Night After Night.... Kristin GabrielЧитать онлайн книгу.

      1

      MIA MALDONADO knew there was trouble the moment she heard “Blue Suede Shoes” blaring from the stereo speakers. Elvis always meant a crisis was brewing, so she proceeded warily through the front hall of the house, ready for anything.

      The living room, which doubled as an office for her interior design business, was empty. Another bad sign. She’d leased the Tudor-style home a year ago, hoping the affluent Philadelphia neighborhood would bring wealthy, decorating-impaired clients to her door.

      It had worked, too—until she’d started dating her design firm’s best carpenter. She had a bad habit of falling too hard and too fast for men like Ian Brock. Men who looked so good in a pair of tight jeans that she overlooked their other genes—the ones that made them lie, cheat…and steal her sanity.

      When she’d lived in Chicago, her heart had been broken so many times that she’d made a donation to the new cardiac wing at one of the city’s hospitals in the name of all her mistakes. Mistakes like Bryan, Andrew, Jeff, Wyatt and Justin. Then she’d moved from Chicago to Philadelphia, ready for a fresh start.

      But Ian was proof that she still hadn’t learned her lesson. He’d dumped Mia three months ago, taking her heart and most of her clients along with him. Now she was determined that he’d be the last romantic mistake she ever made. From here on, Mia was going to follow her head instead of her hormones.

      At least her best friend hadn’t abandoned her yet. She’d met Carleen Wimmer a year ago, when they were the only two people at a matinee screening of Gone With The Wind. By intermission, they’d been sharing a large tub of buttered popcorn and commiserating over the fact that men like Clark Gable didn’t exist anymore. By the end of the movie, Mia had offered Carleen a job as her office assistant.

      Soon after, they decided to pool their limited resources by having Carleen move into the house. Kindred spirits, they shared a love of old movies, Thai cuisine and expeditions to flea markets. Carleen’s gentle, cautious nature was the perfect complement to Mia’s leap-before-you-look approach to life.

      But Mia would lose her roommate next month when Carleen married Tobias Hamilton, a Philadelphia blue blood who could trace his family back to the Mayflower. He didn’t seem to care that his fiancée had grown up in a trailer park instead of on Park Avenue.

      Mia was happy for Carleen, even if Tobias was a little…bland. Maybe bland was good. Bland didn’t run off with the first teenage bimbo to come along. Bland didn’t break your heart. She was certainly in no position to criticize anyone else’s love life. Not when her own had so recently ended in disaster.

      She