Dangerous Ladies Read Free

sparkling gems for eyes. Three black-and-white posters of the Hadrien Boys from England. But peering through the stained glass, running her fingertips
over the dragon’s scales, and looking at the boys did nothing to ease the ache in her chest. In her heart.
    She opened the window and looked out at the soft green unfurling in the trees. Nashville was beautiful in the spring. Their huge yard was tiered and landscaped and usually the sight made Brandi feel warm and secure. Today it wasn’t working. Nothing was working.
    Downstairs she heard the front door slam so hard it shook the house.
    Her throat hurt, so she took big breaths of fresh air, desperate to hold back . . . no, not tears. She wasn’t going to cry.
    She was going to fix this. Somehow she had to do something that would make it better.
    Walking to her painted desk, she pulled out a tablet, one engraved with her name, and at the top she wrote, Things to Learn. She drew a line beneath the words and numbered down the lines, and wrote:
    How to Take Care of My Mother.
    1. Learn how to write checks.
    2. Find out what a utility is.
    3. Figure out how to make the house payment.
    Then she tore that list off, set it carefully to the side, and on the top of the clean sheet, wrote:
    How to Take Care of Myself.
    1. Learn how to write checks.
    2. Get scholarships so I can go to school.
    3. Play baseball.
    She frowned at that one and chewed on the end of her pen. No, that wouldn’t do. She wasn’t good at baseball; to Kim’s annoyance Brandi ducked when the ball came in her direction.
    Brandi crossed off Play baseball and replaced it with Become a lawyer.

    She didn’t know exactly what a lawyer did—a girl who attended ballet, gymnastics, and cheerleading classes in every spare moment learned remarkably little about the real world, especially when her father never talked to her about his job—but she knew he made a lot of money. And her father had required her mother to look beautiful and Brandi to be charming when Mr. Charles McGrath and his wife visited, and Mr. McGrath was an important Chicago lawyer.
    That was what she wanted. She wanted to be important. She wanted the power to make her father behave, and the ability to get her mother a prenuptial agreement.
    Whatever that was.
    Learn how to make a prenuptial agreement.

2

    Chicago
Fourteen years later
     
    I f Brandi’s caller ID had been working, she would never have picked up the phone.
    But it wasn’t, and she did, and that just figured, because it had been one hell of a week.
    Not that Brandi hadn’t expected it. Anybody with a lick of sense could predict that moving from Nashville to Chicago in the dead of winter would be difficult, and Brandi prided herself on her good sense.
    But she’d picked the coldest winter Chicago had seen for a century, which made the pipes in her apartment building freeze for the first time ever, which meant that her movers had had nothing to drink—not that that had stopped them from using her toilet, which for the lack of water didn’t flush and probably wouldn’t for weeks, and using it with such typical male abandon that she didn’t dare sit on it even in the most dire circumstances because there was no way to clean the seat. And one guy caught her talking to herself while she tried to wipe the seat with a wadded-up Kleenex out of her purse, and the son of a bitch had the gall to inch away as if she were crazy.

    She didn’t think much of men right now, and the movers’ back-pedaling only increased her ire—and her sense of isolation.
    She didn’t know anybody in this town except Alan and Mr. McGrath—for years now she’d called him by the honorary title of Uncle Charles—but where were they while she crammed her entire life into a one-bedroom apartment?
    In a lovely piece of irony, the icy roads had sent the truck carrying her new sofa and armchair careening into an empty Marble Slab Ice Cream Shop. The deliverymen wrestled the furniture up to her fourth-floor