Buy To Let Insurance Quotes

I want you, Elsie. All the time. I think of you. All. The. Fucking. Time. I’m distracted. I’m shit at work. And my first instinct, the very first time I saw you, was to run away. Because I knew that if we’d start doing this, we would never stop. And that’s exactly how it is. There is no universe in which I’m going to let you go. I want to be with you, on you, every second of every day. I think – I dream of crazy things. I want you to marry me tomorrow so you can go on my health insurance. I want to lock you in my room for a couple of weeks. I want to buy groceries based on what you like. I want to play it cool, like I’m attracted to you and not obsessed out of my mind, but that’s not where I’m at. Not at all. And I need you to keep us in check. I need you to pace us, because wherever it is that we’re going… I’m here. I’m already right here.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages -- all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers -- yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders -- everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!   Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.   Why shouldn't they?   They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are!   Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket -- that and nothing else.   Maybe

I want you, Elsie. All the time. I think of you. All. The. Fucking. Time. I’m distracted. I’m shit at work. And my first instinct, the very first time I saw you, was to run away. Because I knew that if we’d start doing this, we would never stop. And that’s exactly how it is. There is no universe in which I’m going to let you go. I want to be with you, on you, every second of every day. I think—I dream of crazy things. I want you to marry me tomorrow so you can go on my health insurance. I want to lock you in my room for a couple of weeks. I want to buy groceries based on what you like. I want to play it cool, like I’m attracted to you and not obsessed out of my mind, but that’s not where I’m at. Not at all. And I need you to keep us in check. I need you to pace us, because wherever it is that we’re going . . . I’m here. I’m already right here.

You'll teach me to drive your car if I let you get in the water?" "Uh, no. I'll teach you how to drive Galen's car if you let me get in the water. You're not touching my car without a license. A real one, not some shiny plastic thing Rachel made between afternoon talk shows." Even if Galen doesn't have insurance, he's got enough in his wallet to buy a new one. I, on the other hand, have just enough in saving to cover my deductible. Her eyes go round. "You'll let me drive his little red one? The combustible?" Why not? I nod. "Yep. The convertible. Deal?" She grabs my hand from the couch to pull us both up. Then she shakes it. "Deal! I'll go get the keys from Rachel.

I want you, Elsie. All the time. I think of you. All. The. Fucking. Time. I’m distracted. I’m shit at work. And my first instinct, the very first time I saw you, was to run away. Because I knew that if we’d start doing this, we would never stop. And that’s exactly how it is. There is no universe in which I’m going to let you go. I want to be with you, on you, every second of every day. I think—I dream of crazy things. I want you to marry me tomorrow so you can go on my health insurance. I want to lock you in my room for a couple of weeks. I want to buy groceries based on what you like. I want to pay it cool, like I’m attracted to you and not obsessed out of my mind, but that’s not where I’m at. Not at all. And I need you to keep us in check. I need you to pace us, because wherever it is that we’re going ... I’m here. I’m already right there.

I want you, Elsie. All the time. I think of you. All. The. Fucking. Time. I’m distracted. I’m shit at work. And my first instinct, the very first time I saw you, was to run away. Because I knew that if we’d start doing this, we would never stop. And that’s exactly how it is. There is no universe in which I’m going to let you go. I want to be with you, on you, every second of every day. I think – I dream of crazy things. I want you to marry me tomorrow so you can go on my health insurance. I want to lock you in my room for a couple of weeks. I want to buy groceries based on what you like. I want to play it cool, like I’m attracted to you and not obsessed out of my mind, but that’s not where I’m at. Not at all. And I need you to keep us in check. I need you to pace us, because wherever it is that we’re going… I’m here. I’m already right here

Okay, then. Honesty." He tilts my face backward, lips brushing against my ears. "I want you, Elsie. All the time. I think of you. All. The. Fucking. Time. I'm distracted. I'm shit at work. And my first instinct, the very first time I saw you, was to run away. Because I knew that if we'd start doing this, we would never stop. And that's exactly how it is. There is no universe in which I'm going to let you go. I want to be with you, on you, every second of every day. I think—I dream of crazy things. I want you to marry me tomorrow so you can go on my health insurance. I want to lock you in my room for a couple of weeks. I want to buy groceries based on what you like. I want to play it cool, like I'm attracted to you and not obsessed out of my mind, but that's not where I'm at. Not at all. And I need you to keep us in check. I need you to pace us, because wherever it is that we're going ... I'm here. I'm already right here.

