One for the Money
A Stephanie Plum Novel
CHAPTER ONE THERE ARE SOME MEN who enter a woman's life and screw it up forever. Joseph Morelli did this to me -- not forever, but periodically.
Morelli and I were both born and raised in a blue-collar chunk of Trenton called the burg. Houses were attached and narrow. Yards were small. Cars were American. The people were mostly Italian descent, with enough Hungarians and Germans thrown into offset inbreeding. It was a good place to buy calzone or play the numbers. And. if you had to live in Trenton anyway, it was an okay place to raise a family.
When I was a kid I didn't ordinarily play with Joseph Morelli. He lived two blocks over and was two years older. "Stay away from those Morelli boys," my mother had warned me. "They're wild. I hear stories about the things they do to girls when they get them alone."
"What kind of things?" I'd eagerly asked.
"You don't want to know," my mother had answered. "Terrible things. Things that aren't nice."
From that point on, I viewed Joseph Morelli with a combination of terror and prurient curiosity that bordered ...
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