Dealing with Annie Read online

  But nothing else. Damn, he was hard off if he needed noise. How was he going to make it an entire month? He needed his work, needed it like most needed…well, air. Work defined him.

  Work fulfilled him.

  It was going to be a long thirty days.

  After a few more steps, he was shaking and ready to sit down, but he kept going, partly because all the doctors had said he wouldn’t be able to walk on his own for weeks, but mostly because he was stubborn and figured the more he walked, the faster he’d heal.

  At the end of the long, long driveway he came to the two mailboxes he’d noticed on the way in. One was labeled Thomas McCall, McCall’s Farm. The other mailbox was blank but clearly belonged to the driveway across the road. Because it curved immediately to the right, he couldn’t see the house that went with it, and he was craning his neck when the mailbox started to ring.

  And ring.

  Thomas looked around for the Candid Camera crew but saw no one. Utterly incapable of ignoring his own curiosity, he opened the mailbox and found a cell phone. A bright-pink-with-white-polka-dots cell phone.

  In a mailbox. In Nowhere, U.S.A.

  Ringing.

  Okay, now he’d seen it all. And because he still couldn’t help himself, he reached in. Pay phone, the readout said above the phone number, though the area code excited him.

  New York.

  Somebody was calling somebody from his favorite place in the world. He punched the answer button and lifted the phone to his ear. Beyond terrible static and scratchy white noise signaling a bad connection, he could hear only every few words, and what sounded like, “have to…or…die.”

  Ian blinked. “Hello?”

  More static.

  “Hello?” he said again. “Can you repeat that?”

  But the connection had broken. He stared at the phone in his fingers. What the hell had that been? He couldn’t have even said if the caller had been a man or a woman.

  And whose phone was it? The owner of the house he couldn’t yet see? Adrenaline ran through him, making him forget his own troubles for a moment. He couldn’t just put the phone back and go on his merry way. It was beyond him.

  Have to…or…die?

  Someone had just been threatened. Someone was in trouble. Someone didn’t even know it.

  His leg was killing him. So would Thomas when he found out Ian wasn’t exactly “relaxing.” Nope, he was off finding trouble, but hey, trouble was his middle name, right?

  He started up the stranger’s driveway, careful to keep away from the few ice patches here and there. Naturally it had to be longer, steeper than Thomas’s, and he nearly killed himself several times, but finally he took the last turn and came upon another farmhouse.

  This one was Victorian-style, yellow with white trim and a full wraparound porch. The place was neat and tidy as could be, with no rickety wood or broken shutters in sight. Lace curtains decorated the windows and there were lights strung in the trees, remnants from Christmas. There was an air of elegance and sophistication about the place that his brother’s lacked.

  Oh, and as a bonus, there was no potbellied pig guarding the driveway.

  He knocked on the front door but no one answered. The afternoon had turned bitter cold, and he could see his breath puffing in front of his face in little white clouds. Huffing. From a walk up a driveway, no less. How pathetic was that?

  Smoke rose from around the back, so when no one answered his second knock, Ian limped around the side of the house.

  From his tour, he could see the windows and siding were far fancier than Thomas’s, the yard more of a luxury garden than a working farm. Behind the big house he found a guest house, again well tended. There was an antique wheelbarrow amid a flower bed crusted with snow, and a row of wooden barrels he imagined would be filled with flowers in spring.

  Here was where the smoke rose from a chimney, and gritting his teeth over the few short, shallow stairs, he knocked on the door.

  It whipped open.

  “Aunt Gerdie, I’m so sorry, I lost track of the time—oh!”

  Before him stood a small pixie of a woman with dark hair piled haphazardly on top of her head, though much of it had escaped in long, curly strands, sticking in damp tendrils to her neck and shoulders. She had the lightest blue eyes he’d ever seen, which were wide open on him at the moment, and full, bare lips shaped into a surprised little O.

  And oddly enough, mud coated her entire face as if she were some sort of tribal initiate in a rite of passage.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MAYBE, IAN THOUGHT, HE’D walked right into the Twilight Zone. Maybe the meds he’d taken in the hospital had lingered in his brain, messing him up permanently.

  In any case, he and the woman wearing mud were staring at each other when the pink polka-dot phone went off again, ringing into the late afternoon from its perch in his pocket. Pulling it out, he held it up.

  She gasped.

  “Yours?” he guessed.

  “Why…yes. But how did you…” Taking it, she looked down at the number of the incoming call and brought it up to her ear. “Jenny, hi.” She stared at Ian some more. “I’ve got to call you back—Yes, the sponge has to be on top. I realize it’s cheaper your way, but the mirror will break in shipping. One hundred thousand of them, and I sincerely doubt Saks will thank us, or pay us, if they’re all in bits.”

  She wore a line of concentration through the mud on her forehead as she spoke, and her baggy jeans overalls were covered by a mud-splattered apron that seemed to match her face. “I really do have to call you back,” she said. “No, tell them we’ll be switching to synthetic materials over my dead body. Yes. Dead body. You got it.”

  “Dead body,” Ian repeated slowly when she clicked off and lowered the phone. “Just figurative, I’m assuming.”

  She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head. “Who are you and why did you have my cell phone?”

  For a woman whose hair had rioted and was wearing a whole hell of a lot of mud, she had attitude, he’d give her that. On the whole, women didn’t usually look at Ian as if he was pond scum. Usually they at least smiled, even melted, if he smiled back.

  And if they knew what he did for a living, and the element of danger his world contained…well, he’d long ago discovered that only upped his value. “I was walking by your mailbox and it started ringing.”

  “My mailbox—” She broke off with another frown, then startled him by bursting into laughter.

  The mud on her cheeks split with an audible cracking sound, and with a cry, she brought her hands up to her face. “Ouch. Damn it, ouch!” On the fair sliver of skin between mask and hairline, she went beet red. “I can’t believe I forgot I was wearing a mask.”

  Now he laughed, the sound nearly startling him as he hadn’t laughed much since getting shot. “How could you forget such a thing?”

  “Trust me, it happens.” She looked at her phone. “When I went for my mail earlier, I must have in return deposited what I was holding in my hand—the cell phone.”

  “Ah.” He smiled. “You’re an inefficient multitasker.”

  “Apparently. Anyway…” She backed up a step, her hand on the door. “Thanks for returning the phone, but if you’ll excuse me…” She gestured to her face with what he imagined would be a wry expression without the mud. “I need to—”

  She was shutting the door on him. Unbelievable. “But I didn’t tell you about the call you missed.”

  Her smile was polite and distant. She’d already dismissed him in her mind. He knew because he recognized the distracted expression, as it could have come from his own arsenal. “I’m sure I missed more than one,” she said.

  “This one sounded like a threat.”

  She hesitated, and he put a hand on the door to hold it open. “The connection was bad, and I couldn’t identify whether the voice was male or female. Also, I couldn’t hear all of the words, but I did hear, ‘Have to…or…die.”’

  She stared at him for anoth