Okay, then. Honesty.” He tilts my face backward, lips brushing against my ears. “I want you, Elsie. All the time. I think of you. All. The. Fucking. Time. I’m distracted. I’m shit at work. And my first instinct, the very first time I saw you, was to run away. Because I knew that if we’d start doing this, we would never stop. And that’s exactly how it is. There is no universe in which I’m going to let you go. I want to be with you, on you, every second of every day. I think—I dream of crazy things. I want you to marry me tomorrow so you can go on my health insurance. I want to lock you in my room for a couple of weeks. I want to buy groceries based on what you like. I want to play it cool, like I’m attracted to you and not obsessed out of my mind, but that’s not where I’m at. Not at all. And I need you to keep us in check. I need you to pace us, because wherever it is that we’re going . . . I’m here. I’m already right here.

What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.

Say Bank A is holding $10 million in A-minus-rated IBM bonds. It goes to Bank B and makes a deal: we’ll pay you $50,000 a year for five years and in exchange, you agree to pay us $10 million if IBM defaults sometime in the next five years—which of course it won’t, since IBM never defaults. If Bank B agrees, Bank A can then go to the Basel regulators and say, “Hey, we’re insured if something goes wrong with our IBM holdings. So don’t count that as money we have at risk. Let us lend a higher percentage of our capital, now that we’re insured.” It’s a win-win. Bank B makes, basically, a free $250,000. Bank A, meanwhile, gets to lend out another few million more dollars, since its $10 million in IBM bonds is no longer counted as at-risk capital. That was the way it was supposed to work. But two developments helped turn the CDS from a semisensible way for banks to insure themselves against risk into an explosive tool for turbo leverage across the planet. One is that no regulations were created to make sure that at least one of the two parties in the CDS had some kind of stake in the underlying bond. The so-called naked default swap allowed Bank A to take out insurance with Bank B not only on its own IBM holdings, but on, say, the soon-to-be-worthless America Online stock Bank X has in its portfolio. This is sort of like allowing people to buy life insurance on total strangers with late-stage lung cancer—total insanity. The other factor was that there were no regulations that dictated that Bank B had to have any money at all before it offered to sell this CDS insurance.

The delicate balance between these factors helps explain why, for instance, the typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect. It may not seem as though she should. The architect would appear to be more skilled (as the word is usually defined) and better educated (again, as usually defined). But little girls don’t grow up dreaming of becoming prostitutes, so the supply of potential prostitutes is relatively small. Their skills, while not necessarily “specialized,” are practiced in a very specialized context. The job is unpleasant and forbidding in at least two significant ways: the likelihood of violence and the lost opportunity of having a stable family life. As for demand? Let’s just say that an architect is more likely to hire a prostitute than vice versa.

What’s Your Foreign Policy? Investing in foreign stocks may not be mandatory for the intelligent investor, but it is definitely advisable. Why? Let’s try a little thought experiment. It’s the end of 1989, and you’re Japanese. Here are the facts: Over the past 10 years, your stock market has gained an annual average of 21.2%, well ahead of the 17.5% annual gains in the United States. Japanese companies are buying up everything in the United States from the Pebble Beach golf course to Rockefeller Center; meanwhile, American firms like Drexel Burnham Lambert, Financial Corp. of America, and Texaco are going bankrupt. The U.S. high-tech industry is dying. Japan’s is booming. In 1989, in the land of the rising sun, you can only conclude that investing outside of Japan is the dumbest idea since sushi vending machines. Naturally, you put all your money in Japanese stocks. The result? Over the next decade, you lose roughly two-thirds of your money. The lesson? It’s not that you should never invest in foreign markets like Japan; it’s that the Japanese should never have kept all their money at home. And neither should you. If you live in the United States, work in the United States, and get paid in U.S. dollars, you are already making a multilayered bet on the U.S. economy. To be prudent, you should put some of your investment portfolio elsewhere—simply because no one, anywhere, can ever know what the future will bring at home or abroad. Putting up to a third of your stock money in mutual funds that hold foreign stocks (including those in emerging markets) helps insure against the risk that our own backyard may not always be the best place in the world to invest.

