4 Malice in Christmas River

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4 Malice in Christmas River Page 20

by Meg Muldoon


  Chapter 71

  It was mid-October now, and I had just finished teaching my pie baking class how to make a Gingersnap Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie.

  Thanks to Erik Andersen’s recent glowing article about me and the pie shop, the class had been filled to the brim with ladies, and even a few gentleman. I’d even had to put a few folks on a waiting list.

  And there was no one more pleased than me to see that Jo Pugmire had decided to give my pie baking class a second chance. She, of course, was nothing short of herself throughout the session. Wearing leopard print, asking too many questions, and talking incessantly about the way her mother had done things. But I didn’t mind so much this time. I knew she didn’t mean anything by it. It was just Jo being Jo.

  And thankfully, there was no pie-slinging this class.

  At the end of the session, she came up to me, declaring that the Gingersnap Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie was the best thing she’d ever tasted this side of her mother’s cooking, and that she was going to make it for Harry this weekend. I took that as the highest possible compliment from Jo Pugmire.

  It was growing dark by the time I started driving home. Winter had come early this year to the high elevations, and the mountains in the distance had a fresh coat of snow on them. The weather down in Christmas River wasn’t quite as severe, but there was a distinct chill in the air that promised frost, and more to come soon.

  We had finally escaped the brutal smoke and heat of summer for good, and I was loving the autumn weather. The cozy sweaters, the apple cider, the pumpkins, the rich fall pies…

  It was what I’d been dreaming about for months.

  On my way home, I was thinking about what I was going to make for dinner that night. I was tired and fresh out of ideas. There wasn’t much in the pantry, if I remembered right, which meant I’d have to do some scrounging around once I got home.

  I pulled up into the driveway just as the sky was turning a deep shade of autumn plum. I grabbed my purse, got out, and started walking up the porch steps.

  I probably should have stopped at the store on the way home, I thought, but I just hadn’t had it in me. Going to a store in a town this small was like going to church on Sunday: you inevitably bumped into at least half a dozen people you knew, and it turned into a big social event. And I was too tired at the moment for small talk about the weather.

  I fished the house keys out of my pocket, and opened the front door.

  Something simple, I reasoned. Pasta or a couple of steaks from the freezer. Nothing too fancy. I was far too tired to make anything more than—

  A blast of warm air hit me as I stepped inside the house. It was followed by the gentle rhythms of a ukulele floating from the kitchen stereo.

  The pleasant aromas of grilled meat, fresh lime, and toasted coconut hit my nose.

  I looked around the room in awe.

  Colorful, pineapple-shaped lights were strung around the dining room. The table was decorated with coconuts and candles and flowers.

  My purse slid off my arm and hit the floor. Huckleberry came up, fighting for my attention, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from the scene in front of me.

  Daniel was standing over by the stove, humming along to the stereo. He hadn’t heard me yet, and I just stood there for a moment, staring at my husband, enjoying the spectacle.

  “What’s going on?” I finally said.

  He turned around and looked at me, that million-dollar smile of his lighting up his face.

  He turned a knob on the stove and then came out from the kitchen. He still had the cast on his leg, but he was able to walk around on it now without crutches.

  He had a black collared shirt on that made him look dapper and handsome. I noticed he was wearing a bolo tie – something I hadn’t seen him wear since our wedding. His hair was freshly trimmed, and the beard that he’d been growing out since the accident was gone, revealing his smooth jawline.

  He grabbed me, wrapped me up in his arms and planted a long, slow, swoon-worthy kiss on my lips that instantly made my knees weak and my heart beat like the wings of a moth trapped inside of a glass jar.

  He pulled away after a moment and grinned.

  He’d taken my breath clear away.

  “Welcome to Dan-O’s Luau. Tonight we have a menu that’s going to knock your flip flops off. We’ve got Mai Tai’s, pineapple skewers, sweet and sour pork with fresh mango salsa, grilled coconut with salt and lime juice, and for desert, well, let’s just say there’s a first time for everything.”

  He pulled a fresh hibiscus flower from his pocket, one that he must have plucked from one of our tropical house plants, and then slid it behind my ear.

  I looked around the room in disbelief again.

  “You’ve done all of this?” I said.

  “Well, I just thought that since we can’t go to Hawaii tonight, why not bring Hawaii here?”

  I shook my head.

  “Daniel, this is just…”

  “And speaking of our honeymoon,” he said, fishing something out of his back pocket. “Here. Open this.”

  He handed me an envelope. I looked up at him and then back at it.

  It couldn’t be.

  I ripped it open.

  There were two tickets inside.

  Two Hawaiian Air tickets.Roundtrip to Maui. The flight left in early November.

  “But…” I stammered. “I thought you couldn’t get any more time off until next year. How can we go in November if you’re—”

  “It’s not paid time off,” he said. “But hell. I want to give you your trip, Cin. You deserve it.”

  He laced his fingers through mine.

