Read Online The Right Medicine by Ginny Baird - Free Book Online Page A

later that evening, she was surprised to find a note from Cecil taped to her computer.
    Great news, it said, finally got that check from Knopf...
    Knopf? Cecil had sold a book to Alfred A. Knopf? If he'd already gotten the advance money, it had to have been weeks ago.
    Diane and I...
    Diane? The cappuccino girl with the body piercings?
    Oh, God. Marie plopped down in her chair and tugged off her boots.
    She yanked off her glasses, polished them with a tissue, then set them back on her nose, remembering something. Cecil and the lithe twenty-two-year-old Diane huddled over a back issue of Publishers Weekly sharing some private joke.
    Yep. It was Diane, all right.
    Diane and I have moved to New York. Please try to understand and please don't call. I'll come back for my stuff in a few months if you'd like to box it up.
    Cecil.
     
     

     
     
    Chapter Three
     
    David held the big wedding planner in his hands and flipped through its spiral-bound pages.
    "You getting hitched?" Caroline asked, her voice weighted with skepticism.
    David spun in his chair to face his blond bombshell boss. Funny how he'd stopped noticing how good-looking she was the moment she'd started barking out orders. She was a tough businesswoman, but fair. And, not so incidentally, a contented wife and the mother of two children. Definitely off limits. Caroline chided him about settling down, in a tolerant big-sisterly way. Not that she was that much older, but her superior professional status brought out the mother hen in her. David suspected he was about to get pecked on.
    "Can't a man do a little leisure reading on his lunch hour?" David asked, with mock defensiveness.
    "Sure, read these," she said, dropping a stack of files on his desk.
    David leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on his desk, crossing his legs comfortably at the ankles.
    "You can work me like a slave driver eight hours a day, but these forty-five minutes," he said, clutching the thick planner to his chest, "are mine!"
    "All right, big boy," she said, laying a hand on her hip. "What's in there? Honeymoon lingerie, perhaps?" She made a move toward the book.
    "Not so fast," David said, holding her back with an extended hand.
    "It's not..." Caroline's slender shoulders sagged. "Tell me it's not your sister Debbie heading down the aisle yet again."
    "It's not Debbie," he said with a flawless grin.
    "Okay, David," Caroline said with a giant lunge in his direction, "give it here."
    She caught one end of the large book in her hand and tugged.
    "Hey!" he yelped, dropping his feet to the floor, as a sheaf of papers spilled forth. "Give that back!"
    "David, I swear, if there's something pornographic in—"
    Caroline yanked and the planner tumbled to the floor, pages fanning out in wild disarray.
    "What's this?" she asked, nabbing an unfolded brochure off the floor. "A Books & Bistro events calendar?"
    "Oh my God, David," she said, furiously fanning her face with the flyer. "This is worse than I thought! You're actually reading!"
     
    Marie crumpled up another tear-stained tissue and added it to the heap on the floor. In the three years since she'd been promoted to manager, she could count the times she'd called in sick on one hand. And today was one of them.
    Cecil and Diane? How could she have been so blind? And right under her nose!
    And what—if anything—did the mysterious heartthrob David Lake know about all this? A regular Don Juan, he'd said in reference to Cecil. Marie clutched her stomach, fearing she would throw up. How many? Just how many other women had there been, then? Five? Fifteen, twenty? Oh, God.
    Marie stood and rushed to the bathroom where she vomited violently.
    Thank God she wasn't pregnant, she thought, as her bare knees hit the cold tile floor. She rested her head in her hands over the porcelain john, recalling Cecil's recent suggestion that they make a baby.
    "Don't you think it'd be better if we got married first?" was all she had asked.
    He'd stormed out the