Read Online Barbie & The Beast by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom - Free Book Online Page A

from the person she was thinking of. What
     had it been, twenty minutes, tops, since they’d left the old part of town. With stopping at the mini-mart?
    “Aren’t you going to play it?” Angie padded in bare feet to the kitchen with their shopping bag and dumped the contents onto
     the green tile counter.
    “Not in the mood.” Barbie kicked off her own shoes.
    “You kidding?” Half astonished, Angie ripped open the bag then leaned across the counter waving an Oreo cookie between her
     inch-long, fire red fingernails. “You’re going to leave that red light blinking? What are you, insensitive?”
    Barbie gaped at her. “Insensitive? How do you come up with that?”
    “Poor thing’s trying to get your attention, doing what it was designed to do, and you’re going to make it wait?”
    Barbie snorted. “It’s a machine, Angie, not a butler.”
    “See? Insensitive.”
    “Am not.”
    “Are too.”
    “Fine. I’ll check the darned thing if it’ll make you happy.”
    Barbie suspended a finger over the playback button. Procrastinating, trying to quiet a heart that flopped around as if it
     needed a leash, she slowly pressed down.
    There was a brief space of nothing, then a voice she remembered as if it had been. . .well, only twenty minutes ago since
     she’d last heard it said softly, gently, “Thank you.”
    That’s it.
Thank you.
Just thank you. Yet those two words said it all.
    Angie, Oreo pressed between her lips, had one artfully shaped eyebrow raised when Barbie looked at her. “You holding back
     on the explanations?” she asked.
    Barbie shook her head, if a little unconvincingly, while trying not to frown. Rumor had it that if you frowned constantly,
     the wrinkles would be permanent. If such were the case, one more frown ought to do it.
    “I don’t know who that is,” she said. This was, after all, the truth. She
didn’t
know who he was. She didn’t know anything about him, really, not even his name.
    “With a voith like that, you’d want to know who he ith, I’m thinking,” Angie suggested without removing the Oreo from her
     mouth.
    “Must have been a wrong number,” Barbie said.
    The Oreo came out. “Play it again.”
    “No.”
    “Come on, Barb, play it again.”
    “Why?”
    “Whoever this is sounds sexy. I need some kind of kick after the night we’ve had.”
    Barbie didn’t need much more of a reminder of Angie’s experience. “Oh, all right.” Against her better judgement,her finger headed for the play button. She felt as though this were all a dream. Why had she left that card? Anyone could
     have picked it up. Anyone could have found it. Perverts galore.
    Of course, this wasn’t anyone. It was
him
. No mistake about that. Same dreamy voice—smooth, low-pitched, sensual—as if it always spoke from the vicinity of your neck.
    She hit play.
    “Thank you.”
    Barbie held her breath.
    Angie squealed, took a bite of her Oreo and said, “Play—”
    “No!”
    “Oh, you are such a party pooper, Barb. Wrong number or not, that’s a nice thing to come home to. You sure you don’t know
     who this guy is?”
    “Positive.”
    Barbie peered in the mirror over the sofa to see if her nose had grown longer. Nope. Not yet. But it was only a matter of
     time, if Angie chose to wear her down. Angie Ward could easily have chosen detective work as a career instead of hair. She
     handled an interrogation about as well as anyone Barbie had ever seen on Court TV.
    Still gazing in the mirror, Barbie patted her hair. Miraculously, it hung neatly to her collar, not too mussed by the carting,
     after all. She did seem a little pale, though. Was she conspicuously short of breath? What she needed was an Oreo, not thoughts
     about her caller/stalker/possible pervert.
    Making a mental note to purchase a security bolt for her front door first thing in the morning, Barbie sighed. Maybe she’d
     get a dead bolt the size of Texas. Two of them. With a voice like this guy’s, she’d need a good