My Secret Admirer

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

Chapter 1

Jenny never knew what woke her up. One minute she was in the middle of a deep sleep and the next she was wide awake, the lightweight quilt tangled around her legs, and her heart drumming in her ears. The silence around her was as deep as her sleep had been. It couldn't have been traffic that woke her; the house was miles from the main road. Maybe it was the moonlight. With no other houses close by, they hadn't been in a hurry to put up shades, and a shaft of moonlight spread across her pillow like a milky white ribbon. Jenny was grateful for the moon tonight. Instead of spending a few panicked seconds in total darkness, trying to figure out where she was, she could see around her well enough to know that she was home.

Home. Well, not exactly. Not yet, anyway. She and her parents had moved into the house two and a half weeks before, and Jenny knew from experience that it would be much longer than that before it felt like a home. If it got the chance to, that is.

Four moves in the last six years, she thought, lying back on her pillow. No wonder she had trouble remembering where she was in the middle of the night. Living with a father whose job as a freelance consultant to shaky businesses took him all over the country and a mother whose feet started tapping after more than a year in one place was enough to make anybody lose their bearings.

A movement at the end of the bed interrupted Jenny^s thoughts. Stretching her legs out, she prodded an odd-looking lump with her big toe and got a noise in return, something between a snort and a cough.

"Peaches? You awake?"

The lump moved again and heaved a deep sigh.

Jenny laughed softly and gave it another nudge. "You're awake, all right. You can't fool me."

Finally, the lump sat up. Peaches, an old dog, whose pale, sandy-pink hair was fast turning gray, heaved another sigh and blinked groggily. She'd been a roly-poly puppy and was still chubby in her old age. The closest she got to rolling these days, though, was onto her side for a snooze.

Jenny reached down and gave the dog a hug. "Come on," she said, before Peaches could collapse into sleep again, "I'm wide awake. Let's take a tour."

Taking a tour had become Jenny's solution to sleeplessness. It always happened when they moved, waking up at some strange hour, not knowing where she was, and then not being able to get

back to sleep once she remembered. In two or three more weeks, she knew she'd be sleeping her usual dead-to-the-world eight hours, but until she got used to a new house, a nocturnal tour was a better way to pass the time than lying in bed staring at whatever new ceiling she happened to be under.