Pale Stranger (PALE Series) by Mac Flynn Read Free Book Online Page A

hope you're taking notes here. I plan on writing my autobiography someday, so I may as well start now." I slid into the chair and he stood in front of me.
    "First off, what is your name?" he asked me.
    "Trixie."
    "Trixie?"
    "Yeah, like the cereal but with more eek to it," I quipped.
    "So your full name is Trixie Calhoun?" he wondered.
    I smirked and nodded. "Yep. My mother wanted a name nobody would forget."
    "And raised a daughter very much like the name..." he murmured.
    I frowned. "You murmur to yourself a lot. Didn't you have somebody to talk to other than yourself? What about your previous secretaries? Were they mutes?"
    He chuckled; I was glad to see he still had his humor. "No, but some of them believed a barrier existed between an employer and their employee, and idle chat was never to be commenced."
    "Um, yeah, no. That just isn't going to work for me," I objected.
    "I can see that," he smirked. "You seem to be a very extroverted, personal sort of person."
    "And I'm friendly, too," I added.
    "It stands out, but I don't believe we're getting very far with your autobiography. Where were you born?"
    As much as I loved the topic of the conversation, this wasn't getting me any closer to my life goal of helping out this introvert. Therefore, I decided to be a hostile witness to my own life. "At my place of birth."
    "Obviously, but what city? Do you have any parents?"
    "It takes two to tango," I reminded him.
    He was already exasperated; I had to avoid a meltdown of frustration or he wouldn't open up to me. Instead there'd be an atomic explosion of boss proportions. "Do you have any siblings?"
    "That's enough about me, let's talk about you." I didn't give him a chance to object before I swooped on top of him and switched our places. He sat in the chair and I lorded over both him and the conversation. "Now answer all the questions I just did."
    "But you didn't answer any of them."
    "No excuses, just the facts."
    "Fifteen miles away, yes, no." That backfired in my face.
    "On second thought, just tell me everything you can remember."
    "That's a lot of story. I've lived a long life," he playfully countered.
    "Start the same place as the Bible, at the beginning," I suggested.
    "I was born sickly, my mother died in childbirth, I was raised by my father until he died when I was ten, and then I was taken in by Cecil, my mother's brother." The facts blew past me so fast my hair stuck out the back.
    "Well, that was oddly specific and yet not very helpful," I told him.
    He shrugged, but there was a smile on his face. "Turnabout is fair play." So I cheated and held up his wallet. His face fell faster than a cartoon anvil out of a plane. He jumped up and clapped his hand over his nice ass. "When? Where? How?" he stuttered.
    "Elementary, my dear boss. I swiped it when we traded places." If there was one thing I learned at a dingy diner was that there were thieves who frequented the place to get at tired customers. I had to learn to grab back the wallets and purses they swiped because the brazen thieves were never going to admit to taking it; not when their livelihood and reputations were at stake. I opened the wallet and looked at the contents. "A driver's license telling me you're thirty, a few crisp one hundred dollar bills, some-"
    "Give that back!" He jumped at me, but I swung to the side and avoided his clawing hands.
    "-some credit cards, and a folded piece of paper." He stole back the wallet, but I'd already plucked the folded paper out of the container. "And a-" I stopped cold when I saw a child's crayon drawing of a ghostly stick-man with sharp fangs. Beneath the picture was written the word 'monster.' Benson snatched the drawing from me and stuffed it into his pants pocket. "Why...why do you have that?" I asked him.
    His face was tense and his voice was strained. "To remind me why I shouldn't go out," he replied.
    "Because people will make fun of you?" His reply was to turn away from me. I folded my arms across my chest and