License to Love Read Free Page A

with his other hand. He knew he was making a terrible racket and didn’t care. He willed the door to open.
    It didn’t, but the door across the hall did, and a middle-aged woman appeared, looking annoyed. “There’s nobody home there,” the woman said. “She’s, gone for the long holiday weekend.”
    “Gone?” Steve was flabbergasted. “But we were supposed to have dinner!”
    The woman shrugged. “Looks like you’ve been stood up.” The door closed.
    Stood up! Steve was staggered. It was unthinkable, an alien concept. Michelle had stood him up.
    He was still in shock as he drove himself and his cousin Saran back to the Saraceni family home in the small working-class town of Merlton, New Jersey, for his parents’ annual Fourth of July barbecue.
    It was an event he would’ve preferred to skip, particularly now, but he had learned over the years that it was easier if he was present at family holiday affairs. His absence guaranteed worried and/or scolding phone calls from each and every family member, not to mention the possibility of any one of them turning up on his doorstep “just to make sure he was all right.”
    But it was not his loving family—whose possessive devotion he viewed as suffocating and smothering—that dominated his thoughts on that dismal drive to New Jersey. Images of Michelle kept tumbling through his mind, kaleidoscope fashion: Michelle loving him, and now, hating him.
    He thought back to the first time he had seen her, six months ago. He’d met her shortly afterward. How had it come to this? Steve wondered bleakly—
    In the suburban Washington, D.C. home of her stepsister Courtney Tremaine, Michelle was equally preoccupied with memories of Steve. While she went through the motions of talking and laughing with Courtney and her husband Connor, of oohing and ahhing over the cuteness of their three-month-old adopted daughter Sarah, her mind replayed every scene with Steve from the moment they’d met until their most recent encounter—that tense, unhappy confrontation in his office. Her heart was truly broken. She should have known it would come to this...

    One
    January, six months earlier
    “A chain letter!” Michelle scowled at the letter she’d just opened, then crumpled it up and tossed it into the trashcan alongside her desk.
    “You’re not going to, uh, pass it along to anybody?” asked Brendan O’Neal. He was a part-time law student who worked as an intern in Senator Dineen’s office and was unofficially Michelle’s assistant.
    “I wouldn’t waste the time. I wouldn’t foist one of those idiotic letters on anybody.” She grinned. “Not even on Joe McClusky and his staff.”
    Senator Joe McClusky was one of Senator Ed Dineen’s arch rivals in the Pennsylvania state senate. As Senator Dineen’s assistant administrative aide, Michelle was fiercely loyal to her boss and therefore inimical toward the McClusky forces.
    “It’s supposed to be bad luck not to pass along a chain letter.” Brendan retrieved the discarded paper from the trash, smoothed out the wrinkles and read it. “According to this, there are dire consequences for not sending this letter to somebody else. Listen to what happened to the ones who didn’t—one guy had a winning lottery ticket for a ten-million-dollar jackpot and then lost the ticket, another guy was killed in a plane crash, a woman lost her home and all her possessions in a mysterious flash fire.” He glanced at Michelle. “Are you sure you want to mess with this? You could send it to me and beat the curse. Then I’ll pass it on to McClusky.”
    Michelle laughed. “You and your Irish mysticism!” She i snatched the letter from him and threw it back into the trashcan. “I won’t be intimidated by those bogus threats. Chain letters like these are illegal anyway.”
    “Okay, okay. But may I suggest not buying a lottery ticket or an airplane ticket or lighting a match until the alleged curse wears off. Whenever that is.”
    She