You Dropped a Blonde on Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

than she was doing twenty years ago. Her pom-poms have long since frayed, and her tiaras aren’t so shiny these days. What she thought was once a perfect world is now a beautiful disaster.
    Squeezing the bridge of her nose, Maxine hoped it would keep the tears at bay long enough for her to make a dignified exit. “I can’t, but thanks anyway. I have to pick up my son. But really, it was nice seeing you.”
    “Here.” He shoved a business card at her. “Call me—maybe we could grab some coffee. I’m a good listener.”
    Maxine reached out to take it from him, more politeness than anything else. When their fingers grazed, a weird assault of sensations traveled along her arm. “Thanks, Campbell. Maybe I will.”
    Stuffing the card in her purse, she knew she wouldn’t.
    Maxine Lou Anne Henderson Cambridge wasn’t anything like the girl her old lab partner had once known.
    Catching up with Campbell, who was astonishingly different than he’d once been in the best of ways, would only be like opening her wounds of regret with a dull butter knife and dumping vinegar on them.
    It would only remind her of the other path she hadn’t taken.
    The path of self-sufficiency and independence.
    The path that would have left her with a career that would have provided for her and Connor during a shitwreck of a divorce.
    The path where she could tell Finley Cambridge and all of his lovely moolah to kiss her still untouched by a plastic surgeon’s knife ass.
    The path that had led her to become Maxine—because Finley had said her full name was much less garish—instead of just staying plain old Max.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    Note from Maxine Cambridge to all ex-trophy wives on the business of sucking it up, divorce, and sparing the children the gory details of poverty and infidelity: While divorcing the sugar daddy who left your bucket bone-dry, try not to allow your resentments to become an issue with your kid. Be the better person. Instead, to release pent-up rage, seek out a hunky man-boy and wonk him until your eyeballs roll and he slams the rage right outta ya. That was a joke. Don’t really do that. Chew gum. Or your tongue. Whatever’s easier on your fillings.
     
    Maxine pushed her way through the screen door to her mother’s retirement-village one-level ranch in Leisure Village South, where the motto was “the end of your life is just the beginning.” It was a great place for her mother to live out her retirement years while she aged with more grace and agility at seventy than Maxine felt at almost forty-one. Her mother’d found a circle of friends in the ten years since she’d moved in. They had tons of activities in the village to keep her motivated. Most importantly, she had her own little space and her own things surrounding her.
    Mona Henderson was big on her tchotchkes. There wasn’t a bird-house or garden gnome her mother didn’t love.
    Maxine threw her purse on the speckled counter in disgust. Jesus Christ in a miniskirt, her behavior had been beyond deplorable today.
    She’d forgotten what boundaries were. Boundaries sucked.
    Publicly beating down a teenager because he’d joined the land of the employed was heinously unforgivable.
    A teenager .
    And she’d done it in front of a former classmate who’d probably yuck the experience up at the next reunion at the Holiday Inn Express with everyone who thought Max Henderson would make it big—or at least end up Miss Universe. Today, it was going to take a lot more than reminding herself there was no shame in clawing your way out of unemployment to keep from pitching herself off the roof of her mother’s house.
    Her mother looked at her over the top of her magnifying reading glasses. “So how goes the chicken business?”
    Maxine kissed her on the top of her dyed strawberry blonde head before slinking down into a chair at the kitchen table. “It doesn’t.”
    “Doesn’t what?”
    “Doesn’t go. They hired someone else.” Instead of looking directly at her