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foot on the brake. “I asked Kyle about his dog last night, and he told me he has three puppies at home. I’m going there now to pick one. By any chance would you like to come with me?”
    Leah nodded. “Sure.” As long as the whole town knew she was spending her Thursday evening driving around with the new boy in town, she might as well show up at Kyle and Jessica’s with him. After all, Seth had admitted he had asked Kyle about her. Why not give her friends something to speculate about? Especially since she was the one who was starting to speculate the most.

Chapter Four

    A fter Seth dropped off the delivery van at the PDS main terminal, he and Leah climbed into his rusted Subaru station wagon and headed for Kyle and Jessica’s Victorian mansion on the top of Madison Hill. Leah had lots of questions for Seth but couldn’t ask them because Seth kept talking. He told her about how he had found a place to live in Edgefield, twenty miles away, and had moved in last week. He was hired for his job with PDS after answering an ad in the paper, and the car had been sitting on a used car lot a mile from his apartment, just waiting for him.
    Leah still couldn’t understand why he had left Costa Rica for this. She was sure that if she ever got away from Glenbrooke, Oregon, she would stay wherever she was as long as she could. Especially if it was some place as exotically romantic as Costa Rica.
    “What did you do while you were in Costa Rica?”
    “I worked for Real Planet Adventures. Have you ever heard of them?”
    Leah shook her head.
    “They run tours for young people’s groups. We usually worked with high school students.”
    “So that explains your experience with snack lines.”
    “Exactly. We would take them through a three-week course: backpacking, kayaking, sometimes orienteering. We would give them a couple of matches and a bag of granola, and they would have three days to find their way out of the rain forest.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “Maybe it wasn’t exactly that severe, but you get the idea. The program was designed to develop leadership skills. The most interesting groups were the management teams sent to us by big corporations. We would have four days to build them into what the brochure called ‘a harmonious team’ before sending them back to the concrete jungle. Those groups were always the biggest challenge.”
    Leah could believe that. She could also believe that Seth had enough leadership skills to take on any group of students or corporate managers and handily shape them into a team.
    So why is he delivering packages in this insignificant corner of the planet?
    “Why did you leave?”
    Seth glanced at her and looked surprised. It took him a moment before he said, “I turned twenty-nine last month.”
    Leah wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, although it gave her a small sense of comfort to realize he was older than she was.
    The grand, two-story Victorian mansion came into full view, and Seth stopped the car to take it all in before continuing up the driveway. “Wow! They sure fixed that place up. Ionly saw it once, when I was in eighth grade. We came to Glenbrooke for my great-aunt’s funeral.”
    Leah hadn’t gone to that funeral, but she remembered when Franklin’s wife, Naomi, had passed away. She also remembered how creepy the old Madison Estate used to look when she was a child. It had been vacant since the ’50s, and when Kyle and Jessica bought it almost seven years ago, it had taken months of extensive renovations before they could move in.
    The gem of Madison Hill now glistened, creamy white and inviting. New life had been breathed into the old masterpiece of a house. A wide porch wrapped around the front, complete with a porch swing on the right and a set of wicker furniture on the left. Large, moss-lined baskets of Martha Washington geraniums hung at intervals across the porch’s overhang. A rounded turret ran up the side of the house and was topped by a