ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVENGE Read Online Free

at class, someone would find her. Someone else would discover her true identity, and the newspapers and gossip magazines would print the news in bold headlines. Mob King Takes Revenge on Daughter Who Betrayed Him or Mafia Princess Gets Hers.
    She waited, but no second knock came. No friendly voice called out in concern. She forced herself to breathe, ragged, metallic-tinged breaths that tasted of terror.
    When she could stand the tension no more, she tiptoed into the front room and peered out a gap in the blinds. The street in front of her house was empty. Dark. After another half hour of stillness, she decided no one was there. But maybe they were waiting across the street, waiting for her to open the door.
    She pulled on her coat and gloves, then took the loaded pistol from her bedside table and slipped it into the pocket of her coat. When she’d asked for the gun the Marshals had dismissed her, saying she had no need to be armed. She was merely an innocent schoolteacher. Patrick Thompson had assured her the U.S. Marshals Service would provide all the protection she needed. She’d argued with him to no avail.
    But three days after her arrival here she’d received a package in the mail. The handgun, ammunition and an unsigned note. I hope you never need this , the note read. But just in case...
    One hand on the pistol, she slipped out the back door. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees with the setting sun. The air was brittle with cold, the ground crisp beneath her feet. Staying close to the side of the house, she moved toward the street. She took a step, then waited, listening. She repeated this process all the way down the side of the house, so that twenty minutes passed before she reached the corner. She craned her head around to look toward her front door.
    The small porch was empty, the light shining down on the doormat and a rectangle of white that lay on the mat.

Chapter Three
    Anne studied the rectangle of white that gleamed on the doormat. It looked like an envelope, and a simple envelope shouldn’t be so ominous. But this one was out of place. The mail carrier delivered letters through the slot in the door. Other people who had messages for her telephoned, or contacted her at school. Did this envelope contain an explosive to injure her, or a poison?
    Neither of those things were her father’s style. He believed in personal retribution—not necessarily from him, but from his goons. His representatives, he called them. She remembered overhearing him on the phone with a contractor he suspected of double-crossing him. His words had been so calm, in sharp contrast to the menace in his voice. “I’m sending a couple of my representatives over to discuss this with you.”
    When the police found the man, he was floating in the sound, his face gone. Cut off, she’d heard later, while he was still alive.
    Shivering with cold and fear, she turned and raced back around the side of the house and through the back door. She ran to the front, opened the door just wide enough to snatch the envelope from the mat, then sat on the sofa, shaking.
    She turned the envelope over and read the childish printing. Miss Gardener was rendered in uneven printing. Below that, a more adult hand had penned Happy Valentine’s Day .
    Inside the envelope was a crooked heart cut from construction paper, decorated generously with silver glitter and stickers bearing images of cupids and more hearts. The crayoned signature was from one of her students, a wide-eyed little boy who clearly had a bit of a crush on his teacher.
    She stared at the words through a blur of tears, hating how the sordidness of her old life had reached out to taint this sweet, innocent gesture. If she ran away, all of that ugliness would follow her, to whatever new town she settled in.
    She had friends here in Rogers. A place in the community. She wasn’t ready to give that up, not until she absolutely had to.
    * * *
    “A RE YOU STAYING in town long, Mr.