Nothing but Trouble (Chinooks #5) Read Free Page B

spaghetti and looked across the table at her sister Bo. The meal wasn’t great. It was Prego. “I’m a gourmet cooker.”
    “It’s better than Mom’s.”
    The sisters shuddered. “She never drains the grease off anything.”
    “Flavors the sauce,” Bo quoted their mother as she lifted her merlot. “Cheers.”
    “What are we toasting?” Chelsea reached for her glass. “My skills at opening a jar?”
    “That and your new job.”
    Except for the hair color, looking at Bo was like looking into a mirror. Same blue eyes, small nose, and full mouth. Same small bones and big boobs. It was as if the Olsen twins had gone out and bought sets of matching stripper boobs. Only the reality of being built like their mother wasn’t quite so glamorous. The reality was that they’d been born to suffer backaches and shoulder pain. By forty, they were doomed to start saggin’ and draggin’.
    Bo touched her glass to Chelsea’s. “Here’s to lasting longer than the other home care workers.”
    Chelsea was the older of the two, by five minutes, but Bo was the more mature. Or so everyone always pointed out. “I’ll last longer.” She wanted that ten grand, but she didn’t want to tell her sister what she planned to do with the money. The last time she’d brought up the subject of breast reduction, the whole family had flipped out. They’d accused her of being impulsive, and while that was occasionally true, she’d been thinking about getting a reduction for years. “He may have questioned my intelligence and disrespected my Pucci, but I’ve worked for a lot of jerks and I know how to win him over with my charming personality. I’ll just smile and kill him with kindness. I’m an actress. No sweat.” She took a drink, then set the glass on the table. “Although he must have a few brain cells out of whack, because who doesn’t love Pucci?”
    Bo raised her hand.
    “You don’t count.” Chelsea twirled spaghetti on the tines of her fork. “You’re afraid of color, and Mark Bressler doesn’t count because he’s too big a jerk to appreciate the artistry of designer clothes.” Bo’s apartment was a lot like Bo. Stark and minimalist. There were a few ink sketches above the black-and-white-striped sofa. She had a few dusty silk ferns, but no real splashes of color anywhere.
    “He’s a hockey player.” Bo shrugged and took a bite. “Elite hockey players are arrogant and rude.” After she chewed, she added, “Although whenever I worked with Mark, he wasn’t bad. At least not like some of them can be. Before his accident, we were doing a big media push using him and some of the other players, and he was relatively nice. Sure we locked horns, but he eventually listened to reason. He didn’t balk at taking his shirt off.” She smiled and held up one hand. “The guy had an eight-pack. I. Swear. To. God.”
    Chelsea thought of the man walking slowly up the sidewalk toward her, leaning on his cane, looking anything but weak. Everything about him radiated strength and darkness. Eyes, hair, energy. A dangerous archetype. Like Hugh Jackman in X-Men , minus the claws, facial hair, and superpowers. Not to be confused with the Hugh Jackman who’d hosted the Oscars and sang and danced. She just could not picture Mark Bressler busting out in song. “How bad was his accident?”
    “No one in aftercare told you?”
    “Some.” Chelsea shrugged and took a bite of garlic bread. “They gave me a folder with his schedule and some info in it.”
    “And you didn’t read it?”
    “Glanced at it.”
    Bo’s eyes rounded. “Chelsea!”
    “What? I saw that he has a physical therapist come to the house twice a week, and I was going to read the rest tomorrow. I never read everything till the night before. It keeps it fresh in my head.”
    “That was always your excuse in high school. It was a wonder you even graduated.”
    She pointed her bread at her sister. “What happened to Bressler?”
    “Last January he hit some black