Up In Smoke: Spirit of the Soul Wine Shop Mystery (A Rysen Morris Mystery Book 3) Read Online Free

“First, you have to have a background check done by the FBI.  I’m assuming you don’t have any major crimes or felonies in your background, right?”
    “No, of course not,” Rysen said immediately.  The worst thing she’d ever done was when her car had been towed for unpaid parking tickets.  Her ex-boyfriend’s parking tickets, for that matter.
    Jerk.
    “Good,” Brandon said. He had this little smile curling up the corners of his mouth, and Rysen couldn’t help but feel the way she did.  “There’s more.  You can get your PI license if you pass the background check, and if you have at least three years of certified and compensated experience, minimum of two thousand hours each year.”
    She blinked and tried to make heads or tails of what he’d just said.  “Huh?  What does that mean?”
    “It means, if you want to be a PI, you can work with me for three years.  You’d have to put in about six hours a day, on average, less if we work overtime on the other days.”
    “Wait.  What?”
    Christina slapped her shoulder in a way that Rysen only ever let her sister get away with.  “He’s saying you’d be working with him for the next three years doing investigations, and then you’d have a license to work on your own.”
    Oh.
    Wow.
    She didn’t know what to say.  That was really, really something she wanted to do.  When she’d left Cambria years ago, when she was young, it was with the dream of starting her own design company.  When that had fallen through she’d been completely lost.  No direction, no idea what the future would hold.  She’d had to come crawling back here to her hometown.  In a weird way that had been where her interest in doing investigative work had started.  If she hadn’t been here to help Christina with her troubles, she never would have found out how good she was at that sort of thing.  Now, Brandon was telling her that she could become a PI, if she wanted to.  A real private investigator.  He made it sound so simple.
    The only thing standing in her way was Josh.
    Knowing what he’d say to her when she brought this up left a sour taste in her mouth.  She frowned, pushing her coffee cup away.  It wasn’t as simple as Brandon made it sound, after all.
    “Let me think about it,” she said to him. 
    What she wanted to say to him was yes, oh hell yes.  But she couldn’t just commit to something like that without at least talking to Josh about it first.  They were on shaky ground with their relationship as it was.  They’d gotten back together after Brandon had left Cambria.  Things had started to click with them again.  Now Brandon was back, and she knew Josh wouldn’t be happy about it.
    It was a good thing he was working a double at the hospital last night and today.  It gave her a little time to think of how she was going to explain Brandon being back.
    “If it’s a question of money,” he said to her, “I’ll be paying you.  It’s one of the rules.  The work you do has to be compensated.  You have to get paid for it.  I’m not rich, you understand, but I get by on the work I do.  Enough to take on an assistant.”
    “Thank you.”  It sounded so inadequate.  He was willing to take her on as an apprentice, partner, whatever, just to give her a start in a profession she practically had her heart set on now, and all she could say was thank you?  “Can I let you know tomorrow?”
    He shrugged and picked up his drink again.  “Yeah, sure.  No worries.  In the meantime I’ll get to work on my end and see what I can figure out about this fire.”
    “Uh, Brandon.”  Christina hadn’t touched her coffee.  She didn’t touch it now, either.  “Look, everything I had was tied up in my shop.  I can’t really afford to pay you to look into this for me.  Not yet, at least.”
    He lifted his cup in her direction before tipping his head back and draining the rest of it.  “Don’t give it a second thought.  I’m here, and I’m