A Little Night Music Read Online Free PDF

dollars of bullshit .
    “Well, thanks.” Jon packed the trumpet away in its velvet-sculpted lining as if his pants had caught a spark from the goblin-shaped lighter on the shelf beside him. He fled Madame Troussaint’s All-Seeing Lounge with as much swagger and testosterone as he could muster, a balancing of his natural law of things—though he questioned his track record after marrying an in the closet lesbian.
    Only one person knew the trumpet’s real story. He hadn’t become CEO of the nation’s fastest rising financial services corporation by settling for half-baked, moon-pendant answers. Elli knew something. Why else would she want it back after putting it up for sale? Jon intended to find out what that something was, even if he had to apologize for a kiss he didn’t regret.
     
     
     
    Three
     
     
    Elli was waist-deep in RSVPs from city dignitaries, two borrowed Valentino gowns courtesy of a college friend who married more for a trust account than trust, and enough pink phone message slips to wallpaper the Legacy Foundation for the Advancement of Children in Music office and instrument storeroom. With the year’s most important fundraiser in less than a week, Elli had forsaken eating, sleeping and her usual cheery mood to tackle the last-minute details of putting on a gala that could fund her father’s dream of opening a music school in Honduras.
    Her assistant and friend Macy, attributed Elli’s sour disposition to the night she had returned to The Lotus, expecting to have the trumpet back by midnight. The only thing Elli had by midnight were swollen lips from a hungry kiss and cramps in her hamstrings from hoofing it ten city blocks in heels. When she wasn’t thinking about how expensive to go on the formal’s wine selection, her thoughts invariably returned to the enigma of a man who could be warm and expressive in music and thoroughly boorish when his lips weren’t plastered in a brass cup. 
    Elli heard Macy say something about strippers. Her attention snapped back to the cramped and dilapidated leasing space they had been forced to move into after Katrina. “I’m sorry, what?”
                          “I said…” Macy exaggerated the said until it wrung of desperation from trying to keep Elli on-task. Macy hopped up on a nearby table—always the exhibitionist—and ground out a burlesque number. “I thought we’d hire male strippers, rub our guests in a champagne roux and bathe in Modesta Garden’s seven fountains.”
                          Elli’s patience meandered through Macy’s usual sarcasm and snagged on two words that made her heart skip a beat. “Did you say ‘Modesta Gardens’?”
                          “ That ’s what you gleaned from that? Girl, you gotta get out of this rat-hole.”
                          “Ma cy .” Elli dragged out the last syllable in fake torture.
                          The blond, five-foot-nothing-but-curves graduate student giggled and climbed down from the table. “At least I got your attention. And yes, looks like your Cedric came through for us.”
                          The first real breath Elli had taken since she found out the Aviator Museum double-booked a wedding for the same night clipped short at the innuendo in Macy’s tone.
                          “He’s not my Cedric. I wish you’d stop calling him that.”
                          “For bailing your pretty little bottom out five days before the big event? I’d wrap myself in lightning bolts and call him Zeus.”
                          “It is the crème de la Garden District,” Elli hedged.
                          “Owned by some big-wig in Cedric’s law firm. On European holiday this week.”
                          “What about the Swing band? It’ll