Feeding the Fire Read Online Free Page A

through the house, closing curtains and securing windows as she went.
    Her house was a two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow. In theory. Unfortunately, she didn’t have enough time or money to make all of the rooms usable. The home had previously been owned by an elderly widower. He’d fallen and broken his hip, spending the next few years in a long-term-care facility in Ashville. When he passed on, his kids had fought over his estate for several years, and by the time the house went on the market, it had been vacant for almost a decade.
    One bedroom had a weak floor that needed to be reinforced and a window in such a poor state that the curtains moved even when it was shut. The other had an electrical problem, so none of the outlets or fixtures worked, and the wallpaper was peeling down in a mildewy mess. She was pretty certain that the drywall needed to be replaced in there, too.
    She would use the rooms for storage if she could, but neither was in any shape to put anything in them. With her luck, a heavy box would fall through the floor and she’d find a family of rabid raccoons in her crawl space. That meant that all the boxes of unpacked belongings and homeless furniture were stacked up in what should be the dining room.
    Pepper turned on the light in the kitchen. The saving grace of the house was that both the bathroom and kitchen were functional, although out of date. There was no dishwasher, no washer-dryer hookups, and the cabinetry and tile in both rooms hadn’t been fashionable since before Pepper was born, but they did what they were supposed to do. That was more than she could say about the rest of the place.
    When all was said and done, though, Pepper loved her house. It was her first home. A real wood-and-brick home. She had grown up in a trailer and then moved to an apartment when she got her job at Curls. It took several years to save up a down payment, but she finally had a little place to call her own.
    She’d saved a little over five thousand dollars to put toward improvements to the house. Her attempts at doing a little bit over time hadn’t gotten her very far. She did get the hardwood floors in the living room and dining room refinished and the walls painted in a couple of rooms before she moved in. Everything else had been bumped to the foot-long to-do list she had tacked to her refrigerator.
    Pepper eyeballed the list for a moment, then opened the door to pull out a drink. Her father’s health had taken precedent lately, but her vacation was coming. She was desperate to get at least one of the bedrooms functional so she could move out of the living room. Maybe then she could have people over and not be embarrassed.
    People like Ivy. They had become pretty close again while Ivy was in Rosewood to help with the tornado fund-raiser. Pepper would love to have her over for a visit, but it just wouldn’t happen the way the house looked now. She wouldn’t even let her brother in—there was no way she was going to let a rock star in her house, friend or not.
    Pepper turned to head back toward the livbedoset but stopped when she caught a blur of movement outside the kitchen window. She could barely make out the face of someone watching her. The sudden realization shot her heart up into her throat and she dropped her drink, sending soda spewing across the floor. She scrambled to pick up the can and drop it in the sink. By the time she got to the window to look outside again, there was nothing to see.
    Her backyard wasn’t fenced. Anyone could get up to that back window, then go in five different directions and disappear into someone else’s yard or the next street over.
    One window. She had one window without anything to cover it. She’d bought one of those ruffled valances to go over the top, but the rest of the window was wide-open. That was about to change. Pepper marched through the room and pulled a bath towel out of the linen closet. She returned to the kitchen and flung the towel over the window,