Beauty & the Beast Read Online Free PDF Page A

as if he’d been running. “Please answer your door.”
    “My door?” She looked at Vincent and Cat’s door. “Where are you?”
    “At your apartment. I need to see you.”
    Yes, he’s horny , she thought dismally. “Well, I’m not there,” she snapped. “I slept somewhere else.” Let him chew on that.
    “Did you change your clothes?”
    She frowned. “Huh?”
    “Please, see me. Please. Oh, my God.”
    He was frightened. She blurted, “I’m at my sister’s. I’m housesitting.”
    “Let me come over.”
    “I don’t think so.” She cut off the call. Looked at the phone. Almost called him back. What the heck?
    She poured another cup of coffee and picked up the phone again. He’d been a butthead last night, and now this… this weirdness. Was he in trouble? That was his problem. She wasn’t like Cat, throwing herself into oncoming traffic to save a slow pigeon. Wait, that wasn’t fair. Cat wasn’t like that. Heather’s ex-therapist had suggested that Cat devoted herself to saving others because she had been unable to save their mom.
    “And only three hundred and sixty-four more days until next Mother’s Day, Dr. Freud,” Heather said aloud.
    Sunlight glinted on the phone. Heather kept her distance from it as if it were a rattlesnake. She drummed her fingers on the breakfast bar, sipped more coffee, and opened up the pantry. Wow. You could tell when people were trying to do too much when their spices were all jumbled up like this. Anise was lying on its side. Marjoram’s cap wasn’t even on all the way.
    “Basil, cinnamon…” She stopped herself. Alphabetizing someone else’s spices was too OCD even for her.
    Laundry. If she knew her sister, Cat had made the bed with fresh sheets before they’d left for the airport. Heather checked the hamper and voila, there was the used set. Heather could wash them for her. She got out the laundry basket, the soap, and the fabric softener. It felt good to have something to do, a plan. Something other than wondering what was wrong with Ravi Suresh.
    She added her pajamas and took what she’d intended to be a quick shower before she used up the hot water to do the wash, but in the middle of conditioning her hair, she’d indulged in a pity-party—she and Matthew had planned a honeymoon in Italy, and here she was instead in the city, housesitting, with another Mr. Wrong messing with her heart—
    Was that the phone?
    Who cares?
    The shower sluiced away her tears. She toweled off and slid into jeans and a short-sleeved purple-and-black patterned top. Where on earth was she going to wear that mermaid dress again?
    “There will be other obstetrics charity dinners,” she promised herself aloud. She put on some makeup and twisted her hair into curls. Not that anybody was going to see her today. But still.
    He sounded frightened.
    Resolutely, she picked up the laundry basket and went back down the hall and into the kitchen. She picked up her phone. He had called back.
    Boom, boom, boom.
    That was the apartment’s front door. The sound so startled her that she nearly dropped the basket.
    Her heart thudding, she set down the laundry and peeked through the door’s little peephole. She was shocked to see Ravi looking back at her, his tan face distorted by the fisheye lens. Oh God, how had he found Cat’s apartment? Maybe he used a secret search protocol? Hijacked the GPS coordinates from her phone? JT would surely know…
    Boom, boom, boom.
    Heather jerked back from the door as he pounded on it with his fist. How did he get into the building’s street entrance? Had she been dating a stalker maniac?
    “Heather, please open the door,” he said, loud enough for all the neighbors on the floor to hear.
    A flush heated her cheeks. This was so embarrassing. Also, kind of flattering, but still.
    “ Please .”
    No way was she going to let him in but her concern about the racket he was making—and her curiosity—got the better of her. She peered through the peephole