The Sweetheart Racket Read Online Free PDF Page B

Weary, she arrived home in time for the news and clicked on the living room TV. The shabby two-story blue Victorian belonged to her parents, purchased as an investment property, or so they said. But she was convinced they’d done it entirely for her benefit after her marriage left her dazed and broke. After all, why would die-hard Iowans need a house in Ann Arbor, Michigan?
    She tugged her t-shirt over her head and wandered through the house and up the creaky stairs. The old place had gone through years of college students and the smell of beer and cigars still clung to tattered old wallpaper and worn carpet.
    â€œIf only these walls could talk.” She unsnapped her jeans and longed for her comfy PJs.
    â€œBath first.” She loved the old claw-footed tub. She could sink up to her chin in bath oil and bubbles.
    Her bedroom was in the far back corner of the house and she passed four other rooms to get there. A dying air conditioner in the backyard spit out just enough cool air to keep the house a couple of degrees cooler than the temperature outside and her room from becoming a sauna. Only slightly.
    â€œI need to move to Alaska,” she groused. It wasn’t that she didn’t like summer. It was just that she liked it in small doses.
    Thankfully, the leaves were already changing color. Cooler temps were ahead.
    She’d considered taking in students to help pay the bills and pay for updates to the AC and the furnace. However, she liked the quiet that came with living alone.
    So no boarders. Yet.
    The bedroom was the largest in the house, with a private bathroom. The faded pink floral wallpaper was picked out, she assumed, somewhere in the mid–nineteen hundreds and never replaced. With college students moving in and out during the changing school years, only negligible maintenance from the previous owners kept the roof and walls from falling in. After all, why bother with any new decorations when busy college students didn’t care what the house looked like?
    Weathered hardwood floors ran throughout the house, including her room, and slanted slightly to one side. The builders hadn’t had the fancy leveling tools of today. An old orange hard-water stain marked the ceiling above her bed, like a dried-up river with fingerlike tributaries spread out from the main stain. The leak had been long fixed but evidence of it remained to mock her for not doing something about the ugly eyesore.
    â€œI really need to pull down the paper and repaint this room. Heck, the whole house.” A good plan, if she had the money to make an overhaul. Maybe once her case with Willard was settled she’d splurge on some updates.
    Tossing the shirt into the hamper in the corner, she dug around in her dresser for her favorite old PJs, a long-ago Christmas gift from her nana. Tonight was Thursday, so it was Investigation Discovery and frozen dinner night.
    Her cell rang. She checked the screen. Tim? That was odd. He hadn’t contacted her since the conclusion of their divorce three years ago.
    What could he want? Nothing she cared about. She was done with him. So she hit ignore and reached back into the drawer.
    She pulled out gray PJ pants covered in a daisy pattern with holes in the knees and the matching top, turned, and screamed.
    Outside her window, a man—or, rather, a boy—froze. A pair of owllike eyes stared, wide open in shock and enlarged by thick glasses. In his white-knuckled hand were several pairs of what looked like women’s panties.
    Taryn dropped the clothes, raced to the window, lacy lavender bra and all, and pushed up the pane. “Who in the hell are you! How did you get there!”
    They were two stories up!
    Her yell startled the Peeping Tom and he lurched back on an ancient wooden ladder. Before he could right himself and find a handhold, the ladder tipped away from the window and knocked him off balance.
    â€œWhoaaaaaa!” One arm whipped out and tried to catch the