Royal Pain Read Online Free

least. Keep everyone happy. No need to upset the applecart.
    David looked skeptical. “Just get a girlfriend in Chicago to take your mind off things.”
    “Not likely, but I’ll try.”

Chapter 2
    Bronte had slept like a baby that night after Mr. Texas had walked her home from David and Willa’s—and she slept well for many nights after. She slept soundly for months even, basking in the light of his attention, buoyed by his attraction and appreciation.
    After he returned to Chicago, the long-distance phone conversations had been sublime. That voice. That urgency.
    For the first weeks, they had spent hours every night sharing their life stories with each other. Later, all of those conversations melded together into a sort of first-blush-of-new-love montage in Bronte’s mind. Everything mattered.
    “My mother is a schoolteacher also!” he said.
    “That is so funny. And your father is a wildcat oil driller? That is so cool. Does he write wildcat on his tax form under ‘occupation’?”
    “I guess, yeah,” he laughed. “He probably does.”
    “Did you ever want to do that?”
    “Of course, darlin’! What eight-year-old boy doesn’t want to strike oil?! But then I think, in a way, I’m kind of doing the same thing in my business but just on paper. Trading has the same speculative edge, you know what I mean? Risky. I’ve already gone belly-up twice.”
    He said it as if it were perfectly normal to go broke. He was still a cowboy. (“Or still a boy,” her mother had quipped with blatant disapproval when Bronte told her that particular story. For some reason, Cathy Talbott was not thrilled about Bronte’s new boyfriend.)
    Bronte had seen him as free-spirited. Bronte was sick of being judgmental. She loved how he lived at full capacity. Balls out, as he said.
    Then, after they had succeeded in telling each other every possible detail of their lives, finding similarities and coincidences and meaning, they got into the habit of seeing each other every other weekend for lots of music and alcohol and sex.
    Even months later, after the actual content had devolved into nothing more than loving murmurs, the sound of his voice over the phone was almost as sexy as the sex.
    She remembered one night in July, at around two in the morning her time. Bronte had answered the phone to hear his throaty whisper, “Are you awake?”
    “Barely, but talk to me while I pretend to sleep.”
    “I just got back from the greatest meal. I can’t wait for you to get out here Friday night. I want to take you for dinner and watch you eat the best food you’ve ever tasted. I want to see your face when you bite into that crème brûlée.”
    “Mmmm,” she hummed her appreciation through a fog of sleep deprivation. “Me too. I’ll see you then.” She said good night and rolled back over for a few hours of desperately needed sleep.
    They spent that summer in a whirl: hotel rooms, concerts, expensive bottles of wine. Lots of those Big Weekends.
    By early August, she was really beginning to fray.
    “Are you there, darlin’?” he crooned into her answering machine as she ran to catch the call, fumbling with her keys in the lock before tripping over her dirty laundry on her way to the phone.
    “Hey!” she answered, breathless.
    “I’m thinking about you like crazy, Bron. Want to meet in Vegas this weekend?”
    Did other people really just drop everything and go to Las Vegas for the weekend? She was starting to wonder. Bronte didn’t know any. Was he suggesting Vegas so they could elope? Was he asking her to marry him after five months of great phone calls? And some pretty great weekend sex, she amended.
    “Uh. What’s in Las Vegas?”
    She set down her huge bag. She was falling behind at work (from spending all her time at night on the phone with him and all her weekends traipsing around with him) and had had to carry a couple of presentation binders home with her.
    “You know, the usual. A big, huge bed… and the Rolling