Bluegrass Undercover (Bluegrass Brothers)

the office. Oh that man was waging war on her. Surely that meant he loved her!
    That knowledge put an extra bounce in her step for the rest of the day. Nothing, not even a faculty conference this afternoon, would ruin her mood!
     
    *     *     *
     
    Annie shook her head and tried to focus on the papers in front of her. She was trying to figure out which players had used S2 and which she could flip. Austin was at the top of her list, but he wasn’t talking. She had called him into the office today just to talk. He was polite and talked about the stress of leading the team and about the worry of college scouts, but nothing about S2 and bad influences.
    Annie would get there though. She’d build a good relationship with him and then slowly extract the truth. She glanced at the clock and gasped. She was due at Cade’s parents in less than an hour. Annie scooped up her files and tossed them into her shoulder bag. She had to hurry if she wanted to have time to get home and change for the meeting of the parents.
    It terrified her more than any meth user waving a gun around. Parents. She had never had any and was scared of the unknown. She reached for the doorknob and turned it. Nothing. It didn’t turn. She must have been so nervous that she had accidentally locked it. Annie looked at the lock and grew confused. The door appeared to be unlocked. She tried again to pull the door open but nothing. The blinds rattled against the small glass window as she yanked on the door.
    “Hello? Is anyone there?” Silence met her. She pulled up the blinds and looked out the window but saw nothing except an empty hall. What was going on?
    Annie was reaching for the desk phone when she was plunged into darkness. She tripped over one of the chairs and landed against her desk. Now what? With no outdoor window, her office was pitch-black. She reached out with her hands and felt around her desk for the phone. She grasped it and brought it to her ear. Silence. The electricity outage must have disconnected the phones as well.
    Something nagged her though. The power outage could explain the phone but nothing could explain the locked door. She lifted the leather flap of her bag and rummaged around for her cell phone. Finding it, she activated the screen and the brightness lit up the room enough for her to see. She looked down at her phone and cursed. No signal. Impossible.
    Someone in the S2 ring must have figured out who she was. But, if they figured out who she was, why were they just locking her in? Shouldn’t they be trying to kill her? None of this made any sense. What did make sense though was that she was going to have to break her door’s window to unlock the door.
    She touched her cell phone screen again to light up the room. She looked around and grabbed the blue plastic chair resting against the well with its metal legs. Annie hated breaking glass . It was always such a mess. She gripped the chair on each side and rammed it into the window. The impact reverberated up her arms and into her chest as she watched the window splinter and crack. With a couple pokes of the chair’s legs, the glass shattered and fell to the floor in the hallway.
    Now, if she could just unlock the door. She carefully slid her head through the window and looked down to a sight she was not prepared to see. There, in the door lock was a thin piece of metal broken off. There was no way she’d be able to unlock the door. She was going to have to climb through the window. What took her back more however, was the small black rectangular object that sat a couple of feet from the door: a cell phone jammer. What the Hell was going on and who was responsible for it?
    Annie took off her jacket and laid it over the broken glass. She tossed her bag through the window and placed the chair against the door. She stepped up onto it and looked at the broken window. Oh, this was going to hurt. She hiked her dark green skirt up around her waist and stuck her left leg through the window. She had to grip the side of the window to keep balance, the broken glass puncturing the palm of her hands, as she grasped the sides. She hissed but kept a tight hold until she was precariously perched half in and half out of the window.
    The glass poked at her bottom as she sat on her jacket but didn’t cut her through her jacket. Blood started to trickle down her forearm as she ducked her head and bent far enough over to squeeze her upper body through the window. Shards of glass