Murder in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery Read Online Free Page B

self-conscious, eating the pie neatly, bite by bite, afraid that if they didn’t someone might think they were a pig.
    But Daniel was scarfing it down, like he was in love with every bite.
    Maybe it was because he was drunk, but I liked that he didn’t seem to care. He ate it the way he felt.
    Starved.
    I sat across from him, drinking a cup of pomegranate tea and waiting for the oven timer to go off so I could take the pies out and call it a night.
    I watched him silently, hardly able to believe that he was sitting there in front of me.
    He looked a little older, but not in a bad way. Just more mature. His beard had completely thrown me when I first saw him in the tavern earlier. But when I saw his eyes—those same light green eyes that he’d always had—I’d recognized him immediately. Well, almost immediately.
    But he still had yet to remember me. 
     “I thought the dog was a wolf,” Daniel said in between bites. “He was just there in the woods, staring at me.”
    “Really?” I said.
    He shrugged.
    “And I had nothing better to do, I guess. My gut told me he wanted me to follow him. And I ended up here.”
    “Yeah, he keeps showing up here at night lately.”
    “I don’t blame him,” Daniel said, smiling and finishing off the last giant forkful of pie. “When I saw the lights from the woods, I wondered if I hadn’t froze out there, and if I hadn’t just wandered into heaven.”
    I shook my head and tried to suppress a smile. It sounded like a line out of a bad novel, but he had said it with such sincerity, I just couldn’t laugh at it.
    “He’s a hard dog to catch,” I said. “He doesn’t seem to trust me quite yet.”
    “He’ll come around,” Daniel said. “Especially if you keep feeding him so well.”
    He looked up, his eyes lingered on me, then he cleared his throat and looked back down.
    “So how long have you been running this place?” he asked. “I don’t remember ever seeing it when I used to live here.”
    “About five years,” I said. “I moved back here with… well, about five years ago from Portland.”
    “Do you like what you do?” he asked.
    I smiled, looking around the quaint, cozy kitchen that held all my dreams.
    The place that had been my rock, my true source of strength, for the past two years. 
    “I don’t get as much sleep as I used to,” I said. “The hours are long. I’m here early in the morning and late at night. But at the end of the day, it’s all worth it. You know what I mean? All the bad stuff just melts away because I belong doing this.”
    He looked up and smiled like he understood what I was talking about.
    “Plus, you get to have drunk bums who show up on your doorstep in the middle of the night, scaring you half to death,” he said. “You probably don’t get that in your average 9 to 5 job.”
    I laughed.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I guess you could call it a perk. Homeless dogs and bums arriving at my doorstep in the middle of the night. Definitely didn’t get that at my advertising firm job in Portland.”
    “Is that where you’re from?” he asked. “Portland?”
    I hesitated. Thinking about whether I should tell him who I was. But then, I decided not to. He’d figure it out in his own good time. 
    “No. I’m not from Portland,” I said, clearing my throat. I went back over to the oven, checking the pies. The lattice on top was turning a nice golden brown, and the fruit filling was starting to bubble. They needed a couple more minutes and they’d be ready.
    I turned back around. He was looking at me with that same expression of drunken awe.
    “The smell is murder,” he said, shaking his head. “How do you not just sit here and eat pie all day long?”
    “Well, I won’t lie. I used to be a few pounds lighter,” I said, smiling.
    “Well, you look great to me,” he said.
    The comment filled me with a sort of vain happiness. I quickly shooed it away, though. He was just being nice. 
    I walked back over to the kitchen island