The Deadliest Bite

kept forgetting to deliver letters and packages, necessitating second, and sometimes third, trips to our bookstore, daily. I’d thought he was sweet, but rather dumb, until Tracy had pointed out that he only forgot stuff when I was working.

So we’d flirted and flirted and flirted over the course of a month. Until, just a few days ago, he’d asked me out. I was thril ed. He was cute; he was new; he’d lost someone he was close to, as wel .

And he “obviously” didn’t judge me on my past.

You know what they say about assuming…

“We had a date set up, but he cancel ed. I guess he asked me out before he knew about…

everything. Then someone must have told him. He’s got kids, you know.”

“So?” Grizzie growled, her smoky voice already furious.

“So, he said that he didn’t think I’d be a good influence. On his girls.”

“That’s fucking ridiculous,” Grizzie snarled, just as Tracy made a series of inarticulate chittering noises behind us. She was normal y the sedate, equable half of her and Grizzie’s partnership, but Tracy had nearly blown a gasket when I’d cal ed her crying after Mark bailed on me. I think she would have torn off his head, but then we wouldn’t have gotten our inventory anymore.

I lowered my head and shrugged. Grizzie moved forward, having realized that Tracy already had the anger market cornered.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said, wrapping her long arms around me. “That’s… such a shame.” And it was a shame. My friends wanted me to move on, my dad wanted me to move on. Hel , except for that tiny sliver of me that was stil frozen in guilt, I wanted to move on. But the rest of Rockabil , it seems, didn’t agree.

Grizzie brushed the bangs back from my eyes, and when she saw tears glittering she intervened, Grizelda-style. Dipping me like a tango dancer, she growled sexily, “Baby, I’m gonna butter yo’

bread…” before burying her face in my exposed bel y and giving me a resounding zerbert.

That did just the trick. I was laughing again, thanking my stars for about the zil ionth time that they had brought Grizzie and Tracy back to Rockabil because I didn’t know what I would have done without them. I gave Tracy her own hug for the present, and then took it to the back room with my stuff. I opened the box to give the red satin one last parting caress, and then closed it with a contented sigh.

It would look absolutely gorgeous in my dirty drawer.

We had only a few things to do to get the store ready for opening, which left much time for chitchat. About a half hour of intense gossip later, we had pretty much exhausted “what happened when you were gone” as a subject of conversation and had started in on plans for the coming week, when the little bel above the door tinkled. My heart sank when I saw it was Linda Al en, self-selected female delegate for my own personal persecution squad. She wasn’t quite as bad as Stuart Gray, who hated me even more than Linda did, but she did her best to keep up with him.

Speaking of the rest of Rockabill, I thought, as Linda headed toward romance.

She didn’t bother to speak to me, of course. She just gave me one of her loaded looks that she could fire off like a World War I gunship. The looks always said the same things. They spoke of the fact that I was the girl whose crazy mother had shown up in the center of town out of nowhere, naked, in the middle of a storm. The fact that she’d stolen one of the most eligible Rockabil bachelors and ruined him for life. The fact that she’d given birth to a baby without being married. The fact that I insisted on being that child and upping the ante by being just as weird as my mother. That was only the tip of the vituperative iceberg that Linda hauled into my presence whenever she had the chance.

Unfortunately, Linda read nearly as compulsively as I did, so I saw her at least twice a month when she’d come in for a new stack of romance novels. She liked a very particular kind of plot: the sort where the pirate kidnaps some virgin damsel, rapes her into loving him, and then dispatches lots of seamen while she polishes his cutlass. Or where the Highland clan leader kidnaps some virginal English Rose, rapes her into loving him, and then kil s entire armies of Sassenachs while she stuffs his haggis. Or where the Native American warrior kidnaps a virginal white settler, rapes her into loving him, and then kil s a bunch of colonists while she whets his tomahawk. I hated to get Freudian on Linda, but her reading patterns suggested some interesting insights into why she was such a complete bitch.

Tracy had received a phone cal while Linda was picking out her books, and Grizelda was sitting on a stool far behind the counter in a way that clearly said “I’m not actual y working, thanks.” But Linda pointedly ignored the fact that I was free to help her, choosing, instead, to stand in front of Tracy. Tracy gave that little eye gesture where she looked at Linda, then looked at me, as if to say,

“She can help you,” but Linda insisted on being oblivious to my presence. Tracy sighed and cut her telephone conversation short. I knew that Tracy would love to tel Linda to stick her attitude where the sun don’t shine, but Read It and Weep couldn’t afford to lose a customer who was as good at buying books as she was at being a snarky snake face. So Tracy rang up Linda’s purchases and bagged them for her as politely as one can without actual y being friendly and handed the bag over to Linda.

Who, right on cue, gave me her parting shot, the look I knew was coming but was never quite able to deflect.

The look that said, There’s the freak who killed her own boyfriend.

She was wrong, of course. I hadn’t actual y kil ed Jason. I was just the reason he was dead.

Contents

FRONT COVER IMAGE

WELCOME

EPIGRAPH

EXTRAS

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