Sugar and Spite by G. A. McKevett Read Free Book Online Page B

with his Whopper or Big Mac, but she had seldom seen him show his liquor.
    But there was a first time for everything, and Savannah figured the night a guy watched his ex-wife die was as good a night as any to get stinking drunk. Excuses didn’t get much better than that.
    Besides, there were only a couple more hours of the night left. The green digital readout on her VCR said it was 4:25 a.m. . She figured she would get him soused, then drag him upstairs and throw him into her guest bed. He could sleep all day… as long as he woke up in time to generate a report for Lieutenant Jeffries.
    “Okay,” she said, “I’ll admit it. Polly wasn’t one of my favorite people. But then, I didn’t know her as well as you did. Apparently you saw something in her that wasn’t obvious to me.”
    Heaven knows what
, she added silently as she settled back in her easy chair and petted the ebony, green-eyed purring machine that was curled in her lap.
    Dirk tossed back the shot and grimaced as it went down the hatch. Then he leaned back on the sofa and propped his feet on the coffee table. Savannah had told him a thousand times to keep his shoes off her furniture. A thousand and one times, he had forgotten.
    “Polly could be sweet, when she wanted to be,” he said. “At least, she was in the beginning. She’d say, ‘Pretty please,’ and butter me up when she wanted something. And when I gave it to her, she acted all grateful, like I was some fantastic sort of hero who’d rescued her.”
    Savannah listened quietly, stroking Diamante, remembering something that her grandmother had told her once. Granny Reid had said, “It’s not so much the person we fall in love with… as much as it’s the way they make us feel about ourselves.”
    Perhaps that wasn’t such a grand and glorious commentary on the human heart, but the older Savannah got, the more she realized how true Gran’s words were.
    So, Polly had made Dirk feel like a knight in shining armor, rescuing a fair damsel who was perpetually in distress. Sometimes her dragons were real, other times imaginary, but they were always of her own making. A fact that seemed to elude Dirk.
    But the maid-in-trouble routine had worked all too well for Polly. She had never been without male company. Usually she had dangled several on a chain at once.
    Savannah tried to recall the last time she had felt a tug on her own chain. Ages. But then, she wasn’t in the habit of asking knights to wield their swords on her behalf. Maybe she should take some lessons from Polly on carefully cultivated helplessness.
    But then, defenseless Polly was lying in the morgue, next in line to be autopsied. So much for surrendering your personal power to avoid personal responsibility. If she hadn’t come over to Dirk’s to try to finagle him into bailing her out of some sort of problem, she would probably still be alive and irritating people.
    “Do you have any idea what she wanted from you?” Savannah asked, sipping her own hot chocolate, which, for once, wasn’t laced with Bailey’s or anything else alcoholic. One of them had to stay sober to negotiate the stairs later. And there was another reason for someone to keep a clear head… a reason she didn’t want to think too much about right then.
    “Well, she certainly wasn’t there to cozy up to me—that’s for sure,” Dirk said with a sigh as he poured another shot. “Whatever she wanted, it wasn’t to kiss and make up.”
    For the first time, Savannah realized that Dirk had actually hoped, at least briefly, that Polly’s appearance, Valentine rose in hand, might have indicated a desire to reconcile on her part. She also realized that he might have welcomed that. The revelation didn’t sit well with her.
    “If we could find out what sort of problem she had, we might know why somebody wanted to kill her,” Savannah said. It wasn’t the time to talk shop, but she couldn’t help herself. Her mental cogs were already whirring. If things went as