Anna Meets Her Match - Arlene James Mills & Boon Love Inspired

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referred to a local “bee handler,” who had arrived outfitted head-to-toe in strange gear to tell him more than he’d ever wanted to know about the habits of the Texas honeybee. A quick inspection had revealed that thousands, perhaps millions, of the tiny creatures had infested his attic. It was going to take days to remove them all, and then his entire ceiling, which was saturated with honey, all of the insulation and much of the supporting structure of his roof would have to be torn out and replaced.

      “Oh, my!” Odelia exclaimed, gasping. “The bees must have frightened Gilli.”

      He spared her a smile before turning back to Hypatia, the undisputed authority at Chatam House. “Hardly. She wanted to know if she could keep them as pets.” Gilli had been begging for a pet since her birthday, but he didn’t have time to take care of a pet and so had staunchly refused.

      “What can we do?” Hypatia asked, as pragmatic as ever.

      “What you always do,” he told her, smiling. “Provide sanctuary. I’m afraid we’re moving in on you.”

      “Well, of course, you are,” she said with a satisfied smile.

      “It could be weeks,” he warned, “months, even.”

      She waved that away with one elegant motion of her hand. She knew as well as he did that checking into a hotel with a three-year-old as rambunctious as Gilli would have been sure disaster, but he’d have chosen that option before moving in with his father, second stepmother and their daughter, his baby sister, who would soon turn four.

      “There is another problem,” he went on. “Nanny quit. She’d been complaining that Gilli was too much for her.” Actually, she’d been complaining that he did not spend enough time with Gilli, but he was a single father with a demanding job. Besides, he paid a generous salary. “I guess the bees were the final straw. She just walked out.”

      “That seems to be a habit where you’re concerned,” drawled an unexpected voice. “Women walking out.”

      Reeves whirled to find a familiar figure in slim jeans and a brown turtleneck sweater slouching in the chair opposite Hypatia. A piquant face topped with a wispy fringe of medium gold bangs beamed a cheeky grin at him. His spirits dropped like a stone in a well, even as a new realization shook him. This was not the Anna Miranda of old. This Anna Miranda was a startlingly attractive version, as attractive in her way as Marissa was in hers. Oh, no, this was not the same old brat. This was worse. Much worse.

      “Hello, Stick,” Anna Miranda said. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

      “I’m so sorry, dear,” Hypatia cooed. “We forgot our manners in all the excitement. Reeves, you know Anna Miranda.”

      Reeves frowned as if he’d just discovered the keys to his beloved first car glued to his locker door. Again. Anna smiled, remembering how she’d punished him for refusing her a ride in that car. Foolishly, she’d pined for his attention from the day that she’d first met him right here in this house soon after his parents had divorced. Even at ten, he’d had no use for an unhappy rebellious girl, especially one four years younger, and she had punished him for it, all the way through her freshman and his senior year in high school. While she’d agonized through her unrequited crush, he had pierced her hardened heart with his disdain. High school hadn’t been the same after he’d graduated. Despite his coolness, she had felt oddly abandoned.

      In the twelve or thirteen years since, she had caught numerous glimpses of Reeves Leland around town. Buffalo Creek simply wasn’t a big enough town that they could miss each other forever. Besides, they were members of the same church, though she confined her participation to substituting occasionally in the children’s Sunday school. In all those years, they had never exchanged so much as a word, and suddenly, sitting here in his aunts’ parlor, she hadn’t been able to bear it a moment longer.

      Reeves put on a thin smile, greeting her with a flat version of the name his much younger self had often chanted in a provoking, exasperated singsong. “Anna Miranda.”

      Irrational hurt flashed through her, and she did the first thing that came to mind. She stuck out her tongue. He shook his head.

      “Still the brat, I see.”

      The superior tone evoked an all too familiar urge in her. To counter it, she grinned and crossed her legs, wagging a booted foot. “Better that than a humorless stick-in-the-mud, if you ask me.”

      “Has anyone ever?” he retorted. “Asked your opinion, I mean.”

      His response stinging, she let her gaze drop away nonchalantly, but Reeves had always been able to read her to a certain extent.

      “Sorry,” he muttered.

      Before Anna had to say anything, Odelia chirped in with a reply to Reeves’s tacky question. “Why, yes, of course,” Odelia declared gaily, waving a lace hanky she’d produced from somewhere. “We were just asking Anna Miranda’s opinion on the announcements for the spring scholarship auction. Weren’t we, sisters?”

      “Invitations,” Hypatia corrected pointedly. “An announcement implies that we are compelling attendance rather than soliciting it.”

      Anna’s mouth quirked up at one corner. As if the Chatam triplets did not command Buffalo Creek society, such society as a city of thirty thousand residents could provide, anyway. With Dallas just forty-five miles to the north, Buffalo Creek’s once great cotton center had disappeared, reducing the city to little more than a bedroom community of the greater Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. Yet, the city retained enough of its unique culture to bear pride in it, and as a daughter of the area’s wealthiest family Hypatia Chatam, while personally one of the humblest individuals Anna had ever known, bore that community pride especially well.

      “This spring,” Hypatia said with a slight tilt of her head, “instead of holding the dinner and auction at the college, as in years past, we are opening the house instead.”

      This seemed no surprise to Reeves. “Ah.”

      Everyone knew that Buffalo Creek Bible College, or BCBC, was one of his aunts’ favorite charities. Every spring, they underwrote a dinner and silent auction to raise scholarship funds. This year the event was to acquire a somewhat higher tone, moving from the drafty library hall at BCBC to the Chatam House ballroom. In keeping with the intended elegance of the occasion, they had contacted the only privately owned print shop in town for help with the necessary printed paper goods. Anna just happened to work at the print shop. Given her grandmother’s friendship with the Chatam triplets, they had requested that Anna call upon them. Her boss Dennis had grudgingly allowed it.

      “Anna Miranda is helping us figure out what we need printed,” Mags explained. “You know, invitations, menus, advertisements…”

      “Oh, and bid sheets,” Hypatia said to Anna Miranda, one slender, manicured forefinger popping up.

      Anna Miranda sat forward, asking, “Have you thought of printed napkins and coasters? Those might add a nice touch.”

      “Hmm.” Hypatia tapped the cleft in her Chatam chin.

      Reeves looked at Anna Miranda. “What are you, a paper salesman, er, person?”

      She tried to fry him with her glare. “I am a graphic artist, for your information.”

      “Huh.” He said it as if he couldn’t believe she had an ounce of talent for anything.

      “We’ll go with linen napkins,” Hypatia decided, sending Reeves a quelling look.

      He bowed his head, a tiny muscle flexing in the hollow of his jaw.

      “Magnolia, remember to tell Hilda to speak to the caterer about the linens, will you, dear?” Hypatia went on.

      “If I don’t do it now I’ll just forget,” Magnolia complained, heaving herself up off the settee. She patted Reeves affectionately on the shoulder, reaching far up to do so, as she lumbered from the room. Suddenly Anna felt conspicuously out of place in the midst of this

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