Stay With Me Read Online Free PDF

inform Brenna that her ex-husband’s wife of seven years “wanted his bod in the most cougarly of ways” and if it weren’t for her loyalty to Jim, Faith would be on him “like hot wax on an Escalade.”
    “Sure,” said Trent. “Faith was nice.”
    “Okay, what the hell is wrong with you?”
    “Huh?”
    “You’re acting weird, Trent. You’re willing to work a Saturday unpaid, and outside of chillax and kay-kay, you haven’t said one idiotic thing since I got here. Plus you’re being all polite and you’re talking in full sentences and I gotta tell you, it’s scaring the crap out of me.”
    “Brenna . . .”
    “I mean it.”
    Trent sighed. Slowly, he turned his chair around to face Brenna, but his eyes stayed downcast. “I . . . I’m scared to tell you.”
    “That’s not my problem.”
    “But—”
    “Listen, if you don’t grow a pair and tell me what’s going on, you’re out of here, do you understand me? I can’t work with you like this. It’s stressing me out.”
    “Okay, fine,” he said. “You promise you won’t judge me?”
    “Why does everybody think I’m going to judge them? I don’t judge .”
    Trent closed his eyes, and Brenna noticed, for the first time since she’d known him, a few errant hairs poking out from the bridge of his nose. He didn’t wax his eyebrows today . . .
    “Brenna,” Trent said. “I’m going to be a dad.”
    Actually, Trent didn’t know for sure if he was going to be a dad. That was why he was scheduled to take a paternity test in less than an hour.
    It had all started—as pretty much everything these days had—with the Neff case back in September. Solving the high-profile case, involving a twelve-year-old disappearance and more than one highly placed public official in the insanely wealthy Westchester County suburb of Tarry Ridge, had landed Brenna (and Trent) on all the morning news shows, making them, for a time, into local celebrities.
    Long before that, though, Trent had longed to be famous. If only he were famous, he used to say, he’d be “crushing more ass than an eighteen-wheeler on a donkey farm.” So when the opportunity to be famous finally presented itself, the outcome wasn’t hard to predict.
    In late October, he’d gone to the wedding of an acquaintance from high school—some guy named Cooper whom Trent had never liked all that much, but hey, it was a wedding and, as Trent truthfully pointed out, “No one crushes it harder than a famous guy at a wedding.”
    Proving the point, Trent had gotten hit on beyond his wildest dreams—women calling him “hot” and “dreamy,” women eyeing his moves on the dance floor and pressing into him as he got himself a drink and slipping their phone numbers into the waistband of his pants, all of them acting as though this happened to Trent all the time, sure it did, he was famous after all and this is what happened to famous guys . . .
    But of all the women hurling themselves at Trent in the Staten Island banquet hall where the reception was being held, the one that thrilled him most was Cooper’s cousin, Julia. Trent had been in love with Julia back in kindergarten, and he’d never truly gotten over her. And now, here they were, eyeing each other across the crowded room like the final scene in a Nora Ephron movie. (Yes, Trent had watched a couple of those movies with his mom and maybe cried a little, so what? )
    Julia had approached Trent. “Want to dance?”
    And Trent had said yes, their slow turn to a Bruno Mars song resulting in a moment that he would remember for the rest of his life: Julia in his arms in her blue bridesmaid’s dress, looking up into Trent’s eyes, time skidding to a halt.
    Trent , she had said. I’ve always kinda been into you.
    Recounting it now, Trent said, “I almost crapped my pants.”
    “Wow,” said Brenna. “That’s romantic.”
    But for Trent, it was. Later that night, he wound up consummating that breathtaking moment . . . not with Julia