Royal Pain Read Online Free PDF

and a woman and her enormous bag—and unkissed lips—left standing in said airport.
    Gutted.
    She always thought of a Haida dugout canoe when she thought of that word. Perfect.
    Fucking gutted.
    He may or may not have come back to help carry the bag—her well-honed wolf whistle may have alerted him to his slight oversight—but that was irrelevant. The reality (why hello! Nice to meet you!) slapped Bronte so hard that she never really got over it.
    He didn’t give a rat’s ass whether she was there or not. If she wanted to shack up for a while, that’s cool, whatever. Move in with me. Move in across the street. That’s cool. Wherever it leads. Yeah. Right.
    Wrong.
    In the end—for surely The Bag Incident was the beginning of the end—it wasn’t even his fault. He had never said, “Move in with me and it will be hell-fire-kick-ass-knock-your-socks-off sex day and night followed by a lifetime of more excellent sex and marriage and children and more great sex.” Bronte had simply hoped.
    She had hoped hard.
    She had hoped that because she was twenty-eight and smart and independent and tall and all that , and he was thirty-five and approaching a certain age and had always told her she was cool and how they were really great together and, yeah, well, you get the picture. One of his favorite compliments had always been to tell Bronte that she was “a bit of all right”—as in “you’re a bit of all right, darlin’.”
    In real life, however, it turned out that the weight of any lasting commitment could not be borne by a bit of all right. It required a boatload.
    By early November, after she had tried every desperate, craving, begging thing to keep them together, bitter understanding dawned. It turned out that all of his winking and thrumming and complicit Texan drawling was not in the least bit exclusive. Not that he was cheating on her, exactly—it was just that he made every woman feel like she was the only person in the world on whom he would bestow the shining light of his goodwill.
    Unfortunately, Bronte did not grasp that germane fact until she had left her perfectly good life in New York and entered his world in Chicago. She was no longer the special weekend treat but the daily routine.
    Was all that shit about getting the milk for free really true? No, in her case at least, it wasn’t that—Bronte was already happily giving him the milk for free in New York and on sexy weekends elsewhere, after all—but when she was right there every minute of every day, asking about groceries and dry cleaning and whether he wanted to go to the movies on Thursday night? That just wasn’t special enough. She just wasn’t special enough.
    Within days of moving to Chicago—within minutes, really—Bronte knew for certain that she had made the biggest, whoppingest, ball-out-of-the-park, shit-show mistake of her young life. The fact that whoppingest was not a word didn’t stop her from using it (repeatedly) to describe the extent of her folly.
    A mere eight months ago, she had been a chic, independent junior advertising executive, dating her long-distance dream man (successful, complimentary, magnetic, all that ), while living the high life in New York City: at the top of her game, so to speak.
    So.
    To.
    Speak.
    The top of her game, in retrospect, was really her ability to sustain the belief that her feelings were shared when reality lent no such credence.
    Mr. Texas had even had the gall to suggest they might want to continue “fooling around” after they broke up, you know, as one does. She had never gone for the friends-with-benefits idea and certainly wasn’t going to start with, the bad boy from Midland. First of all, they were never really friends to begin with, and second of all, there was no benefit to spending time in bed worrying over why he never wanted to be more than friends.
    She told him it was simply because he was a horse’s ass. The truth was that his greatest crime was being a too-potent reminder