Fast & Loose by Elizabeth Bevarly (the giving tree read aloud .txt) 📕

the apparatus again. Nothing happened. He pushed it a third time. Nothing. He checked to make sure the battery was snug in place. It was. Another push of the button. The laptop lay there lifeless.

Dammit.

What the hell was the matter with this piece of crap computer? he wondered. Bad enough this house wasn’t equipped with wireless and it had taken Cole fifteen minutes to locate someone in the neighborhood whose service he could pirate. Fat lot of good it did now that the damned machine wasn’t even working. He went back downstairs to retrieve the power cord and bumped his head on the ceiling when he returned. He plugged one end of the cord into the laptop and the other into a wall socket, then pushed the On button again.

Nothing.

He looked at the big computer on the desk. The one that belonged to the house’s owner. The one with one of the ubiquitous pink Post-it notes affixed to it. He’d read this one his first evening here, but now he strode across the room to read it again.

“Please don’t feed the Mac,” it said. “She must stay on a strict vegetarian diet to maintain her multitasking capabilities. And please don’t ask her for help. She’s very shy. If you need a computer, there are several at the library, and being social creatures, they adore visitors!”

In other words, Cole translated, Mitts off.

He knew it would be a violation of all that was decent and holy to violate the instructions on that note. It would be the equivalent of opening that drawer in the dresser he was sure housed his hostess’s underwear to fondle it, or rifling through her filing cabinets in search of financial information that was none of his business.

Oh, hell, it would just be for a couple of minutes, he told himself, and she would never know, and there might be some really important e-mail that needed his immediate attention, and blah, blah, blah, fill in the blank with whatever lame excuse worked, because he was going to fire up her computer. He admitted it—he was an e-mail junkie with an e-monkey on his back the size of e-Kong. He needed his e-mail, dammit. He needed that even more than he wanted to fondle women’s underwear. That probably said something about his manliness he’d find a little troubling if he took the time to consider it, but, thankfully, he was too busy—manfully busy—to make time for that. So he strode manfully back to his laptop and manfully slammed it shut, manfully clutched his cognac in its glass with the little etched flowers, and made his way manfully back to the desk—first bumping his head manfully on the ceiling again—then reached for the computer with a manful hand…

Only to hesitate when he saw the bright pink Post-it note still affixed to the left of the screen.

If she was really that concerned about someone using her computer, he thought, then she would have protected it with a password before she left. Hoping that wasn’t the case, he felt around the machine until he found the On button and, with only one more small—but still manful—hesitation, he pushed it.

Oh, yeah, that did it. He could feel his testosterone surging again, having manfully ignored the conventions of courtesy by completely disregarding the wishes of his hostess.

He mentally crossed his fingers as the Mac whirred to life, narrowing his eyes at the screen as he waited for some kind of password prompt to appear. Instead, a background popped right up that was a swirl of bright color. It took him a moment to realize her computer wallpaper was a photograph of some kind of elaborate glass. Or, at least, a detail of something made out of elaborate glass. As he seated himself at the desk, he tilted his head first one way, then the other, to get the full effect. He had no idea what it was. But whatever it was, it was beautiful, like all the other glass pieces he’d seen in the house.

He shook his head to clear it. He had way more important things to do than look at pretty pictures of glass. How did you get the Internet to come up on this thing? He’d never used a Mac before and had no idea what kind of software was on it. The desktop was surprisingly clean, with only a handful of files stacked one atop the other on the far left-hand side. Along the bottom was a row of icons, some of which he recognized by their PC counterparts, the others…not so much.

Might as well just start clicking…

One by one, Cole moused over the different images, until something called Safari opened up to what was clearly an Internet site. An Internet site about glass—gee, there was a shocker—that he ignored to type in the URL of his ISP. There were dozens of e-mails awaiting him, but nothing too major, and he was able to plow through them fairly quickly—though all right, it was more than a couple of minutes. She’d still never know. He had closed the Internet and was about to power down when his eye landed on an icon at the very top of the screen he hadn’t noticed before, because it was on the right-hand side and nearly the same color as the bit of glass on the picture behind it. The icon was of a small book. And the words beneath it said, Daily Journal.

So his hostess was a diary keeper, was she? Somehow, that didn’t surprise him. Considering the belongings he’d found stashed everywhere over the past few days, he knew she was the sort of person who liked to surround herself with things that made her feel good. Things that satisfied her. It made sense that such a person would be introspective enough to want to keep a journal.

Not sure what made him do it, Cole moved the mouse to the little book icon and let it sit there. He wasn’t going to open