Silent Night Man. Diana Palmer

      At the funeral home the friend of the deceased was a big, richly dressed man who looked like a professional wrestler. He was wearing expensive clothing and a cashmere coat. He had olive skin, black eyes and wavy black hair that he wore in a long ponytail. He stood over the casket without saying a word. He looked aloof. He looked dangerous. He hadn’t spoken to anyone since he entered the building.

      Tony Danzetta stared down at John Hamilton’s casket with an expression like stone, although he was raging inside. It was hard to look at the remains of a man he’d known and loved since high school. His best friend was dead. Dead, because of a woman.

      Tony’s friend, Frank Mariott, had phoned him at the home of the man he was working for temporarily in Jacobsville, Texas. Tony had planned to stay around for a little longer, take a few weeks off from work before he went back to his real job. But the news about John had sent him rushing home to San Antonio.

      Of the three of them, John had been the weak link. The other two were always forced to save him from himself. He fantasized about people and places that he considered were part of his life. Often the people were shocked to learn that he was telling his friends that he was on close terms with them.

      Tony and Frank thought that John was harmless. He just wanted to be somebody. He was the son of people who worked for a local clothing manufacturing company. When the company moved outside the United States, they went to work at retail stores. Neither of them finished high school, but John often made up stories to tell classmates about his famous rich parents who had a yacht and their own airplane. Tony and Frank knew better, but they let him spin his yarns. They understood him.

      But now John was dead, and that…woman was responsible! He could still see her face from the past, red with embarrassment when she’d asked him about one of their assignments at the adjunct college class they were both taking in criminal justice. That had been six years ago. She couldn’t even talk to a man without stammering and shaking. Millie Evans had mousy-brown hair and green eyes. She wore glasses. She was thin and unremarkable. But Tony’s adopted foster mother, who had been an archivist at the local library, was Millicent Evans’s superior and she liked Millie. She was always talking about her to Tony, pushing her at him, right up until the day she died.

      Tony couldn’t have told his foster mother, but he knew too much about the girl to be interested in her. John had become fixated on her a couple of years ago and during one of Tony’s rare visits home, had told him about her alter ego. In private, he said, Millie was hot. Give her a couple of beers and she’d do anything a man wanted her to do. That prim, nervous pose was just that—a pose. She wasn’t shy and retiring. She was a party girl. She’d even done a threesome with him and their friend Frank, he’d told Tony in confidence. Don’t mention that to Frank, though, he’d added, because Frank was still embarrassed about it.

      What Tony had learned about Millie Evans had turned him right off her. Not that he’d found her attractive before that. She was another in a long line of dull, staid spinsters who’d do anything to get a man. Poor John. He’d felt sorry for his friend, because John was obsessed with Millicent Evans. To John, Millie was the queen of Sheba, the ultimate female. Sometimes she loved him, John moaned, but other times she treated him like a complete stranger. Other times, she complained that he was stalking her. Ridiculous, John had told Tony. As if he had to stalk her, when she was often waiting for him at his apartment, when he got off from work as a night watchman, wearing nothing at all!

      John’s description of the spinster was incomprehensible to Tony, who’d had beautiful, intelligent, wealthy women after him. He’d never had to chase a woman. Millicent Evans had no looks, no personality and she seemed rather dull witted. He never had been able to understand what John saw in her.

      Now John was dead. Millicent Evans had driven him to suicide. Tony stared at the pale, lifeless face and rage built inside him. What sort of woman used a man like that, abused his love to the extent that she caused him to take his own life?

      The funeral director had a phone call, which forced him to approach the silent man in the viewing room. He paused beside him. “Would you be Mr. Danzetta?” the man asked respectfully. The caller had identified him as tall and unconventional looking. That was an understatement. Up close, the man was enormous, and those black eyes cut like a diamond.

      “I’m Tony Danzetta,” he replied in a deep, gravelly voice.

      “Your friend Mr. Mariott just phoned to tell us to expect you. He said you had a special request about the burial?”

      “Yes,” Tony

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