Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance Read Online Free PDF Page A

baby elephant mysteriously dropped off in a trailer in downtown Culver City. An attractive woman I rescued from handcuffs who smells like elephant poop. How could I resist?”
    My heart sank. The broadsword glowed bright enough to halo Hudson. He thought this was some grand adventure. He thought he was going to rescue me.
    “Look,” he said when I didn’t respond with the enthusiasm he had expected. “I’ve got a laptop in the van. Let’s figure out where this elephant was taken from, drive her back, and sort this all out with the police once that baby is reunited with her mother. Hopefully we can get Jenny some mental help in the process.”
    Well, crap. He really was going to rescue me. I was doomed.

CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    I ordered us both drinks from the nearby café, scrambling furiously for a plan. One that wouldn’t involve Hudson putting Jenny in a position to expose my secret to the world. Hudson hunched over his laptop at one of the outside tables, engrossed in his grand rescue strategy.
    “Nothing. Can you believe it? At least not on the major news sites. I’ll check more locally . . .”
    I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I wiped the dirty trunk marks from my legs with wet paper towels, then stared at myself in the mirror. My cheeks were paler than normal, and my slate-blue eyes looked haunted.
    “This won’t do,” I told myself. I fixed my ponytail, reapplied lip gloss, and patted some color into my cheeks. I’ve never been impressed by white knights or their co-conspirators, the damsels in distress. Their whole relationship was predicated on the belief that the white knight could intuit the damsel’s needs, but I had yet to meet a man with telepathy. Like Hudson, the knights bumbled along, using logic based on only half the facts. Left alone, my white knight would mess everything up in his endeavor to be the hero. So, like women throughout history before me, I had to rescue myself from my problem and from the “help” of the hero. Only, I didn’t have logic on my side, and I couldn’t explain my reasoning without revealing my secret. I’d have to get creative, and as much as I didn’t want to, I’d also have to trade on the attraction that had drawn Hudson to me and this mess in the first place.
    “Any luck?” I asked when I sat down at the table.
    “Nothing. You’d think it’d be a top story, at least locally. How often are elephants stolen?”
    “What if Jenny was on to something?”
    Bright blue eyes lifted to my face. “Meaning?”
    “She seemed to think Kyoko is in danger. What if she’s right? What if we were to return her to wherever she came from, and they were torturing her?” I nibbled at my bottom lip, giving him Bambi eyes.
    “Ah, well, I hadn’t considered that. We could take her to an animal rescue facility.”
    Damn. Another good solution. Was he trying to ruin my life? I consciously mirrored the position of his arms on the table, then crossed my leg in his direction. Using flirtatious body language in such a calculated manner felt sleazy, but desperation helmed this train wreck. “If we did, then what about Jenny?”
    “You think she’d steal another elephant?”
    Okay, it sounded pretty far-fetched to me, too. “She could be an extremist. If we keep the elephant a day or two, when Jenny comes back for Kyoko, we could turn her and the elephant over to the police.”
    “Or we could track her down first. Damn it, I thought this thing was fully charged.” Hudson tapped at the black screen of his laptop. When it didn’t respond, he shoved it aside. “What about the Byron guy with all the dead batteries? What was that about? Would he know where she is?”
    I shook my head and sipped my drink to give myself a moment to compose my expression. “I think we have a better shot at finding Jenny than some guy she remembered from high school.” Not that I thought we’d have a lot of luck finding Jenny. I couldn’t remember meeting her once in high school, and