Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77857 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77857 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
“You do?” This time she looks at me, and she widens her eyes. “We were all really looking forward to that.”
“Don’t worry. We’re not canceling. There’s just some stuff going on right now, and Rory can’t get the program together as quickly as we first thought. I’m thinking maybe mid-December?”
“Come on back to my office, and I’ll take a look at our schedule.”
Schedule? Really? The Snow Creek cinema has a schedule?
“Okay.”
I follow her back to her office, which is the size of a large closet. She sits down at a tiny desk and taps on the computer.
There’s no extra chair, so I stand.
“Yeah,” she says. “Just as I suspected. We’re planning a great big Christmas movie marathon beginning December fifteenth. We’ll have all the oldies. Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Bells of St. Mary’s…”
“What about Elf?” I ask.
“Elf?”
“Yeah. It’s a freaking classic.”
She reddens further. “Okay. I’ll see if we can get it.”
I chuckle. “I’m kidding, Jenny. What if we booked Rory on the fourteenth?”
“That’s a Thursday.”
“So what?”
“Wouldn’t you want her concert to be on a weekend?”
Jenny raises a good point. “What would it take for me to get the place on that Saturday night, the sixteenth, and then you start your holiday thing on Sunday?”
“We’re not open on Sunday, Brock.”
Of course not. Nothing is open on Sunday in Snow Creek. Sometimes small-town living really sucks.
“Saturday then.” I smile. “Give Rory Friday, and start the Christmas classic marathon on Saturday.”
“Well… I might be able to swing that.”
“Friday would be great,” I say. “A Friday evening, ending the workweek… Coming to see Snow Creek’s most beautiful woman with the voice of an angel singing—”
Jenny frowns.
Yeah, not my best moment. Mentioning how beautiful Rory is.
“I’m willing to pay more.” I smile. “Enough so you can probably get Elf for your Christmas movie marathon.”
She taps on her computer. “All right. You can have Friday. I’ll send you a contract. Sign it and send it back to me.”
“You’re a doll, Jen. Thank you.”
Red cheeks once more, as Jenny stares at her computer screen. “You’re welcome, Brock.”
Rory now has over a month to plan her program, and I can get back to dealing with this other bullshit.
Man… I hope the blood on that rose stem belongs to Patty Watson.
But then… What if it does?
That means…
That means we have the bones of an innocent eighteen-year-old girl buried on our property.
And that can’t mean anything good.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
RORY
It’s two o’clock, and I just finished my last lesson for the day. I tidy the studio and then take a glance out my window.
Brock is walking up the street, looking luscious as usual in Levi’s, a black button-down, and black ostrich cowboy boots. What’s he doing here in town? He’s supposed to be in the city meeting with Ruby’s DNA expert.
He disappears behind the building.
I finish, lock up, and head down.
Sure enough, Brock is standing by my car.
“Hey.” I walk into his arms and give him a kiss on the lips.
“Hey yourself, beautiful.”
“What are you doing here in town?”
“I went to see Jenny over at the cinema. I changed the reservation for your concert to Friday, December fifteenth.”
“Thanks for that. That gives me a little over a month.”
“I thought you’d be happy.”
“Surely we can figure out all this other stuff in a month, right?”
He doesn’t reply.
“Brock?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart. I just don’t know. There’s so much going on. It may take a while to find the answers.”
“We have to. We have to at least find out if Pat Lamone is really your cousin.”
“Yeah, we will. Although DNA may not be entirely conclusive.”
“It’ll be able to tell you if he’s a second or third cousin, right?”
“I don’t know. He’s allegedly descended from a half sibling, which makes it more complex. A lot of it is Greek to me. I mean, sure, I studied agricultural science in college, and I can tell you all the parts of a bovine. When it comes to human anatomy and DNA? Not so much.”
“Yeah, me too. I definitely don’t have a science brain.”
“So we’ll leave it to the expert. The hair samples from the hair tie weren’t viable, and he found another hair on the panties, which also wasn’t viable. But…he did manage to find a speck of blood on one of the rose stems.”
“But that could be Ennis’s.”
“Exactly. It’s a shot in the dark. But it’s better than anything else we’ve got.”
“When do we find out?”
“He says he’ll try to have more information for me within twenty-four hours. I called Dale and Donny and my dad and gave them the info. Then I came over here to deal with Jenny and the cinema and to see the most beautiful woman in the world.”
He brushes his lips lightly over mine.
Then he gazes at me, his dark eyes flaring with fire.
Already I know what he’s thinking.