Despite the Gentleman's Riches: Sweet Billionaire Romance (For Richer or Poorer Book 1) Read Free Page A

involuntarily at the thought, pulling a twig until it cracked rather than bending it gently into position. "Damn!" There went any possible apples next year on the Arkansas Black limb. I threw down my tools, tears pooling at the back of my eyes as I realized that there was a limit to how much drama even Pippin could take.
    Well, desperate times called for desperate measures. If neither of my usual friends was able to cheer me up, I figured I was going to have to take drastic action. Which is how I found myself digging a pit in the earth not too far away from Pippin's roots, topping a stack of flammables off with that scratchy Food City t-shirt and a dollop of gasoline, and letting 'er burn. If my future was going up in smoke, I might as well get some satisfaction out of the flames.
     
    ***
     
    "Our Virginia Beauty has arrived!" Okay, yes, I'll admit that I'd chosen my tree in large part because one of her branches shared my name. Not the "Beauty" part, but my parents had christened me Virginia, and months ago I'd made the mistake of telling a non-profit member that my tree and I had the same first name. Ever since then, I'd become Virginia Beauty instead of Ginny to the kind, middle-aged ladies who formed the central backbone of Citizens United Against Dirty Coal (Cuadic for short).
    "Hey, Ms. Cooper," I greeted the high-school biology teacher who had first sucked me into the group, long before we'd streamlined our focus to center around the current travesty. The educator kept asking me to call her Claudia, but old habits died hard and I wasn't quite ready to make the leap from student to friend. Still, I gave her a hug as I walked into the meeting room, noticing the hint of formaldehyde that followed the teacher around on dissection days. If my memory of high-school biology served, today's lesson would have been frog physiology.
    "Ginny, just the person I wanted to see!" exclaimed Brett, the group's paid organizer, as he pulled me away from Ms. Cooper's side. I never let on, but I both crushed on and envied our sole employee, who managed to turn nature into a full-time job. Brett had gone off to some fancy college up north rather than barely managing to eke out two years of community-college night school like I had, so it was no wonder he'd been offered the paid position instead of me. Still, I couldn't help imagining a world in which I was Cuadic's organizer...rather than simply a volunteer who might not be able to attend the next protest if I didn't find a way to pay for gas.
    Not that any of those issues were relevant at the moment. Everyone here was united in our fight against so-called Clean Power, so I pasted on a mostly-real smile and helpfully asked, "What do you need?"
    "Did you turn off your cellphone?" Tom interjected. Our resident conspiracy theorist, Tom was positive that the government was listening in on our conversations using cellphone technology. That seemed like a tremendous waste of manpower to me since Cuadic members spent most of their time eating cookies (gluten-free, honey-sweetened rocks when it was my turn to bake) and gossiping about grandchildren, but what did I know?
    "Sure," I lied, not wanting to explain for the twentieth time that I didn't own a cellphone. Sometimes it bugged me that all of the other members of Cuadic were pretty upper crust and considered cellphones about as costly (and definitely as essential) as shoe laces. But I had to pick my battles, and keeping a mercury-spewing power plant out of our neighborhood was the battle I'd chosen to fight. The truth was that pollutants in the environment caused cellular mutations, and our region already topped the nation in cancer deaths per capita. My campaign to ensure that everyone around me achieved their maximum longevity made helping Cuadic an essential part of my week, even if the other members seemed to live in a slightly different universe than I did.
    In front of me, Brett rolled his eyes, proving that he at least recalled that I