege started ordering far more pizza than four ordinary sized people should ever hope to eat. ‘Again. Apparently it’s what we do now.’
    ‘Sounds promising.’
    ‘The girl who went missing from The Gingerbread House wasnae Annabeth French,’ Stewart said. ‘Annabeth French wasnae French Vanilla.’
    ‘Right,’ said Xanthippe, sitting on the kitchen counter, because she can’t just use a chair like a normal person. ‘That’s unexpected.’
    ‘It means our missing girl is still missing,’ I agreed. ‘For some reason, French Vanilla was pretending to be Annabeth French from Flynn.’ I thought about it some more. ‘Annabeth must have been in on it. She pretended to know what I was talking about, when I asked her about Ginger and Melinda. So she has to have known about it.’
    This was bad.