Софи Райан - Telling Tails

Sam just laughed again. “Are you driving?” he asked.

I nodded. “I am. It’s raining. Why?”

“We have an amber ale from that new microbrewery, Grimcross. I just wanted to get your opinion.”

“Ask Jess,” I said. “She’d be happy to tell you what she thinks.”

“Good idea,” Sam said. “Tina will bring your order when it’s ready.” He headed for the kitchen.

I’d just picked up my fork when Jess slid onto the chair beside me. “I was not meant to live near the water,” she said, shrugging out of a red raincoat, which she draped on the back of the chair.

“Hello to you, too,” I said. “And why were you not meant to live near the water?” I knew Jess didn’t really mean that. She loved being close to the ocean. She wasn’t as fanatical about sailing as Mac was, but she liked to go out a few times each season on one of the big schooners that called the harbor home. I teased her that she’d been a pirate in a past life.

Jess put a hand to her hair. “This,” she said.

“Your hair looks good,” I said. She was wearing it back from her face in a loose braid.

“Well, it was like wrestling with a bear to get it to do anything.” She held up her hands about three feet apart. “When it’s humid, it gets this big.” She peered at the bowl in front of me. “That smells fantastic. What is it?”

“Spicy chicken and noodles,” I said, taking a bite.

“Ooo, I want some,” she said.

I darted my eyes sideways to look at her.

“Don’t worry,” Jess said. “I’m not crazy enough to try and take food away from you.” She looked around the pub, and then I saw Tina making her way across the room toward our table.

I had no idea how Jess did it, but she was always able to get the attention of servers, bartenders and sales associates wherever we were.

“What could I get you?” Tina asked when she reached the table.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” Jess said, pointing to my bowl, “with a fried egg on top.”

“What is it with you and fried eggs?” I asked after Tina was on her way to the kitchen.

Jess shrugged. “I like them as long as I don’t have to eat them by themselves.” She reached over and swiped a breadstick from my plate.

“I saw that.”

“I know,” she said before taking a huge bite.

“How was your day?” I dipped the end of the remaining breadstick in the spicy sauce in my bowl.

“Good. Lots of tourists in the shop. No bus tours, but there was a group of people in camper vans traveling together. Did you get any of them at your place?”

I nodded.

“Hey, I saw Josh. He told me about Rose. Is she all right?”

I set down my fork. “She’s fine. I think her head is harder than a cement block. How did Josh know?”

I had known Josh Evans since we were kids. He was a lawyer and had come to the Angels’ rescue more than once.

Jess shrugged. “His mother’s working for Liz now, remember?”

Jane Evans had worked for Daniel Swift, who was descended from the original family that had founded North Harbor, at Swift Holdings. Liz had persuaded her to come work for the Emmerson Foundation, Liz’s family’s charitable foundation.

“Liz probably told Jane,” Jess continued. “She told Josh. You know how those things work.”

Tina came back then with Jess’s order, including a bottle of the amber ale Sam had mentioned to me.

“Sam wanted your opinion on that,” I said, indicating the tall green bottle.

Tina smiled. “On the house.”

“I can do that,” Jess said with a smile.

We ate in companionable silence for a few minutes, Jess wordlessly handing over one of her breadsticks. “So is Nick coming?” she asked.

“As far as I know.”

“Do you want me to remember a previous engagement and make myself scarce?”

I frowned at her. “Why would you do that?”

She raised an eyebrow. “So the two of you can have a little alone time.”

I looked around at the rapidly filling room. “Because this is such an intimate romantic place,” I said.

“Hey, I was just trying to nudge you two along a little,” Jess said.

I rolled my eyes at her.

“Are you at least going to kiss him again? And I don’t mean that little peck-on-the-cheek thing you do, which is more like kissing your brother.”

“We’re not talking about kissing Nick or my brother.”

Jess opened her mouth to say something and I held up a hand. “Not. Doing. It.”

She laughed. “Well, at least tell me if the earth moved when you kissed Nick.”

“You’ve been watching Outlander again, haven’t you?” I said.

“Love me some Jamie Fraser,” Jess said. “I wouldn’t mind kissing him.”

I shook my head and bent over my bowl again.

“So have you figured out exactly what happened to Rose yet?” she asked after she’d devoured about three-quarters of her noodles and chicken. She’d tucked one leg underneath her and was leaning against the back of her chair, drinking the beer straight from the bottle.

I sighed and shook my head. “Not really.” I explained what Rose had seen, what Michelle thought had happened and how I’d noticed the needle mark on Rose’s neck, which had resulted in Nick taking the blood sample.

“So what do you think?” she said. “Do you believe Rose actually did see someone dragging that guy’s body?”

“I think she saw something. I just don’t know what. You know Rose. She’s not above taking a little dramatic license to get what she wants, but she wouldn’t make this up and she didn’t have a stroke. First of all, they checked her out at the hospital, and second, she’s as healthy as a horse. Her blood pressure is lower than mine.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Leesa Cameron killed her husband, assuming that he’s really dead.”

I pushed my empty dish away. “And that would be because?”

“She’s been in the shop about half a dozen times,” Jess said. “And she just bought a vintage lace robe on Tuesday. It’s not the kind of sexy purchase a woman makes if she’s going to kill her husband the next day.”

“True,” I said. “But it is the kind of sexy purchase a woman makes if someone other than her husband is going to see her in it.”

Jess made a face. “Good point. You think someone else was going to get a look at the goods, so to speak?”

“I don’t know,” I said with a sigh. “I wish there was a way to find out.”

“What are you drinking?” a voice said behind us. Nick was standing there.

He really was cute, I thought, looking up at him as he shrugged out of his rain jacket. His hair was windblown, which made him look younger and less serious. He’d always had the kind of boy-next-door looks that made women swoon.

Jess turned the bottle so he could read the label. “So what’s wrong with it?” he asked, snagging the third chair and pulling it closer to us before he sat down next to me. He smelled like Hugo, the aftershave he’d been wearing since high school, the aftershave he’d been wearing when I French-kissed him at fifteen.

I shook my head. It wasn’t a good time to think about that.

“Nothing,” Jess said. “It’s great—rich, warm with a hint of caramel.”

“So why the face?”

“We were talking about what happened to Rose,” I said. “Do you know if Michelle has managed to get a lead on Jeff Cameron?”

“Not as far as I know,” Nick said. “What about Rose and her cohorts? Have they come up with anything?”

Jess tried not to smile and took another drink of her beer.

“They have a couple of theories,” I said, choosing my words carefully.

“Are you going to tell me what they are?” Nick scanned the room but couldn’t seem to catch the eye of any waitstaff. Jess looked up, and just like before, Tina was suddenly on her way to the table. “How do you do that?” he said.