Read Crush on You for Free Online

need you! I don’t need anything.” Particularly from a man who had the looks of a movie star and the machismo of a motorcycle hellion. “I’m going back to my house.”
    She thought he might laugh at her vehemence, or at least make some final mocking remark, but instead he stared at her, his eyes unreadable. Then he sighed.
    “Before you leave, you should see this.” He reached into his back pocket and withdrew a white sheet of paper. “I found it nailed to a wall in the back room.”
    Alessandra snatched it from him, frowning. As she unfolded it, he trained the beam of his flashlight onto the page. Glancing down at the sheet, the first thing she noticed was that it was letterhead from Newton’s construction business. The second thing to strike her was that the nitwit couldn’t spell.
    Left for Orgun.
     
    “Oh, fudge !” She really let the semicurse fly this time as comprehension dawned.
    She’d been wrong. She needed something after all.
    Worse, she needed some one .

3

    Penn stared at his half brother Liam, sitting on the other end of the leather couch in the Bennett game room. He couldn’t believe that the same man who days ago had warned him off was now trying to hook him up—in a manner of speaking, anyway—with the nun.
    Yeah, that one. Alessandra Baci, the Nun of Napa. Penn still didn’t know why the hell she was called that, and he’d decided to make it a point not to find out. Hadn’t he learned his lesson about getting over-involved with strangers?
    So instead of responding to Liam’s request that Penn complete the work on the wedding cottage, he jabbed the buttons of the video game controller, focusing on the Halo 3 game projected on the big screen that took up nearly one wall. Obliterating one of the Brutes didn’t calm his uneasiness. “Should we be playing something more civilized, do you suppose?” he wondered, looking around him.
    The Bennett game room featured a teak-and-felt billiards table and in the opposite corner marble chess pieces sat ready for action. From his place on the long leather sofa, he could see dominoes resting in an inlaid box, a cribbage board that might have belonged to George Washington, and a backgammon set worthy of a European prince.
    Liam’s younger brother, Seth, spoke up from his sprawl in a nearby overstuffed chair. “You’re the one who wanted to battle the Covenant.”
    Which was strange, because he was much too cynical to act on the belief that he could eradicate evil from the world. He glanced at the younger man—Penn was sandwiched in age between Liam and Seth—and once again was startled by the resemblance he saw to himself. For a kid who’d grown up sleeping on the sofa in an apartment living room, making himself a dinner of Cheerios every night while his mom, blue-collar Debbie Penn, worked the bar at Mr. G’s, it was going to take more time to adjust. It was still hard to believe that when he’d been keeping company with late-night TV and the neighbor’s cat, four hundred miles away these near doppelgangers had been living in a Tuscan-styled villa with a game room, eight-car garage, and enough bedrooms for a football team, including its cheerleaders. Living with their father, Calvin Bennett, who apparently strode around town unconcerned by the secrets he’d left behind. Secrets who had grown up fatherless.
    And they called Penn a bastard.
    He thought again of that skinny boy who’d been himself, the kid scared shitless by things that went bump in the night, the kid just as scared his mom wouldn’t earn enough tips to cover the next month’s rent. Maybe it wasn’t such a surprise that there came the day when he’d been suckered in by a sob story.
    Never again, though. He’d wised up and remembered all the lessons he’d learned in his rocky childhood. Every pair of wide eyes wasn’t innocent. Not every trembling mouth told the truth.
    Liam closed down the game, the screen going dark. “Look, about the cottage. I know you’re here