Cloudy With a Chance of Marriage Read Online Free PDF

sporting for you or anyone else. Nor shall I kiss you. Ever .”
    The crack in the door became even smaller, but he noticed she didn’t shut it completely.
    He leaned on the jamb and saw her eye, unblinking but narrowed. “It would be so much easier for both of us if you’d fall in line.”
    That same eye grew wide and offended.
    “Not in a million years,” she declared. “How can I sell books when you persist in tomfoolery? I enjoyed being Queen of the Coconut Girls and dropping those bags of water very much. But I’m wise enough to know there’s a time and a place for making merry, and doing so every night and day on a street where many other people live and work is not the time nor the place.” She paused a beat. “Good night, Captain. Please send Otis back when he’s feeling better, with both his shoes and his missing heel.”
    She shut the door in his face.
    In his face.
    Stephen could hardly believe it. If anyone had done that on board his ship, they’d have been thrown into the ship’s brig. And when they were let out, made to scrub the decks with a tiny scrub brush until they gleamed.
    *   *   *
     
    Jilly leaned against the bookshop door and took a deep breath. Captain Arrow was a dangerous man. Thank God he was leaving Dreare Street soon.
    Dancing on stage had made her giddy with delight. So had dropping bags of water out the window. Even walking home with the captain had made her happy. Possibly because he was breathtakingly handsome. And funny. He’d made clever jokes all night long, the kind that sometimes took a minute to ponder because his sense of humor was so dry.
    Of course, she’d ignored them. She didn’t want him to think he was entertaining in the least.
    She was on to his strategy: he’d confessed it himself. He wanted her to fall in line, to make her more malleable, to turn her over to his way of thinking. He believed one could take part in revelries whenever one wanted to, whether one had obligations or not. He wanted her to stop complaining and join his party indefinitely!
    Thank God she’d not succumbed.
    “Oh, dear,” she muttered, and put her fingers to her lips. She couldn’t help thinking about how close she’d come to seeing things his way, when he’d put his mouth so close to the crack in the door and said the word kissable .
    For a split second, she’d had visions of them doing just that. But then she’d remembered.
    Hector.
    She was married already, and to a cruel, stupid man—a distant cousin, actually—who’d delighted in making her miserable while running through her father’s fortune. From his deathbed, Papa had acknowledged Hector was a crude sort of man, but he was also the true heir. He was kind to marry Jilly and not force her out of her own home, wasn’t he?
    Jilly shuddered. If only Papa had known Hector’s true nature. He was the opposite of kind .
    But it’s all right, a stalwart voice in her head reminded her. At least you’re free of him now .
    Jilly’s mother had owned a small property independent of her husband’s estate. Thanks to the discretion of her family attorney, Hector had known nothing about it. Jilly had sold it off, along with a steady stream of precious family heirlooms, behind Hector’s back, to raise the funds to buy Hodgepodge.
    And then she’d run away—in the middle of the night.
    She’d been terrified, but the closer she’d come to London, the more exhilarated she’d become.
    It was a new life for her. A new life for Otis, too.
    Now she yawned and crawled into bed, comforted by the thought that someday she’d be able to go long lengths of time without thinking of her husband.
    But she found she couldn’t sleep, and not because she was thinking of Hector. She was thinking about Captain Arrow again. They’d never gotten around to making those toasts to Dreare Street, had they?
    “And we probably never will,” she whispered softly to herself. “Not if his aim is to ply me with punch.”
    Even as she said it,