Read Mr. Love: A Romantic Comedy for Free Online

that a trusted advisor has been embezzling funds from my private accounts.”
    There are murmurs of shock and he holds up his hands.
    “The man confessed what he has done and has chosen to hand himself over to the authorities. But the money is gone never to return.”
    He looks around the room, his handsome face unsmiling.
    “Friends, the simple reality is this : unless we are the recipient of a windfall—and I’m talking a truckload of cash here—the Foundation is going to have to close its doors.”
    He shrugs.
    “I’m interpreting this as a positive challenge. As an acid test of where the Foundation is and where it is meant to be. And I’ve had to remind myself that holding on to the Foundation is like holding my breath—I’ll suffocate. So, I’m going to let go and hand it over to the winds and see where they blow us. Thank you.”
    He walks out, leaving the room in shock.
    People start to whisper and chatter and there is talk of cake sales and fairs.
    Bitsy is too distraught to join in.
    She walks back to her car, devastated, as if the central pillar supporting her world has been pulled loose, leaving her in a freefall that has her panicked and terrified.

9
     
     
     
     
    When Gordon, crossing the East Devon square, finds himself patting his pockets for a pack of cigarettes, he realizes how nervous he is.
    He kicked the vile habit a decade ago.
    Passing a couple of sad stalls selling junk (trying for the Ye Olde Village market thing and not succeeding) he gets the pungent whiff of tobacco smoke and sees a pimply early-teenage girl with canary yellow hair selling used books, puffing as she bops to music on her iPod.
    Gordon has to restrain himself from bumming a cigarette from the delinquent.
    He takes a deep breath, trying to tamp down his twin terrors: that Jane Cooper will sneer at his novel and that his sentimental gesture of putting the picture of the old bridge on the cover of Ivy has led to his exposure and humiliation—a serious, literary novelist, reduced to writing women’s romance.
    Pushing these thoughts away, he does his best to stroll casually toward Grace’s Field to Fork.
    The eatery was known simply as Grace’s Diner when he was growing up in East Devon. Even dowdy Grace, with her beak of a nose and plow horse hocks has succumbed to cuteness in the expectation of the tourist boom that has never come to East Devon.
    Since his return a few months ago Gordon’s heard many explanations as to why the town hasn’t taken off like its neighbors: the road linking it to Route 7 is poorly maintained; the town is overshadowed by the just-too-nearby Brattleboro; there hasn’t been enough support from the various tourism associations.
    Oddly, the explanation that makes the most sense to him is his sister’s hocus pocus take on the situation: East Devon has bad feng shui , which she blames on a legacy of negative energy from a massacre in the town during the Revolution.
    He doesn’t buy the massacre thing but the town is depressing, with an all-pervasive atmosphere of gloom and failure.
    A good place to leave.
    Gordon, you are a harbinger of doom , he tells himself as he enters Grace’s, setting off a distorted electronic version of “Yankee Doodle” when he opens the door.
    Even though he’s a little early Jane Cooper already sits at a window table drinking coffee and eating a plate of Grace’s signature Red Flannel Hash with corn fritters and maple syrup.
    “Good morning,” Gordon says, sitting opposite the agent.
    “Morning.”
    “Did you sleep well?”
    “You weren’t kidding about the bedbugs.”
    “Commiserations,” he says, sounding like a pompous idiot.
    Grace appears with her notebook and Gordon asks for a coffee, too nervous to eat.
    Stilling his hands on the table top when he finds them fiddling with a menu, he leans forward and says, “So . . .”
    Jane Cooper sets down her cutlery and dabs at her mouth with a napkin.
    Her face, free of make-up, is delicately boned, and