Dead Before The Wedding: A Carly Keene Cozy Mystery (Carly Keene Cozy Mysteries Book 1) by Ruby Blaylock Read Free Book Online

if you want, Carly, but I wouldn’t want to be within a mile of her when that conversation goes down.”
     
    Carly thought for a minute, then replied. “I guess you’re right. I just hope Mona knows what she’s getting when she says ‘I do’. He’s obviously not looking to change his ways by getting married.” Carly couldn’t understand how someone could claim to love a person, then cheat on them with anything that moved.
     
    The thought that Tucker couldn’t be more unlike his brother crossed her mind, and she blushed for even thinking about it. Why on earth should she care what Tucker’s dating habits were? After all, it wasn’t like she was going to be asking him out any time soon.
     
    Carly resumed her place on the stool behind the counter and picked up her phone, where Tucker’s contact information was still displayed. Then again , she thought, who knows? She was smiling slightly as she closed his contact details, and wondered vaguely what the more respectable Gaston twin was doing later that week.
     

Chapter 6
     
    The following week was pretty uneventful around Parker’s Mill. Shell and Carly dropped off Saturday’s leftover muffins for the church’s weekly coffee morning, where Mona’s wedding was mentioned, but not discussed in detail. Apparently the ladies at the church had a little more tact than the ladies at the bank, because come Monday morning, Tiffany was back, talking about how the bank employees had all seen Mona storming off down Main Street after her visit to Sweets & Eats.
     
    Tuesday and Wednesday brought a couple of photo shoots at the Senior Center. Carly loved doing these types of photo shoots because they were not only simple and straightforward, they were genuinely rewarding and fun. The Senior Center was the local meeting place for active senior citizens, and occasionally the city sprung for activities and trips for the local elderly residents. This week, Carly was taking fake “vacation” photos with a very unrealistic beach background and lots of silly props from the discount store.
     
    The photos would be free for the members of the Senior Center, but the Center had paid Carly a tidy sum to take, edit and process the photos. She had a place that she ordered her prints from over in Jackson, Mississippi, that always delivered great results. Carly suspected that the only reason she was asked to take the photos, and had been paid so well, was that her grandfather had been a regular at the center up until his death five years before. He’d been very beloved, and Carly had gone with him on more than one occasion as his ‘date’ for center functions.
     
    Carly had doted on her grandfather, and had been devastated when he’d passed away peacefully in his sleep. He was a real character, and a woman chaser, up until his last day on Earth. Carly remembered how he used to constantly try out cheesy pickup lines on the ladies who waited tables at Chow Time. Everyone in town had loved her grandfather, and it was sometimes hard to believe that he was gone.
     
    Thursday had been slow at Sweets & Eats, so Shell had spent most of the day working on that monstrosity of a wedding cake for Mona and Larry. Carly had admired the persistence that Shell had put in, spending hours online and finally tracking down the odd little wedding cake toppers that Mona had requested. Sure enough, she’d found them on eBay.
     
    The cake itself wasn’t so bad. Shell had managed to get three tiers, plus a tiny fourth tier about the size of three cupcakes, put together after all. Shell had confided that the top tier was, indeed, three cupcakes, but some clever frosting hid that fact and kept it all looking good. The bottom three tiers weren’t frosted yet, because the wedding was still over a week away, but Shell did a trial run with the stacking, and it looked pretty impressive.
     
    Carly was licking the frosting off one of the top-tier cupcakes (it was just a trial run, after all) when the doorbell