The Ghost and Miss Demure Read Free Page A

volunteered to edit it. Add some impulsive screwups, and you had a slippery slope that never led to the kind of everlasting love her parents had found…or even to any kind of reasonable mental, financial or physical well-being. Why, the sound of his voice—the mere memory of the sound of his voice—made her want to do mean and mostly illegal things. She clearly had given F. Christian too much control over her emotions.
    But that was all in the past. She’d had enoughof being low woman on the romantic and professional food chains. She was taking charge of her destiny. No man was ever going to screw with her life again.
    Karo let up on the gas pedal as she went glissading around a blind curve in something approaching a true hydroplane, leaving a little more of her precious paint behind on the roadside bushes. She exhaled a shaky breath and wiped the film of sweat from her brow, knowing she had to get a grip. She couldn’t afford to go into a rage every time she thought about F.-fucking Christian. She had already broken her eyetooth bridge by grinding her jaw, and she couldn’t afford another nine hundred bucks for dental repairs. After all, her new employer hadn’t said anything about dental insurance. Did such a perk come with a guide/curator/secretarial-dogsbody job?
    Still, it was hard to keep her temper as she thought about what a fool she’d made of herself. Did her IQ simply drop twenty—fifty!—points every time she got involved with a man who claimed to like smart women? Did the occasional red rose left on her desk destroy her reason? Why had she been the only person in Williamstown unaware of F.-fucking Merriweather’s reputation, and that he had his job only because his father bought it for him with huge annual grants to the society?
    She unconsciously pushed down on the accelerator and fled another memory of the day she committed professional suicide; the Kodak-moment flashbacks seemed never ending. F. Christian deserved his bruised butt and bump on the noggin! If only the entire board hadn’t been standing behindthe buffet when she’d upended the potato salad on his head, it would have been grand. She could have had her revenge and no one would have ever known, because F. Christian wouldn’t have brought it up.
    “Well, hell!” Karo beat her hands on the steering wheel. She had to stop reliving that awful moment. It would be the rubber room for sure if she continued to dwell on the fact that she was this decade’s main entrant for the Williamstown Hall of Infamy. It didn’t help her mental state that she felt belated shame about what she had done. Violence was never the answer, not even to snakes like F. Christian. Public executions had been banned for a century, at least, and she shouldn’t have ruined that party. Especially not if she wanted to be assigned to the visitors’ project, which had been her plan before she’d lost her mind.
    Things weren’t a complete loss, though, Karo reminded herself grimly; she understood now why the Williamstown Historical Society wanted its employees to change clothes before leaving work. Real clothes could save a person a wealth of embarrassment out in the real world. She’d remember the lesson for the rest of her life. No one took the shrieking chambermaid seriously as she’d stomped through the lobby, raving; they had laughed uneasily at the slapstick routine instead of calling the police. The visiting professors had been very polite, too. Karo had to give them credit. Standing calmly in the ruins of the buffet, they had managed to pretend that it was an accident Karo had thrown the potato salad at her boss. Of course, what else could they do—laughat the man whose father patronized the foundation they were hoping would provide some financial backing for their latest project?
    “That’ll be the day.” Karo aimed for a puddle, pretending it was F. Christian himself. She still couldn’t believe the rat fink had actually tried convincing her that they