Anna Meets Her Match

“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 loving family.

“I should be going, too,” she said, clutching her leather-bound notebook as she rose. “If I’m not back in the shop soon, Dennis will think I’m goofing off.”

Hypatia stood, a study in dignity and grace. She smiled warmly at Anna Miranda. Reeves stepped away, taking up a spot in front of the plastered fireplace on the far wall where even now a modern gas jet sponsored a cheery, warming flame.

“I’ll see you out,” Hypatia said to Anna, and they moved toward the foyer. “Thank you for coming by. The college press is just too busy to accommodate us this year.”

“Well, their loss is our gain,” Anna replied cheerfully. “I should have some estimates for you soon. Say, have you thought about creating a logo design for the fund-raiser? I could come up with something unique for it.”

“What a lovely idea,” Hypatia said, nodding as they strolled side by side toward the front door. “I’ll discuss that with my sisters.”

“Great.”

Anna picked up her coat from the long, narrow, marble-topped table occupying one wall of the opulent foyer and shrugged into it. She glanced back toward the parlor and caught sight of Reeves. Frowning thoughtfully, he seemed very alone in that moment. Instantly Anna regretted that crack about women abandoning him.

As usual, she’d spoken without thinking, purely from pique because he’d so effectively ignored her to that point. It was as if they were teenagers again, so when he’d made that remark about the nanny walking out, Anna had put that together with what she’d heard about his ex simply hopping onto the back of a motorcycle and splitting town with her boyfriend. Now Anna wished she hadn’t thrown that up to him. Now that the harm was done.

Reeves leaned a shoulder against the mantle, watching as Hypatia waved farewell to Anna Miranda. He didn’t like what was happening here, didn’t trust Anna Miranda to give this matter the attention and importance that it deserved. In fact, he wouldn’t put it past her to turn this into some huge joke at his aunts’ expense. He still smarted inwardly from that opening salvo, but while she could make cracks about him all she wanted, he would not put up with her wielding her malicious sense of humor against his beloved aunties. He decided to stop in at the print shop and have a private chat with her.

“Lovely. Just lovely,” Odelia said from the settee, snagging his attention. “What color is it, do you think?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Antique gold. Yes, that’s it. Antique gold.” She made a swirling motion around her plump face with the lace hanky. “I wish I could wear mine that short.”

Reeves felt at a loss, but then he often did with Auntie Od. Adding Anna Miranda to the mix hadn’t helped. He walked toward the settee. “What about antique gold?”

The hanky swirled again. “Anna Miranda’s hair. Wouldn’t you say that perfectly describes the color of Anna Miranda’s hair?”

Antique gold. Yes, he supposed that did describe the color of Anna Miranda’s short, lustrous hair. It used to be lighter, he recalled, the brassy color of newly minted gold. She’d worn it cropped at chin length as a girl. Now it seemed darker, richer, as if burnished with age, and the style seemed at once wistful and sophisticated.