The Witch and the Gentleman Read Online Free PDF

thing.”
    “ A cat?” I asked.
    “ You,” he said after a moment.
    I snorted at that. “You are such a goofball, Conn. You’ve never even met me.”
    “We can change that, you know. I could meet you tonight for drinks.”
    “ That’s not gonna happen.”
    “ Yes, I know,” he said.
    “ I’m sorry.”
    “ It’s okay,” he said. “If this is the only way I can spend time with my dream girl, then I will accept my lot in life. Better a few minutes a week with you, Allison, than no time at all.”
    I was touched again by his words. “It’s your money,” I said after a moment, although my tone was now much softer. “Do what you want with it.”
    “I am,” he said, “and I can think of no greater way to spend it than by spending time with you.”
    “ Geez, Conn, have you always been such a romantic fool?”
    He thought about that. Little did he know that I could see him thinking about it, that I could see him now sitting in his rather lavish home overlooking the Pacific. That I could see that he was, in fact, everything he claimed to be, and perhaps even more. Never did he mention his money, of which he clearly had a lot. I knew his address, too, and I knew his home inside and out. Yes, I’d even checked out his attic and under his floorboards. No bodies. He wasn’t a creep. He wasn’t a sicko. He was just lonely.
    Or perhaps, as he claimed, in love with me.
    That he was also somewhat handsome made things all the more interesting. Of course, he knew none of this, knew nothing of the snooping I’d performed. And, thank God, he mostly wore clothes when he called me.
    We chatted some more, about my day, about me, about anything that came to his mind. He paid, of course, for every minute of it. I suspected he could have talked to me all day, and, for some reason, I didn’t mind that. Not one bit.
    He was halfway through a story about his dog—a dog I could see sitting by his feet now—when I felt a disturbance. Someone had picked up. One of them .
    “ Thank you for the call, Conn,” I said, cutting him off. “I hope I was of service to you today.”
    After two months, Conn knew the routine. “You were incredibly accurate, Allison. Never in all my life have I ever come across a psychic more accurate than you.”
    Oh, brother, I thought. One thing Conn was good at doing was pouring it on.
    He clicked off and I sat back on my couch, decaf Americano in hand, and smiled.
     
     
     
    Chapter Eight
     
     
    It was early afternoon, and I was at The Whisper Lounge at The Grove with my friend, Bernice.
    And, no, we weren’t whispering. Truth was, we rarely whispered. I didn’t think we knew how to whisper. On second thought, I didn’t think they much liked us here at The Whisper Lounge.
    Anyway, Bernice Jepson was a fairly new friend of mine. I called her Bernie because it suited her better. She had been my trainer at The Psychic Hotline. As in, I sat in on some of her phone calls and made notes. As I made notes and listened in on a few days of her taking calls from clients, one thing had become rather apparent: Bernie was not a very good psychic.
    As in, she rarely, if ever, got anything right. She had made an art out of backing out of her statements, re-wording and charging along by distracting the clients with some new “revelation.”
    While it was true that Bernie was a bad psychic, she was a great friend. That she was slightly delusional and lived with her head in the clouds made her all the more endearing to me. That she thought she was a good psychic would be a nice case study in human psychology, one that I would leave to the experts. Perhaps even a team of experts.
    Truth was, I found her hilarious. But not in a way that mocked her. She was genuinely caring. And certainly believed she had special powers.
    Maybe I was enabling her, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her what I really thought of her psychic powers. Anyway, while the waitress brought over our mango margaritas, or mangoritas,