Love Isn't Blind 1 Read Free

college, and as simple as some people might assume it to be, it was incredibly difficult to translate speech into typed words. People generally spoke very quickly and used a lot of strange sentence structures and filler words that looked ridiculous when transcribed. She'd had to use a foot pedal to go back and re-listen to almost every sentence in order to be sure she was getting everything down exactly right.
    This was a different experience entirely. Her boss spoke with the phrasing and clarity of a writer composing a carefully crafted narrative, and she found his pace just slow enough that she could easily keep up without having to double back. He used a specific set of short codes that he explained before each instance, and she could easily discern paragraph breaks from a pause before the next line. She hadn't intended to do much more than just practice to see how much of her day she'd need to dedicate to work, but the gap of dead silence after the end of the first recording left her shocked that she'd been typing for nearly two hours.
    It was a little like listening to a book on tape, she realized. The typing was almost effortless, as it is for those who spend the bulk of their waking hours typing stories or essays for school; and she discovered that she rather enjoyed hearing the development of prose as it spilled from his lips. He rarely stopped to think about what he'd say next, and she was already learning new things about composition from the places where he'd told her to scratch the last sentence and replace it with an impromptu revision. Hearing the story unfold before her from the first chapter was a special gift. She knew this novel would see several rounds of edits that would ultimately change it quite a bit from the first draft she was now transcribing, and this meant she would likely be the only person to ever experience this version of his next book.
    Ashley snapped the lid of her computer down and went in search of the kitchen. She desperately needed coffee if she were going to do work this intensely, and she'd already worked well past the time of day she normally had her first cup. Luckily for her, Helene was pouring hot black liquid into a nice large mug as she walked into the kitchen.
    "I figured you to be a coffee drinker," said the woman, holding out the mug and nodding toward the sugar bowl on the counter. "Milk and cream are in the fridge, although I should warn you that we don't normally have cream in the house. Mr. Lang likes his coffee strong and black, so you'll be needing to buy your own cream if that's the sort of thing you require."
    "Milk is fine," said Ashley, removing a glass bottle from the fridge. Everything about this house seemed from another era, she mused, pouring milk from a bottle that looked like it could have been delivered to the front door by a man in a white outfit with a matching cap.
    "How was your meeting with Mr. Lang?" asked the housekeeper.
    "Quick," she said. "He didn't say all that much, and then he was off to get started on his work. Something about exercise getting his brain fired up."
    "Yep, that'll be Mr. Lang for you. The man's a sweetheart, he really is, but when it comes to his writing work, he's got the social graces of a buffalo."
    "Does he always work through dinner like he did last night?" asked Ashley. She'd eaten hers alone in the kitchen while Helene did some late-season work in the garden.
    "A lot of the time, yes. It's hard to tell with him. He'll go for months with me having to bring his supper to his office, and then suddenly he's here at the table for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for a week. If there's one thing I've learned to expect from our Mr. Lang, it's never to know what to expect."
    "That makes absolutely no sense," said Ashley, giggling a little at the idea of working for such a character.
    "Mr. Lang makes his own sort of sense, and the way I see it, it's not for me to understand what's going on in his head. I just cook and clean, and