Totally Spellbound Read Online Free PDF

John, this one
hadn’t.
    Rob liked to keep his office tailored
to his own size—which wasn’t exactly small, except in comparison to
his best friend.
    “Happiness is overrated,” Rob
said.
    John shook his head. “You never used
to say that.”
    “Overrated is a relatively new term.”
Rob tapped the computer on the far side of his desk out of sleep
mode. The day’s stock reports were already updating
themselves.
    “Relatively is a relatively new term,”
John said, “but you know what I mean.”
    Rob glanced at the Dow, watching the
lines move, knowing that the money lost with each downturn could
feed a thousand families for a year. Sometimes he lost faith, that
was all. Sometimes he felt like everything he did—everything he had
always done—was completely futile.
    “You’re ignoring me,” John said. “The
midnight falconry didn’t work, huh?”
    “It was the woman.” The words left
Rob’s mouth before he even thought about them. He raised his
head.
    John’s bushy eyebrows hit the edge of
his curly brown hair. “Woman?”
    Rob grabbed the mouse and
clicked open his NASDAQ window. The lines were moving on that
thing, too. Making and breaking fortunes all over the
world.
    Pretend money.
    He missed gold pieces.
    “What woman?”
    Rob shook his head. “A pretty thing.
She drove her car right into my bubble.”
    “That’s not possible.”
    “That’s what I thought, but it
happened.”
    “And it made you unhappy?”
    “Threw me off my rhythm.” He had
thought about her for the rest of the night, not about falconry and
magic and the lovely—albeit desolate—scenery.
    “A woman did that?” John’s gray eyes
glinted.
    “We hardly spoke to each other. I was
just a bit startled that she had appeared, that’s all.” Rob tried
to focus on those lines for what they meant to him—a double-check
to see if he had talked with the right CEOs about the right
investments, so that they would make the right amount of money, so
that they could funnel an even righter amount of money into his
nonprofits.
    “She was magic, then,” John
said.
    “No.”
    “She’s going to be magic, then,” John
said.
    “I have no idea.”
    “She’s attractive, then,” John
said.
    “Well, of course,” Rob
muttered.
    “Aha!”
    The “aha” startled him,
and made him realize he’d answered the questions out loud. He
really was off his game this morning.
    “You haven’t found a woman attractive
since Marian died,” John said.
    Rob crossed his arms. “Have
to.”
    “Have not.”
    “That’s eight hundred years ago. A man
would have to be dead not to find another woman
attractive.”
    “If the shoe fits,” John
said.
    “I wasn’t dead,” Rob said. Even though
he had wanted to be.
    For a very, very long time, he had
wanted to be.
    In fact, sometimes, when he saw an
elderly couple holding hands, enjoying their last few years
together, he felt cheated. He wanted a normal life with his lady
love. He wanted a belief that even though the life ended, the love
endured—and not just in story and song.
    He wanted to feel his mortality, not
her mortality.
    “Was she pretty?” John
asked.
    “Of course she was pretty,” Rob said.
“You knew her. She was the most beautiful woman on
earth.”
    “No.” John’s voice was soft. “The
woman who burst your bubble.”
    Rob hit the sleep button,
and stared at the darkening screen, not seeing it but the woman.
She lacked a modern beauty. She had curves where modern women had
angles. Her face was full, not bony, and her eyes were the most
spectacular green he had ever seen. She had perfect auburn hair—the
color of a Sherwood sunset in the fall—and a generous, kissable
mouth.
    Her face was too lush for
Da Vinci, too pleasant for Rembrandt. There was nothing classic
about her. Nothing expected — not even that deep, rich
voice.
    “Pretty?” Rob repeated. It seemed like
a small word for that woman. She wasn’t beautiful, not like Marian,
who had been a true English