Kiss the Moon by Carla Neggers Page B

chosen the black shirt and jacket deliberately, to square it in the minds of the people of Cold Spring that, indeed, he was a Sinclair. Possibly he’d done it to square it in her mind in particular.
    Spying on him didn’t seem like a bad idea.
    “Good God, you’d better do something before you get yourself into real trouble.”
    She popped off the couch, energized. Ten minutes later she had her hair up in sticks her mother had given her and was crossing the frozen ruts in the dirt road to check her sap buckets. The air was bright and cold under a cloudless blue sky.
    Huge, old maples lined the road, looking picturesque and majestic with their galvanized buckets hanging from their taps. Farther into the woods, she used plastic milk jugs, cheap, efficient, not as high a capacity as the buckets but quite workable. She was meticulous about not drilling too many taps—the trees could easily replace the small amount of sap she took. Gravity tubing would be more efficient, but she wasn’t making syrup commercially, just for the fun of doing it.
    She checked a few buckets, the void of the next three weeks yawning before her. She needed to fly. Didn’t her father understand? She loved Cold Spring, but it couldn’t contain her.
    But she’d run out of gas. “I’d have grounded you, too.”
    She climbed over the stone wall that ran alongside the road and checked a few more taps, noticing footprints and trampled brush. Possibly Bubba, more likely reporters. They’d wanted footage of the landscape for their reports. They didn’t need to go onto Sinclair land—this was good enough.
    Penelope pushed her way through whiplike leafless brush, the snow shin deep in places, barely up to her ankles in other spots. It had melted to the ground around many of the trees. Before long, she’d be out cutting pussy willow.
    She heard a movement and stopped, listening. A squirrel? A bird?
    Silence. That made her suspicious.
    “Bubba?” she called softly.
    No answer. If it was Bubba, there wouldn’t be one.
    She wondered if he knew she’d changed her story, if he knew she’d told about the plane in the first place. She hadn’t been to his shack. For all she knew, he’d packed up and left before the reporters could find him, before she could renege.
    In a day or two, she would go and check on him.
    She started back, the cold air and exercise improving her spirits. When she climbed over the stone wall, a man emerged from behind a maple and stood in front of her. She yelled, startled.
    He held up both hands, palms forward. “Easy, there. It’s okay. My name’s Jack Dunning—Brandon Sinclair sent me up here.”
    She recovered quickly, nodding, as her heartbeat settled down. He was a fit, sandy-haired man in a shearling-lined jacket and a cowboy hat, and if he didn’t fit in the New Hampshire landscape, he didn’t look as if he gave a damn, either. If Wyatt would give her little benefit of the doubt, this man would give her none.
    “You’re Penelope Chestnut?”
    She nodded again, feeling faintly self-conscious. Had he deliberately snuck up on her? How long had he been out here? She shook off the rush of questions. “I was just checking my taps.”
    “Nice little hobby, maple sugaring. I’m kind of partial to the fake stuff myself. You mind if we talk?”
    His accent was a curious mix of southern—Texas?—and New York. Penelope tried to relax, not look as if he’d caught her doing something wrong. “No, of course not. I explained to Mr. Sinclair’s son—”
    He leveled flat, colorless eyes on her and said patiently, “Wyatt doesn’t represent Brandon Sinclair. I do.”
    “Okay. Fine.”
    She walked onto the road. The sun was hitting it, the temperature steadily climbing, and the frozen ruts were already softening. Jack Dunning followed her. His rented car was parked behind her truck in her short gravel driveway. She wondered if he’d just arrived or if he’d heard her calling Bubba. If it suited his purposes to tell