Read Online Open Season by Linda Howard - Free Book Online Page B

ready for work. For once, she hadn’t laid out her clothing the night before, and now she stood in front of the closet staring at the selection of boring skirts and blouses and dresses. She couldn’t bear wearing those, not one more time. She dithered until, for the first time in her life, she ran the very real risk of being late to work. Finally she grabbed a pair of black slacks and pulled them on. She had never before worn pants to work, but that was because of her own stodginess, not any rule by the town council. This was yet another break with her old way of life, and her heart hammered in a combination of fear and excitement. She didn’t have any stylish tops, of course, just her regular, boring white blouses, but she put one on and tucked the hem into the waistband of her slacks, then buckled the belt and slipped her feet into black loafers.
    She didn’t dare look in the mirror to check the result, just grabbed her purse and ran downstairs.
    Aunt Jo raised her eyebrows when she saw her, but didn’t say anything.
    “Well?” Daisy demanded, even more nervous under that silent regard.
    Evelyn came out of the kitchen and stared at her daughter. “Nice,” she finally said, nodding her head. “Different. And the pants show the shape of your butt.”
    Ohmigod;
now she wouldn’t be able to turn her back to anyone all day long. Aghast, she swiftly checked her watch. There was no time to go change clothes. “Why did you have to say that?” she moaned.
    Evelyn smiled. “It’s okay, honey. If I remember correctly,men are partial to butts. See if you can remember to priss when you walk.”
    “Priss,” Daisy repeated numbly, still unable to take in that her mother—her
mother!
—thought it was a good thing for her to show the shape of her butt.
    “You know. . . back and forth.” To demonstrate, her mother strolled across the room, her hips swaying in a gentle rhythm that drew attention to her own rear end. The movement was so astonishingly sexy that Daisy was shocked. Her
mother?
Her intellectual, unsophisticated mother?
    “But not too much,” Aunt Jo advised. “Or it’ll look like two pigs fighting to get out of a sack.”
    That was all she could take. With a mumbled excuse about being late for work, Daisy fled.
    She had barely got the key in the lock of the employees’ door when a white car drove up behind her and Chief Russo got out. He might not be at the top of her list of people she didn’t want to see that day, she thought in exasperation, but he was close. She tried to shift to the side so he couldn’t see her butt, not that he was looking anyway. He was scowling as he strode up to her. “You’re late.”
    Daisy checked her watch. It was twelve seconds to nine o’clock. “I’m right on time.”
    “You’re always about half an hour early. Today, you aren’t. Therefore you’re late.”
    “How do you know what time I get to work?” she asked, feeling flushed and harassed. Just once she was almost late, and that
would
be the one day someone was waiting for her arrive. Besides, he was standing too close, crowding her again in that annoying way of his, as if he were trying to intimidate her with his size. Maybe it was working, since she felt flushed andharassed. She tried to squeeze closer to the door.
    “The lights in the library are always on when I drive past.”
    Meaning she was always—well, almost always—at work before he was. She barely refrained from smirking and instead, with an effort, assumed her librarian’s expression and tone. “May I help you with something, Chief?”
    “Yeah,” he said in that brusque Yankee way. “I tried to get into the on-line library last night, but it wouldn’t open. You wrote down the wrong password or something.”
    Why was it always the woman’s fault? she wondered, mentally raising her eyes to heaven. “If the page won’t display, then you probably need to upgrade your browser.”
    He stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign