Blame It on Texas Read Online Free

encourage one of these men to talk with her, she wasn’t above doing it.
    All she had to figure out was how much to tell the PIs. Sooner or later, she was going to have to trust someone. She just wasn’t sure who or when. Stepping inside the business, leaving the bright sunshine for a dark room, she allowed her eyes a second to adjust. And when they did, her gaze caught on the only piece of “furniture”—if you could call it that—in the room. She took a quick step back. A coffin, yup, an honest-to-goodness coffin with a raised lid, bracketed the back wall.
    “Hello?” she muttered in the dead silence. And it did feel dead. Like a funeral home felt. She’d been in too many already in her life. First her dad when she was sixteen, her best friend who’d been killed in a car accident their senior year of high school, and then her mom. Personally, she preferred to never visit another one.
    A noise, a slight moan, echoed from the room. Nowait… not from the room, from the casket. Shit! Her heart started racing. Her eyes shot back to the casket, and her hands jerked behind her, feeling for the doorknob. Then another snortlike noise came from the coffin. Suddenly, a big canine face popped up and rested its round head on the coffin’s wooden edge.
    Zoe chuckled. “A vampire dog, huh?”
    The dog stretched its neck—what little neck it had—and leaped out of the casket and came sniffing around her feet.
    “So, you’re the official door greeter?” She knelt to pet the English bulldog as it started sniffing her up and down. “You smell Lucky on me? Or is it the Slam Dunk, Three-Egg Dollar Ninety-Nine special you smell?” It took two or three shampoos every night to get the smell of bacon from her hair. After a couple of seconds of giving the animal attention, she stood up.
    “Hello?” she called again.
    And again no one answered. She walked down the hall. The dog followed, his paws clicking on the wood floor, but the lack of noise filtering into the building seemed louder than the clickity-clack of his paws. The first door to the left was a large office. Three unmanned desks filled the room. She stepped inside.
    A sign hanging from the front desk said, “If no one is here, press the button.”
    Zoe looked for the button. Various files and papers covered the desk. Was the button under those? Moving in, she looked around the desk. She lifted a big pile of files when a name on one of the folders caught her eye. Bradford.
    The same Bradford?
    Zoe reached for the file, then pulled her hand back as if it might bite. Then she reached for it again and pulled back just as quickly. Yanking her purse higher on her shoulder, she stood there while her conscience played tug-of-war with her desire for answers. She gave the room a good look-see for anyone who might tattle if she… took a small peek.
    Looking down at the dog, she asked, “You wouldn’t tell on me, would you?”
    When he shook his head back and forth, she laughed.
    Finally, her desire for answers won out. She flipped open the file. Less than a dozen sheets of paper resided there. The first one looked like a resume. She picked it up to read it, when the sound of a door opening filled the quiet office.
    The dog barked and took off running.
    She dropped the papers back on the desk and slapped the file closed. She stepped away from behind the desk, but in her haste, her purse knocked the folder off, and the file and all dozen or so papers scattered on the floor.
    “Damn.” She dropped to the floor on her hands and knees to gather the evidence of her wrongdoing. She heard footsteps moving closer, and her heart pounded.
    Snagging the folder and papers, she threw them on the desk and was about to stand up when she heard those footsteps enter the room, followed by the sounds of clicking paws.
    Friggin’ great.
    Now all she had to explain was why she was down on all fours behind someone’s desk. Her heart did another flip-flop when she remembered she was possibly