  “Some things are more important than money.” He looked deeply into my eyes. “That’s uh, that’s something I’ve figured out these last few weeks.

  I bit my bottom lip.

  He was so right.

  It was so easy to get caught up in the day to day grind. In the little dramas of work, in the trips to the grocery store, in the hours of mindless vegging in front of the television. You could live your life that way, always caught up in the next thing. Always thinking of tomorrow, of your future, of the next paycheck. Never stopping to appreciate the moment you had now. Never stopping to appreciate the friends and family and love and laughter that existed in every single day of your life.

  Life could just pass you by like that, without you really noticing the good. And it was a shame if it did.

  It was a sin, if you let it go like that.

  I hadn’t always seen that either.

  But looking up into Daniel’s eyes, I realized that there was nothing more important than this moment. Than the here and now. Than him and me, together, like this. Right now.

  My life was full and rich and beautiful.

  I had everything and everyone I ever wanted right at my fingertips.

  I kissed Daniel passionately as this newfound understanding rushed through me.

  “Mahalo,” I said.

  Chapter 72

  The sky was falling.

  Hell had turned to ice.

  The moon had up and floated away.

  I stared down at the slice on my plate, and then looked back up at him.

  “This is… this is…”

  My pool of adjectives had dried up completely.

  Daniel placed his jacket over my shoulders and took a seat next to me out on the deck. He smiled at me with eager anticipation.

  “Well? Are you gonna just stare at it all night? Or are you gonna take a bite?”

  “I’m just... I’m still in shock that you did this.”

  “Well, don’t say anything yet. It could be the worst-tasting thing this side of the Christmas River.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Daniel had baked me a pie.

  A Coconut Chocolate Cream Pie, at that.

  I grabbed the fork and dug in. I brought a hunk up to my mouth and closed my eyes, letting the flavors take over.

  Sweet and creamy custard melded with the rich and roasted
flavors of toasted coconut and luxuriously smooth chocolate. A soft chocolate cookie bottom finished it off. I let the flavors swirl around in my mouth, dancing on my tongue. A moment later, I felt an uncontrollable happiness spreading through my body.

  I could taste another ingredient in this pie too.

  A rare, hard-to-find ingredient that pushed its way to the foreground.

  Love. And a lot of it.

  “What do you think?” he said, finally, after I’d been silent for several more heavenly bites.

  I didn’t answer. I finished the entire slice without saying so much as a word.

  I could feel his energy start to dim a little bit, thinking that my silence was an answer in itself.

  I put down my fork and plate.

  “Daniel Brightman,” I finally said, taking time to enunciate each syllable. “That’s the best damn pie I’ve ever had.”

  His face lit up brighter than the North Star on a cold and dark winter’s night.

  “You mean it?” he said. “You’re not just saying that?”

  “That’s my professional assessment,” I said. “And should you ever need a job when this Sheriff’s thing runs its course, the door to my pie shop kitchen is always open.”

  He laughed.

  “You know, I could say the same thing to you,” he said. “You’d make a pretty decent cop. Maybe we both missed our callings.”

  I laughed too and reached for his hand.

  After that bad fight we’d had, we’d had a long, long talk. A good talk. We made several agreements. He wouldn’t ever keep anything that was bothering him from me. And I would tell him if I ever had a hunch about something, instead of going off and trying to solve it myself.

  And in the end, I knew that our marriage was that much stronger for what had happened.

  I now knew that we could face anything, so long as we had each other to hold onto.

  We sat there for a little while, enjoying the cool, autumn night air, enjoying the crisp colors of the sunset while listening to the music drifting from the stereo inside. Bobby Darin’s Beyond the Sea came on, and Daniel stood up.

  “Dance with me, Cin?”

  He reached a hand out to me. I looked up and smiled.

  I shook his jacket off and placed my hand in his. He pulled me to my feet, and clutched me tightly.

  It wasn’t much of a dance, what with his cast sticking out the way it did.

  But Daniel Brightman was the only one on earth I wanted to dance with. The only one I’d ever want to dance with.

  I was more in love with him than ever.

  “You know, I never needed Hawaii,” I whispered into his ear.

  He pulled away just far enough so he could look at me.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  I held onto him tightly.

  “I think you know.”

  I stood on my tiptoes, kissing him softly and tenderly. Bobby sang about golden sands and seashores and ships. And it was as if we were already in Hawaii and on our honeymoon.

  Life just didn’t get any better than this.

  The End

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  Look for the Christmas River Thanksgiving Novella, Roasted in Christmas River, in November of 2014.

  Look for the fifth full-length installment of the Christmas River series, Mischief in Christmas River, in December of 2014.

  About the Author

  Meg Muldoon writes cozy fiction mysteries from her home in central Oregon. She enjoys bourbon bread pudding, red cowboy boots, and craft glue guns.

  She lives with an Australian cattle dog named Huckleberry.

