inside looked just as expensive as the gold case except for the fact that the watch face crystal inside was shattered. Even though he knew little about antiques, Logan figured it was worth at least a couple hundred dollars.
So why had Julia put it in his pocket?
Since he was a skeptic, his first thought was that she might be trying to set him up, to make it look as if he’d robbed her. But Logan couldn’t imagine why anyone would do that unless she was planning to try to blackmail him with it.
He dropped the watch on the bed and finished dressing, all the while staring at it. He cleared out some of the cotton in his brain and grabbed the hotel phone to call the front desk. Someone answered on the first ring.
“I’m in room...” Logan had to check the phone. “Two-sixteen, and I need to know...” He had to stop again and think. “I need to know if Julia is there in the lobby. She left something in the room.”
“No, sir. I’m afraid you just missed her. But checkout isn’t until noon, and she said her guest might be staying past then so she paid for an extra day.”
“Uh, could you tell me how to spell Julia’s last name? I need to leave her a note in case she comes back.”
“Oh, she said she wouldn’t be coming back, that this was her goodbye party. And as for how to spell her name, well, it’s Child, just like it sounds.”
Julia Child?
Right. Obviously, the clerk wasn’t old enough or enough of a foodie to recognize the name of the famous chef.
“I don’t suppose she paid with a credit card?” Logan asked.
“No. She paid in cash and then left a prepaid credit card for the second night.”
Of course. “What about an address?” Logan kept trying.
“I’m really not supposed to give that out—”
“She left something very expensive in the room, and I know she’ll want it back.”
The guy hemmed and hawed a little, but he finally rattled off, “221B Baker Street, London, England.”
That was Sherlock Holmes’s address.
Logan groaned, cursed. He didn’t bother asking for a phone number because the one she left was probably for Hogwarts. He hung up and hurried to the window, hoping he could catch a glimpse of her getting into a car. Not that he intended to follow her or anything, but if she was going to blackmail him, he wanted to know as much about her as possible.
No sign of her, but Logan got a flash of something else. A memory.
Shit.
They’d taken pictures.
Or at least Julia had with the camera on her phone. He remembered nude selfies of them from the waist up. At least he hoped it was from the waist up.
Yeah, that trip to hell in a handbasket was moving even faster right now.
Logan threw on the rest of his clothes, already trying to figure out how to do damage control. He was the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company. He was the face that people put with the family business, and before last night he’d never done a thing to tarnish the image of McCord Cattle Brokers.
He couldn’t say that any longer.
He was in such a hurry to rush out the door that he nearly missed the note on the desk. Maybe it was the start of the blackmail. He snatched it up, steeling himself for the worst. But if this was blackmail, then Julia sure had a funny sense of humor.
“Goodbye, hot cowboy,” she’d written. “Thanks for the sweet send-off. Don’t worry. What happens in San Antonio stays in San Antonio. I’ll take this to the grave.”
HAVING ONE FOOT in the grave was not a laughing matter, though Reese Stephens tried to make it one.
So, as the final thing on her bucket list she’d bought every joke book she could find on death, dying and other morbid things. It wasn’t helping, but it wasn’t hurting, either. At this point, that was as good as it was going to get for her.
She added the joke books to the stack of sex manuals she’d purchased. Donating both to the same place might be a problem so Reese decided she’d just leave them all in a stack in the corner of her apartment.
“You’re sure you want to get rid of these?” Todd, her neighbor, asked. He had a box of vinyl albums under one arm and a pink stuffed elephant under the other.
Since Reese had bought the vinyls just the month before at a garage sale, it wouldn’t be a great sentimental loss. She could say that about everything in her apartment, though.
Now that the watch was gone.
Reese hadn’t intended to leave it with the cowboy, but it’d just felt right at the time, as if it were something he would appreciate.
As for the elephant, she’d found it by the Dumpster and couldn’t stand the thought of it having the stuffing crushed out of it so Reese had given it a temporary home. Temporary was the norm for her, too, and she made a habit of not staying in one place for long.
“Take them,” Reese assured Todd. “I won’t be able to bring anything with me to Cambodia.”
Reese wasn’t sure why the lie about Cambodia had rolled so easily off her tongue, but it did now just as it had the first time she’d told it. So had the other lies needed to support that one because as she’d quickly learned one solo lie just led to more questions.
Questions she didn’t want to answer.
As the story now went, she was moving to Cambodia to do a reality show about jungle cooking. She wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone for at least a year, and after that, the producers of the show were sending her to Vietnam. It was surprising that everyone believed her. Of course, everyone wasn’t close to her. That was her fault.
In my next life I need to make more friends. And not move every few months.
But with mental memos like that came the depression. She wouldn’t cry. She’d already wasted too many tears on something she couldn’t change. Though if there was more time, she would have run to the store for some books on coping with grief.
“Knock, knock,” someone called out from the open door. “Food pimp has arrived.” Jimena Martinelli wiggled her away around a departing Todd, ignoring both the elephant and the heated look Todd gave her.
Jimena was the worst chef Reese had ever worked with, but she was also Reese’s only friend. In every way that counted, she was like a sister.
The genetic product of an Irish-Mexican mother and Korean-Italian father, even in a blended city like San Antonio, Jimena stood out partly because she was stunning. Also partly because she drank like a fish, cursed like a sailor and ate like a pig. Her motto was If it’s not fun, don’t fucking do it, and she literally had those words
