flipped it over to look at the cover, where a kitten was crawling through a tangled pumpkin patch.
“I only picked it up yesterday.”
Right after I’d gotten back from Julian’s, in fact. When my head was still spinning and my heart was trying to explode out of my chest, angry at me for leaving without telling him how I felt.
Julian’s whole life had just turned upside down. The last thing he needed was me adding more confusion to the mix. But it had been on the tip of my tongue from the moment I’d woken up, so I’d basically had to run out of his house to keep it from spilling out.
“Weren’t you reading that a week ago?” Em said, pulling me out of my reverie and back to the present. He peered closer at the cover. “I swear it was the same cat.”
I snorted. “It was. But in that one, someone got murdered at a flower show. This one, someone gets brained with a pumpkin at a harvest festival. Big difference.”
“Clearly.”
I’d actually read another book in between those two, where someone got smothered at a quilting bee, and the sleuth’s cat found the quilt that had been used as the murder weapon. But admitting that I’d read so many books in such a short time was only going to give Em ammunition to ask what was going on with Julian. To ask if anything had changed, and how I was feeling about things.
Em was big on feelings.
And mine were such a mess. I felt like I’d lived a week in the past two days. The terror I’d felt at the thought of losing Julian. The relief that he was okay. The meat-cleaver-to-the-chest of hearing him say he thought he was broken. And the realization that nothing I’d been mad about before actually mattered—not compared to the love for him that pumped through my veins with every beat of my heart.
Yeah, there was no way I was in any shape to talk about that.
“As long as there’s murder,” I said instead, “I’m happy. I’m not too picky about how it happens.”
“That’s a comforting thing to hear,” Tate said from the kitchen, and my head snapped up to look at him. He was pouring himself a cup of coffee from the carafe Mal had left on the island. I hadn’t even realized he’d come into the room with Em.
I was slipping. I hadn’t intentionally tried to scare Tate for weeks now. How was I supposed to keep my little brother’s boyfriend terrified of me if I didn’t even notice when he was around?
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The people who get murdered always deserve it.”
I smiled—just a small one, with a hint of teeth—and Tate swallowed.
Good.
“Who deserves what? And is it newsworthy? And do they want me to write a story on it, instead of this salute to historical mailboxes we’re supposed to run?”
Em’s friend Nora stepped into the great room from the balcony outside, a messenger bag slung over her shoulder. She propped her sunglasses up on her head and smiled at all of us.
“Hope you don’t mind me coming in,” she added to Em. “You weren’t out front, so I figured I’d come back and check.”
Em’s eyes flew to the clock in the kitchen. “Oh shit, is it time to go already?”
“Where are you headed?” I asked, not so much interested in the answer as eager to move the topic of conversation firmly away from me.
Em had started working as the Adair Gazette’s staff photographer when he’d moved back to Summersea, which mostly meant hanging out with Nora, the paper’s chief—and only—reporter. There weren’t actually that many assignments for him, on a weekly basis, so it left him with a lot of time for his freelance business.
Em rolled his eyes. “Walking around Adair photographing antique letterboxes. In ninety degree heat.” He turned to Nora. “You know, bright daylight isn’t necessarily the best light for photographs. You sure we couldn’t postpone until dusk?”
“Sadly, yes. This has to run in tomorrow’s paper, which means it has to be ready for layout before that.” She grinned. “Have I told you recently how nice it is to have someone suffering with me when I write these stories?”
“Sadist.”
Nora glanced at me and Tate. “I don’t suppose either of you wants to come and sweat along with us.”
“Ooh, thank you for the offer, but I think I’m going to have to pass,” Tate said. “I have to go over to Brunswick to pick up some lumber. I’m