Free Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters) by Kat Martin

with a visit and she fed him some ham bone scraps from the beans and biscuits Maude had cooked for supper the night before. Afterward, she climbed a little way up the hill to get the best reception possible on her cell phone.
    She called her dad, as she did once a week, and told him she was well and getting settled in. She asked about Patience and her dad said she was dating a lawyer, but he didn’t think it was all that serious. The conversation ended a little while later. Long distance calls were expensive up here and her dad had remarried several years ago and had a busy life of his own.
    She phoned her apartment to speak to her sister, but Hope wasn’t in. She called her best friend, Deirdre Steinberg, an editor at Simon and Schuster, and they talked about happenings in New York.
    “Jeremy’s been calling,” Dee said. “He seems lost without you. I didn’t tell him you had a cell phone, but maybe I should. He’s desperate to talk to you. I could give him the number and—”
    “Please, Dee—I don’t want to talk to Jeremy, and besides, the reception out here is really bad. The phone doesn’t work unless you’re outside the house, so he probably couldn’t reach me even if you gave him the number.”
    “I take it that means you’re planning to stay.”
    “I’m staying, Dee. For the full six months, at any rate.”
    Something beeped on the other end of the phone. “Darn it, my other line is ringing,” Dee said. “I’ll pacify Jeremy for as long as I can, but call me again—soon. I worry about you, you know.”
    “I know, and thanks, Dee. The only thing I really miss up here is my family and friends.” Charity rang off and walked back to the house, feeling a little bit lonely. It wasn’t unexpected. She was miles from home and living on her own, but it was exciting, too.
    In the afternoon, the rain stopped and the sun came out. Since the toilet still wasn’t working, she walked out to the little wooden shed she was growing to hate more every day. She was finished and heading back to the cabin, dodging the mud puddles that lined the path, when she heard a rustle in the bushes behind her.
    Charity stopped and turned, searching the thick green forest on the hill. “Smoke? Smoke, is that you, boy?” God, she hoped it was. But Smoke didn’t appear and the rustling grew louder. When she spotted a patch of long brown fur moving among the branches of a tree, Charity screamed and started running.
    Unfortunately, she forgot about the protruding branch of a shrub she had stepped over on her way to the latrine. Her pant leg caught. She tripped and went sprawling—right into a puddle of mud. Charity jerked her head around, too frightened to care about the murky stuff sticking to her clothes, certain that a bear was about to charge out of the woods any minute and chew her into little pieces.
    Instead, a cute little furry brown creature the size of a cat jumped down from a rock and raced away, its long, fluffy tail dragging behind its small body.
    Charity groaned in frustration and slammed her fist into the mud, sending up a stream of brackish water.
    She was muttering, silently cursing as she dragged herself to her feet. Her clean, white turtleneck was covered with mud and so were the jeans she had dried overnight in front of the pellet stove. Mud clung to her boots and oozed between her fingers.
    “I don’t believe this,” she grumbled, slinging mud from her arms and knocking it off her pant legs.
    “Somehow I don’t have the least problem believing it.” The sound of Call Hawkins’s voice jerked her gaze toward the trees.
    He crossed his arms over that granite-hard chest. “I swear, sweet pea, if you’re that afraid of a cute little weasel, what’s going to happen when you run across a bear?”
    A growl of frustration rose from her throat. “What are you doing here? And by the way, you’re trespassing. Do you realize that?”
    “I was looking for Smoke. He used to hang around when Mose lived in