Mountain Peril by Sandra Robbins

Author:Sandra Robbins
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Steeple Hill
Published: 2010-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

Jack took a sip of his ginger ale and glanced around at the people spread across Nathan Webster’s formal dining room and the huge living room beyond. When Danielle had said chalet, he expected a rustic cabin tucked in the mountains, not this huge mansion that towered among the maple and pine trees at the end of a gated trail. When they’d first driven up, he thought they must have come to a lodge, not a home where a man lived alone.

Danielle smiled up at him. “Enjoying yourself?”

Jack chuckled. “So this is how the rich and famous live?”

She raised her glass of ginger ale to her mouth. “I don’t know about that. Everybody here, with the exception of Nathan, is a faculty member just like me.”

He let his gaze rove over the group of mostly middle-aged men and women and grinned. Even if he hadn’t known, he could’ve guessed their occupations. Each one of them had an academic look about them. Maybe it was their dark-colored clothes or perhaps the impression of high IQs they projected that he’d come to associate with the teaching profession. All of them looked the part. All of them except Danielle.

He smiled at her. “They may be faculty members, but there’s not one here like you.” Color rose in her cheeks. “How many teachers are there at Webster?”

She thought a moment. “I think at the beginning of the year we had over ninety.”

Jack’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “Ninety? For four hundred students?”

Danielle nodded. “When the Webster family endowed the school, they wanted only the most gifted students. So they offered full scholarships to anyone with high SAT scores who could pass the difficult entrance exams. They also wanted to keep the enrollment low and faculty numbers high so there would be more one-on-one attention to the students.”

“And you were one of those that got in.”

Danielle glanced across the room at Nathan. “Yeah, but it wasn’t easy. Even after I passed the exams, the screening committee was still reluctant to admit me.”

Jack’s mouth gaped open. “You’ve got to be kidding. Why?”

She set her glass down on a table beside her and chuckled. “Nathan had been a fan of my parents and knew about their drug and alcohol abuse. He thought I might be tainted because of my heritage.”

“So how did you get in?”

“The committee invited me for an interview. I was so scared when I walked into that room. But from the minute Nathan met me, he liked me. The interview was a success, and Nathan became one of my best friends. I don’t know what I would have done without him after Jennifer’s and Stan’s deaths.”

Jack thought of seeing Danielle with Nathan at the restaurant and tried to ignore the twinge of jealousy that nibbled at his mind. “He seemed to be very attentive the night I saw him with you at the restaurant.”

Her eyes grew wide. “Like I said, he’s been a wonderful friend.”

Jack took a sip from his glass. He groaned as Nathan

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.