Table of Contents Things About House For Rent Barrie Excitement About House For Rent Barrie The 15 Second Trick For House For Rent Barrie If you're looking to move into a home that's not going to be taken over by an estate agent, then you should seriously consider taking a house for rent to stay. There are many reasons why you might want to rent a home rather than staying in your own. Perhaps you've just bought a house and you're trying to find somewhere to stay before you move in. Maybe you're simply on holiday and need somewhere to stay until you're back at home. Things About House For Rent Barrie There are many things to think about when you are considering renting a house instead of buying one. Before you decide whether or not you want to rent a house, you will need to consider what you'll be doing in the house for the majority of your stay. Will you be living alone, with a friend or partner or as a couple? How long do you want to stay in the house to avoid being tempted to move away once your new home is complete? The main reason why you might want to rent a house instead of buying it is because you can save money in the process. You won't have to spend months paying rent, or put down a deposit, or arrange for an insurance policy or rental repayments to take care of everything in the event that you move out. With the economy currently, people don't like to have to spend money, but they also like to save money. If you live in Barrie, then this will be an ideal place to rent a house to live for most of the year. Although you may have to pay some sort of rent during the summer months, and during the colder months you may have to find some other way to pay the costs involved in staying there. Most people who rent a house often decide to move back into their own homes once the lease on the property is up. However, they often find that moving back in isn't as easy or comfortable as when they first moved into the home. So, they choose to take a house to rent to stay for a few months, until they're back in their own home. Renting a house is also a great way to get a place to work in London. Because London is so popular, there are many people working in various different places all across the city, and they are not all living in one place. A house to rent to stay in is a convenient option for many people, and it allows them to work from home. This way they will be able to continue to work, pay their bills and other expenses at home, but still have access to other activities throughout London. Excitement About House For Rent Barrie When you are thinking about taking a house to rent to live in, there are also a number of benefits for you. First, you won't have to put up with the expense of all the costs that go along with having a property to rent and buying a property. Even if you do want to buy a property you may be able to buy it cheaper. The other benefit to owning a home is that you'll be able to easily get a tax return back on the money you have saved by taking on a house to let in Barrie. Although not all landlords give out tax returns on the money you owe them, it is worth asking. The truth is that more people are choosing to rent out their homes to tenants, and this gives them an opportunity to help themselves to some of that money.

Here’s a little thought experiment: Let’s take three radically disruptive technologies and mash them together. Bitcoin. Uber. Self-driving cars. What happens when you mash the three together? The self-owning car. A car that pays for its Toyota lease, its insurance, and its gas, by giving people rides. A car that is not owned by a corporation. A car that is a corporation. A car that is a shareholder and owner of its own corporation. A car that exists as an autonomous financial entity with no human ownership. This has never happened before, and that’s just the beginning. Audience member gasps: "Oh shit!" I can guarantee you that one of the first distributed autonomous corporations is going to be a fully autonomous, artificial-intelligence-based ransomware virus that will go out and rob people online of their bitcoin, and use that money to evolve itself to pay for better programming, to buy hosting, and to spread. That’s one vision of the future. Another vision of the future is a digital autonomous charity. Imagine a system that takes donations from people, and using those donations it monitors social media like Twitter and Facebook. When a certain threshold is reached and it sees 100,000 people talking about a natural disaster, like a typhoon in the Philippines, it can marshal the donations and automatically fund aid in that area, without a board of directors, without shareholders. One hundred percent of donations goes directly to charitable causes. Anyone can see the rules by which that autonomous altruistic charity works. We are beginning to approach things we have never seen before. This is not just a currency. Now, let’s look at how the bitcoin community is addressing this incredible potential with their design choices and metaphors. Oh boy, it’s a mess.

