Mismatch Read Online Free PDF Page A

stumbling and falling on a snake, then picking herself up and running into some cooty old mountain man who would drag her off and hold her prisoner in his cabin. Wade dropped his fork on his plate as his stomach rolled over.
    He snarled at himself and his wild imagination. “Mr. Worst-Case Scenario. You’re as bad as she was with that ridiculous Ted Bundy business.”
    Even as he told himself he was being foolish, he could see the headline: Heiress Slain While Neighbor Sleeps.
    Absently he set his plate on the coffee table and stood up to pace, digging a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket. Tucker wasted no time helping himself to the rest of the burritos.
    If he couldn’t get Bronwynn to see reason, he was going to have to take matters into his own hands. He paused in his pacing to take a double swig of antacid. The woman clearly needed a keeper, and, for one night anyway, it would have to be he.
    Bronwynn sat back on the couch, swallowed up in the enormous double sleeping bag she’d bought at the hardware store in Shirley. Shirley, Vermont, she reflected as she nibbled at a toasted marshmallow, should have been the name of a B-movie actress in the thirties. Still, it fit the town. It was the kind of town that looked as if it should have a person’s name. The feel of the place was familiar, comfortably worn, like an old pair of slippers. If Shirley had been a person she would have been the kind of mom who wore housedresses and pink curlers and cooked tuna casserole on Fridays. Bronwynn was glad she had come.
    She wasn’t quite as glad about her decision to stay at the house. It had seemed like the thing to do earlier, when the prospect of checking into a hotel alone on her wedding night had been a distinctly distasteful option. Now that night had crashed down around her, cable TV at Motel 6 didn’t sound so bad.
    The thing was, she always had felt safe at Foxfire—and not just because she had been surrounded by people she loved there. There had been something about the house itself that was welcoming and comforting. She would probably have been feeling safe right now if not for Wade Grayson and his comments about creatures and big hairy things going bump in the night.
    It hadn’t occurred to her until after he’d left that she had explored only one room by the fading light of day, and had done so when she had hardly been in a rational state of mind. That left roughly fifteen rooms where anything could be hiding—or anyone. Deciding she had used up her daily supply of fortitude walking out on Ross, Bronwynn postponed the tour and set up camp in the parlor. She was too stubborn to give in to unseen fears and leave, but at the first sight of something big and hairy, she was going to be out the door and testing her car’s zero-to-sixty capabilities in a flash.
    It wasn’t so bad, really, she thought, surveying her array of shiny new camping equipment. She had her camp stove and a kerosene heater. A lantern on the claw-footed oak table created an oasis of warm amber light in the room. A broken windowpane was providing adequate ventilation, so she didn’t have to worry about being overcome by fumes.
    She wondered what had ever become of the caretaker of the place. Surely someone had been hired to look after it when her uncle had died, but he obviously hadn’t been doing his job for a few years. It made her sad to see the house in such a state of disrepair. It had been such a wonderful, happy house. Now it seemed old, lonely, and depressed.
    “We can be depressed together tonight, house,” she said, lifting a can of orange soda to her lips, soda she spilled down her front when she heard a car draw near the house. Immediately her heart and her active imagination went into overdrive.
    She was in a secluded, abandoned old house. People probably came out there all the time to do things they didn’t dare do anywhere else. The people in the car could be teenagers looking for a place to have a party, or lovers