Hard Rustler. B.J. Daniels
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of what he’d been able to accomplish. Annabelle wasn’t the only one who’d done well over the years, he told himself with no small amount of defensiveness.
“Got a chip on your shoulder, do you?” he grumbled with a curse. He’d been thinking about her again. All the way to town he’d been trying to exorcize her from his thoughts with little luck. Before she’d left town, she’d made him feel as if he was never going to amount to anything. It still stuck in his craw.
He kept seeing her sitting in her car while he refueled it. She hadn’t even had the good grace to look at him—not to mention acknowledge that she’d once known him. Known him damned well, too.
Dawson gave that memory an angry shove away. When Annabelle Clementine had left town in a cloud of dust years ago, she’d said she was never looking back. Well, today proved that, didn’t it?
Worked up over his run-in with her, he told himself he just needed a hot shower and clean clothes. But as he caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror, he came to a startled stop and had to laugh. He wouldn’t even recognize himself after two weeks in a hunting camp in the Missouri Breaks.
He stared at his grizzled face and filthy, camp-worn clothes, seeing what she’d seen today. Even if she had recognized him, seeing him like that would only have confirmed what she’d thought of him all those years ago. He looked like a man who wasn’t going anywhere.
Stripping down, he turned on the shower and stepped in. The warm water felt like heaven as he began to suds up in a fury. He just wanted that woman out of his hair—and his head. But his thoughts went straight as an arrow to that image of her standing beside the river. Her long blond hair gleaming in the sunlight and that black outfit hugging every unforgettable curve he’d once known so well. Growling, he turned the water to cold.
Out of the shower and toweling himself off, he looked at his reflection in the mirror again. Was it really possible that she hadn’t known him? He reached for his razor, telling himself it didn’t matter. With a curse, he acknowledged that he’d been lying to himself for years about his feelings for her—ever since that day he’d rescued her from his tree house when she was five.
And he’d rescued her again today, he thought with a curse. He just never learned.
* * *
ANNABELLE TOOK THE key from her pocket and opened her grandmother’s front door, Mary Sue Linton at her elbow. Taking a deep breath, she stepped inside, bracing herself for more painful memories. Instead, shock stopped her cold just inside the door.
“You can’t sell the house like this,” Mary Sue said, stating the obvious next to her. “I thought you said your sisters cleaned everything out?”
“They said they took what they wanted.” She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Her grandmother hadn’t been a packrat, she’d been a hoarder. The house was crammed full of...stuff. She could barely see the floor. The rooms appeared to be filled with furniture, knickknacks, stacks of newspapers and magazines, bags of clothing and clutter. The house looked more like a crowded old antique shop than a home. Unfortunately it didn’t take a trained eye to see that all of this wasn’t even junkshop worthy.
“What am I supposed to do with all of this?” she demanded. “I can’t very well have a garage sale this time of year. If there was anything in all this mess worth selling.” It was late November. Christmas was only weeks away.
Mary Sue shrugged. “You could hire someone to help you pack it all up. Unfortunately, the local charity shop can’t take most of this. If there are things you want to save—”
“No.”
“I was going to say that you could put them into a storage shed.”
Annabelle was shaking her head, overwhelmed as they worked their way along the paths through the house.
“Otherwise, I could give you some names of people who might be able to help you at least haul it out to the dump.”
“Great. How long is that going to take? I need to get this house on the market right away.” She followed the narrow trails, going from room to room, Mary Sue on her heels, until she reached what had once been a bedroom but now looked more like a storage room where a bomb had gone off.
“This is no normal hoarding,” Mary Sue said. “It looks like someone ransacked this room.”
Annabelle agreed it did appear that someone had torn into all the boxes and dumped the contents on the floor. Her grandmother before she died? Her sisters when they’d come back for the funeral?
“Look at the window,” Mary Sue said in a hoarse whisper as she grabbed Annabelle’s arm, her fingernails digging into tender flesh.
“Ouch.” She jerked free and kicked aside some of the mess to move to the window, which was now half open, the screen torn. “The lock is broken.”
Behind her, Mary Sue let out a shudder. “Someone broke in.”
That was the way it appeared, although she couldn’t imagine in her wildest dreams why they would want to. She closed the window and turned to find Mary Sue hugging herself.
“Whoever broke in isn’t here anymore,” she tried to assure the Realtor. “Let’s look upstairs. Maybe it’s better.” Unfortunately, the upstairs wasn’t any better; both bedrooms were stacked full of clutter, including her grandmother’s old room.
Back downstairs, she took another look at the front downstairs bedroom. It wasn’t quite as full as the others. She checked the closet, found what must be her grandmother’s clothing and assumed that, as Frannie got older, she’d moved downstairs.
“Could this be anymore outdated?” Mary Sue called from the kitchen.
“I think I can clean out one of the downstairs bedrooms so at least I’ll have a place I can stay,” Annabelle said as she joined her in the kitchen. The front bedroom downstairs had been hers growing up.
Mary Sue didn’t seem to hear her. Instead, she was frowning at the clipboard she had in her hands.
“What?” Annabelle demanded. “Don’t tell me there is another problem.”
“No, not exactly. But it is strange. This is a layout of the house I got from the records department at the courthouse,” she said, indicating the sheet on her clipboard. “That wall shouldn’t be there.”
“What?”
“This shows an alcove.”
“An alcove? Maybe it’s back there behind all the junk and you just can’t see it.”
Mary Sue’s frown deepened. “Do you remember an alcove from when you were growing up here?”
She was supposed to remember an alcove? Seriously? “No. The plans for the house must be outdated.”
“Not according to the courthouse. Your grandmother bought this house when she was in her twenties so she had it for...”
“She was seventy-six when she died, so she had it for more than fifty years.” Annabelle hadn’t realized how long Frannie had lived in Whitehorse until she’d seen it in the obituary that one of her sisters had sent her. It hadn’t been out of kindness that Chloe had mailed it to her. Her older sister had never been that subtle. Both Chloe and Tessa Jane—TJ—had tried to make her feel guilty about their grandmother leaving her the house—let alone Annabelle missing the funeral.
“Frannie owned this house almost from the time it was built,” Mary Sue was saying. “So if anyone made the changes, it had to have been your grandmother. Why would she wall up an alcove? I wonder what’s behind it?”
“Okay, you’re giving me the creeps now,” Annabelle said. “Clearly, you have the plans for the wrong house. Aren’t there a bunch of houses along this street with similar floor plans?”
Mary Sue nodded, but didn’t look convinced. “I can