Here’s how it works: let’s say your income is $150,000 per year, or $12,500 a month gross. At 36% DTI, your total monthly payments, including your proposed mortgage, taxes, homeowners insurance, and homeowners’ association (HOA) or condo fees can’t exceed $4,500.

Did you know that credit cards automatically give you amazing consumer protection? Here are a few examples you might not know about: ■ Automatic warranty doubling: Most cards extend the warranty on your purchases. So if you buy an iPhone and it breaks after Apple’s warranty expires, your credit card will still cover it up to an additional year. This is true for nearly every credit card for nearly every purchase, automatically. ■ Car rental insurance: If you rent a car, don’t let them sell you on getting the extra collision insurance. It’s completely worthless! You already have coverage through your existing car insurance, plus your credit card will usually back you up to $50,000. ■ Trip-cancellation insurance: If you book tickets for a vacation and then get sick and can’t travel, your airline will charge you hefty fees to rebook your ticket. Just call your credit card and ask for the trip-cancellation insurance to kick in, and they’ll cover those change fees—usually between $3,000 to $10,000 per trip. ■ Concierge services: When I couldn’t find LA Philharmonic tickets, I called my credit card and asked the concierge to try to find some. He called me back in two days with tickets. They charged me (a lot, actually), but he was able to get them when nobody else could.

I went to see the house. (...) The place was a squat—thirty-five heroin addicts were living there. The chaos was palpable. It smelled like dog shit, cat shit, piss. (...) One floor was literally burned—it was nothing but charred floorboards with a toilet sitting in the middle. This place looked terrible. “How much?” I asked. Forty thousand guilder, they told me. They clearly just wanted to dump this house. But if you bought it, you were also getting the heroin addicts who were squatting in it, and under Dutch law, it was all but impossible to get them out. For any normal human being to buy this place would be like throwing money out the window. So I said, “Okay, I’m interested.” I talked about it with my friends. “You’re nuts,” they said. “It’s not money you have—what the hell are you going to do?” ...A drug dealer [had] bought the place. But he didn’t pay the mortgage. And he didn’t pay and he didn’t pay, and finally he was in such financial trouble that he decided to burn the place down for the insurance. Except that the fire was stopped in time and only the one floor was damaged. And then the insurance investigator found that the drug dealer had done it intentionally, and the bank took the house away from him. And this was how it turned into a squat for heroin addicts. “But where is this guy?” I asked. “He’s still living in the house,” the neighbor told me. This house had two entrances. One went to the first floor and the other to the second. The door with the board across it was the entrance to the first floor, where I’d already been; the drug dealer was living on the second floor. So I went around and knocked on the door, and he answered. “I want to talk to you,” I said. He let me in. There was a table in the middle of the floor, covered with ecstasy, cocaine, hashish, all ready to go into bags. There was a pistol on the table. This guy was bloated—he looked like hell. And suddenly I poured my heart out to him. I told him everything... I said that this house was what I wanted—all I wanted—the only home I could afford with the little money I had. I was weeping. This guy was standing there with his mouth open. He stood there looking at me. Then he said, “Okay. But I have a condition.” “This is my deal. I’ll get everybody out; you’ll get your mortgage. But the moment you sign the contract and get the house, you’re going to sign a contract that I can stay on this floor for the rest of my life. That’s the deal. If you cross me...” He showed me the pistol. It was in a good neighborhood, where a comparable place would sell for forty to fifty times the price. And [now] it was empty—not a heroin addict in sight. I got a mortgage in less than a week. But now, since my bank knew the house was empty, Dutch law gave them the right to buy the house for themselves. So I went back to the drug dealer and said, “Can we get some addicts back into the place? Because it’s too good now.” “How many you want?” he asked. “About twelve,” I said. “No problem,” he said. He got twelve addicts back. I took curtains I found in a dumpster and put them on the windows. Then I scattered some more debris around the place. Now all I had to do was wait. My contract signing was two weeks away—it was the longest two weeks in my life. Finally the day came... and I walked into the bank. The atmosphere was very serious. One of the bankers looked at me and said, “I heard that the unwanted tenants have left the house.” I just looked at him very coolly and said, “Yeah, some left.” He cleared his throat and said, “Sign here.” I signed. “Congratulations,” the banker said. “You’re the owner of the house.” I looked at him and said, “You know what? Actually everybody left the house.” He looked back at me and said, “My dear girl, if this is true, you have just made the best real-estate deal I’ve heard of in my twenty-five-year career.

