Skating Under the Wire: A Mystery (Rebecca Robbins Mysteries) Read Online Free Page A

open the phone, and a warm, sexy voice said, “Hey, I’m sorry, but I’m running a little late. Mrs. Pendley’s horse jumped a fence and hurt its leg.”
    Lionel was a large-animal vet. When he wasn’t tending to the four-legged critters around town, the two of us were working to define our current relationship status. Lionel was the love, commitment, and marriage kind of guy. I was still trying to figure out what kind of girl I was. Right now, I was a girl who’d forgotten she had scheduled a date for tonight. Oops.
    “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We can reschedule for another night.”
    “I should be done here in another hour. Would you mind waiting a little longer to eat dinner?”
    The idea of a real meal instead of a bowl of cereal had its lure, but I’d seen Lionel after one of his emergency animal visits. While nothing could detract from the appeal of his sculpted features and deep green eyes, dirt, blood, and manure were serious appetite suppressants.
    “Why don’t I meet you at your place?” I suggested. “That’ll give you a chance to clean up before we eat.” Plus, since one of last year’s Thanksgiving theft victims lived just down the road from Lionel, I’d have time to pay her a visit. Could I multitask or what?
    Plans made, I ate another handful of cereal, changed into jeans and a fitted blue sweater, and then rummaged through the end table in my bedroom for a pad of paper. In the movies, investigators wrote things down. Columbo, the Law & Order gang, Inspector Gadget—they all had pen and paper on hand when doing their work. While a spiral notepad wasn’t exactly a stamp of legitimacy, it made me feel like I was at least trying to look the part.
    Finishing the last handful of cereal, I brushed the crumbs from my sweater and shrugged into my white winter jacket. The coat was bulky and made me look like the Michelin Man. Perhaps not the look a person should go for when meeting the world’s sexiest vet for dinner, but I didn’t care. What the coat lacked in attractiveness it made up for in warmth. Anyone who’d lived through a Midwest winter would agree that warmth won out.
    Checking to make sure my gloves were in my pocket, I opened the front door and walked smack into the chest of Deputy Sean Holmes.
    The impact threw us both off balance. Sean staggered down two steps before regaining his footing and catching the back of my jacket as I started to sail past him. He hauled me onto the stair he was standing on, and for a moment we both looked down to the bottom of the steps, contemplating what might have happened.
    Sean recovered first. After taking my arm, he walked me up the three steps to my apartment, pulled me inside, and closed the door behind us. “You can’t stay out of trouble, can you?”
    “I didn’t expect you to be lurking behind my door.” We both knew he wasn’t referring to our close encounter of the almost painful kind, but I was hoping he’d believe I was shook up enough to avoid the other, less appealing topic.
    No such luck.
    “Your grandfather seems to think Julie Johnson hired you to catch the Thanksgiving Day thief.”
    My grandfather really needed a lesson on when to take his dentures out of his mouth. Without his dentures, Pop sounded like he was speaking Yiddish. I was faced with two choices: Tell the truth or lie. I opted for something in the middle. “Mrs. Johnson was at Danielle’s bridal shower. The thefts might have come up in conversation.”
    He crossed his arms and stared at me.
    The clock on the mantel ticked.
    Sweat dripped down my back. Outside the coat would be perfect. Inside it was stifling. I tried not to fidget under Sean’s unblinking gaze.
    I failed.
    Crap. “Mrs. Johnson really wants to know what happened to the things that were stolen. She asked me to talk to the other victims and see if I could uncover something new. Since I don’t know much about the thefts, she thought I’d have a fresh perspective.” I took a step back