Read The Manhattan Hunt Club for Free Online

tension that had only increased as she and Jeff had begun to fall in love.
“He’s not our kind of people,”
her father told her over and over again.
“People like us marry other people like us—not the son of the handyman.”
And she knew Keith’s attitude was exactly the reverse—that he thought of her as nothing more than a society girl who would demand a standard of luxury Jeff would never be able to provide. She and Jeff had long since stopped trying to deal with either of their fathers on the subject, and now was certainly not the time to resurrect it.
    She bent down and kissed Jeff. “I’d better go,” she said, her voice dropping. “Maybe they’ll let me come back later—”
    Jeff reached toward her arm, but didn’t quite touch it. “This isn’t a hospital.”
    Their eyes met, then Heather’s flicked toward Keith Converse for a moment. When he made no objection, she slowly sat back down. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I just thought my fath—”
    “It’s okay,” Jeff cut in. His gaze shifted to his father. “Look, Dad, none of this is anybody’s fault. It’s not Heather’s, it’s not her father’s, it’s not mine. It’s just something that happened. So let’s just try to get through it, okay?” Keith Converse’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing. “It could have been a lot worse—I could have gotten twenty years.”
    “And he can be out in five months with good behavior,” Sam Weisman added.
    “He shouldn’t be in there at all,” Keith insisted.
    Jeff stood up and went to his father, felt the older man stiffen as he put his arms around him. “I’ll be okay, Dad. I’ll get through it, and so will you. But right now, there isn’t anything you can do about it. You’re just going to have to deal with the way things are.”
    Keith’s arms came up and he embraced his son. “You be okay,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “Don’t let ’em get to you, all right?”
    “You bet, Dad.”
    Jeff held on to his father for another second or two, and then the correction officer led him away.

CHAPTER 3
    E ve Harris was sorely tempted to ignore the buzzing of her intercom. The day, as always, had proved to be a couple of hours too short, and even though she tried her best to keep to her schedule, she had, as always, failed. First, the City Council meeting had gone on an hour longer than it should have, which wouldn’t have been fatal, since she’d learned on the first day of her first term on the council that no meeting of that body would ever end on time. Too many egos wanted the last word.
    It was the meetings with constituents that always wound up completely destroying the schedule, because while Eve had a natural ability to screen out the more pompous of her fellow councilmen’s pontifications, she had no ability whatsoever either to end a meeting with one of New York City’s masses of the disenfranchised or to deafen herself to their complaints. In her first two terms, she’d earned a reputation for having not only the most accessible office on the council, but the best ears as well.
    When her constituents talked—no matter how inarticulately—Eve Harris listened. It had always been so, from her first days at P.S. 154 up on 126th Street in Harlem, where all the other kids seemed to bring their problems to her, right through graduation from Columbia University, where she’d finished magna cum laude with a double major in sociology and urban planning. Nothing had changed, even after she’d married Lincoln Cosgrove and moved into Linc’s huge duplex on Riverside Drive. She’d kept her job with the city, doing what she could to make life better for the poorest of its citizens, spending endless hours solving what problems she could, and just as many hours listening to problems for which there seemed to be no solutions.
    But Eve Harris—who had refused even to consider hyphenating her name to include Linc’s, let alone giving up her own—had always