4 Malice in Christmas River Read Online Free Page A

for dinner.
    I thanked her again for her help with my makeup and watched as she left through the kitchen’s back door.
    I sighed.
    It made me sad seeing Kara unhappy like this.
    Late summer sometimes made for this kind of restlessness. Made you tire of the monotony of small town living. Made you think about doing wild, outlandish things.
    Hell, half the town suffered from that kind of thing this time of year. People did crazy things when the smoke from the wildfires lingered in the air too long, the way it had these past few months. People backed their cars into trees. They fell in love with people they normally never would have and left their significant others. They’d leave burners on by accident and before they knew it, their kitchen would be up in flames.
    But it was all temporary. Husbands would show up with flowers for their scorned wives, begging for forgiveness. Cars would get fixed, and kitchens would get renovated. Just as soon as the cooler temperatures returned and the wildfire season ended.
    But I could see in Kara’s face that it was more than just a late summer malaise she was suffering from.
    And what was worse was that I didn’t know what I could do to help.
     
     

 
    Chapter 3
     
    I rolled down the window and let the smoky night air run its fingers through my hair.
    It was unusually warm for a September evening in Christmas River. Normally, even on the hottest of days, the nights were cool in the Central Oregon Cascades. But the smoke from the wildfires in nearby Bridger Valley had trapped all the heat from the day, the way it had for most of the summer. The air felt stagnant and warm, like the inside of a chimney right after the fire’s last embers die out.
    Maybe it was the unpleasant atmosphere or how hard I’d been working the past few months, but this summer had felt like the longest one I’d ever known. And not in a good way.
    I couldn’t wait to get to the cool trade winds of Maui next week.  
    I glanced up at my face in the mirror. Some of the blush was still clinging to my cheeks, and I wondered if I didn’t look like a Barbie doll tossed in the oven: all melted and droopy.
    Daniel was going to get a kick out of this look I had going.
    I just hoped that he was home, and that he didn’t have to pull another long shift tonight.
    But I should have known better than to complain about Daniel’s long hours. That’s what you get when you marry a sheriff.
    I sighed happily, thinking about our lives.
    We’d been married for just over eight months now. And in some ways, it felt like a lot had changed in that time. I sold my house and moved into the beautiful new one Daniel had bought us on Sugar Pine Road. For the first time, we were living together. And while that inevitably brought up its share of issues, overall, being Mrs. Daniel Brightman had been a slice of pure heaven.
    It felt like I was falling more in love with Daniel each day, if that was even possible. Like the more I found out about him, the more I realized just how lucky I had been that he’d wandered into my shop that cold and snowy night two and a half years ago.   
    The only thing was that it sometimes felt like I didn’t see him as much as I wanted to. Sometimes he wouldn’t get home until 8 or 9 at night. And given my early hours at the pie shop, I was practically dead to the world by then.
    Other times when he was at home, his mind would be elsewhere. He was always on call, always ready to drive out to an incident if need be. 
    We’d squeeze in lunches here and there during the day, but summer had been rough on the Sheriff’s Office. Lots of vandals and hikers needing help in the area kept Daniel busy pretty much all the time.
    But I’d been busy too, what with the pie shop being as popular as it was with the tourists and the locals. And once the weather cooled off and we got to autumn, I knew that we’d both have more time to spend together.
    Plus, we had a little thing called a honeymoon we were going on next