Hired by Her Husband Read Online Free PDF Page B

clear.”
    Tallie snorted dismissively. “What does he know? Besides, it doesn’t matter if he needs you or wants you. I do.”
    “You? What do you mean?”
    “You, my dear Sophy, are going to save my life,” Tallie told her, taking her by the arm and steering her to a pair of chairs where they could sit.
    “Don’t you want to see George?” Sophy said hopefully.
    “In a minute. First I want to get you on your way.” The CEO Tallie had once been came through loud and clear. “I need your help.”
    “What sort of help?”
    “George, bless his heart, thinks that I can simply drop my life and take over the running of his. And admittedly, there might have been a time I could have done it,” Tallie said witha grin. “But that time is not now. Not with three little boys, a baby due in three weeks, a homemade bakery business that has orders up the wazoo, orders I need to get taken care of before the arrival of my beautiful baby girl—” Tallie rubbed her belly again “—not to mention a husband who, while tolerant, does not consider sharing me with a dog for more than one night to be the best allocation of my time.
    “Besides,” she went on before Sophy could say a word, “he has to go to Mystic for a boat launch this afternoon. He took the kids to school, but I need to be home to get Nick and Garrett from kindergarten and Digger from preschool. I was planning to bake today before I had to go get them. And I’d take Gunnar home but he doesn’t get along with the rabbit, er, actually vice versa. So—” she took a breath and gave Sophy a bright, hopeful smile “—what do you say? Will you save me? Please?”
    Sophy was even more exhausted just thinking about it. She swallowed another yawn.
    “And you can sleep while you’re there,” Tallie said triumphantly.
    “George won’t like it.”
    “Who’s telling George?” Tallie raised both brows.
    Not me, Sophy thought. She should say no. It was the sane, safe, sensible thing to do. The less she had to do with George or any of his family before the divorce was final, the less likely she was to be hurt again.
    But life, as she well knew, wasn’t about protecting yourself. It was about doing what needed to be done. “Payback” wasn’t always what you thought it would be. It didn’t mean you had a right not to do it.
    “All right,” she said resignedly. “I’ll do it. But as soon as George can come home, I’m leaving.”
    “Of course,” Tallie said, all grateful smiles. “Absolutely.”
    Sophy hadn’t let herself think about where George might be living ever since he’d walked out of her life.
    If she’d wanted to guess, she’d have picked some sterile but extremely functional apartment where he’d be called upon to do as little interaction with his environment as possible.
    She couldn’t have been more wrong.
    George had a brownstone on the Upper West Side. Not just an efficient studio in a brownstone or even a complete floor-through apartment. George owned the whole five-story building.
    And while most of the brownstones in the neighborhood had long since been subdivided into flats, George’s had not.
    “When he came home he said he wanted a house,” Tallie told her. “And he got one.”
    He had indeed. And what a one it was.
    Sophy stopped on the sidewalk in front of the wide stoop and stared openmouthed at the elegant well-maintained facade. It had big bay windows on the two floors above the garden entrance, and two more floors above that with three identical tall narrow arched windows looking south across the tree-lined street at a row of similar brownstones.
    It had the warm, tasteful, elegant yet friendly look that the best well-kept brownstones had. And to Sophy, whose earliest memories of home were the days spent in her grandparents’ brownstone in Brooklyn, it fairly shouted the word home.
    It was exactly the sort of family home she’d always dreamed of. She’d babbled on about it to George in the early days of their