Because of Audrey. Mary Sullivan

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СКАЧАТЬ hadn’t struck to warrant the panic. All of that worry for nothing.

      Time to deal with the nutcase his foreman had called about.

      Silhouetted against the building, her posture dramatic, one arm chained to the door and the other spread across the glass as though one of the workers were threatening her with a sledgehammer, stood a full-figured woman who looked like she’d stepped out of an old movie set.

      It took him a moment to recognize her, to remember her from high school.

      Audrey Stone.

      That darkness, that suffocating panic, slammed into his chest with the force of a wrecking ball. He reached to loosen his tie so he could catch an ounce of oxygen, a fragment of air, anything to stop the dizziness and nausea.

      What the hell did the accident have to do with this woman? He hadn’t seen Audrey in years. He’d never had a relationship with her. They’d never dated, had never been friends.

      Audrey didn’t look a thing like Marnie, and in fact was Marnie’s antithesis. Marnie would never have done something this rash. This emotional. So why did Audrey bring up this crippling hangover from the accident?

      He undid the top button of his shirt and sucked in a deep breath.

      Better.

      Ramming his shaking hands into his pants pockets, he studied the woman chained to his greenhouse and forced himself to rise above his distress to view her objectively. Studying her would give him a minute to collect himself.

      He’d avoided her in high school. Looked like he wasn’t going to be able to now.

      Audrey had changed. She’d been strange back then, in Doc Martens, studded dog collars and spiky black hair, but she’d traded it all in for a more sophisticated weirdness. She wore a suit—a cropped jacket and skirt, and looked like something out of a sixties society photo, Mrs. S—Lunching with Friends.

      He stepped closer. Fire-engine-red lipstick that matched a ridiculous little hat perched on her head defined a sinfully full mouth. Black eyeliner framed violet eyes. A cap of black curls surrounded a pale face.

      Jackie O meets Betty Boop.

      Gray knew both characters well. Mom had a lifelong obsession with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, and Dad loved old cartoons, but come on, these days who dressed like an uppercrust fifties or sixties housewife out on the town?

      As had happened in high school, his feelings about Audrey couldn’t be clearly defined—sometimes anger, sometimes confusion, often panic. They flummoxed him and made him a little crazy. He was a good judge of character, but who was Audrey, really, and why did he feel so strange around her?

      And why did she bring up these memories of the accident?

      Why would who she was even matter to him? It wasn’t as if she was anything more than another of the town’s citizens, a satellite floating around the edges of his world.

      Calmer now, he stopped in front of her. If his stance was aggressive, so be it. He was in no mood to beat around the bush. “What are you doing?”

      “Protecting my property.” Her body might have Betty Boop’s curves, but her voice had none of her squeaky breathlessness. No-nonsense and down-to-earth, it had an intriguing depth.

      “You’ve got stuff in our greenhouses?” So this situation wasn’t Dad’s fault. Audrey was nothing more than a garden snake variety of trespasser. Harmless. “That’s squatting.”

      He turned to his foreman. “Cut off the handcuffs. Escort her from the property.”

      “This land belongs to me.” For a short woman, she had a big voice. Must be those well-endowed...lungs. “If any of you puts a hand on me, I’ll call the police and have you charged with both assault and trespassing. Get off my land now.”

      Gray stilled. “Your land? What are you talking about?” His foreman was right. She was a nutcase.

      With her free hand, she reached into a boxy white purse hanging from her handcuffed wrist and pulled out a paper, the nerves underneath her defiance betrayed by the wavering of her hand.

      He snatched it, read it...and stopped breathing. A photocopy of the sale of a swath of land to her, it looked legit.

      Impossible. The air around him became thin. Man, he was getting tired of being dizzy.

      Dad, you didn’t—

      You couldn’t have—

      He had.

      Dad had sold a piece of their land to Audrey Stone in...Gray checked the date...January, seven months ago, and not a corner plot, or a slice of land from one of the boundaries, but a chunk right in the blasted middle of the land Gray wanted to sell. Correction, needed to sell.

      His jaw hurt with the struggle to maintain control, to keep the panic at bay. “How did you get this out of my father? What did you do, threaten him or blackmail him with something?”

      “I asked him. Politely. He said yes. It’s legal.”

      “We’ll see about that.” He strode away and whipped out his cell. Dad’s lawyer answered on the second ring, none too pleased to be disturbed at breakfast. Too bad. This needed to be handled. Two minutes later, Gray had an appointment to see the man in his office this morning.

      He hung up and gestured to the construction crew. “Clear out. Remove the machinery.”

      If this sale was legitimate, they were trespassing.

      They grumbled but obeyed. Today’s debacle was going to cost Gray a bundle. If the sale of land to Audrey had been fraudulent in any way, Gray would sue for damages.

      He turned to the woman unlocking herself from the greenhouse door. If he were a violent man, he’d knock her ridiculous red hat from her head.

      “This isn’t over.”

      “Yes, Gray, it is.” She’d just won a battle and should have looked triumphant. Her solemn frown, though, didn’t reflect victory.

      The few times he’d run into her over the years, he’d gotten the feeling she knew something he didn’t. What? Her knowledge, and his ignorance of it, angered him, made him want to lash out. She was nothing more than a resident in the town he’d grown up in, so why this sense of...drama, of history?

      He jumped into his car to drive home, to find out from Dad what kind of whim or idiocy had led him to sell a valuable portion of their land, but not at all sure he’d get an answer that would satisfy him. Dad had always been too softhearted, and was growing worse with age.

      When Gray realized he was counting telephone poles, he pulled onto the shoulder, put the car into Park and reached into the glove compartment. Counting, for God’s sake. In the months since he’d returned to Accord, he’d started counting everything, from how many times he chewed his food before he swallowed to the number of steps between his bedroom and the bathroom. Wasn’t that a sign of OCD personality or something? He’d never done it in his life before. Moving back home had screwed him up. He loved Accord. He’d had a good, solid childhood, so why did returning give him the heebie-jeebies?

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