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as painfully as possible.
    Unexpectedly, AJ Yarborough crossed her thoughts. AJ would never have done anything like this—he was too decent. Bianca was stunned by immediate shame, remembering that he had once loved her and she had treated it like a game; and now this. Payback really was a bitch. Why was it so easy for KPayne to use and discard me?
    Her gaze lifted long enough to catch the eyes of an approaching man. His bold stare held until he drew close enough to whisper: “Girl, you know you’re so fine, I would drink your dirty bathwater.”
    Yeah, right. I’ve heard that one before.
    His step slowed even more and held even with her, laying a hand across his heart. “Ain’t nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you.”
    That’s pretty much what KPayne said—in the beginning.
    She pushed the dark glasses up over her eyes and walked away, leaving her admirer lusting in her wake. Headed back toward her parked car, a single thought surged forward: I could call Julia. As quickly as the thought occurred, she discarded it. How could she call her sister? They’d shared a mother and childhood, and then everything changed between them.
    Standing on the sidewalk with her heart in her throat and her cellphone in her hand, Bianca tried to think. Opening her cellphone, she scrolled through the directory. Taurean . Back in the day, Taurean Blaque would have been among the first people she would have thought of. But not anymore. Their breakup had been bitterly decisive.
    Ugly breakups had a way of limiting the favors one could ask. Bianca couldn’t help the sigh that escaped her—the breakup with AJ had been just as decisive. But the truth was, if she called him now, he would still probably come, but it would only be out of pity. And as bad as things were, she don’t think that she could survive the look that she already knew would be in his eyes.
    Thumbing the buttons on her phone, she continued to scroll through names until she came to Julia Coltrane, her sister. Julia was nine months younger, but those nine months might as well have been nine light-years. Their lives were totally independent of each other. Different as night and day. Julia was in bed by eight, and Bianca was in a Jag 9x8. The last time they’d seen each other was at John’s funeral.
    John Leighton was the stepfather who’d raised them—or more correctly, who’d been there until the sisters were both eighteen and on the way to college. Betting that their stepfather was glad that they were less than a year apart in age and out of the house at practically the same time was the last thing Bianca and Julia had agreed upon. Calling Julia would be a mistake.
    Bianca found herself back in the parking lot of the now-closed bank. After four , she guessed, opening her car door and dropping into the driver’s seat. She unzipped her boots and slid her tired feet free. When she tossed the damp boots over the seatback, they landed on the discarded AJC the doorman had given her earlier.
    She pulled the paper free and smoothed it against her thigh. Dragging a finger along the column headed Money to Loan, she saw an ad for pawnshops, and she creased the paper around the ad that promised “highest prices paid”.
    Making her way to the pawnshop was easy. When she pushed the door open, a little brass bell tinkled overhead, just like on TV. Pulling off her jewelry and handing it across the counter, hoping to get enough money to get past the crisis, was harder.
    Cursing herself for not wearing more, Bianca snapped the catches on the back of her heavy diamond-studded earrings. Feeling a bit like an old-time stripper, she slipped gold bangles along her arm and onto the glass-topped counter. She plucked a trio of stacked rings from her fingers and, against her better judgment, she let the diamond tennis bracelet KPayne had given her to make up for an argument last month fall heavily beside them when she