Threaded for Trouble Read Online Free

amount of cleavage for an event in a thread art boutique on a Wednesday morning. Rumor had it that she was once again on the hunt for a man. But even before she’d sent her most recent husband packing, she’d dressed in clothes that neither fit nor flattered.
    She thrust a flyer into my hands. “This would be a good thing for you and your little friend to do,” she whispered. Mona always shook her head no, even when she was being, in her own way, encouraging. Little friend? I tilted my head in confusion. She flapped a hand toward Haylee, who was at least a head taller than Mona. “It is the citizenly duty of the Threadville shopkeepers to help out in this effort.”
    The page’s title was
Application to Volunteer with the Elderberry Bay Fire Department
. The subtitle was
Come Join Us—We Always Need New Firefighters
.
    Always? How alarming. What happened to the old ones?
    Suppressing a shudder, I told Mona, “I can’t join the volunteer fire department. Firefighting requires skill and strength. And knowledge that I don’t have.”
    “Nonsense,” Mona countered, shaking her head. “They’ll train you and your little friend.”
    “Haylee,” I corrected her.
    “You both must be strong from heaving bolts of fabric around.”
    Is that all she thought we did? “Are you joining?” I asked her.
    She gave me a smile like I was just too, too cute. “I’m not big and strapping like you two.”
    First Haylee was my “little friend,” and now she was big and strapping? No one had ever described either of us that way before. Both of us were tall and thin, and some people actually saw us as fragile, which wasn’t true, either. I suspected that Mona’s real reasons for refusing to become a volunteer firefighter had a lot to do with not wanting to wear a big clumsy outfit, mix soot in her makeup, or break a nail on a fire hose. I suppressed a grin at a mental picture of her shaking her head at a fire in hopes of encouraging it to extinguish itself.
    Women milled around the Chandler Champion. Felicity crowded me. “Tell them to stop touching that machine. They’ll destroy it.”
    I started to shake my head, thought of Mona, and settled for looking stern. “They’re all careful around machines. And respectful. They would never harm a sewing machine.”
    “Do you know every single one of those women?”
    “Most of them.” I didn’t recognize a few of the women poking at the Champion, but they probably attended classes in the other Threadville shops, and my friends could vouch for them.
    “Can’t you tell them to sit down?”
    I flicked the lights to get everyone’s attention.
    Despite Felicity’s predictions, we didn’t have enough seats, and many of us remained standing near the door, including Felicity. She had backed out of my personal space but was still glowering, maybe because of the large crowd I’d drawn. “We can’t start until our winner arrives,” she whined. “Go say something.”
    Leaving Susannah near the door to greet latecomers, I folded the fire department flyer into a pocket and walked away from the door, past rows of excited Threadville regulars, to the back of the store.
    Beside the dog pen’s open gate, I turned and faced the audience. Most of the people were my students, or had beenat one time or another. They beamed at me, and I forgot my annoyance with Felicity and spoke directly to them and to my friends standing by the front door. I couldn’t make eye contact with Russ. He was still studying the floor. He probably felt odd being the only male in the room. To make matters worse, no one sat within two chairs of him.
    A siren interrupted my ad-libbed welcoming speech.

3
    A RED SUV MARKED WITH THE WORDS
Fire Chief
stopped in front of In Stitches. Recruiting volunteers?
    “Aha,” Felicity announced from the front door. “Better late than never. Here comes our guest of honor.” But instead of staying there to greet the winner of the sewing and embroidery competition, Felicity