Truth & Lies: A Queen City Justice Novel by Elizabeth Bemis Read Free Book Online Page A

she would be considering herself very, very lucky about now. He was six feet five inches, well over two hundred pounds, with very short black hair and dark, almost black eyes. His complexion spoke of time out in the sun and a likely smattering of different races and ethnicities, though she couldn’t put her finger on any one in particular.
    His body wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes either. Khaki cargo pants hung low on trim hips. His shoulders were about a mile wide, and his snug, black, long-sleeved T-shirt showed off impressive muscles. The hand propped at eye level on the doorframe boasted large, long fingers, with neatly trimmed square nails and just the barest dusting of dark hair. His middle finger had a Band-Aid around one knuckle.
    Once again she wondered why a guy like this would need a mail-order bride. He was gorgeous.
    “Hello,” he said slowly, a hint of question in his voice.
    Guido dropped her suitcase and shoved her toward the door. “I’ve brought your bride.”

Chapter Five
    Thursday, November 20—4:30 p.m.
    Oakley Neighborhood, Cincinnati, Ohio
    It took a few cycles through Deck’s language filter before he was able to parse what the Italian guy standing on his front porch said into some sort of coherent sentence. Unfortunately, it still didn’t make sense.
    “My new… what ?”
    He leaned harder against the doorjamb to take more of the weight off his left leg. Looking over the guy’s shoulder, he could see that the Croatian girl he’d been talking to on the Internet was indeed standing on his porch. Her dimples were even more adorable in person than they had been in her photo.
    As the silence stretched on, the adorable dimples disappeared, leaving her looking tired and a little defeated.
    “Y-You do not want me?” she asked in heavily accented English. She had cinnamon-brown eyes with little flecks of amber shooting out from the center, surrounded by thick eyelashes. Freckles dotted the landscape of her upturned nose. She was, in a word, cute. Slightly curly brown hair had escaped the knot at the back of her head and fell to her shoulders, and her face was scrubbed free of makeup. Between the dimples and the freckles, she looked like the girl next door, except with the kind of serious curves that made him want to get neighborly.
    He shook his head, trying to restore reality. “How did this happen?” he asked.
    The Italian guy pushed the woman forward half a step. “I’m from Dream Come True. This is Draghana, your new bride. Catch up, buddy.”
    “Yeah. I got that. She and I spoke over email a few times. But I never asked her to marry me.”
    “But you gave her your personal info, which is against the site’s terms of service. Kind of a ‘ you break it, you buy it’ thing.”
    Shit. He’d used his own credit card rather than get the department bean counters involved. Deck had a feeling there was probably a hefty charge sitting on his MasterCard at the moment.
    Deck didn’t doubt that it was written in the Terms of Service. The legal document had been about twenty pages long, and he’d been skimming by the end. He was also pretty sure Dream Come True didn’t have a legal leg to stand on and that he could fight the charge in court if he wanted to—if he didn’t mind paying five times as much in legal fees.
    That they’d try to scam him out of the thousand dollar “meet fee” wasn’t shocking. That they’d sent on his bride was .
    The Italian guy’s eyes narrowed in a manner that could only be described as crafty, which pushed some big red button in the back of Deck’s head labeled DANGER.
    “I can take her back.”
    That seemed like a pretty good idea to Deck. He opened his mouth to agree, until Freckles face fell.
    “Please do not send me back,” she said quietly.
    “It’s no problem, actually,” the guy said, eyeing the woman with what looked like far too much appreciation. “She may not be your type. It happens.”
    Something about the situation brought out