Dead Eye (A Tiger's Eye Mystery Book 1) by Alyssa Day Read Free Book Online

I was a champion distracter. It had been my only defense during my half-wild high school years.
    “Aunt Ruby home? I don’t see her car.”
    “She went to town to get doughnuts. Figured you’d be needing some sugar, after yesterday.” He studied me with a sober expression in his light blue eyes. “Are you okay, Tess?”
    It was surprising that it had taken him this long to ask. He was ferociously protective of me. They both were. They’d never been able to have kids of their own, so they’d focused all that frustrated parenting on me. I realized how very lucky I was. Once in a great while, however, I wished there were someone else to share the over-protection load.
    “Yes. I’m fine. Last night was…bad. I don’t know how else to put it. It was just bad. Chantal—I didn’t know her well, but I knew her to say hi to, and I just saw her a few days ago, and—” I broke off helplessly, shaking my head. “I just don’t understand any of it. Who would shoot her? Why would they dump her at the shop? What does it have to do with Jeremiah, if anything?”
    He led the way up the steps to the porch and sat down on the old swing, leaving room for me. I settled in next to him, smiling a little at the memory of the many heart-to-heart talks we’d had in this same swing over the tumultuous years of my childhood. I’d had an orphaned child’s anger and fear of abandonment, and Aunt Ruby had been too emotional for us to be able to connect when I was overwhelmed with so many feelings. She and I had bounced off each other, like atoms in some crazy sssscience experiment my not-a-snake-shifter chemistry teacher had droned on about. But Mike Callahan had a big, warm, heart and an engineer’s soul—logical and steady—and he’d always been the one to talk me back to an even keel after I’d made a side trip to Crazy Hormonal Town.
    “When were you planning to tell me Jack Shepherd was back in town?” His voice was mild, but I could tell he wasn’t pleased. Once we’d learned that Jack was a tiger shifter, I was fascinated, but Uncle Mike had kept me far away from him. Not that we’d had much interaction, since Jack was six years older than me, but even at barbecues and town socials, Uncle Mike managed to make sure I was in the part of the gathering that didn’t overlap wherever Jack was.
    I studied his tanned face. When had so much white sneaked into his hair? When I looked at him, I still saw the tall, strong man who’d given me piggyback rides across the field and who’d patiently answered the seven thousand questions that a curious little girl could ask in a day. He was still tall and still strong, but the lines in his face had deepened, and he looked like the man approaching seventy that he was.
    “He just got here. Anyway, what do you have against him? He was never one of the town troublemakers.” He’d gone off and become a war hero overseas, and then he’d come home and joined the rebels.
    Uncle Mike laughed. “I don’t have anything against Jack. He was a fine young man, if a little wild after he learned he was a shapeshifter. No, it was you I worried about. You were young and starry-eyed, and something as exotic as a shapeshifting tiger would have struck you as unimaginably romantic. Better that I kept you two apart.”
    I pushed against the floor with one foot, setting the swing into gentle motion. “You won’t be able to keep us apart any longer. You know that Jeremiah left the pawnshop to both of us.”
    “The damn fool. I wonder what he was up to with that. Well, don’t go touching Jack, at least. A man like that, he might have a very violent death in front of him, and you know how hard it is on you to see the bad ones.”
    I took a deep breath. “Too late.”
    “ What? Tess, you know better. If—”
    “Speak of the devil, er, tiger,” I said quickly, pointing. “Here he comes, with Aunt Ruby.”
    Aunt Ruby parked her Chevy Malibu (her rebellion against Uncle Mike’s obsession with all