Sleeping with Beauty by Donna Kauffman Page B

                                                                                                                                       
    I wonder how it’s going,” Jana mused, peeling the skin off her orange.
    “She’ll be fine,” Grady said shortly. He tore off a piece of hot-dog roll and tossed it out to the pigeons gathering around their bench.
    Yeah, but will
you
be fine?
Jana sent him a sideways glance, worried about her best friend. Both of them. She’d finished up her preseason interview with head coach Joe Gibbs earlier than expected, so she’d left Redskin Park and made a beeline for D.C. with the sole purpose of ambushing Grady.
    She’d been wrestling with her conscience over what to do ever since the invitation had shown up and Lucy had gotten it into her head to make herself over. Should she barge in and potentially change things between them forever? Or play it safe and keep her mouth shut? After all, she’d been keeping her mouth shut for what, going on fifteen years now?
    She knew Grady jogged every afternoon, alternating his path between laps around The Mall or the Tidal Basin. It was Monday; Lucy had been gone two days now. Jana staked out a bench on The Mall, across from the Museum of Natural History, and waited. He hadn’t seemed completely surprised to see her. Wary, but not completely surprised. Of course, he’d been avoiding her calls since he’d dropped Lucy off at Glass Slipper headquarters. He had to know she wasn’t going to stand for that very long.
    Only now that she was here, with no chance of Lucy popping up or calling, the perfect opportunity she’d so carefully staged staring her right in the face . . . she was chickening out. “Maybe we shouldn’t have given her such a hard time about this,” she said, inwardly cursing her cowardice. “If she feels she needs to do this for herself, who are we to say she’s wrong? Right?” She picked at her orange. “What was the place like?”
    “Very Tara Meets Capitol Hill.”
    A smile tugged at the corners of Jana’s mouth. “Pretty much what we’d deduced from the website, then.” She hazarded another glance, but he wasn’t looking at her, didn’t so much as nod.
To pry, or not to pry?
“Did you meet the godmothers?”
    “I saw them. Interesting lot. Not surprised they don’t include their photos on their home page.”
    Jana straightened, both intrigued and shamelessly relieved to put off the Very Important Talk a bit longer. “Really? Why?”
    “They were quite . . . colorful.” He didn’t add anything else.
    Jana knew he wasn’t in the mood to dish. Of course, delivering one-liners while she and Lucy dished on the subject of the moment was more his thing. Another time she’d have dragged every last cynical detail out of him anyway. But not today. “So, was Lucy excited? Nervous?”
    “Both.”
    Christ, it was like pulling teeth. “Did she say anything else to try and convince you how great an idea this really is?”
    Jana watched Grady as he threw the rest of his crumbs at the expanding, grateful flock, then leaned his rangy body back on the park bench. There had been times over the years when Jana had found herself looking at his body in more of an opposite-sex way, not a best-friend way. She’d even dared to quiz Lucy a time or two, when she thought she could get away with it, without giving away what she knew. What the whole world would know if it paid the slightest damn bit of attention. Lucy’s responses had generally been vague, like those of a sister being asked to rate her brother on a scale of one to hottie. Lucy said she found it hard to be objective about a guy she’d watched go through puberty; zits, developing body hair, and all.
    Maybe it was because Jana was married. Or maybe it was because she had the analytical, objective eye of a reporter. Or maybe it was