Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel by Alex A. King Read Free Book Online

No mention of the fact that I could guess. Grandma hadn’t shared her health status with me. No way was I going to share it with Melas.
    He lounged against the car. A hundred degrees and the man was in jeans—and he looked cool wearing them. Detective Nikos Melas was an impossible situation. We were attracted to each other, yeah, but he was a lawman and I was the offspring of a former hitman—amongst Dad’s many other talents—and the granddaughter of one of Greece’s most notorious women.
    He already had a bad habit of turning me on when I’d rather snipe at him. My body’s memory had perfect recall when it came to The Kiss he’d stamped on my mouth last week. Those stupid hormones of mine wanted a rematch.
    Well, they weren’t getting one. I was the one in control of my moving parts, and where I wanted to move was far away from Detective Melas—effective right now.
    Too bad he had a look on his face that said he wanted to converse, now that his color was returning to normal.
    Here it came—the bad boy grin. Followed by that move where his eyes slowly raked over my body, digging up all kinds of feelings I didn’t want, most of them in my underwear. I hadn’t seen him since the day after he’d been one of a four-man rescue team who’d saved my bacon from the Baptist.
    “I’ve been thinking about taking you out again,” he said.
    “We’re out right now.”
    “Are you snippy because I haven’t called?”
    He wished. “Why would I? Our date wasn’t a date. It was business.”
    He blew out a long stream of hot air. “Maybe I wanted it to be a date.”
    “Did you?”
    “It’s complicated.”
    You’re telling me . “It’s complicated because you’re making it complicated. All you have to do is quit bringing it up and—voila! —uncomplicated.”
    “That’s not how it works.”
    “Denial solves a lot of problems.” I thought about it. “Maybe not solves , but denial definitely has its place.”
    He changed the subject. “How are you?”
    “So hot and sweaty that either my sweat glands shut down or the heat is sucking it up faster than I can make it.”
    “I meant to check on you, see how you were doing after the Baptist thing.”
    “You didn’t.”
    “But I wanted to.”
    A cold spider clambered up my spine. The former cop was dead but the horror lived on. Fear was like a zombie: reanimate that sucker and it would stump around after you forever, moaning for its share of your brain.
    “I’m fine,” I said. Was I fine? Not really. More like fine-ish. Except for the part where a serial killer almost snuffed my lights out, where my family was the mob, and where my father was still missing and maybe dead.
    “I have to go,” I said. “I have a thing.”
    “I know. I saw it. I’m coming with you.”
    “No, you’re not.”
    “It’s evidence of a crime.”
    “For all you know it fell off.” He looked at me so pointedly he could have poked out my eye. “Or it could be from one of those medical corpses.”
    “Which would make it stolen property.”
    “You suck, Melas.”
    He grinned. It was the slow, lazy expression of a man who had me where he wanted me. “Not even once, honey.”
    I jumped back into my yellow car, revved the engine, cranked the radio’s volume button until the speakers blew my hair back. Then Stavros and I blasted back toward Mount Pelion with Melas on our tail.
    By the time we reached the compound, and I killed the engine outside the garage, I’d already come up with a dozen different identities for the man with the missing frank. He was a medical corpse, like I suggested to Melas. Or some poor homeless guy who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was the sender’s enemy—or a friend who really screwed up. The sender had delivered a message, but where the heck was I going to find an interpreter, and what did any of this have to do with Dad? Without Grandma around I’d have to figure out who sent the box, then go to the source itself.
    A big