Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter's Nine Lives

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For Mom

Acknowledgments

As always, deepest thanks go to my superb editor, Marcia Markland, and everyone else at St. Martin’s Press, including associate editor Kat Brzozowski, editorial assistant Quressa Robinson, and publicist Sarah Melnyk. Thanks also to my friends Dana Beck, Hellyn Sher, and Mike Harder for their priceless encouragement; to Detective Sergeant Chris Iorio and Lieutenant David Parisi of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department for their expertise; to India Cooper for her extraordinary copyediting; to my agent, Al Zuckerman at Writer’s House, for his guidance; to Ellen Thornwall and the real Cosmo, as well as author Elizabeth Hand and the real Mrs. Silverthorn for giving me good character names; and finally to David Urrutia, Zoe, and the rest of my family for their undying love and support.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Also by Blaize and John Clement

About the Authors

Copyright

Unable are the Loved to die

For Love is Immortality.

—Emily Dickinson

1

There are lots of good things about having a boyfriend—especially a new one. First of all, you get to do all those corny, young-love things that new couples have been doing since the dawn of time: hold hands on the beach, watch the sun set, make out like teenagers. Then there are the more practical advantages. For example, you get to mention how the trash needs to be taken out, and if you have a well-trained boyfriend, he’ll take it out. You get to look in the mirror and mutter, “I look like warmed-over toast today,” and he’ll lavish you with compliments. If you have a really well trained boyfriend, you might even get a box of chocolates now and then (my own personal weakness). At the end of the day, a boyfriend is a very good thing.

But there’s a downside.

Don’t get me wrong, Ethan is as smart as a whip, 100 percent thoughtful, and devastatingly, bewilderingly, unrelentingly hunky. But now that I have a boyfriend, I can’t really sit around all afternoon eating Fritos and ice cream and watching old reruns of Golden Girls. Not that that’s the sort of thing I do on a regular basis—at least not anymore. Ethan is under the impression that I’m the kind of girl who listens to hip music and reads the latest thought-provoking books in her spare time.

I’m not sure where he got that idea, but I have to try to live up to it as much as possible.

I’m Dixie Hemingway, no relation to you-know-who. I used to be a deputy with the Sarasota Sheriff’s Department, until my whole world came crashing down around me and I quit the force, or to be accurate, the force quit me. I think the official words on my discharge report were “unfit for duty.” Now I’m a professional pet sitter on Siesta Key, an eight-mile barrier island that sits just off the shore of Sarasota, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico.

I’ve built a pretty good business for myself. Most of my clients are cats, but I have a few regular dogs, too, with an occasional bird or iguana, and even recently a giant tank full of priceless exotic fish. I draw the line at snakes, though. Some people think snakes make a real neat pet. Those people are crazy.

It was a little after 5:00 P.M. when I left my last client for the day and pulled my Bronco out onto Ocean Boulevard, heading south toward the center of town. My plan was to stop by Beezy’s Bookstore on my way home and buy something impressive to read. Beezy’s is the type of place where you can find the latest blockbuster novel right next to an old, dog-eared copy of Gulliver’s Travels, complete with faded yellow highlighting and scribbled notes in the margins.

I was looking forward to it. I hadn’t been there in years, but I was a regular customer when I was a little girl. I remember sitting in the aisle with my older brother, Michael, while our grandmother was shopping at the market across the street. I loved the feeling of being surrounded by all those dusty thoughts and dreams of writers from all over the world, all with their own story to tell. I distinctly remember the moment I realized I’d never live long enough to read every book in the world. I cried for days.

The northern end of Ocean Boulevard is mostly old houses and runs along a stretch of beach, but as you get closer to the center of town, all kinds of shops start popping up on both sides. Most people just assume the street was named for its breathtaking view of the Gulf of Mexico to the west, but in fact, the man who originally bought up all the land in this area named it after his wife, whose name just happened to be Ocean.

I was keeping an eye out for a parking spot when something in the rearview mirror caught my eye. It was an old, cherry red convertible sports car right behind me, flashing its headlights and weaving from side to side. The driver was a thin-faced man with expensive-looking sunglasses perched on top of his pale, balding head. He had that blank, set-in-stone expression that only a true … well, let’s just say a true jerk can muster. He was revving his engine and drawing within inches of my back bumper, waving his hands in a frantic “Speed up!” gesture.

Now, I’m no angel. I’ve been known to drift outside of the traffic laws every once in a while. I even got pulled over once for going thirty miles per hour over the speed limit, which sounds bad enough except the speed limit was seventy. In my defense, I was twenty-one years old and dumb as a fruitcake, driving my own car for the first time in my life, not to mention I was the only car on the road for miles. I was midway along State Road 84, a sun-parched two-lane highway that cuts a straight horizontal swath right through the Florida Everglades. The only thing you have to worry about running into there (besides a cop with a speed gun) is the occasional alligator lumbering across the broiling asphalt.

But here we were in the middle of a beach town, not to mention in the middle of tourist season—shops and cafés on either side of the street, happy retirees on two-person bicycles ambling along on the shoulder, and kids skipping around with ice cream cones and listening to music on their iPods. I was already going about five miles per hour over the limit. There was no way I was speeding up just so some ember-head could get to his golf game two minutes earlier. I gently eased off the gas and slowed to the actual speed limit, which in town is only twenty-five.

I looked up in the mirror and saw the man smack his forehead in exasperation. His cheeks were beginning to turn a deep shade of plum. He leaned his head out over the striped lines in the road to see if he could pull around me. Normally, I’d stick to my guns and cruise along at exactly the posted limit just to teach him a lesson, but I was pretty sure he was about to make a run for it, and there was too much traffic to do it safely.