Rent A Husband by Sally Mason Read Free Book Online Page A

is: to see Darcy reduced and humiliated (why do good, kind-hearted women become the targets of this kind of vindictiveness?).
    He’s looking forward to seeing his little swan starting to spread her wings.
    Eric, deep in thought, starts the Jeep and turns out of the parking lot at the beach, crossing the intersection that in Santa Sofia has become known as Bigelow Bend (Darcy filling him in on the awful but side-splittingly funny tale of the runaway ice cream truck) when he nearly flattens a woman who steps off the sidewalk right in front of him.
    Eric stands on his brakes and the Jeep comes to a screeching halt just inches from the woman who stares at him blankly.
    He has never seen her before, and with her wild hair and pale, windswept beauty, she looks like she’s been blown off one of the Brontë sisters’ moors, not stepped out of a Santa Sofia strip mall.
     

14
     
     
     
     
     
    Her name, remarkably, is Brontë.
    Brontë Baines.
    And when other kids were falling asleep to Dr. Seuss and The Brothers Grimm, her mother was reading her Jayne Eyre and Wuthering Heights . And even though she’d been born in the Imperial Empire (Riverside) not the seat of the British Empire, she had grown into a distracted and vague girl with a delicate and romantic disposition, at odds with the world of Twitter and Facebook an on-line dating.
    Or any kind of dating.
    So, fleeing by Greyhound Bus from the latest Mr. Rochester-not (a grabby traveling salesman from Gardena) she finds herself in this little town without knowing quite how she got here or what she’s going to do now.
    She stepped off the bus to use the bathroom at the gas station, became distracted by a display of flowers in the little garden, and quite failed to notice that the coach had driven away with her bag in its belly.
    Oh well.
    These things happen to Brontë Baines.
    Happen with remarkable regularity.
    So, with nothing but the clothes on her back and a couple of dollars in the little cloth bag that hangs from her shoulder, she walks along the sidewalk, the breeze tugging at the long dress she wears, showing a pair of bird-like ankles ending in ballet pumps.
    Following some internal GPS she steps off the curb almost in front of a jeepy thing— the driver shouting and saying something unflattering.
    He roars off and she wanders across the road, pleased at the near-accident, because it got her looking where she was going, otherwise she would have quite missed the bookstore with the sheet of paper of Scotch-taped to its glass door: HELP NEEDED .
    Good, this was a sign.
    Well, of course it’s a sign, Brontë, you clot.
    A rather untidy, handwritten sign.
    No, not that kind of sign.
    A sign sign.
    A message, telling her that she has come to the right place.
    And when she pushes open the door to the store and sets off the first few bars of “Greensleeves”, she knows this is another sign.
    Standing there, inhaling her two favorite smells—books and coffee—mixed into a heady perfume, Brontë feels a sudden jolt of raw happiness.
    “Morning, need assistance?”
    She turns to see a tall, wild haired man, with a beautifully ugly large-boned face.
    He holds a huge cream cake on a tray.
    “No, but clearly you do.”
    “Do I?”
    He stares at her, perplexed, and she sees he has eyes blue as robin’s eggs, wide and without guile.
    The tray is balanced precariously in his hands and he rights it at the last moment, stopping the cake from sliding to the floor.
    Brontë points toward the door.
    “The sign.”
    “Ah, the sign. The sign. Yes. Yes I do.”
    He stares down at the cake, and turns and sets the tray down on a small bench that is parked near one of the shelves of books.
    “Do you have any experience?” he asks.
    “Well, I read books and I eat cake and I love coffee.”
    “Oh, okay. Great, Miss . . .?”
    “Brontë Baines.”
    “Brontë like . . .?”
    “Charlotte and Emily.”
    “Not to forget Anne.”
    Brontë, impressed, says, “No, of course