The World is a Stage Read Online Free PDF

Peterson’s mouth was firm as their eyes met over her head. Peterson looked an awful lot like a man in love.
    He looked fucking miserable.
    “Give her a chance, please?” Peterson had asked quietly. Had he joked or laughed or even cracked a smile, Michael would have abandoned him on the spot, happily and without a single backward glance. But with that face and that plea, Peterson obviously needed him.
    And Michael never left a man behind.
    So he’d sighed and agreed, knowing the whole time he would live to regret it. There was more in that small request than just one night of sacrificing himself on the altar of good wingman behavior. Unless he was very much mistaken, that woman planned to cut him up into tiny pieces and feed him to a pet lion.
    Of course, Michael let none of those fears show as he made his way up the steps to the house, exchanging warm greetings with people he’d never met and gratefully accepting the first red plastic cup of beer that was placed in his hand. He was Michael O’Leary. He wore a skirt, and he smiled in the face of hostility. He stood by his friends through Shakespearean zombies and hissing she-bats.
    These were the things he knew to be true.
    It only took him a few minutes to unwind, and he wasn’t the only one. Based on the number of empty cups lying on their sides, he’d say these actors could drink as well as any Scottish Highland athlete after a big game.
    At last. People after his own heart.
    Just about everyone had changed into street clothes, and as Michael scanned the crowd, he realized he had no idea what the sister looked like without her creepy face on. He tried searching for someone who looked like Molly, but no one jumped out at him.
    He decided, about half a beer and a fruitless twenty-minute search in, he’d have probably been better off searching for an unhappy-looking woman with a man’s balls pinned to her chest.
    “So, is there a fire pole somewhere around here?” he asked, giving up the search and directing his conversation toward a pleasant-looking man in a velvet vest and cargo pants. Michael recognized him as one of the guys who’d pranced around the stage in nothing but tights. It was a memory that would burn for a long time, but the guy seemed decent enough now that his clothes were back on. “I’ve always wanted to try one of those.”
    The man grinned. “I wish. Dominic had it taken out a few years ago. He fell through the hole one night on his way to the john. I hear there’s a rundown fire truck out back, though.”
    They chatted a little about the possibility of getting the hose to work again. Michael was tempted to go out and give it a try, since he had a knack for breaking down mechanical devices and putting them back together again. It was a skill that came from an adolescence spent working a farm. Out where the wheat whistled and the hills rolled, things had a tendency to break, and no one worth his salt out on the Palouse hired someone else to fix it.
    A man given to deeper reflection might make the connection between salvaging broken-down hay balers and a knee that refused to hold his own weight anymore.
    Fortunately, Michael was not that man.
    He was a wingman, the friend Peterson could count on to woo a slab of stone wrapped in ice.
    “Do you know if Rachel Hewitt is around here anywhere?” he asked. His companion’s eyes flickered for a moment, something like surprise or amusement or—most likely—gut-wrenching sympathy flitting through. The man nodded toward the direction of the kitchen, which was open to the living room, separated only by a huge granite island covered with bottles of every kind of alcohol known to mankind.
    Good. Maybe she was a little bit…softer when she was drinking. The two scotches he and Peterson had kicked back while the show ended certainly hadn’t improved things on his end.
    There were several people gathered around that part of the kitchen, but it wasn’t hard to pick Rachel out. She was tall and