Anna Meets Her Match Read Free

Miranda.”
    Irrational hurt flashed through her, and she did the first thing that came to mind. She stuck out her tongue. He shook his head.
    “Still the brat, I see.”
    The superior tone evoked an all too familiar urge in her. To counter it, she grinned and crossed her legs, wagging a booted foot. “Better that than a humorless stick-in-the-mud, if you ask me.”
    “Has anyone ever?” he retorted. “Asked your opinion, I mean.”
    His response stinging, she let her gaze drop away nonchalantly, but Reeves had always been able to read her to a certain extent.
    “Sorry,” he muttered.
    Before Anna had to say anything, Odelia chirped in with a reply to Reeves’s tacky question. “Why, yes, of course,” Odelia declared gaily, waving a lace hanky she’d produced from somewhere. “We were just asking Anna Miranda’s opinion on the announcements for the spring scholarship auction. Weren’t we, sisters?”
    “Invitations,” Hypatia corrected pointedly. “An announcement implies that we are compelling attendance rather than soliciting it.”
    Anna’s mouth quirked up at one corner. As if the Chatam triplets did not command Buffalo Creek society, such society as a city of thirty thousand residents could provide, anyway. With Dallas just forty-five miles to the north, Buffalo Creek’s once great cotton center had disappeared, reducing the city to little more than a bedroom community of the greater Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. Yet, the city retained enough of its unique culture to bear pride in it, and as a daughter of the area’s wealthiest family Hypatia Chatam, while personally one of the humblest individuals Anna had ever known, bore that community pride especially well.
    “This spring,” Hypatia said with a slight tilt of her head, “instead of holding the dinner and auction at the college, as in years past, we are opening the house instead.”
    This seemed no surprise to Reeves. “Ah.”
    Everyone knew that Buffalo Creek Bible College, or BCBC, was one of his aunts’ favorite charities. Every spring, they underwrote a dinner and silent auction to raise scholarship funds. This year the event was to acquire a somewhat higher tone, moving from the drafty library hall at BCBC tothe Chatam House ballroom. In keeping with the intended elegance of the occasion, they had contacted the only privately owned print shop in town for help with the necessary printed paper goods. Anna just happened to work at the print shop. Given her grandmother’s friendship with the Chatam triplets, they had requested that Anna call upon them. Her boss Dennis had grudgingly allowed it.
    “Anna Miranda is helping us figure out what we need printed,” Mags explained. “You know, invitations, menus, advertisements…”
    “Oh, and bid sheets,” Hypatia said to Anna Miranda, one slender, manicured forefinger popping up.
    Anna Miranda sat forward, asking, “Have you thought of printed napkins and coasters? Those might add a nice touch.”
    “Hmm.” Hypatia tapped the cleft in her Chatam chin.
    Reeves looked at Anna Miranda. “What are you, a paper salesman, er, person?”
    She tried to fry him with her glare. “I am a graphic artist, for your information.”
    “Huh.” He said it as if he couldn’t believe she had an ounce of talent for anything.
    “We’ll go with linen napkins,” Hypatia decided, sending Reeves a quelling look.
    He bowed his head, a tiny muscle flexing in the hollow of his jaw.
    “Magnolia, remember to tell Hilda to speak to the caterer about the linens, will you, dear?” Hypatia went on.
    “If I don’t do it now I’ll just forget,” Magnolia complained, heaving herself up off the settee. She patted Reeves affectionately on the shoulder, reaching far up to do so, as she lumbered from the room. Suddenly Anna felt conspicuously out of place in the midst of this loving family.
    “I should be going, too,” she said, clutching her leather-bound notebook as she rose. “If I’m not back in the shop soon,