Shelly's Second Chance (The Wish Granters, Book One) by L B Gschwandtner Read Free Book Online Page B

of them joined forces, she’d
never draw another free breath in her life.
    I know you can’t help it
baby, Ben’s voice said. I know you’re sick.
    Shelly tossed the lottery
tickets up in the air and watched a breeze take them, watched them float like
small feathers down to the ground beneath her. A confetti parade of twenty-five
hundred tickets. Twenty-five hundred dollars. Twenty-five hundred chances to
make things right, and all of them gone.
    Wait a minute. Not
twenty-five hundred. Twenty-four hundred ninety-nine. She still had her Vegas
Chance card, securely zipped into the side pocket of her purse. Shelly exhaled,
wiped away the tears, shut out the sight of the tickets swirling slowly to the
ground, the steady drone of Ben’s voice. She’d skipped work today, hadn’t she?
They could do without her for a couple more. She could always call in and use
the rest of her sick days. Damn him for being so smug and superior. Damn Marcus
too, and the lady who’d taken her thirty million.
    It didn’t matter. None of it.
She still had one last chance to make it right.
    She was going to Vegas.

Chapter Eleven
     
     
    Alanna found herself manifested
to an airplane seat. First class, judging by the wide armrests and plush
cushions and that her knees weren’t pushed up to her nose. Shelly was seated
beside her and evidently they’d been talking for some time based on the
confidential way Shelly was leaning towards her, telling her life story
complete with big looping arm gestures,
prattling on about fate and how she believed
that whatever happened was meant to be. Okay, so getting her to open up
wouldn’t be a problem, Alanna figured. It didn’t hurt that Shelly had been
drinking. Three empty wine glasses were lined up on her seatback tray and the
plane hadn’t even left the ground.
    It must be her first time
flying first class, Alanna thought. The newbies are always dazzled by the free
alcohol. She’d no sooner thought the thought than it shamed her. Maybe Joe was
right, and she was used to money, but there was another clue hidden somewhere
within that thought too, wasn’t there? Evidently in her previous life she’d not
only flown first class, but frequently enough that it no longer impressed her.
Alanna glanced around the cabin. God only knew how she’d gotten through
security and onto the plane or what name her ticket was under. She was flying
on a need-to-know basis and all she needed to know right now was that the
powers that be had seated her beside Shelly who was so hyped up with the thrill
of first class that she was spilling her guts and very nearly her cabernet.
Alanna turned back toward Shelly and willed herself to concentrate more closely
on the girl’s story.
    “You see how he is. He
doesn’t want me on this plane. He doesn’t want me buying Lotto tickets. He
doesn’t want me in Vegas,” Shelly was saying. “No way. He agrees with everyone
else at GA. I even asked him to come along to see for himself what I won. But
there’s no way he would have taken three days off and come with me even before
we had that awful fight. Workaholic.”
    “Well, it’s good for a man to
have ambition.”
    “You think?” Shelly drained
the wine glass and signaled to the flight attendant as if she were a waitress.
They had to be close to take-off but the woman, with a slight, nearly
invisible, shrug, turned back into the cabin to get Shelly another drink. It
was probably long past when they should be handing out drinks but evidently the
airline bent the rule for first class, especially on flights to Vegas. Shelly
was hardly the only person in the cabin who’d begun to celebrate early.
    “I mean yeah, you’re right,”
she was saying. “Ambition’s good, but does he have to work all the time? He
says it would take ten men working a hundred hours a week to keep me up in the
manner I expect to live, but that’s not true. I’m not materialistic. I just
like nice things, you know? I mean everyone likes nice