You Dropped a Blonde on Me by Dakota Cassidy Read Free Book Online Page A

of pardons.

CHAPTER THREE
     
    Note from Maxine Cambridge to all ex-trophy wives on the art of sucking it up, Princess: No job is too menial when you’re broke. When someone offers you money for services rendered and you’re broke—despite the fact that the service you’ll provide sucks testicles that are big and hairy—don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Princess. Set aside your inflated opinion of what’s beneath you, and run like hell for that light at the end of the tunnel. Colored paper awaits you. The green kind. You know, the kind you haven’t seen since you were relieved of your wifely duties? Even if it smells like dog poop and mothballs. Money’s money. Suck it up. This is your new life. Welcome.
     
    A sun-browned hand came to rest on her shoulder, warm and delicious. The comfort it brought made her close her eyes for a moment and inhale before even realizing she had. “Max Henderson twice in one day. It’s like Christmas without the annoying blinking lights,” Campbell joked, making Maxine’s mother giggle and Gail cluck her tongue with a wink.
    God really did have a hard-on for her today. Maxine straightened in her chair, her spine stiff, her lips compressed. “Yeah, imagine your crazy luck. So what are you doing in my mother’s house?”
    He held up a wrench that gleamed silver in the bright afternoon sun spilling from the window above her mother’s kitchen sink. “Fixing her leaky faucet, and FYI, I didn’t make the connection. I didn’t know Mona was your mother.”
    Campbell Barker plumbed leaky faucets? Not the whiz she’d known in high school. But who was she to pound the gavel of judgment? That meant at least one of them had an honest to God, paying job. She swung around on the rollers of her mother’s dining room chair to face him. “You’re a plumber? I thought you’d gone off to college to get a business degree—or something.”
    He nodded with a grin that left deep grooves on either side of his lean cheeks. “Yep, but I decided a business degree was boring and way beneath me. So I bought a plunger and some PVC pipe. Look at me now, huh?”
    “Campbell is Garner’s son. He works helping his dad now, Maxie. He’s a good boy,” her mother said with a doting smile in Campbell’s direction.
    “He’s a good-lookin’ boy, too,” Gail added with a devilish glint in her eyes. Because stating the obvious was so essential. “Don’t you think so, Maxine?”
    She cringed.
    “Yeah, don’t you think so, Max?” Campbell encouraged with a chuckle and a nudge.
    Yeah. She thought so. After eight months of not finding anyone or anything remotely interesting while she rode the train to poverty, today she suddenly thought Campbell Barker was good-looking. Funny that.
    Thankfully, her mother’s phone rang, saving her from having to answer Campbell’s smug question. Maxine lunged for it, following the ear-splitting jingle her mother’d set on the highest volume, digging beneath a pile of Good Housekeeping magazines to get to it. Looking at the caller ID, she didn’t recognize the number.
    She’d hoped it was Lenore. The one and only friend Maxine had left on planet Earth, seeing as the still employed trophy wives didn’t much commune with the commoner she’d recently become. Len didn’t give a shit that she wasn’t rich anymore. She didn’t give a flying fuck that the women they’d once socialized with stuck their surgically tweaked pert noses up at her. She didn’t even care that practically all of her close-knit family wasn’t speaking to her because she’d defended Maxine.
    Instead of her little sister.
    Lacey.
    Pressing the “talk” button, she ignored the pang of regret that it wasn’t Lenore calling to let her live vicariously through her, and answered the phone. “Hello?”
    “Maxine Cambridge?”
    “Speaking.”
    “This is Joe Hodge. I got one of your fliers today over at the rec center. You still walkin’ dogs?”
    She’d walk saber-toothed tigers if