The calamity Janes Read Online Free

kill you, I will.”
    She glanced across the table to see tears in her mother’s eyes. “Mom? What’s wrong?”
    “I’m just so happy to have all of you around this table again, squabbling the way you used to. You, too, Lauren. I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed having my whole family under one roof.”
    Guilt spread through Emma. “I’ll get home more often, Mom. I promise.”
    “You say that now, but once you’re back in Denver, you’ll be deluged with clients, and the next thing you know another two years will have slipped by.”
    “I won’t let that happen,” Emma vowed.
    But, of course, it would. She was powerless to stop it. Her career defined her. Being the best and brightest in her class had challenged her to become the best and brightest in the firm. She wanted to be the first lawyer people thought of when there was a high-profile case in Denver. She’d failed at marriage. She was a neglectful, if loving, mom and daughter. But she would be somebody when it came to her profession. Men made sacrifices for their careers all the time, and no one thought any less of them. Why should it be different for a woman? And at least she was setting an example for Caitlyn that a woman could achieve whatever she wanted to in a man’s world.
    But at what cost? some would ask. Emma even asked herself that from time to time in the dark of night. So far, though, she hadn’t come up with a satisfactory answer. She wondered if she ever would.

Chapter 2
    F ord hadn’t intended to go anywhere near the Winding River High School class reunion. With no other reporter on staff, he’d assigned Teddy Taylor to cover it and given him a camera to take along. Teddy had been ecstatic.
    “Be sure you get a few shots of Lauren Winters,” he reminded the teenager. “Everyone’s going to want to see the big celebrity deigning to mingle with the small-town folks.”
    Ford’s sarcasm was unmistakable, even to Teddy. The boy had frowned. “I don’t think Lauren’s like that. Uncle Ryan says she’s great. She was the smartest kid in the class. He says she was real serious back then. Nobody expected her to wind up an actress.”
    “Whatever,” Ford said, dismissing the ardent defense. “Just get lots of pictures. You probably know who’s important better than I do.”
    “I hope so. I got a list from Uncle Ryan. He knowseverybody. There’s a lady named Gina who has one of the hottest restaurants in New York—”
    “Gina Petrillo?” Ford asked, startled. “Owns a place called Café Tuscany?”
    Teddy glanced at his notes, then nodded. “Yeah, that’s it. You’ve heard of it?”
    “I’ve eaten there,” he said. The editors of a New York paper had taken him there when they’d been courting him, trying to steal him away from an investigative team in Chicago. He’d been impressed by the food and the ambience, if not by the New Yorkers’ pitch. The owner’s name had stuck with him, though he’d only caught a glimpse of her as she rushed from the kitchen to greet favored guests. Discovering that Gina Petrillo came from Winding River was a surprise.
    “And there’s someone named Emma, who’s some kind of courtroom barracuda in Denver now,” Teddy had continued. “And Cole Davis, the big computer-programming genius—well, he wasn’t in the class, but his girlfriend was. Uncle Ryan says he’ll probably be there even though he’s a couple of years older. Everybody’s turning out because it’s such a big deal for the town that Lauren’s coming.”
    Ford had been even more startled by the complete litany of success stories. Even though he’d come from a small town himself, he’d always felt that the odds of success were stacked against him. To find so many high achievers coming out of one small class in Winding River—okay, two classes, if Cole Davis had been a year or two ahead of the others—was intriguing.
    The more he’d thought about it, the more convinced he’d become that there was a story