Baked Alaska by Josi S. Kilpack Read Free Book Online

liverwurst.
    There was less cloud cover tonight, leaving patches of starlit sky they both admired, though Sadie struggled to shake off the day, which had been full of difficult things. Finally, Pete asked her what was wrong, and she downloaded everything she’d been aching to tell him. He commiserated with the parts about Breanna, and then asked to see the picture of the woman with braids. Sadie reluctantly took it out of her shoulder bag, not sure if he was in support or not.
    After looking at it for several seconds in the muted light, Pete passed it back to Sadie.
    “Well?” Sadie asked.
    “Well, what?”
    “What do you think?”
    “I think you’re well on your way to driving yourself crazy, and if Shawn finds that photograph, it’s going to make things even harder between you two. Why did you buy it?”
    “I guess I just wanted to get a good look at her. Every other time I’ve seen her, she’s hurrying away from me.” Sadie let out a breath and put the photo back into her bag. Last night Pete had been holding her, but tonight, she and Pete were sitting side by side on deck chairs and the night felt heavy and cold. “How do I let this go?”
    “You just do,” Pete said, reaching over to rub her shoulder. “You focus on something else.”
    “Like my daughter who’s miserable about her wedding that I apparently don’t get to help with?”
    “At least she wants your help. She invited you into that situation; you’re not invited into Shawn’s.”
    Sadie couldn’t help but glare at Pete a little bit. “Is it a man thing to shrug things off like this? Or a cop thing?”
    Pete smiled without answering and moved onto her deck chair. Squeezing both of them into the relatively small space was tricky, but a little exciting too. They ended up face-to-face, arms wrapped around each other.
    “You could focus on us,” he whispered before kissing her gently on the lips. “We’re grown-ups with a future ahead of us as well.”
    “You might have a point,” Sadie said as her worries began to drain away.
    They stayed there until a group of teenaged girls coming up the stairs sent Pete back to his own chair, and then it was just too cold to enjoy the night—nevermind the giggling girls hanging over the railing and swooning over the boys getting out of one of the hot tubs below.
    With a look, they agreed to go and made their way down the stairs. Sadie was disappointed when the girls followed them down; she and Pete could have stayed up there if the girls hadn’t interrupted them. Still, it was cold. Cold enough that Sadie did a double take when she noticed that the passenger they’d passed earlier was still curled up on the deck chair.
    She elbowed Pete in the side before pointing toward the dark form. “That person was there when we went up,” she said. “It’s freezing.”
    Pete scowled and then nodded. “They probably overindulged at the bar. Stay here.”
    It was silly for Sadie not to go with him, but his cop instincts must have kicked in, and she wasn’t a fan of dealing with drunks anyway. The hot-tubbing boys and giggling girls left through the automatic sliding doors, leaving silence in their wake save for the bubbling hot tubs.
    “Drinking makes you even more susceptible to hypothermia, you know,” Sadie added as Pete moved away. “Alcohol lowers your internal temperatures.”
    Pete smiled at her over his shoulder and wound through the deck chairs while Sadie shifted her weight from one foot to another. He leaned down, shaking the person’s shoulder and talking softly enough that she couldn’t hear what he said. She watched as he paused, then seemed to pull back the blanket covering the person’s head.
    The increasing cold Sadie felt wasn’t from the weather. Something was wrong.
    She quickly joined Pete, and he looked up at her with an anxious expression on his face. “I can’t find a pulse.”
    “What?” Sadie stepped around him so she could get a better view, then gasped as she saw