Jinxed Read Online Free PDF

She has spunk to spare. He dropped his jacket to the porch floor and pulled his shirt right side out, never taking his eyes from the flecked and pieced glass. That’s my future wife in there. Holy shit, I found her .
    An old man walking a poodle in a Santa Claus sweater paused by the porch. “Missus throw you out?”
    “Something like that.” Jinx found and pulled on his boots over damp socks. “It’s just a tiff, we’ll work it out.”
    “Well, good luck. Spent many nights on the couch myself but still managed forty-three years with my wife. Flowers help some but the only thing to do when they’re this mad is say you’re sorry and you’ll never do it again. Lie if you got to.”
    “It would be a lie because I’m not the least bit sorry.” Jinx pulled his coat on and released a chuckle. “Not sorry at all. I’m right and she’d going to see that.”
    “Well, good luck to you. If you love her, make it work. Too many marriages just throw in the towel these days.”
    “Oh, I love her.” Stepping onto the sidewalk, he turned his head up and saw a light blazing through a window. Her bedroom, he guessed with a small sigh of regret. He’d almost found out. “And I don’t give up. When I know what I want, I go for it. Getting her to come along is going to be the challenge.”
    “I’ve got my dog to ‘come along’ but never the wife.” The old man sniggered while his dog sniffed around Jinx’s feet. “‘Course, can’t swat your wife with a rolled-up newspaper either.”
    Jinx zipped his jacket and fished in his pocket for his keys. He raised his eyes once more to the lit window and a grin lifted his lip. “No, and I might end up getting my nose whapped a few times, but I’m going to have her eating out of my hand before it’s all said and done.”
    “Just make sure she doesn’t bite your fingers off.”

Chapter Two
    “Suddenly he stops. He looks up. For, lo, there she stands. The girl of his dreams. Who she is or whence she came, he knows not, nor does he care for his heart tells him that here, here is the maid predestined to be his bride.”
    —Grand Duke in Cinderella
     
    “There’s a Mr. Sullivan on line three.”
    Frannie dropped her head on her desk and groaned. She’d been waiting for this moment all morning. She knew Jinx wouldn’t just drop it. He was crazy; crazy people had more stick-to-it-ness than Elmer’s glue. She didn’t even bother raising her head.
    “Tell Mr. Sullivan I’m not at my desk, Tracey. Send him to voicemail hell.”
    “Having a pre-mid-life crisis?”
    Standing in the connecting door, Steve McAlly chuckled at the scorching look she sent him. He intercepted her hands as she reached for her coffee mug and handed her a takeout bag from the corner diner. “Eat. You put too much caffeine in your system. By the time you’re forty, you’re not going to have a stomach lining left. Selfishly, I don’t want my partner getting sick on me. Who would go on all those last minute ‘save my adorable ass’ trips for me?”
    Steve looked like your typical California surfer heartthrob and knew it, relished it even. His purposely disheveled blond hair and twinkling blue eyes had people forever fawning over him. He liked the attention. Frannie teased him about using more hair product in a year than she did. He simply laughed her off and called her jealous. She called him mirror-obsessed. She’d never buttered him up and it allowed their friendship to grow flawlessly. He loved her like a little sister and teased her relentlessly. She in turn had adopted him and pestered him like family.
    “Yeah, about that—” she dug hungrily into the bag, “—next time Alvarez gets all panicky, you go hold his hand. That man gives me the creeps.”
    “But that ‘creep’ brings in mucho dinero for this company. Thanks for bailing me out and going on such short notice.”
    Steve sat in the dark blue upholstered chair beside her desk and watched her eat her breakfast sandwich.