Glad Tidings Read Online Free Page A

“I do on occasion, but I don’t make a habit of it.”
    His dog sneezed, spraying her pant leg. This was her best pair of wool pants and she wasn’t keen on showing up for the interview with one leg peppered with dubious-looking stains. Oscar sneezed again and again in quick succession, but at least she had the wherewithal to leap back. “Yuck!” she muttered. “Oh, yuck.”
    “You wouldn’t happen to be wearing perfume, would you?” Oliver demanded in a voice that suggested she was attempting to carry an illegal weapon on board.
    “Yes, of course I am. Most women do.”
    He grumbled some remark she didn’t hear, then added, “Oscar’s allergic to perfume.”
    “You might’ve told me that before now,” she said, wiping her pant leg a second time. Thank goodness she’d brought gloves. And thank goodness they were washable.
    He raised his shoulder in a nonchalant fashion. “Probably should have. It slipped my mind.” He continued his outside inspection of the plane. “Oh, yeah,” he said, testing the flap on the opposite wing, “I need to know how much you weigh.”
    “I beg your pardon?” There were certain things a man didn’t ask a woman and this was one of them.
    “Your weight,” he said matter-of-factly.
    Despite her drug-induced state of relaxation, Emma stiffened. “I’m not telling you.”
    “Listen, Emma, it’s important. I’m loaded to the gills with furnace parts. I have to know how much you weigh in order to calculate the amount of fuel we’re going to need.”
    She scowled. “You expect me just to blurt it out?” A woman didn’t tell a man anything that personal, especially a man she barely knew and had no intention of knowing further.
    “If I miscalculate, we’ll crash and burn,” Oliver said, apparently assuming this would persuade her to confess.
    She glared at him in an effort to come up with a compromise. With her mind this fuzzy, it was difficult. “I’ll write it down.”
    He didn’t seem to care. “Whatever.”
    Emma set her briefcase on the floor inside the plane and extracted a pencil and small pad. The only time she weighed herself was when she suspected her weight had fallen. She certainly wasn’t overweight, but a desk job had done little to help her maintain the figure she’d been proud of back in college. A few pounds had crept on over the last five years. She penciled in her most recent known weight, according to a doctor’s visit last year, and then quickly erased it. After a moment’s hesitation, she subtracted ten pounds. At one point in the not-so-distant past, she’dweighed exactly that and she would again, once she got started with an exercise program.
    Tearing the sheet from the pad, she folded it in fourths and then eighths until it was about the size of her thumbnail.
    Oliver was waiting for her when she’d finished. He held out his hand.
    Emma was about to give him the folded-up paper, but paused. “Swear to me you’ll never divulge this number.”
    He grinned, increasing his cuteness a hundredfold. “This is a joke, right?”
    “No,” she countered, “I’m totally serious.”
    He grunted yet another comment she didn’t understand and grabbed what now resembled a paper pellet. “I can see this is going to be a hell of a flight.”
    Oliver stepped away, and Emma didn’t see where he went, but he came back a few moments later. He casually told her it was time to board. She stood outside the aircraft as long as she dared, summoning her courage. Maybe she should’ve swallowed two tablets for this first flight.
    Oscar was already aboard, curled up in his dog bed behind the passenger seat. He cocked his head as if to say he couldn’t understand what she was waiting for.
    “You got lead in your butt or what?” Oliver said from behind her.
    With no excuse to delay the inevitable, she hoistedherself into the plane and then, doubling over, worked her way forward into the cramped passenger seat. Her knees shook and her hands trembled as