Most Eligible Spy Read Online Free Page B

chickens from the coop and fed them. The dogs weren’t allowed in the fenced-off area that protected her chickens from foxes and coyotes. She shooed them off. Dylan had some booby traps set up for anything that might go after her poultry. The dogs knew the traps and had been trained to stay away, but she didn’t like them back here.
    “Go play.” She pushed them away, and they did run off.
    Soon they were barking by the shed. What on earth was wrong with them today? Maybe they sensed a storm coming. She glanced up at the sky, but the clear blue dome stretched from horizon to horizon without a blemish. Looked as if the relentless heat would be staying. Wildfires were more of a threat than a storm at this point.
    She collected the eggs into the empty bowl she’d brought the wheat in for the hens. Barely anything. The hens didn’t lay much in this kind of heat. She took the eggs into the house, then went back out to look in on her sizable vegetable garden. Weeds never took a break. She didn’t use pesticides or herbicides; all her fruits and vegetables were 100 percent organic, which got her top dollar at the local restaurants where she did weekly deliveries.
    Since it hadn’t rained in forever, watering came first. She decided to use some compost tea as well, so she headed to the shed. The dogs were still scratching at the door. She shooed them away, but when she stepped inside, they rushed past her, nearly pushing her over.
    They were growling and sniffing at everything.
    “What’s up with you today?”
    But then she caught it, too. Something was off. Okay, a lot of things were off, she realized suddenly, noticing that her buckets had been pushed around. A couple of the floorboards were damaged.
    “All right. What got in this time?” She let the dogs investigate, stepping aside and leaving the door clear in case a wild animal was hiding in some corner and was about to make a dash for freedom.
    Despite her best efforts and the dogs, wild critters had a way of getting into her garden and outbuildings from time to time. On the rare occasion, they’d done pretty spectacular damage in the past. Which didn’t seem to be the case here. Unless...
    Her gaze caught on the top of a large antique feed box in the corner, the lid askew.
    “Oh, God, not the corn.”
    She kept her organic corn seeds in that box. She saved those seeds carefully year after year, since they were hard to come by. She always made sure the lid was closed tight so the occasional mouse couldn’t get in. That corn was one of her most prized possessions. If something ate that...
    She hurried closer, even as she thought, A wild animal couldn’t have opened the lid. But she didn’t relax when she found the corn still in place. The lid had definitely been moved. The short hairs stood up at the back of her neck. A wild animal couldn’t lift the lid like that, she thought again.
    A wild animal couldn’t have gotten in here in the first place. The door hadn’t been locked, but she did keep it barred. She turned in a slow circle, searching for holes in the floor and wall, the roof. She saw no hole that could have been an entry.
    She squatted to examine the scratched floorboards, patting the dogs when they immediately came to lick her face. “I don’t like the look of this.”
    The scratch marks were short and perfectly straight, not like what an animal would make.
    “Crowbar,” she muttered, and Skipper gave a sharp bark, as if agreeing.
    “Oh, yeah? Where were you when this was happening?”
    But she knew the answer. The dogs had been out here, barking. She’d heard them in the night. And she’d ignored them, thinking nothing of it. They had plenty of wildlife around; the dogs were always barking at something or other.
    She stood and grabbed a rusty old screwdriver from the windowsill, then pried one of the floorboards up, then another and another, until she had a gap wide enough for a good look. Nothing under there but a foot-deep gap to the