The Secret Sin. Darlene Gardner
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Название: The Secret Sin
Автор: Darlene Gardner
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
isbn: 9781408950357
isbn:
“I’m not his real niece. I just call him Uncle Frank. He’s friends with my grandpa Joe.”
“Joe Thompson?”
“Joe Nowak.”
The tension left Annie’s coiled muscles. Her father often talked about his friend Joe. They’d known each other as boys in his native Poland. She seemed to recall that Joe lived in western Pennsylvania and had an adult daughter who’d died of breast cancer years ago. Her name had been…Helene. She searched her memory, certain her father had never mentioned Helene having children, but who else could this girl be? “Are you Helene’s daughter?”
“Yes,” the girl said. “So can I talk to Uncle Frank?”
“He’s out of town,” Annie said.
“You’re kidding me?” She sounded distressed. “Now what am I going to do? He said I could come visit him anytime.”
Visit him?
In the ensuing silence, Annie heard distant voices and what sounded like a train whistle. She got an uneasy feeling that Lindsey Thompson wasn’t phoning from home.
“Where are you?” Annie asked.
“In Paoli.” The town was on the westernmost edges of the Philadelphia suburbs, almost a ninety-minute drive from Indigo Springs. “At the train station.”
“Alone?” Annie asked.
“Yes.” The tone of her voice spiked the way a very young child’s might. She no longer sounded as poised and self-assured as she had a few moments ago.
“How old are you?” Annie asked, her stomach clenching in preparation for the answer.
“Fifteen.”
Damn. That was way too young to be alone at a train station in a strange city, even if Paoli wasn’t exactly an urban metropolis. “Can you get on a train and go back home?”
“I don’t know,” Lindsey said. “Probably not. I’m kind of short on cash.”
“You need to phone your parents.”
“No! That’s a terrible idea.” She sounded on the verge of panic. “Oh, God. What am I going to do?”
Annie’s mind whirled until she came to a sudden, inevitable decision. “Here’s what you’re going to do. Go inside the train station, find a bench, sit down and don’t move.”
“Why?”
Annie glanced at the kitchen wall clock, which showed it was ten minutes until her white-water trip was due to leave. Ten minutes in which she needed to find someone to take over for her. Because, really, what choice did she have?
Lindsey Thompson was only fifteen years old.
“I’m on my way.”
T HE WOODEN BENCHES inside the Paoli train station were empty except for a young woman reading a paperback novel and wearing a V-neck wrap top in a bright, eye-catching pink.
Annie did a complete three-sixty, turning slowly to visually cover every inch of a station that was doing brisk business for a Friday afternoon.
Commuters who’d taken the early train home from Philadelphia walked quickly through the corridor, getting a head start on their weekends. Customers sipped from cardboard cups in the coffee shop. Soon-to-be travelers stood at ticket windows or navigated the automated machines. Not a single person looked like a marooned fifteen-year-old.
So where was Lindsey Thompson?
Annie’s heart thudded harder than mallets pounding a drum.
She’d phoned the train station after she’d hung up with Lindsey, and asked the employee who answered to keep an eye on the girl but there was no guarantee that he had.
Her gaze fell once more on the young woman engrossed in her book, part of her face obscured by long, silky honey-brown hair. Annie marched toward her.
“Excuse me.” Annie spoke loudly enough to pull the woman out of her fictional world. “Have you seen a teenage girl?”
The woman lifted her head, brushing her hair back to gaze at Annie out of sky-blue eyes as lovely as the rest of her face. She had been blessed with nearly perfect bone structure: high cheekbones, a narrow, well-shaped nose, a delicate chin and a full mouth.
“Are you Annie Sublinski?” the young woman asked.
The voice matched the one on the phone. Annie looked closer and realized that beneath the makeup was a girl younger than she’d first thought.
Much younger.
“I’m Annie.” She couldn’t contain her surprise. “Are you Lindsey?”
“Yep.” The girl smiled at her, revealing enviable white teeth. “Thanks for coming. I’ve been waiting here, just like you told me to.”
She marked her place with a bookmark and closed the paperback with a soft thump. Annie recognized the name on the book cover. The author wrote romantic stories about good-hearted teenage vampires, wildly popular among young girls.
Even though Lindsey Thompson didn’t look her age, a young girl was exactly what she was.
Lindsey stuffed the book in an expensive-looking oversize bag that matched her top before getting to her feet. She wore metallic pink ballerina flats with her skinny jeans, but still topped Annie by a few inches. She was also model-thin.
“What’s that on your face?” Lindsey asked, touching her own unblemished cheek.
The purplish mark on Annie’s left cheek was about the size of a silver dollar but irregularly shaped. Because of the stares of strangers, Annie never quite managed to forget its existence. Most people she was meeting for the first time didn’t mention it, though. She fought against taking offense.
“A port-wine stain,” Annie said. “I was born with it.”
“Why do you still have it?” Lindsey’s stare grew more intense. “Can’t you get rid of it?”
Enough, Annie decided, was enough.
“Let’s see about getting you on a return train,” she said. “Don’t worry about being short on cash. I’ll pay for the ticket.”
“But I don’t want to go back to Pittsburgh.” In a flash of her mascara-coated eyelashes, Lindsey went from a girl who seemed on the verge of womanhood to a whining teen. “I want to go to Indigo Springs.”
That answered one of Annie’s questions. Lindsey Thompson was from Pittsburgh. Annie steeled herself against the girl’s pout.
“Sorry, but I’m not set up for visitors.” Running her father’s business was a full-time job. Besides, Annie didn’t know anything about taking care of a kid. At nearly thirty, she’d never even СКАЧАТЬ