The only thing that would have made the evening more perfect for Amber would have been if Melanie could have been dancing and laughing with her, Kim, and the rest of the Here and Meow Committee.
Once the meal was out of the way and the formality of the evening loosened a bit, Amber tracked down Betty, the two squealing and jumping up and down.
“I knew you could do it!” Amber said.
“I still can’t believe it!” said Betty.
“Oh, I just love you both!” Bobby said, his bottom lip shaking as he pulled them into a group hug. As soon as Bobby started crying, both Betty and Amber completely lost it.
When the drinking started, Betty and Bobby made for the exit. Amber told them that they would go out for celebratory Catty Cakes in the morning.
While Amber stood at the front doors, watching Betty—with Bobby’s arm wrapped tight around her shoulder—walk across the parking lot, she caught sight of Chief Brown chatting with Connor Declan. Curiosity piqued, she walked outside, the click of her kitten heels giving her away as she got closer; the lot was mostly deserted at the moment. Older residents had fled before things got too rowdy, while the younger set were just getting started. Both men looked up at her. Chief Brown smiled; Connor did not.
“Well, thank you for talking to me, Chief Brown.” Connor offered Amber a curt nod, said, “You look lovely this evening,” then turned on his heel and left before she could even think of how to respond.
Amber was still frowning after him when the chief said, “I came by to talk to you—and see how the Hair Ball turned out—but Declan cornered me before I could get in there. I swear the guy had been hiding between two cars waiting for me and popped out just when I went by. Scared the daylights out of me.”
“What did he want?” she asked, finally turning to him.
“Usual reporter stuff … wants to interview me about how the takedown of Sean Merrill went,” the chief said. “He was asking a lot of questions about you too, though. I’d keep an eye out for him. He’s very … suspicious.”
Amber recalled the way he’d followed her and found Cassie Westbottom instead. She’d need to sort out the Connor Declan problem later. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
“Once the dust settles, I may still need your help with the Chloe case,” he said. “That Sean Merrill is a piece of work. As soon as we got him in the interrogation room, we couldn’t shut the guy up. He threw everyone he could think of under the bus when he wasn’t too busy lying through his teeth. He had the audacity to blame Karen for all of this. Pretty classic psychopath: no empathy, no remorse, and thinks he’s smarter than everyone else in the room. He said if Karen had shown up after he’d originally called her, he wouldn’t have needed to kidnap Chloe.”
Amber pursed her lips. It was strange to so deeply hate someone she’d never met. “When Sean messaged her, he used a single photo—who was that?”
“It was a photo he found on some teenage boy’s public modeling portfolio,” the chief said.
As much as the idea of a police takedown sounded exciting, she was glad she’d never had to lay eyes on the creep. Besides, she would have been so unbelievably angry, her magic very well would have reacted without her permission and maimed him. Kim knowing Amber’s secret was bad enough; a group of law enforcement finding out about her abilities wouldn’t be ideal. Was maiming a felony?
“The person who kidnapped Chloe is an old friend of his from Lirkaldy—Shane Miller,” the chief continued, pulling Amber out of her thoughts. “Sean promised Shane a cut of the half-a-million life insurance payout—upwards of fifty grand—if he snatched Chloe. He drove Chloe to Portland, then ducked out of town once the deed was done. Shane is still at large; no one in Lirkaldy seems to know where the guy could be. I’ve got your buddy Alan Peterson on the hunt.”
“See,” she said, “not all PIs are bad.”
The chief offered a noncommittal shrug in response. “If we can’t find Shane in the usual ways, I’ll give you a call. Once Shane hears that he’s not getting his money, he might be ticked off enough to come after Chloe again.”
Amber nodded, hoping they caught the guy soon.
The chief’s attention shifted toward the community center. “I don’t have a ticket, but can I see how the Hair Ball turned out? Jessica wanted me to take pictures.”
She laughed. “You’re the chief of police—I’m pretty sure you can go anywhere you want.”
They walked back to the front of the center and stopped on the threshold.
The chief let out a whistle. “You guys did good.”
Smiling she said, “Thanks. You did too.”
The chief wandered the building for a few minutes, snapping dozens of pictures. When Kim saw them, she came bounding over from the dance floor, her face flush and her hairline a little damp. “Chief! Come dance!”
He stared at her as if she’d just admitted that Marbleglen was a superior town and that they should burn Edgehill to the ground. “No, thank you,” he said. “I should be getting back to Jessica and the kids.” His gaze flicked to the dance floor full of twirling, laughing, and arm-waving people, and Amber could swear he paled. “Congratulations on the gala, ladies.” Then he hurried away even faster than Connor had earlier.
Kim shrugged and grabbed Amber’s hand. “You, however, cannot say no!” she said, tugging Amber after her.
Amber spent hours on the dance floor after that, even though her date refused to join her. Edgar stayed seated for most of the evening, though he watched the dancers with a strange kind of longing. Amber danced with Chloe and her friends—which they loved and were completely horrified by at the same time—and she danced with the committee members. At one point, Jolene and Ann Marie led the group of dancers through a popular line dance. It was easy enough that Amber forced the ever-grumpy Edgar onto the dance floor. He grudgingly cooperated and ended up picking up the dance even quicker than Amber had.
