My Bluegrass Baby Read Online Free PDF

through
     the morning with grace and dignity. I would paste on the sort of guileless smile Gran
     said would get me through any situation, even if I felt like committing a felony.
     And I would not refer to Josh as “Lord Gel-demort.”
    To his face.
    “Did you have any questions for me?” I asked, as if butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth.
    “Oh, I have lots of them,” Josh promised me, his eyes lingering on the neckline of
     my camisole even as he shuffled through some papers. I crossed my arms over my chest
     and returned his stare. I would not be intimidated by a well-coiffed boob ogler. Grace and dignity , I told myself, at any cost . Even if that cost was an awkward, prolonged silence.
    Just as Josh managed to open his mouth again, there was a light knock on the door
     frame.
    “Sadie, I processed those new reports you asked for,” a smooth voice sounded from
     the doorway. “It turns out that closed bridge in Marshall County might have actually
     increased the number of campers in the Kentucky Dam area last summer . . . Oh, I’m
     interrupting. I’m sorry.”
    Dr. Charlie Bennett, our resident genius, stood in the doorway, giving Vaughn a confused
     stare. Charlie was some sort of Beautiful Mind math prodigy, with several doctorates from perfectly respectable schools but without
     the sinister imaginary roommates. And for some reason, he had eschewed legitimate
     academia to design, distribute, and decipher surveys for our department, determining
     customer satisfaction levels with various state park facilities, events, and attractions.
     He could break down his survey results by age group, profession, and preference for
     Coke or Pepsi if we asked him.
    Aside from his big sexy brain, Charlie was lean and sleek with a refined bone structure
     and curly dark hair. Unfortunately, without a large billboard directly outside his
     bedroom window, Charlie would not recognize that Kelsey was not-too-secretly in love
     with him. And Kelsey just didn’t have room for a billboard in her budget.
    Even socially inept Charlie seemed to recognize that he was walking into a time bomb
     of a room (one possible clue being my making big air-traffic-control motions toward
     the door).
    “Never mind,” he said, turning on his heel and walking away from the conference room
     as quickly as he could. Oh, how I envied him.
    “I’m assuming that was Dr. Bennett?” Vaughn said, looking over what appeared to be
     a staff list. “How exactly can we afford our own statistician?”
    “His position is grant-funded,” I told him, a bit defensive. “Securing the federal
     money was one of the first things I did when I took over the assistant director position.”
    Vaughn seemed almost impressed with this, but schooled his surprised expression back
     into one of bland disinterest. “Dr. Bennett is not our only grant-funded employee,
     correct? We also have a Bonnie Turkle on staff.”
    I nodded. “Bonnie is our multimedia historian.”
    “What exactly does a multimedia historian do?”
    I chewed my lip. Bonnie looked like Snow White and spoke like a preschool teacher,
     which was handy given her school speaking engagements. But Vaughn didn’t need to know
     about Bonnie’s obsession with collages and positive reinforcement via smiley-face
     stickers. With state budgets constricting every year, we had to work twice as hard
     to produce the same results. The last thing I needed was for the new guy to come in
     and decide that Bonnie’s position was expendable or could be construed as wasteful
     spending. So I presented her in the best possible light. “Bonnie is sort of a one-woman
     anthropology team. She travels to remote locations and goes through archives, library
     records, film strips, and oral histories and builds multimedia historical exhibits.
     She’s the one that set up the McBride Music Hall Museum.”
    Vaughn’s face couldn’t have expressed less interest if he were trying. “I didn’t catch
     that one.”
    I