To answer this question with some kind of scientific certainty, what you’d really like to do is conduct an experiment. Pretend you could randomly select a group of states and command each of them to release 10,000 prisoners. At the same time, you could randomly select a different group of states and have them lock up 10,000 people, misdemeanor offenders perhaps, who otherwise wouldn’t have gone to prison. Now sit back, wait a few years, and measure the crime rate in those two sets of states. Voilà! You’ve just run the kind of randomized, controlled experiment that lets you determine the relationship between variables. Unfortunately, the governors of those random states probably wouldn’t take too kindly to your experiment. Nor would the people you sent to prison in some states or the next-door neighbors of the prisoners you freed in others. So your chances of actually conducting this experiment are zero. That’s why researchers often rely on what is known as a natural experiment, a set of conditions that mimic the experiment you want to conduct but, for whatever reason, cannot. In this instance, what you want is a radical change in the prison population of various states for reasons that have nothing to do with the amount of crime in those states.

Let the record reflect that the supposedly robust American Democracy was no match for the twin assault of nineteen Arabs with box cutters and an African-American man who made everyone buy health insurance.

The next time you go to the supermarket, look closely at a can of peas. Think about all the work that went into it—the farmers, truckers, and supermarket employees, the miners and metalworkers who made the can—and think how miraculous it is that you can buy this can for under a dollar. At every step of the way, competition among suppliers rewarded those whose innovations shaved a penny off the cost of getting that can to you. If God is commonly thought to have created the world and then arranged it for our benefit, then the free market (and its invisible hand) is a pretty good candidate for being a god. You can begin to understand why libertarians sometimes have a quasi-religious faith in free markets. Now let’s do the devil’s work and spread chaos throughout the marketplace. Suppose that one day all prices are removed from all products in the supermarket. All labels too, beyond a simple description of the contents, so you can’t compare products from different companies. You just take whatever you want, as much as you want, and you bring it up to the register. The checkout clerk scans in your food insurance card and helps you fill out your itemized claim. You pay a flat fee of $10 and go home with your groceries. A month later you get a bill informing you that your food insurance company will pay the supermarket for most of the remaining cost, but you’ll have to send in a check for an additional $15. It might sound like a bargain to get a cartload of food for $25, but you’re really paying your grocery bill every month when you fork over $2,000 for your food insurance premium. Under such a system, there is little incentive for anyone to find innovative ways to reduce the cost of food or increase its quality. The supermarkets get paid by the insurers, and the insurers get their premiums from you. The cost of food insurance begins to rise as supermarkets stock only the foods that net them the highest insurance payments, not the foods that deliver value to you. As the cost of food insurance rises, many people can no longer afford it. Liberals (motivated by Care) push for a new government program to buy food insurance for the poor and the elderly. But once the government becomes the major purchaser of food, then success in the supermarket and food insurance industries depends primarily on maximizing yield from government payouts. Before you know it, that can of peas costs the government $30, and all of us are paying 25 percent of our paychecks in taxes just to cover the cost of buying groceries for each other at hugely inflated costs. That, says Goldhill, is what we’ve done to ourselves. As long as consumers are spared from taking price into account—that is, as long as someone else is always paying for your choices—things will get worse.

