A Place to Call Home (Harlequin Heartwarming) Read Online Free Page B

voice he injected with a good measure of cheerfulness.
    “Look, Brandon, you gave it your best shot, that land-swapping idea. And there’s nothing wrong with hoping she’ll give up and go on somewhere else. But you’re not dreaming of any shenanigans, are you?”
    “Shenanigans?”
    “You know, revenge on Murphy. Stealing that land back. Something like that. If I can get my land back fair and square, that’s okay. It was my fault I didn’t keep that receipt. I should have known better. You pay in cash, you need to be double sure you keep the proof you paid. And yeah, Murphy and Melton took sore advantage of me. Melton is a lying dog, saying I didn’t pay that tax debt.” Uncle Jake slammed the refrigerator door shut. “But I’ll tell you like that doc told me when I had my heart attack over all this. You got to move on, or it will kill you. Toting a grudge will eat you alive.”
    Brandon said nothing. Let Uncle Jake think what he wanted. He didn’t want to admit to Uncle Jake he’d been thinking about how pretty Penelope was or how many lucky guys she had at her fingertips.
    No, Brandon wouldn’t be one of the guys on Penelope Langston’s list. She wasn’t the right sort of woman. Couldn’t be. Not when she was standing square in the middle of the road to what Brandon was after.
    * * *
    P ENELOPE JABBED the calculator’s keypad with the ground-down eraser on her pencil. She’d figured her money three times—and all three times it had agreed.
    She’d come up short.
    She clenched the pencil, unclenched it, then clenched it again. She glanced over at the single sheet of paper that had laid waste to her plans.
    I regret to inform you that we must cancel the commission we’d agreed upon and surrender to you the ten percent deposit already paid. I trust that this comes to you before you’ve ordered materials...
    What a day. First that crazy deputy calling Grandpa a thief, and now this. The writing hadn’t changed, not in the thirty seconds that had passed since Penelope had last read it.
    Fifty grand. Gone up in smoke.
    She’d been counting on that money. She’d emptied her checking and savings accounts to pay for the land and the house. Her grandmother had matched her dollar for dollar. An art investment, Grams had called it as she signed the check with a flourish. Penelope had borrowed more money for the studio and renovating the house. That money was spent, and Penelope had borrowed still more money for the studio...
    Her brain refused to process anything beyond how this could have happened. She’d played by the rules. She’d got an agreement. She’d done her financial homework.
    And yet here she was, caught on the tracks with a mortgage payment bearing down on her—and no way to pay it.
    Two months. She had two months before the first payment was due. Penelope said a silent prayer of thanks that she’d taken up the mortgage company’s offer for delayed payments.
    Theo wound around her legs and yowled for attention. She ignored him. Think. She had to think.
    If this company didn’t want her sculpture, somebody else would—she’d just have to get out there and sell it. And in the meantime, she’d have to come up with a way to survive without touching the borrowed money in her checking account.
    Penelope had survived before. She’d eaten mac and cheese from scratch-and-dent sales and taken on untold numbers of jobs to pay the rent—bartending, car washing, waitressing, even a short stint at a Cineplex, selling popcorn until the smell nauseated her.
    One thing she wouldn’t do: breathe a word to her parents. She’d learned the hard way that if they even suspected she was going through lean times, they’d be wiring money to her checking account or asking the landlord to check her fridge for food.
    She hated the way they’d held her failures over her head as a way to persuade her to join the family business.
    Real estate. Land, land, land. Buying, selling, leasing, commercial, residential,