Read Online His One and Only by Theodora Taylor - Free Book Online Page A

concentrating on?” she guessed.
    Mac didn’t answer, but the troubled look that flickered across his face was all the answer she needed.
    “I’m not sure how well you know Mr. Prescott, but if you can get him to at least consider some adjustment to blindness training, that would help him considerably.”
    This request made her heart sink. She knew Beau better than most, considering she had watched him grow from a boy to a man. But she couldn’t convince him to let her lead him across a room, much less take his blindness training seriously.
    “I’m sorry, but cooking and cleaning is kind of all I’m really equipped to do in this situation.”
    Mac gave her a “fair enough” nod. “In that case, do you usually make food this heavy?”
    Josie, who’d been surviving on soup for the last few months, shook her head. “Not for myself, no. I was just making the same stuff my mama made for Mr. Prescott when he was playing high school football.”
    Mac made a note in his smartphone. “Tomorrow, I’ll bring a cookbook for you. If he’s serious about staying in fighting shape, we need more protein and less carbs and gravy.”
    “Okay, sorry about that,” Josie said. “I’ll just get these plates out of your way.”
    But Mac grinned and said, “No, leave it.” He forked off a piece of biscuit, circled it in the gravy, and popped it into his mouth. “Now that’s what I’m talking about! My wife’s blind, too, so I do most of the cooking for us. That means I haven’t had biscuits and gravy this good in a month of Sundays—they require a woman’s touch, you know.”
    He stated this with such authority that Josie decided not to correct him. Besides, it was a pleasure to see a man about the same age Loretta would have been had cancer not taken her too soon, enjoying one of her mother’s recipes.
    After Mac left the kitchen, she settled on a plan for the rest of the day, deciding to use her mother’s old Friday routine of spot-cleaning every room in the house. However, when she went to clean Beau’s room while he was in another part of the house with Mac, it looked like a bear had gone through it.
    The delicate, decorative bottles on top of the drawer and several houseplants had been knocked over. There were also various baubles scattered about the floor, the victims of a blind man’s attempt to find something.
    What had he been looking for? she wondered. From the state of the room, she doubted he had found it.
    It only took her a few minutes of picking up before she solved the mystery. She found a silver phone with large buttons under the bed and its blinking screen informed her that its owner had missed several calls.
    Josie’s heart broke for Beau as she put the story together. The phone must have fallen (or maybe it had been thrown?) and slid under the bed. And then when it had started ringing, Beau hadn’t been able to figure out where it was well enough to actually reach it.
    Why hadn’t he used the intercom to ask for her help? And what was with him pledging to work out every day but refusing to do anything that helped him navigate his blindness? She held the phone to her chest. Obviously, Beau was in a major state of denial.
    Later on, she caught Mac by himself and pressed the phone into his hands.
    “What’s this?” Mac asked. Then his face lit with recognition. “Oh, you bought him one of those low-vision cell phones! Good idea.”
    Josie shook her head. “No, this is his phone. I found it in his room, but I need you to give it to him and tell him you found it this morning. Act like you’ve been carrying it around with you all day, but you just now realized you had it. ”
    “I don’t understand.”
    Neither did she. Why was she protecting Beau from his own asinine ego when she could have used the found phone to bring him down a peg, make him realize he needed her just as much as she needed this job and she wasn’t completely under his thumb? Maybe it was because at the end of the day, she