whimper, her fingers hovering over the phone’s screen.
Chip looked from Ashleigh to Bree, to the porch door, and back again. There would be no winning here. The Invisible Fence was hard enough to put in, what with pulling up the yard, and avoiding a dead phone line straight from the sixties . . .
A phone line. A dead little phone line, straight from the sixties.
And she, little Barter actress with no construction knowledge, wanted so desperately to have the fence moved.
The Barter.
“You want the line moved so bad?” He straightened, a smile forming as he put out his hand to shake. “Fine. Let’s make a deal.”
Chapter 7
Bree
If Chip thought he was going to get anything out of Bree, he was in for a rude awakening.
That being said, it brought her unspeakable joy to sit cross-legged on her inflated donut on the gravel supervising as he broke into the dirt with his shovel.
“So, give me everything you got on Mr. Richardson,” Chip said, pulling his shovel back with a load. “Everything. Where he likes to eat, what his hobbies are. What he gave the cast for Christmas presents. Everything.”
Bree crossed her ankles and plastered on the patented sweet, innocent grin that had landed her every one of her jobs. She tried not to look at Russell, who lay at the edge of the line on the other side of the car, panting and staring at her.
“Oh, what can I say? There’s just so much.” She pressed her finger to her chin and tapped it twice in thoughtful musing.
In exchange for his moving the fence line, she had agreed to give him inside information about the Barter heading for a complete renovation. That would’ve been all well and good, but for the fact her backside was still so sore from the dog’s latest tackle that she had to carry around one of those pillows for people recovering from tailbone surgery. She wanted to be helpful, but Evie had been so fond of her new wannabe-minimalist lifestyle that she had “forgotten” to pay the water bill the same day a truck delivered twelve empty barrels for their “new rainwater harvesting system.” This was followed by Evie’s enthusiastic lecture on how they could “forgo drinking recycled pharmaceutical pills and sewage and instead live on the crystal clean water from the sky.”
There had been a pamphlet.
There were also red circles on their fridge calendar, dates when Evie was planning to cut things out of her life she had owned or paid for since before Bree moved in: the television, the dishwasher, the rugs, all plastic Tupperware . . .
So, forgive her, but Bree just couldn’t summon up the energy to be “helpful.” This was about the insanity this man had so cheerfully brought into her life. The way that he chuckled at her demise. The way he acted as though she just took life too seriously.
Too seriously?
Bree Leake of all people most emphatically did not take life too seriously. She was the epitome of easygoing. Her middle name was easygoing. Two years ago, when she’d spontaneously hopped on a Greyhound for a round trip to California just to see a West Coast sunrise, every one of the passengers called her Miss Sunshine.
Miss. Easygoing. Sunshine.
She sensed her eyes grow a bit stormy just looking at him. Thunder grumbled in the distance.
To some degree, that’s what really irked her in all this. Easygoing was a part of her identity, yet this man riled her up. The whole Leake family crammed inside her parents’ house over Christmas, and what did she do while her stepsiblings grumbled about having to share a bedroom with their toddlers? Snagged a blanket and said, “No big deal, guys. I’ll just hunker down on the rug.” Whenever Stephen forced the cast to stay late just to nail down one scene? “Sure. No prob, Boss,” was Bree’s response while everyone else onstage moaned.
One day her tenth-grade teacher said the dictionary definition of easygoing was simply this: “Bree Leake.”
Miss Easygoing.
And here this man waltzed in, pulling out her very identity from beneath her as though she didn’t deserve it.
But really, no matter how relaxed a girl was, there came a time when enough was enough. That moment came two mornings ago, at 9:36 a.m., when he reached down a hand to help her up from Russell’s latest tackle. She’d wiped the saliva slime out of her eyes and she saw it: those big brown eyes batting back tears of mirth.