Valentine's Day Is Killing Me Read Online Free Page A

About.”
    Whew! Something to focus on besides Scott’s nipples. “That’s ‘Aboot’,” she corrected the lady detective, whose name, she had since learned, was Hobbes.
    “You’re kidding.”
    “No.”
    “Okay.”
    “Aw,” Scott said, rubbing his wrists where the cuffs had recently been removed. “I think it’s cute.”
    “Shut your nipples, Scott.”
    “What?”
    “Mouth. Shut your mouth.” Oh, God, I didn’t just say that, did I? “So, Detective Hobbes, you were saying—back here tomorrow afternoon?”
    “Yes. And you were telling him to shut his—”
    “Never mind. He’ll be here. Guaranteed.”
    “Yes, I know,” Hobbes said cheerfully, scooping up the ream of paperwork Julie Kay had just signed. “It’s not like we can’t track you down.”
    “So that’s it? I can really leave?”
    “As I said earlier, we don’t have enough to hold you overnight. But we’ll be chatting with you again tomorrow.” Yes, the lady was weirdly cheerful for a murder cop. Maybe it came from being a redhead? “And between now and then we’ll be conducting a number of interviews.”
    “You’re thinking, if I have a super-secret motive, you’ll find it.”
    The smile slipped off Hobbes’s face. “Yes. That’s what I’m thinking.”
    There was an awkward silence, and then Julie Kay tentatively touched Scott’s bare shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go.”
     
     
     
    “So, should I get a cab or do you mind giving me a lift back to my—”
    “I promised your lawyer and the cops that I’d vouch for you showing up tomorrow.”
    “Great. So—”
    “So, you’re staying at my place.”
    “We are in lurrrrrrrv!” he said delightedly.
    “Shut up.”
    “Seriously, Julie Kay, thanks. You’re a girl in a million.”
    “I haven’t been a girl in twenty years, and shut up.”
    “I mean, most girls would have fled screaming into the night, not gone to the jail with me and got me released and promised to haul me back the next day.”
    “Most girls are smarter than me.”
    “Not hardly.”
    “Well, thanks, but there’s got to be an explanation.” Besides his yummy nipples. “I think I have a fever,” she muttered, unlocking her car. Then, “Aren’t you freezing? You look…uh, cold.”
    “Well, I am, a little. But it seemed kind of lame to complain. What’s being cold compared to being dead?”
    She rummaged around in her backseat and found another cardigan. He shrugged into it without complaint. It wouldn’t button—he was too broad—so he just held it as closed as he could.
    “Home, Jeeves,” he mock-ordered, and she almost shuddered. She really had lost her mind. How was she ever going to explain all of this?
    “You just better not be guilty, you perky-nippled son of a bitch.”
    “Have no fear. Drive on.”

Chapter Nine
     
     
    “Well, this is it.” She tossed her keys on the kitchen counter. “Home sweet hell.”
    “It’s nice,” he commented, glancing around the small house she rented from her brother-in-law. “I used to live in Inver, back when I was a student at the U.”
    “Yeah, what, six weeks ago?”
    “Oh, you’re hilarious.”
    “I hate apartments. I always feel like a bee in a hive. So when my brother-in-law moved into a bigger place, he let me rent this one. It’s worked out for everyone.”
    “Mmm.” He was prowling around the living room and dining area like a big, brunet panther. “I have an apartment, and I know what you mean. But I’m almost never there.”
    “Where are you?”
    “Work, usually. That’s why I was really glad when you decided to go out with me. I mean, I have no social life.”
    “But you’re so…” Gorgeous. Delicious. Fabulous. Tall. “…smart.”
    He shrugged. “I was always the tallest kid in my class, and the skinniest. But I was bad at sports. So who’d want to go out with a big gork like me?”
    Oh, I dunno, anyone with half a brain?
    “Uh, let me see if I can find something better than my old cardigan.” She turned