Read Online Getting Rid of Bradley by Jennifer Crusie - Free Book Online Page B

house. Her house. Her bedroom. How could she have been so stupid, not to even have
    had a clue? How could Bradley do that to her?
    He had just stood there with his mouth working like a fish, saying he could explain.
    Except he never had.
    He was a creep. Bringing that woman into her house. Her house. What a creep.
    At least she was free of him now.
    Her eyes fell on the boxes.
    Or she soon would be.
    She stood, gently displacing Einstein’s head from her knee, and carried Bradley’s boxes to the basement
    door. She set them down, opened the door, picked them up again, and threw them down the stairs,
    watching them turn and smash against the steps as they fell.
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    “Too bad there wasn’t anything breakable,” she told the dogs, and shut the door.
    Then she went back into the living room and studied it. Beautiful. Bradley-less. Un-Bradleyed.
    Almost.
    His chair still sat in the middle of the room beside the love seat. It was ugly—a recliner upholstered in
    synthetic olive-green flecked with red. If Bradley had been born a piece of furniture, he would have
    looked like that chair. Practical, boring, and irritating. The fact that he’d loved it and wouldn’t let the
    dogs on it only made it more Bradley-like. The dogs had been napping on it regularly since he’d gone,
    but it was still an annoyance.
    “What do you think?” Lucy asked the dogs. “Getting rid of a perfectly good chair would be totally
    irresponsible, right?”
    The dogs cocked their heads at her.
    “Right. Just think how proud of us Tina will be.” Lucy opened the basement door. Then she pushed the
    chair to the doorway, shooing Maxwell away just in tune, and shoved the chair down the stairs. Halfway
    down, it hit the stair rail and broke through it, tumbling over the side of the steps to smash on the
    concrete below in a small cloud of dust.
    “Independence Day,” Lucy said, and slammed the door.

Chapter Four
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    “So then she said, ‘You mean that hood is following my sister?’ and tried to take off after you,” Anthony
    told Zack an hour later. They were back in the squad room, their feet propped up on their desks in the
    thin warmth of the dusty late-afternoon sunlight that filtered through the dirty windows. “I almost let her
    have you. I was hoping she’d rip that damn jacket off you and shred it. But then I remembered you were
    my partner, and I saved you.”
    “Thank you.” Zack was stretched out in his desk chair, feeling every bruise that Lucy had given him that
    afternoon. “I gather she did finally talk to you?”
    “Of course.”
    “There’s no ‘Of course’ about it,” Zack said. “Lucy told me about her sister. You’re lucky you’re still in
    one piece.”
    “We had coffee in the diner.” Anthony stretched and put his hands behind his head. “She was no
    problem at all.”
    “You get the mean one, and she drinks coffee from your hand. I get the nice one, and she tries to beat
    the tar out of me. God, to have your luck.”
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    “It’s not luck. It’s charm,” Anthony said. “You don’t have any.”
    Zack gave up. “So what does Tina Savage know about Bradley Porter?”
    “That he’s a womanizing, weak-kneed, slime-covered scum who made her sister cry, so he should be
    shot, strangled, drawn, quartered, and castrated. I don’t think she likes him at all.”
    Zack scowled. “He made Lucy cry? I’m with her, then.”
    “But the problem is...”
    “He’s not our Bradley.” Zack nodded. “I know. Lucy explained that. I’d hoped for a while there was a
    chance he might be, but she says it’s no-go.”
    “I know,” Anthony said. “But I floated the possibility by the sister anyway, just to see what she’d say.”
    “And?”
    Anthony grinned. “Oh, she’s in favor of it. The thought of Bradley in jail for bigamy,