More than once, she caught Kim eyeing Edgar as if he was a sandwich and she was starving. Amber had yet to let her know that Edgar, too, was a witch. She was a little worried that that fact would make Edgar even more attractive to her.
She’d have to ask Edgar later how he wanted her to handle that, if at all.
The last dance of the night—just before midnight—was a slow one. Most of the crowd had cleared out of the community center by then. Cabs had been parked out in the lot in anticipation hours ago and were soon whisking drunk Hair Ball guests safely back home. Amber shoved Kim and Edgar together. She spotted a very red-faced Ben Lydon asking Chloe to dance, who happily said yes.
Amber flopped into a chair and kicked off her shoes, watching the remaining two dozen guests sway around the dance floor. Her feet and lower back ached, but she hadn’t been this content in a long time. She was also quite sure she could fall asleep sitting up—with her eyes open.
“I thought you weren’t much of a dancer,” she heard someone say close to her left ear.
She turned that way, but no one was there.
“You looked great out there,” he said to her right now. “Happy.”
When she turned her head toward his voice, she found Jack Terrence sitting beside her. Her first instinct had been to tell him how sorry she was that he’d lost in both categories tonight, but that intense look from the last time she’d seen him was back, making her apology dry up in her mouth. The memory of the zap she’d felt when their hands touched replayed in her head. Her magic didn’t feel haywire at the moment, though her heart hammered.
Then what he’d said caught up with her. “You … you remember that night at the Sippin’ Siamese?”
“Something happened when your hand touched mine. Maybe it screwed with whatever your aunt did,” he said. “Because now I remember everything.”
Amber swallowed. “Everything?”
His gaze swept across her face and down to her neck. He swallowed hard, too, then looked back up into her eyes. “Everything.”
About the Author
Melissa has had a love of stories for as long as she can remember, but only started penning her own during her freshman year of college. She majored in Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology at UCDavis. Yet, while she was neck-deep in organic chemistry and physics, she kept finding herself writing stories in the back of the classroom about fairies and trolls and magic. She finished her degree, but it never captured her heart the way writing did.
Now she owns her own dog walking business (that’s sort of wildlife related, right?) by day … and afternoon and night … and writes whenever she gets a spare moment. The Microsoft Word app is a gift from the gods!
She alternates mostly between fantasy and mystery (often with a paranormal twist). All her books have some element of “other” to them … witches, ghosts, UFOs. There’s no better way to escape the real world than getting lost in a fictional one.
She lives in Northern California with her very patient boyfriend and way too many pets.
Her debut novel, The Forgotten Child, released in October of 2018, and the first two books in the Witch of Edgehill series, Pawsitively Poisonous and Pawsitively Cursed, are out now.
You can find out more about her upcoming books at: https://melissajacksonbooks.com
Acknowledgments
Thanks again and again to my beta readers! You guys are lifesavers! Thank you, Mom, Krista Hall, Margarita Martinez, Brittany Gray, Christiane Loeffler, Jennifer Laam, Lauren Sprang, Garrett Lemons, Noel Russell, Lindsey Duga, Tristin Milazzo, Jasmine Warren, Kara Klemcke, Bobby Lewis, Mary Studebaker, Samantha Lierer (SSDGM, new Murderino sister), Kimberly Ann Shepard, Jesika Olson, and Stefan Anders. And to Courtney Hanson just for being you.
Thank you, Maggie Hall, for being a design wizard.
Thanks to Michelle Raymond and Clark Kenyon for all the cat-filled formatting.
Thank you to Justin Cohen for being my go-to proofreader.
Many thanks to the crazy talented Victoria Villarreal for bring Amber and Edgehill to life. Hopefully we can work on many more books together!
Thank you to Sam for setting up a place for me to write in the garage when I was going loopy and needed a change of scenery. Thank you for running to the store for energy drinks and chocolate when I need to hit a new over-the-top word count goal. You’re the best and I love you. (I’m still upset you turned Dusty into a dog, though.)
And, as always, thank you to my readers. Thank you for pre-ordering, reading, reviewing, and telling your friends about my books. I’m so glad I get to share my stories with you. Onto the next!
Thank you for reading Pawsitively Secretive! If you enjoyed this story, please consider leaving a review. Reviews mean the world to authors. Reviews often mean more sales, and more sales means more freedom to write more books.
Now available as an audiobook, too!
Continue the series with:
Pawsitively Swindled – coming March 2020
Pawsitively Betrayed – coming June 2020
Other books by Melissa Erin Jackson:
If you’re looking for a slightly darker tale, consider The Forgotten Child, a haunting paranormal mystery starring a reluctant medium.
The dead can speak. They need her to listen.
Ever since Riley Thomas, reluctant medium extraordinaire, accidentally released a malevolent spirit from a Ouija board when she was thirteen, she’s taken a hard pass on scary movies, haunted houses, and cemeteries. Twelve years later, when her best friend pressures her into spending a paranormal investigation weekend at the infamous Jordanville Ranch—former home of deceased serial killer Orin Jacobs—Riley’s still not ready to accept the fact that she can communicate with ghosts.
Shortly after their arrival at the ranch, the spirit of a little boy contacts Riley; a child who went missing—and was never found—in 1973.
In order to put the young boy’s spirit to rest, she has to come to grips with her ability. But how can she solve a mystery that happened a decade before she was born? Especially when someone who knows Orin’s secrets wants to keep the truth buried—no matter the cost.
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