Read Online THE DEVILS DIME by Bailey Bristol - Free Book Online

nerve down across her collar bone. It wasn’t good. Jess Pepper had thrown his muscled physique into her like a bull on the loose. This was all his fault.
    She groaned, ashamed at her disregard for his quick thinking. If he hadn’t acted so swiftly, she might be on her way to a hospital right now, or dead with a broken neck.
    What else could she ruin today?
    In the last hour she’d managed to cause one man to put to rest any idea she’d ever had of having a father. And another man to reverse what she’d felt was a favorable first impression of her. How could he not be repulsed? Unless...
    Addie fingered the embroidered collar points that laid prettily at her throat and wished again her mother were here to talk things through with her. She’d certainly bungled things with her father. Had she bungled things beyond repair with Jess Pepper so that he would want nothing to do with her?
    Or perhaps, she blanched at the thought, she’d revealed the very thing that would make him want everything to do with her. And for all the wrong reasons. Lord have mercy. How did one explain that one was not that kind of a girl when one had already clearly demonstrated that one was?
    Addie groaned. What’s done is done. She dragged her violin case across the bed and retreated to the safety of her musical chores. At least here she knew all the answers. Why hadn’t she been content to stay in that world she knew so well? The one with her violin tucked under her chin and the music wrapping its safe buffer all around her.
    Addie opened the well-worn case and smiled at the new German strings she’d strung just the night before. They were the best in the world, the very first thing she’d bought with her payment from the hotel job.
    She switched the violin to her right hand, allowing her healthy left arm and shoulder to do the hard work of tuning the instrument rather than straining her injured side further. It was a shame she couldn’t play that way, and give her inflamed right shoulder a rest for a few days. Because it definitely was inflamed. The rolling burn that had taken up residence there told her so.
    Addie twisted the tuning pegs until the new strings were tuned several pitches too high, forcing them to stretch further than they needed to now so they’d cooperate sooner, hold an accurate pitch longer. Today she’d forced herself to stretch, too, perhaps tried to reach a little too high. To take a chance on the father she hoped to find. And it had gone sour.
    Addie rolled her shoulder, searching for a comfortable position. When there was none, she knew it was going to get worse before it got better. She was simply going to have to be more careful if she ever hoped to leave the bank and make her living with her violin.
    From now on, she’d stay with things she could be sure of, things that wouldn’t let her down. Or, for that matter, knock her down. She’d stay with things she understood.
    Judging from today’s experience, perhaps that ought not to include men.
    . . .
     
    Ford Magee smashed his palms into his forehead and kicked the book he’d been reading across the room. His heart thumped brutally in his chest as alarming screeches in his eardrum signaled the blood rushing to his head.
    She had been right there at his very door! His daughter. Addie. There was no doubt it was her.
    His mind kept whipping back to the moment he’d opened the door and thought he’d gone crazy, thought he was seeing a younger, taller Julia standing before him. But it wasn’t Julia. It was Julia’s daughter.
    His daughter.
    Addie.
    Ford’s hands shook as he drew a glass of water from the cool crock he kept on the dry sink. It was her. The same hair. Same accusing hazel-green eyes. The same stricken expression he’d seen when Julia told him she was going away. And taking Addie with her. To her aunt’s place outside Chicago. Where stalkers didn’t lie in wait for brown-haired females on the street.
    In his mind’s eye Ford saw that day, saw