Unfortunately, the Bull that gilded Renaissance New York did little for most Americans. Eighties Wall Street was about institutional money released by deregulation, mergers and acquisitions, and, most of all, the debt that made it all possible. As John Kenneth Galbraith points out, financial euphoria always starts with new ways to borrow money; this time it was triggered by the Savings & Loan crisis. Volcker’s rocketing interest rates had forced S&Ls to offer double digits to new depositors while only getting back single digits on the old thirty-year mortgages on their books. S&Ls were going under, and getting a mortgage was nearly impossible, so in March 1980, with the banking system and the housing market on the brink, Carter had signed a law to allow them to issue credit cards, invest in commercial real estate, and offer checking accounts in order to stay in business. Reagan then took it a step further with a change that encouraged S&Ls to sell their mortgages in search of higher returns, freeing up a $1 trillion that needed to be invested in something. Which takes us back to Salomon Brothers, where in 1978 one Lew Ranieri had repackaged an old investment product the government had clamped down on during the Depression: A group of home mortgages all backed by government insurance would be bundled together, then sliced into bonds, thus converting the debt some people owed on their homes into an asset for others. Ranieri had been a bit ahead of the curve then—the same high interest rates that killed the S&Ls also made his bonds unattractive—but now deregulation let Salomon buy up the S&Ls’ mortgages at a deep discount, bundle them into bonds, and sell them back to the S&Ls who believed they’d diversified into the bond market when in fact they’d just bought ground meat made out of their own steaks. In June 1983, Salomon Brothers and Freddie Mac together issued the first collateralized mortgage obligation bonds (CMOs), which bundled up debt and cut it into tranches based on the amount of risk: you could choose between ground chuck and ground sirloin. It would be years before technology would allow doing this on a huge scale, but the immediate impact was that all kinds of debt, not just mortgages, were bundled, cut into bonds, and sold: credit card debt, car loans, you name it. Between 1983 and 1988, some $60 billion of CMOs were sold; GM’s financing arm became more profitable than its cars. America began to make debt instead of things. The

Nick implied the job pays crap, so they can’t expect me to be some sort of art professor, right?” She paused when the bartender appeared with a bottle of beer and a slender fluted glass of champagne. The bubbles streaming upward through the pale liquid reminded him of Emma’s personality: round and fizzy, rising as high as they could go. He felt like shit. “Of course, I still need to find a place to live,” Emma said after taking a sip of her drink. “But as long as I have a place to work, I’m good. I can always buy a tent.” “You don’t have to buy a tent,” he said curtly. “Just joking.” She reached across the table and gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “But at least now I don’t have to worry about finding a place to live where I can also work.” He drank some beer straight from the bottle, relishing its sour flavor. Closing his eyes, he pictured that small, windowless room in the community center, its linoleum floor, its cinderblock walls, its sheer ugliness. She was thrilled because she thought it was her only option. But it wasn’t. “Look, Emma—if you want, I’ll take my house off the market. I don’t have to get rid of it. If you want to continue to live there…” She’d raised her champagne flute to her lips, but his words clearly startled her enough to make her lower the glass and gape at him. “But you came to Brogan’s Point to sell the house.” “It can wait.” “And I can’t keep teaching there. You said so yourself. There are those nasty zoning laws. And insurance issues, and liability. All that legal stuff.” She pressed her lips together, effectively smothering her radiant smile. “Taking the room at the community center means I’ll be able to teach there this summer in Nick’s program. So I’ll earn a little more money and maybe make contact with more people who might want to commission Dream Portraits.” She shook her head. “I can make it work.” “You could make it work in my house, too. Stay. Stay as long as you want. We’re not a landlord and tenant anymore. We’ve gone beyond that, haven’t we?” She stared at him, suddenly wary. “What do you mean?” He wasn’t sure what was troubling her. “Emma. We’ve made love. Several times.” Several spectacular times, he wanted to add. “You can stay on in the house. Forget about the rent. That’s the least I owe you.” Her expression went from wary to deflated, from deflated to suspicious. Her voice was cool, barely an inch from icy. “You don’t owe me anything, Max—unless you want to pay me for your portrait. I can’t calculate the cost until I figure out what the painting will…entail.” She seemed to trip over that last word, for some reason. “But as far as the house… I don’t need you to do that.” “Do what? Take it off sale? It isn’t even on sale yet.” “You don’t have to let me stay on in the house because we had sex. I didn’t make love with you because I wanted something in return. You don’t owe me anything.” She sighed again. The fireworks vanished from her eyes, extinguished