Mission: Irresistible by Lori Wilde Read Free Book Online Page A

crowd inhaled a collective gasp of surprise. She could feel a hundred pair of staring eyes.
    “Oh, no,” Cassie denied. “You’re wrong. That’s not what happened at all.”
    She had been quite mistaken. Things could get worse. A lot worse.
    “Detain her,” Phyllis barked to the security guard, “while I alert the police.”
    The brawny security guard moved to firmly take hold of Cassie’s arm.
    “What a minute,” Harrison blurted, nudging aside the guests until he was standing beside them. “Phyllis, obviously you didn’t get the memo.”
    The curator looked puzzled. “Er, what memo?”
    Cassie gaped at him, totally confused. What was he talking about? What was going on? Why was he trying to help? The guy hated her. She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.
    Harrison sent her a look that said,
Just go along with me on this.
    As a rule, she wasn’t a liar. She did not prevaricate without a darned fine reason. And she wouldn’t allow someone to step in and take the blame for her. Especially not someone like Standoffish, who wasn’t even pleasant to her under normal circumstances.
    “Phyllis, I don’t know what memo he’s talking—,” she started to say, but then Harrison gently but firmly trod on her toe.
    Shut up
, his chocolate eyes insisted.
    Hey, hey, hey!
    Purposefully, she jerked her foot out from under his brown tasseled loafer. She couldn’t believe he was behaving so out of character. What was up?
    “What Cassie means is that she doesn’t understand why you didn’t receive your memo,” he said, muscling in and interrupting her in midsentence. “She sent it four days ago, after we cemented the plans.”
    “Clyde, did you get their memo?” The curator glanced over at her executive assistant, a pie-faced balding man in his early fifties.
    Clyde Petalonus was dressed as George of the Jungle in a cheetah-spotted loincloth with artificial kudzu vines draped around his neck. Poor Clyde didn’t really have the figure for the ensemble. Cassie presumed he’d either gotten his Brendan Fraser movies mixed up, or his sense of geography was so terrible he actually thought there were jungles in Egypt.
    “Sure thing. I got the memo,” Clyde lied.
    His reply took Cassie by surprise.
    Why was Clyde lying? She knew he liked her and that he really disliked Phyllis. The curator had the annoying habit of sending him on “essential” errands the minute the man sat down for a meal in the employees’ lounge. And the sneaky woman would always wait until Clyde had a cherry Pepsi poured over ice and his sandwich unwrapped or his frozen Hungry Man zapped in the microwave before she sprang the urgent assignment on him. But that wasn’t explanation enough for him to risk his job over her.
    She looked at him, and he gave her a quick smile that said,
Don’t worry, I’ll cover for you.
But she was worried. Why would he cover for her?
    Maybe he wasn’t covering for her. Maybe he was lying to protect himself. He was in charge of overseeing the crew that had set up the lighting for the exhibit. Maybe he was afraid Phyllis would accuse him of some culpability in the crime when she got done chewing out Cassie.
    She might get fired, she might even get accused of stealing the amulet, but she knew she was innocent. Whatever Clyde’s and Harrison’s motives might be, she simply could not allow them to prevaricate on her account. She’d done nothing wrong. Phyllis couldn’t pin a thing on her.
    Could she?
    “What memo?!” Phyllis’s voice jumped an octave, and the tip of her nose turned blotchy red. “What are you talking about? What did this memo say?”
    “Interactive murder mystery theater,” Harrison supplied. The tone of his voice was calm and steady, but Cassie caught the jerk of a subtle tic at his right eyelid. He was nervous.
    A general titter of delight undulated throughout the gathered crowd.
    “What a marvelous idea,” murmured Lashaundra Johnson, a reporter for the Arts and Entertainment section of