Third Time's a Charm Read Online Free PDF

instead of the fun stuff, like creating campaigns and overseeing strategies. Some of the friends she’d gone to school with had settled for jobs outside of marketing altogether. She’d been lucky to find a job as a marketing research analyst. One that paid well too.
    And if she wanted to keep her job, she needed to have the Harmon report on Kate’s desk before she left for Chicago Monday morning. Since tomorrow’s meeting would probably result in another big project that would suck up her Sunday night, the sooner she got the Harmon analysis out of the way, the better.
    But surely she deserved a few minutes’ pleasure. After all, it was Saturday night. The mall was just a few miles away . . .
    She flipped off the turn signal and headed straight through the intersection. A little shopping before she dove in to all those dull numbers was just the mood lifter she needed.

3
    The tree-covered hill on the other side of the cornfield tossed back a sharp echo with each blow of Ryan’s hammer. Walt held the stud in place as the brothers knelt together on the subfloor. The smell of raw timber mingled with the rich odor of tilled soil that had been ever-present from Ryan’s earliest memories being raised on the farm. Thank goodness the wind was blowing from the west this evening. At times the smell of the hogs from Pop’s farm next door could get pretty rank.
    One last pound and the nail sank flush with the stud. Ryan sat back on his ankles and stretched his spine as he spoke to his older brother. “Hand me that level, would you?”
    Walt grabbed the tool from behind him and held it next to the stud. Ryan leaned forward onto his hands and knees to check their work. The bubble was hard to see in the rapidly dimming light. One more stud and they’d have to call it a night whether this wall was finished or not.
    Walt squinted at the level. “Looks good.” He climbed to his feet and crossed the subfloor to gulp from a bottle of water at the edge of the platform, in front of what would eventually become the back door. “The weather looks good for tomorrow afternoon. With luck we’ll be ready to raise this one by midweek.”
    A trickle of sweat ran from Ryan’s temple to his jaw, and he lifted his arm to wipe his face on his sleeve. He glanced down the length of the unfinished wall. With just the two of them working tomorrow after church, they’d probably finish the framing in a couple of hours and get started nailing on the sheathing. One exterior wall stood braced in place on the south side of the subfloor. Maybe when they got this second wall in place the building would look more like a house-in-the-making and less like a pile of lumber on a platform. But at the rate they were going, Walt and Loralee and the boys would be in that singlewide trailer at least another year. He glanced toward the front of the property, where a light shone dimly in the small window of the place his brother’s family called home.
    Ryan crawled sideways and checked the position of the next stud in the frame. “I can work for a few hours right after church, but I may have something going on tomorrow afternoon.” He focused on lining up the two-by-four with the marking they’d made earlier, aware that Walt was studying him.
    “Yeah? You have a date or something?”
    Ryan shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe.” If all goes well tomorrow morning.
    “With who?”
    “You don’t know her.” He picked up his hammer.
    “’kay, so who is she?”
    Ryan lifted an eyebrow at his brother. Walt wasn’t normally all that inquisitive about the girls he dated. “Does it matter?”
    A grin hovered around his brother’s lips. “Loralee will want to know.”
    Walt’s wife had been trying to fix him up with a friend from the restaurant where she worked since last fall, when the girl from church he’d been sort of going out with took a job out of town and moved away. Loralee meant well, but the idea of a blind date held about the same amount of appeal as