Broken Resolutions Read Online Free PDF Page A

night. Until the day she’d decided on her New Year’s resolution: No men for a year. She was giving herself a chance to get her head straight. By next New Year’s Eve, she hoped she was no longer attracted to men who didn’t value her enough. Ones who found her poor, obscure, plain, and little. More importantly, she hoped she no longer thought of herself that way.
    After making the resolution, she’d torn down the paper from the mirror, vowing never to need that quotation again. Funny. Seeing Jack tonight . . . those words had come back to her. All evening, she’d thought, If I had more beauty, I would make it as hard for you to ignore me as it is for me to ignore you.
    Right before he’d begun to read, he’d introduced himself. Jack Williamson was indeed Brenda’s son. He was also a divorced accountant who worked from home to minimize the time his four-year-old daughter spent in daycare. Thirty-five, like her. Incredibly striking, unlike her.
    He didn’t resemble any accountant she’d ever met. If all of them looked like this, stampedes of women would rush to get their taxes done as early and often as possible. E-filing numbers would drop dramatically. Tax preparation businesses would have to install barricades and hire security. Because what woman wouldn’t want to stare at a man like Jack while he was crunching numbers?
    Silence. Penny looked up to see everyone watching her. Waiting. Oh, right. She was supposed to be reading, not remembering her own stupid mistakes. Not mooning over a man who seemed to dislike her. Even if he’d gone out of his way to protect her from the brunt of Red Tie’s boorishness.
    “I grieve to leave Thornfield,” Penny read. “I love Thornfield—I love it, because I have lived in it a full and delightful life,—momentarily at least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. . . . I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I delight in,—with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester; and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.”
    She reached the end of the scene Jack had chosen. She now found herself unable to look at him. Unable to say anything. Afraid that the look on her face, whatever words she might use, would give away how deeply connected she felt to him in that moment. How absolutely compelling she found him.
    “ The Pirate Master and His Precious Booty was better,” muttered Clarence.
    “No joke,” Red Tie said. “Look, can we just get to the next game? This is getting boring.”
    She looked at the book in her hand, evaluating the situation. The passage she’d chosen was wonderful, and she always loved sharing it with others. John Williamson wrote beautifully about love, his prose abounding with grace and lyricism.
    Then again, reading with Jack again might very well kill her. Spontaneous combustion sometimes occurred because of extraordinary male hotness, right? She really shouldn’t risk turning into a pile of ash and a grease mark. The library couldn’t afford to buy new chairs.
    “Okay,” she said. “We’ll stop there.”
    Jack looked directly at her, frowning. It was pretty much the same expression he’d had all night. Except . . . was that disappointment in his eyes? Relief? She couldn’t tell, honestly.
    Something occurred to her. “Wait a second,” she said. “We still need to hear why Jack picked this particular passage.”
    “I didn’t,” he said. “My mother did.”
    The crowd laughed, and Penny’s heart gave a twinge.
    “Oh.” She averted her face, trying to hide how it fell at his words.
    “But my mom knows me better than I thought. That was exactly the scene I would have chosen.”
    Penny turned back to him. “Why?” she asked. “Why that particular passage?”
    He hesitated, seeming unsure for the first time all night. “The