A Good Kind of Trouble (A Trouble in Twin Rivers Novel Book 1) by Ellie Ashe Read Free Book Online Page A

her lap. She absently stroked his ears and he sighed and closed his eyes. Getting a dog was the best decision she’d made recently. If she couldn’t meet a nice guy, at least she had Steve to keep her company.  
    Well, she had met a nice guy. But then she Maced him.  
    Her cell phone buzzed from the depths of her messenger bag. Pulling it out, she saw that the number was blocked.  
    “Hello?”
    “Ms. Fox?” a nervous male voice asked.  
    “Yes.”
    “Did you get the contracts I mailed you?”
    Lindsey’s heart leapt. She’d been receiving fat envelopes full of legal documents for several weeks, but they arrived with no explanation and no indication about who had been sending them. Maybe her anonymous pen-pal was ready to tell her why he was sending her the indecipherable contracts.  
    “Yes, I think so,” she said. “We need to meet. I have a lot of questions for you.”  
    There was a long pause. “I don’t know about that. I can’t let anyone know I’ve been talking to you.”  
    “You haven’t been talking to me. We can meet somewhere private.”
    As soon as the words fell out of her mouth, she wanted to take them back. Given her recent string of accidents and suspicious incidents, she should not be meeting strangers in secluded areas. Bad, bad idea.  
    “The library,” the man said. “Fourth floor, east side. Near the windows, there’s a sitting area. Meet me there in thirty minutes.”
    The call disconnected abruptly. Lindsey stared at the phone in her hand. At least the library was a public space, which would be safer than her suggestion. She shoved the documents back in the bag and stood, displacing the dog. Steve followed her to the door.  
    “Sorry, Steve,” she said, leaning down to scratch his ears. “You need to stay here.”  
    Lindsey pulled her hair into a ponytail and took a baseball cap out of her overnight bag. She wrote a note to Dave and Kathleen, leaving it on the kitchen counter where they’d find it. She grabbed Kathleen’s car keys from the hook by the garage door. She had always appreciated Kathleen’s open-closet policy with her friends, but this was the first time Lindsey had taken Kath up on her standing offer to borrow the sporty little BMW in the garage. Kathleen preferred to walk the half-mile to her boutique and as a result, the car was in pristine condition.  
    She tossed her messenger bag into the passenger seat and backed out of the garage, a frisson of excitement in her stomach. Finally, she was going to learn what her anonymous source was trying to tell her.  
    Forty-five minutes later, Lindsey’s excitement had turned to disappointment. She arrived early and found the seating area her source had suggested. The east side of the fourth floor was empty. In fact, she hadn’t seen anyone anywhere on the fourth floor. Lindsey heard the elevator ding softly and craned her neck to look down the row of European history and Ancient Mythology tomes, only to see a librarian pushing a cart full of books to be reshelved.  
    Another fifteen minutes passed with no sign of anyone who might be her source. She pulled a book off the shelf and tried to act like she was reading it, but kept looking at her watch.
    She had been stood up.  
    Lindsey stared out the window and watched the traffic below slowly increase as the afternoon rush hour got off to its inevitable start. The library sat across the street from City Hall and was only a few blocks from the courthouse where Lindsey had started her day.  
    She wasn’t even supposed to have been at the courthouse. Sam thought she was at City Hall, looking up the plans for the sewer plant retrofit. It was an assignment that could only be described as punitive. She was being punished for pushing too hard on the arena story. Too many complaints about the critical coverage and her editors got nervous. She’d started looking into the actual construction costs, and the likely contractor, ValCorp. ValCorp had a terrible