Mr. Love: A Romantic Comedy Read Online Free PDF Page B

contradiction,” Quant had told her in a one-on-one counseling session shortly after Gordon had dumped himself on her. “You have attracted this relationship with your brother, which means it is precisely what you need in your life at this moment. It is fueling your own evolution.”
    “And what will happen when I’ve evolved enough?” she asked.
    Quant had laughed, his piercing blue eyes disappearing into a ripple of wrinkles.
    “Then you’ll be able to tell the freeloading S.O.B to shape up or ship out.”
    Just one of the contradictions of Quant himself, that he could make solemn pronounce ments one moment and then sound like a longshoreman the next.
    Part of his appeal, along with his tanned skin and graying hair worn cropped close to his skull.
    It was terribly clichéd, Bitsy knew, to fall for a self-help guru, but she’d fallen for Daniel Quant.
    And fallen hard.
    Since the end of her very short-lived marriage nearly twenty years ago—when her husband, an academic at a minor East Coast college, had burst out of the closet what could Bitsy do but gather her few belongings and what was left of her pride and slink back to East Devon?—she has experimented with everything from yoga, to transcendental meditation to holotropic breath work.
    No New Agey event has taken place within a hundred mile radius of East Devon without Bitsy gassing up the old Volvo and hitting the self-realization trail.
    But t he only realization she’d arrived at was that she was alone and lonely and probably always would be.
    Then she’d picked up a flier at a health food store in Brattleboro, advertising a talk by Daniel Quant of the Quant Foundation.
    Located on a farm close to East Devon.
    Bitsy had seen too many shaggy, neo-hippie farming communes (topless lactating women with hairy armpits; feral children; weed-smoking men sorely in need of dentistry) to be interested, then she spotted the couple who were handing out the fliers.
    They were clean and trim in tasteful summer wear.
    He had neatly cropped hair and (when he smiled and handed a flier to a passerby) good teeth. She was pretty enough to play a housewife in a suburban sit-com.
    No, not typical at all.
    So Bitsy had driven across to the farm the next Saturday and had been pleasantly surprised.
    The farm was not a commune, home only to Daniel Quant and a few of his personal assistants.
    Assistants of both genders and a variety of ages, which seemed to dispel the horny guru cliché.
    Growing from the side of the old brick farmhouse was a new two-story glass and wood structure that housed the Foundation.
    It was in a hall in this building that Daniel Quant spoke to an audience of around a hundred people.
    What he said wasn’t all that revelatory, a synthesis of various Eastern-flavored philosophies all tied together by the string theory, but it was the way he said it that impressed Bitsy.
    She was swept away by t he sheer force of his personality.
    And Daniel wasn’t at all creepy.
    He was humorous and likeable.
    A regular guy.
    Almost.
    Telling people what they were desperate to hear: how to be happy.
    Bitsy became a frequent visitor and spent a month at the Foundation in summer, attending classes and helping with fundraising.
    Daniel Quant had some money, it seemed.
    But he wasn’t wealthy enough to run the Foundation out of his back pocket.
    Bitsy, although she’d never been asked to, made a small contribution each time she visited.
    Today, as she drive s past the Quant Foundation sign, she feels a lifting of her spirits as she always does.
    She parks the Volvo beside the other cars, SUVs and fancy sedans rubbing shoulders with old pick-ups, and makes her way into the hall, greeting a lot of familiar faces.
    Daniel comes in and although he smiles, he carries with him an air of seriousness, and the assembled group quietens.
    “I’m going to say this plainly. The Foundation has been funded both by me and by generosity of the wider community. It was revealed to me yesterday