Bending the Rules Read Online Free PDF

head…this!
    “S HARON , YOU want to come take a look?” Poppy twisted around on her perch near the top of the stepladder to look for the coffee-shop owner.
    The woman popped her head out of the kitchen. Brushing flour from her hands against the white apron tied around her waist, she stepped into the retail area and studied the blackboard, closely inspecting the updated menu Poppy had just completed. Then she smiled. “Lookin’ good.”
    “Excellent.” Poppy packed up her case of colored chalks and climbed down off the ladder. She slid the container into her big tote, which she’d left by the register, then folded in the ladder’s legs and tipped it carefully onto its side in the narrow area behind the glass bakery case until it was parallel to the floor and she could get a grip on it with both hands. Glancing out the door at the pale glow of daybreak beginning to lighten the eastern sky, she said, “I’ll just go put this back in the closet, then clean up and get out of your way.”
    “I took a blueberry coffee cake out of the oven about ten minutes ago,” Sharon said. “You have time for a slice and a cuppa joe? My staff’s going to start trickling in pretty soon and I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a break.”
    “That would be great.” As if to demonstrate its appreciation, her stomach growled and, patting it, she laughed. “Don’t tell my mother, but I skipped breakfast this morning.”
    She maneuvered the ladder through the kitchen to the big utility closet by the back door, where she stored it away. Then she washed the multicolored layers of chalk from her hands and joined Sharon at a table. They visited over cups of full-bodied coffee and luscious, still-warm cake.
    She didn’t linger long after the snack was consumed, however. She still had three other boards to do this morning at sites scattered from Madison Park to Phinney Ridge to the Ballard neighborhood where she’d grown up, and they needed to be completed before the businesses were open to the public.
    When she finished the last job, a deli just off Market Street, she looked at her watch. She’d planned to drop in on her parents but schools were closed for a teachers’ “professional development” day, she had a date with some kids in the Central District—or the CD, as it was called by native Seattleites—and she had to stop by the mansion first. So with a regretful glance in the general direction of her childhood home, she steered her car toward the Ballard Bridge.
    She lucked into a parking space on the block below the mansion on the steeply pitched western slope of Queen Anne and, getting out of her car, she paused to look up at the house.
    The sunroom that had been scabbed onto the front of the edifice was now whittled down to a size and style in keeping with the rest of the structure and the Kavanaghs had repaired the facade to match the original. Her artist’s soul smiled to see the elegant bones restored to the early-twentieth-century mansion. The sound of hammers, pithy obscenities and male laughter coming from the kitchen as she approached the back door elicited yet another grin.
    She let herself into a room filled with buff guys wielding power tools. Well, okay, only one of the four men in the gutted kitchen was actually operating one. As Devlin Kavanagh’s drill whined into silence and he and his brothers looked over at her, she inhaled a deep breath, then blew it out with theatrical gusto. “I love the smell of testosterone in the morning!”
    Raising his black eyebrows toward his Irish-setter red hair, Dev drawled, “According to Jane, babe, you wouldn’t know what to do with testosterone in the morning.”
    “You are so full of it, Kavanagh. Janie would never rat me out—not even to you. And watching all this tool-belt activity does make my little heart go pitty-pat. It’s. Just. So—” she batted her lashes at Dev and his brothers “—manly.”
    They laughed and went back to work. She headed