Amazing Gracie Read Online Free PDF

thousand dollars from him and sank it into a taco stand.”
    “It was a fried chicken franchise,” Bobby Ray protested, his expression sullen.
    “Oh, yes, that’s right. Next door to a Kentucky Fried Chicken,” Kevin reminded him.
    “This chicken was better. It was Ella Mae’s recipe. Everybody in the Northern Neck of Virginia loves Ella Mae’s chicken.”
    “Maybe so, especially when she cooked at your mama’s house and served it up free. But you don’t takeon a national franchise with a thirty-thousand-dollar investment and an advertising budget of zilch. The only people who ever ate there were related to you, and as big as our clan is we couldn’t support an ice cream stand on the boardwalk in summer, much less an entire restaurant year round. This latest scheme of yours is every bit as ill conceived. Get a job, Bobby Ray. It’ll do you good.”
    “Go to hell.”
    “No doubt about it,” Kevin said. Bobby Ray Daniels wasn’t the first member of his family to wish him a speedy end and a fiery destination.
    The Daniels family wealth, accumulated over generations, thanks to wise investments and savvy handling, had never once been endangered until the current crop of cousins had landed on earth. Thanks to some very unfortunate marriages, the genetic pool had spawned—with one or two notable exceptions—an entire generation of irresponsible males and throwback southern belle females, who wouldn’t deign to lift a finger if the house was burning down around them.
    Entrusted with what was left of the family fortune, Kevin had his work cut out for him. He wasn’t sure which his cousins resented most, the fact that he held the purse strings or the fact that he didn’t give a damn about the money they craved. He’d have given them each their fair share and been done with it if he hadn’t known they’d be back on his doorstep within a year, desperate for more.
    What every single one of them needed, far more than they needed cash, was self-respect. Kevin didn’t have a clue how to go about giving them that, except by forcing them to actually work for a living. He’d opened door after door, only to have them blow the chances. He was running out of friends who’d hire them. There was achance that Dick Flint in Richmond would find something for Bobby Ray. Dick had half a dozen used car dealerships and a penchant for losing at poker. He owed Kevin bigtime.
    “I’ll call Dick Flint, if you’d like,” he offered.
    Bobby Ray stared at him as if he’d suggested he take up sky-diving. “You want me to be a used car salesman?” he asked, as he straightened the monogrammed cuffs on his two-hundred-dollar shirt.
    “I want you to do something that would excite you, something at which you’ll succeed.” Something that would justify those expensive, imported shirts and pay for the fashionable lifestyle to which Bobby Ray and Sara Lynn aspired.
    “Well, it sure as hell won’t be selling those broken-down heaps Dick Flint passes off on an unsuspecting public,” Bobby Ray snapped. “One of these days you’re going to push me too far, Kevin. Me or one of the others.”
    Kevin was tiring of Bobby Ray’s idle threats. One of these days he was simply going to pummel some sense into the overgrown jerk, just as he’d tried to do on more than one occasion when they were kids. Come to think of it, it hadn’t worked then, either. Instead, he leveled a look straight into his cousin’s eyes.
    “Meaning?” he asked, his tone icy.
    Not even Bobby Ray was able to mistake the fact that he’d gone too far. “Forget it,” he grumbled. “Just forget I stopped by. Forget I exist.”
    As if I could , Kevin thought as his cousin stormed out of the house. The wills of various and sundry uncles had made sure of that.
    As it always did, talking to Bobby Ray had worked up a mighty big thirst. Kevin wandered into the kitchenof his ridiculously huge house and found a pitcher of lemonade in the refrigerator. Molly, the