Whatever It Takes Read Online Free PDF Page B

your tits hanging out and your skirt up to your ass.”
    Kellie grinned. “Shoot, girl. If you got it, flaunt it, is what I say. Anyhow, I don’t show ’em a thing they don’t enjoy looking at, but I don’t waste my assets on Tom, Dick, and Harry.”
    â€œDon’t hand me that,” Mabel said. “If you want something out of ’em, you’ll offer up your booty as fast as a bondsman will put up bail. I’m on to you, girl. You dress like Miss Ann and talk like a lady, but you got grit in your teeth.”
    Kellie let a smile float over her face to give the impression that she thought Mabel was joking, but she knew the truth in the woman’s comment. “Come on, Mabel. Just because I’m proud that I have it doesn’t mean I let just anybody use it.”
    â€œI ain’t the priest, so don’t be confessing to me. It’s yours; you do what you please with it.”
    â€œYou forget I’m a minister’s daughter; I was properly brought up.”
    â€œYeah. I gotta get my work done.”
    Kellie didn’t like being put down by a woman she considered beneath her, but she wanted a promotion from secretary to receptionist, which to her mind was a more prestigious job, and she stood a better chance if her colleagues liked her. “Good idea, Mabel. I want to finish this report so I can leave a little early.”
    She completed it, put it on the supervisor’s desk and headed outside for another look at the man she saw in the tree earlier that afternoon. As she approached, he climbed down from the ladder. “Don’t you get dizzy up there?” she asked him. “I would. What were you doing to the poor tree, anyway?”
    â€œI was inspecting it for disease.” He collected his tools and the ladder, tipped his baseball cap and headed toward the building’s basement entry.
    Angry with him for ignoring her and furious with herself for speaking to him, she promised herself that she’d make him pay. “Men make me sick,” she said aloud, repeating a sentiment she’d uttered to her mother when her father left home. She wondered if she believed it and wasn’t so sure when she recalled her first sexual experience at the age of fourteen.
    The man was her father’s close friend and a deacon in his church. Suddenly she began to giggle. That man had been crazy about her. He’d keep his head between her legs as often and as long as she’d let him, and all she had to do was caress him and stroke him. He’d be talking with her father in Marshall’s office at home, and she’d go in and make up a yarn to tell her father while she rubbed and pinched her breast as she stood behind her father’s chair, toying with the man. Before he left the house, he would manage to get her in the basement and do all kinds of things to her while her unsuspecting father worked on his Sunday sermons. She hadn’t let the man penetrate her and often wished she had. He heated her up, and no other man had been able to do it.
    She considered stopping by Lawrence Bradley’s office and thought better of it. Desperate to get the brooch before Bradley delivered it to her sister, she stopped at Benny’s Jerked Chicken, a shop less than a block from Bradley’s office, and telephoned him.
    â€œBradley.”
    â€œHello, Mr. Bradley. This is Kellie Graham. Do you mind if I call you Lawrence?”
    â€œNo, I don’t, but I can’t see that it’s necessary.”
    â€œOh, please, not you, too. This has been one awful day. From the time I rolled out of my bed until a few seconds ago, it’s been downhill.”
    His pause lasted too long for her comfort. At last he said, “What happened a few seconds ago?”
    Just the lead she wanted. “I heard your voice.”
    â€œOh, come on, Miss Graham. You can do better than that.”
    â€œI wish I could, but from the minute I heard your voice