Fearless. Fern Michaels

Chapter 9

       Part Two

      Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25

      Epilogue ANNA’S RIB RUB

      KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

      Kensington Publishing Corp.

      119 West 40th Street

      New York, NY 10018

      Copyright © 2020 by Fern Michaels.

      Fern Michaels is a registered trademark of KAP 5, Inc.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

      Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953564

      ISBN: 978-1-4967-1456-5

      First Kensington Hardcover Edition: April 2020

      ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1457-2 (ebook)

      ISBN-10: 1-4967-1457-1 (ebook)

      Prologue

      Lubbock, Texas

      Now

      Anna Campbell accepted the friend request from Laura Jones, a common enough name. Possibly, she was a friend of a friend, or someone who followed her vlog on YouTube, The Simple Life.

      Accepting the request, she then clicked on the name to see if there were photos to put a face to, possibly reminding her who Laura Jones was.

      She read through the woman’s Facebook bio, then once more. This was a mistake. It had to be. She drew in a deep breath, slowly letting the air of uncertainty pass through her dry lips. Chewing on her bottom lip, she pointed the cursor to the photo tab. Afraid, yet knowing she couldn’t stop now, she double-clicked on the link. Heart racing, she viewed the images. One by one, still shots of the woman’s smiling face grinned back at her. She clicked on one photo, realizing it had been taken just a few hours ago.

      This whole thing was impossible, yet she couldn’t deny what she was seeing.

      She clicked through the pictures, each image tearing apart the life that she was trying to put back together. She stared at the images again.

      No way this could be real. Photoshopped, most likely. Yes, it had to be. Maybe one of her viewers had decided to play a cruel joke on her after all the publicity she had received lately. With over 6 million subscribers, it’s highly likely that some were haters. The vlogging community was like any other in that respect. People disagreed. Respectfully. Or not.

      Clicking the white back arrow, she viewed the pictures a third time. With a few clicks of her mouse, she was able to enlarge the photos.

      No. This was not some crazy subscriber trying to rattle her.

      This was the face of a woman she’d seen on Daniel’s phone. The photos that were discovered in Renée’s luggage after the fire. Dark brown eyes, thin lips pressed together with deep grooves furrowing above her upper lip. Dull gray short hair, choppy, as if it had been cropped with blunt scissors, the ends uneven. In one of the photos, she smiled, showing protruding teeth yellowed from years of nicotine. Using her thumb and index fingers to enlarge the picture, Anna saw old acne scars and knew this was not Laura Jones. She closed the window, brought up the search engine, typing in her name, then hit PHOTOS. Almost 2 million hits according to the info displayed on her screen. She scrolled through several of the blue hyperlinks and clicked on the first page. Yet none of the Laura Joneses she saw matched the face in the photographs.

      Anna pulled the Facebook pictures back up. In all, there were seven, each a different pose but with the same background, the same pale pink blouse. If this were a joke, someone had gone to great lengths. She recognized the Sun ’N Fun home and garden show, the charity fund-raiser she herself had been at earlier that night. It raised money for Habitat for Humanity, an organization near and dear to her heart. An auction open to the public. Laura Jones had obviously also attended it, given the background in the photos. Anna tried to recall if she’d seen her, or possibly spoken to her. Almost three thousand people had attended, and while she knew it was impossible for her to have spoken with that many people one-on-one, those whom she did speak to usually left an impression on her one way or another.

      Searching her memory, she guessed she’d spoken to thirty or forty people, mostly women, but there had been a few men. She would have remembered if one in particular stood out. If they had, she would have mentioned it to Mandy during the drive on the way home, as they’d had a short chat. They’d gotten into this habit a few weeks after the accident.

      Her days were long and the nights sometimes longer when Christina had one of her rough nights dealing with being cooped up in the den for so long. Though they weren’t as frequent as they’d been after the accident, she still had them once in a while. Long gone were the days when Christina would spend the evenings by herself in her room, reading Harry Potter books and texting with her best friend, Tiffany. It absolutely enraged Anna when she thought about what had happened. She wanted to kill the son of a bitch who had done this to her, but she knew these were idle daydreams and nothing more. Even so, there were many nights when she would lie awake plotting ways to rid the world of the evil it contained.

      The woman in the photographs had not been the topic of any late-night discussion. Only once had her name come up during the time she had a relationship with Ryan, if you wanted to call it that. Anna had expressed sympathy over the tragedy, then moved on. She knew from personal experience that life wasn’t always fair or kind. When life bombarded one with bushels of lemons, Anna knew that with perseverance, often the sweetest of lemonades resulted. Her life was testimony to that.

      Ten years into her first marriage, her husband, Wade, had died in a motorcycle accident on his way home from Woodworks, the furniture store in Corpus Christi where he’d built and sold custom-made furniture for yachts and boats. A lifelong dream, shattered in seconds on a wet, slick road. After months of wallowing in the dark depths of despair, Anna had had no other choice but to pull herself out of her grief-induced depression and find a way to provide for her daughter. Without Wade, there was no furniture store, no income. With a degree in marketing, and little