  For more about Meg and her upcoming books, visit her blog at http://megmuldoon.blogspot.com/

  Continue reading for a sample of Meg Muldoon’s Burned in Broken Hearts Junction: A Cozy Matchmaker Mystery

  Burned in Broken Hearts Junction

  A Cozy Matchmaker Mystery

  by

  Meg Muldoon

  Published by Vacant Lot Publishing

  Copyright 2014© by Meg Muldoon

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance whatsoever to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  Most people don’t want to know who their soulmate is.

  They pretend like they do. Like if they just knew who their true love was, where they were, and how to find them, all of their problems would just disappear like smoke in the wind. Like all the ugly parts of their life would just fade away into the background and be replaced by red roses and fairy dust and long walks on the beach just as soon as the one finally showed up.

  But it doesn’t work out that way. Doesn’t even come close.

  Believe me. I would know.

  Because your soulmate isn’t the dashing prince who’s strong and intelligent and tender and kind, and who also happens to be drop dead gorgeous with a fat bank account. It isn’t the beautiful princess with a heart of gold, a dynamite sense of humor, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the NFL that puts your guy friends to shame.

  No. Those kinds of soulmates don’t exist. Because those kinds of people don’t exist.

  Your true love is the short man in the corner with Sideshow Bob hair, sweat stains under his armpits, and a laugh that sounds like cat nails on a chalkboard, nursing one too many tequilas and smoking like a chimney. Or he’s the guy with jock good-looks and a sly smile who’s in and out of jail as much as he’s in and out of seedy dive bars.

  She’s the tall pretty blonde who seems to have the world on a string, but spends her nights sneaking sips of vodka in the bathroom, wondering why her father never loved her. Or the homely-looking woman with smeared lipstick and a nervous smile, chewing her nails down to the wick while watching the news on the bar TV, so sure that the world’s going to come to an end tomorrow morning.

  That’s what prince and princess charming really look like for most of us: problematic, unappealing, and mostly damaged beyond repair.

  They’re just people. Like you and me. And the truth is, most of us would rather not know who fate has in store for us. We’d rather just stumble around in the dark, throwing our line in for all the wrong fish in the ocean, pretending like we’re looking for the “right” one.

  Take my best friend, Beth Lynn, for example.

  I’d been telling Beth Lynn Baker for weeks now that she ought to be looking for a stocky lawyer-type with caterpillar eyebrows, thick bottle-top glasses and frizzy black hair, like the man I’d seen in my vision. But here she was, on another Saturday night at The Stupid Cupid Saloon, with a man far too young for her and far too impossibly good-looking to match the description of her soulmate.

  But then again, I didn’t know what else I should have expected from Beth Lynn.

  A former queen of the Broken Hearts Junction Rodeo, Beth Lynn still dressed and curled her hair the way she did when she was 17, and had more trouble than most letting go of her preconceived notions of what her soulmate should look like.

  She sidled up to the bar, holding onto her young arm candy like if she loosened her grip, he might just float away like a balloon.

  “A Cupid’s Slingshot for me,” she said, leaning over the bar, revealing a little too much cleavage as the neckline of her tight-fitting sweater took a
plunge.

  She was ordering the drink with her name on it, all right. Stupid was how she was acting tonight. Stupid had been the way she’d been acting for weeks now.

  Her guy’s eyes drifted down where she had wanted them to go, but when he saw that I was looking at him, waiting patiently on his drink order, his cheeks turned bright red, just like a little kid’s.

  “Uh, I’ll take one of those, too,” he said quietly, looking away quickly.

  I grabbed two glasses and the lowest shelf whiskey, combining the spirit with cherry juice, a splash of lime juice, and some honey simple syrup in a shaker. I divided the contents out into the glasses, topped them off with a dash of bitters, and in a few seconds, both Beth Lynn and her boy toy had the house specialty cocktail sitting in front of them on the bar.

  If it were up to me, I’d have used a nice mid-level whiskey. But Dale was being a stickler lately about saving money at the saloon, which translated into charging customers more and slumming when it came to the liquor.

  “Thanks, Bitters,” Beth Lynn said to me, sipping her drink and making a sour face, which went a ways toward highlighting those late-30s-almost-40s wrinkles that had started to settle in at the edges of her eyes and mouth.

  “Y’all here for the show tonight?” I asked going back to my station where I’d been chopping up lemons and limes.

  “We’ll see how the evening pans out,” Beth Lynn said, looking starry-eyed at the kid next to her.

  Jeez. It didn’t seem like such a stretch to believe that he was young enough to be her son.

  Beth Lynn had sunken to new depths of cougarism with this catch.

  I thought about saying something, but bit my lip. The last thing anybody needed from a bartender was a helping of judgment, let alone from a best friend. No matter how much Beth Lynn might have deserved a reality check.

  And besides, I didn’t interfere anymore. After nearly two decades of matchmaking, I’d made a pact to stop meddling with other people’s love lives. I’d helped enough people in my time. And now, I just wanted to focus on getting my own life together. Making something of myself instead of spending all of my time making others happy.

 

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