A Bravo Homecoming Read Online Free PDF

before bed nightly, they had told her at the spa, both on her hands and her feet, and then wear the gloves and booties to bed every night for the whole week.
    She was starving by the time she got back to the suite. She wanted a burger and fries and a strawberry shake. Or at least a big slab of meatloaf and a mountain of mashed potatoes with a healthy side of mushy canned green beans. On the rig, the kitchen was open round-the-clock and you could get yourself a huge pile of hot food—heavy on the starches and fats and red meat—any time you got the least bit hungry.
    Not here, though. Jonathan ordered room service for them.
    When it came, she wanted to break down and cry. All day being waxed and plucked and pummeled in the spa. And for dinner, she got an itsy-bitsy mound of barely cooked broccoli, three tiny red potatoes. And grilled salmon.
    Actually, it was delicious. But it wasn’t enough to keep a fly alive.
    She begged for more. Jonathan refused to let her even have one more dinky red potato. He said she wasn’t getting enough exercise to eat the way she was apparently accustomed to eating.
    It was too much. She yelled at him. “Jonathan, I would be frickin’ happy to exercise. I’ll go down to the gym right this minute and bench-press my butt off if you will only swear on your life that there’ll be a blood-rare T-bone and a baked potato slathered in butter and sour cream waiting for me when I get back up here to this frickin’ tasteful, so-classy suite.”
    He only shook his head. He was a slave driver, that Jonathan.
    After the piddly-ass meal, they had grammar lessons. He made her take a vow that she would never use the word frickin’ again in this lifetime. And then he tutored her on how to eat at a table set with endless pieces of unrecognizable silverware.
    It was actually pretty simple, once he explained that you started with the outermost fork or knife or spoon and worked your way in. And if in doubt, you waited to pick up the next tong or cracker or pointy lobster-picking thing until you were able to subtly observe what your host or hostess did with it.
    “Subt-ly,” Jonathan repeated, making a big deal of both syllables. “And by ‘subtly,’ I mean a sideways glance in the direction of the hostess in question. No open-mouthed ogling. One must learn, darling, to accomplish one’s goal in such a way as not to telegraph one’s ignorance to the table at large.”
    “Gotcha,” she answered, feeling vaguely resentful. Yeah, okay. She did have a lot to learn, but she’d never been the kind to stare with her mouth open.
    He sighed in a way that indicated she caused him endless emotional pain. “ Gotcha. Another word you would do well to remove from your vocabulary.”
    “Jonathan, you keep on like this, I won’t have any frick —er, darn words left.”
    “But, darling, you will learn new ones. I will see to that—and as concerns your elbows…”
    “Yeah, what about ’em?” She pushed back her sleeve. “They’ve been creamed and scrubbed and buffed just about down to the bone.”
    “Yes, they do look much better.”
    “Thanks, but that’s not what I was getting at.”
    “It doesn’t matter what you’re getting at. You’re the student. You’re here to watch, listen and learn. And as to elbows, they are under no circumstances to be allowed on the surface of the table while one is still indulging in the meal. Understood?”
    “Yeah, I knew that.” Not that she’d ever cared all that much where she put her elbows while she was eating. But still. Everybody knew they weren’t supposed to be on the table, even if most people didn’t give a damn either way.
    “However.” There was a definite gleam in Jonathan’s beady little eyes. “ After the meal, while one lingers, chatting, enjoying the heady conversation that so often swirls around the table when one is in good company…then, and only then, is it considered acceptable to delicately brace one, or even both elbows on the