Mr. Love: A Romantic Comedy Read Online Free PDF

moue of distaste, cleans the splattered bug from the back of the manuscript.
    She flushes the Kleenex away, washes her hands and returns to the bed, leaving the manuscript lying on the floor.
    No way in hell is she ever going to read another word of that tome.
    It is pretentious, ridiculously over -written and stultifyingly boring.
    To say the characters are made of cardboard would be to suggest they have dimension.
    What is she going to say to Gordon Rushworth in the morning?
    She’ll get him to go first, she decides.
    Tell her what he has gleaned from reading Ivy .
    If he ’s helpful to her—and, hearing Jonas’s cool voice on the phone earlier, prays that he will be—she’ll leave him with the impression that she likes his book and will do her best to get her boss to like it too.
    If Rushworth arrives with nothing in the way of help, she’ll tell him that his book is just not her thing, leave it on the table and head on back to New York
    What the hell, if he can’t help her she’ll be out of a job anyway.
    Despite her very distressing day, she feels a twinge of compassion for Gordon Rushworth.
    He is clearly an intelligent man, if a little pompous.
    And not bad looking, in an appealingly rumpled, bookish way.
    But he ’s monumentally untalented as a writer and she can only imagine how painful it will be for him to have spent a decade on this book, only to face its inevitable rejection.
    Well, he can always self-publish.
    There may be a few suckers out there prepared to part with a couple of dollars to read his drivel.
    But a man like Gordon Rushworth would never be satisfied with that.
    He wants his genius to be acknowledged by New York City publishers and the coterie of reviewers who write for the major newspapers and magazines.
    He didn’t say, but Jane is certain he is an academic of some sort, hence the sabbatical.
    Probably teaches English Literature.
    Well, better that he forget his ambitions to be a writer and return to whatever crusty Ivy League college he is a faculty member of.
    Jane, almost drifting off to sleep, sits bolt upright and, despite her earlier resolve never to touch Gordon Rushworth’s book again, she stretches across and snags the manuscript and opens it on her knees, not even worrying that she may be getting roach juice on her sweats.
    She skims through the book, zooming along with Lance Prescott as he watches his childhood sweetheart waste away and die (this tragedy presented with all the emotional insight of a Hallmark card, bogged down with pages of Lance pondering the meaning of life and death), fights off the high school bullies who torment the young intellectual, and finally makes his way to an East Coast college where he forgets about love and dedicates himself to (in his words) “the life of the mind.”
    Jane powers up her iPad and opens Ivy , clicking through the pages, until she bursts out laughing.
    The coincidences are to o numerous to ignore.
    The small Vermont town.
    The bullies.
    The drunken stepfather.
    The East Coast college.
    Sarah Oatman, the tragic, Salinger-sprouting, ingénue of Too Long the Night lives on as Suzie Ballinger, the horny, Salinger-sprouting heroine of Ivy .
    “Thank you, God,” Jane says, slumping down onto the bed with her eyes closed and a stupid grin plastered across her face.
    She has found Viola Usher.
    And she’s having brunch with him tomorrow.

8
     
     
     
     
    Bitsy Rushworth loves her brother, but she doesn’t like him.
    A contradiction that she mulls over while driving her Volvo through the breathtaking Fall landscape, leaving East Devon behind, making her usual Saturday morning pilgrimage to a farm forty minutes from her home.
    A farm that houses the Quant Foundation, headed by Daniel Quant, a man who has been responsible for a radical shift in Bitsy’s thinking over the last year.
    It’s Quant’s philosophy that enables her to embrace her seemingly contradictory feelings for Gordon.
    “Be thankful for the challenge of this