Your Coffin or Mine? by Kimberly Raye Read Free Book Online

up the phone.
    “Thank you for calling Dead End Dating, where your perfect match is just a Visa, Mastercard, or Discover swipe away.” It wasn’t the greatest slogan, but my business was still fairly new and I was testing the waters.
    “What about American Express?” A familiar female voice asked, and my heart jumped into my throat.
    My gaze swiveled to the caller ID display. My mother’s phone number blazed back at me and dread rolled through me.
    Uh-oh.

Seven

    W ay to go, Lil.
    I gave myself a mental kick in the ass for not checking the caller ID before picking up the phone and then fought down a wave of guilt.
    She was my mother. She hadn’t endured hours and hours of labor to bring me into this world so that I could avoid her—which I did whenever possible be cause she drove me nuts. The woman gave me an afterlife. The least—the very least—I could do was talk to her. Especially since I couldn’t exactly hang up without her knowing it and heaping more misery on me later.
    I pasted on a smile (just in case Big Brother turned out to be Big Mama) and remembered my game plan for just this type of situation. Single syllable answers. Do not engage. She would get frustrated and hang up and I’d be home free.
    “Um, hi, Mom.”
    “So do you take American Express or not?”
    “No.” Definitely one syllable. “Not yet.”
    “Oh, well, it makes no never mind.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “I just thought I would ask since your father prefers I use the American Express to avoid the monthly percentages of our other credit cards, but he’ll just have to deal with it.”
    “Deal with what?” Wait. Did I just engage?
    “I want to hire you, dear.”
    I’d engaged, all right. What’s worse, I heard myself do it again. “You want to hire me ?” I remembered the Moe’s uniform currently doing time in my hall closet—lime-green polo shirt, beige Dockers—and cringed.
    Moe’s is the family business. We’re talking copy machines. We’re talking printing services. We’re talking major yuck.
    “I already told you, I’m not working for Dad. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but I have bigger aspirations than replacing the toner in a copy machine or collating some guy’s thesis paper.”
    “While I can’t imagine a more successful enterprise than Moe’s—your brothers are all managers and they adore it—that’s not what I’m calling about.”
    Phew, that was close.
    “I need a matchmaker.”
    What?
    My heart gave a panicked ka-thumpety-thump. “But you already have Dad.” I opened my mouth and the words poured out, tumbling over each other as anxiety washed over me. “You’ve been committed for five hundred and twenty-two years. I’m sure that whatever he did, you can work it out. You can’t just throw away half a millennium because he squeezes the toothpaste from the middle or pops open a beer can with his fangs. It’s the quirky things that make him special—”
    “Lilliana,” my mother tried to cut in, but I was already on a roll, freaked with the possibility that my mother might actually be leaving my father. Breaking things off. Moving in with me.
    “You can’t,” I blurted. “I know Dad can be a pain, but he doesn’t mean to be. He’s just eccentric. And pompous. And maybe a little snotty. But he can’t help it on account of how he was raised and—”
    “Lilliana Arabella Guinevere du Marchette,” she snapped and just like that I morphed from a fantabulous, well-dressed businesswoman into a fantabulous, well-dressed five-year-old.
    “Yes, ma’am?”
    “I’m not leaving your father, though I can’t say I haven’t thought about it. Since Viola stole his chain-saw—the one he usually uses to cut down the azalea bushes—he’s been a man possessed. He’s hired a former Navy SEAL for a search and rescue. They’re meeting out in the pool house as we speak.”
    “They’re going to break into Viola’s house?”
    “The SEAL, not your father. At least, I think he’s a SEAL.