A Baby...Maybe? & How to Hunt a Husband Read Online Free PDF

she glanced at the top of her dresser. Then again, maybe not.
    She called it a jewelry box, but it was more like a chest than a box. Made of solid, heavy oak, it had come to her through her grandmother Romano and all the generations of Romano women before her. Over a hundred years ago, her great-great-grandparents had brought it to America, filled with silver and copper coins, nothing that would seem of real value. Nothing worth stealing.
    Only, the coins inside the chest were actually there to distract anyone from finding the real treasure the chest held.
    Cara walked slowly over to the dresser. You only live once, she told herself. What was she saving all of the jewelry for? They were there for her to use. She wore the earrings almost every day. They were the smallest of the gold coins her forebears had brought over in the secret compartments built into the chest. The coins had been set in a gold-filigree bracket by a past Romano relative. She looked at her reflection in the dresser mirror. She never thought twice about wearing the earrings. They were so much a part of her. But they were only a small part of the treasure.
    She lifted the lid and reached inside, bringing out what remained of the solid-gold coins. Some of the coins had been used to start businesses, to send Romanos to college, to get started in life. She had inherited what remained. That same Romano relative who had done the earrings also had made coins into a necklace, bracelet and brooch. They were solid gold, heavy and priceless.
    Cara tried on the necklace and almost collapsed under the weight of the coins, each set in a filigree frame then attached to the gold necklace. The bracelet was the same design, and the brooch was layered with coins in the shape of a crescent moon.
    She never wore any of the jewelry except the earrings. Tomorrow all that would change. The coins had brought her ancestors luck. They would bring her luck, too. She didn’t know how, she didn’t know where, all she knew was that she was going to wear those pieces of jewelry, either separately or together, and her life would work out fine.
    She undressed for bed, took the sweet-pea nightgown back out of the drawer and was about to put it on but stopped. No, she wouldn’t need it. She set her alarm and slipped naked beneath the sheets, took a few deep breaths, then with eyes wide open stared at the ceiling, waiting for the alarm to go off.
    Saturday morning couldn’t come fast enough, and when the alarm finally buzzed, she was already set to go. She left her car parked on the street in front of the apartment building and took a cab to the airport. She checked her luggage, walked over to the airport gift shop and stopped in front of the mailbox outside the entrance. She took the goodbye note she had written to her parents out of her purse, unfolded it and read it one last time before licking the envelope shut and sending it on its way.
    The note was simple and very, very sweet. It was also to the point, because she felt extremely sympathetic to her parents’ feelings.
    Dear Mom and Dad,
    I didn’t take my cell
    phone, so don’t even try to
    call, because it would just
    be a waste of time.
    Love,
Cara

2
    A T TEN O’CLOCK on Saturday morning Rex parked his pickup about fifty feet from the cow billboard on the shoulder of the freeway, close to the outdoor patio of Mama Jo’s Bar-B-Q.
    The meat smoking in the massive drums on the backside parking area had probably been cooking for at least twenty-four hours already. The smell of huge slabs of beef saturated with flavors from mesquite and hickory chips made his stomach growl despite that he had finished breakfast only about an hour earlier.
    Mama Jo happened to be one slick businesswoman who knew how to bring in the customers. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, those smokers were working, and the sweet-tangy aroma of smoking beef could be inhaled from miles away. It was no wonder Mama Jo’s was