Too Hot to Handle (Jackson Hole 2)

God. If this was only friends with benefits, she’d take it. She’d take it and she’d worship him from across the hall and swallow her worries for her heart and she would take it all.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay, be cool.”

She could be cool. She’d kill herself being cool about it if she had to. She’d taken a chance and it had been worth every second.

Merry washed up and when she got out of the bathroom, she felt more in control. She tucked her wet hair up into a bun and fired up her iPad to send an email. If she didn’t get the answer she wanted, then she’d take one more chance. What the hell.

Life was good today. And Merry was determined to make tomorrow even better.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

MERRY LOOKED AT EACH of their faces,

Levi and Harry, both creased and leathered by the sun, Marvin, still plump and pale under his standard fisherman’s hat, and the women: Kristen, a handsome sixty-two-year-old woman with carefully styled hair, and Jeanine, starting to stoop a little with age. To a person, each of them stood in the bright morning sun and stared openmouthed at the sign.

Black paint had dripped from the crude letters and stained the rough grass beneath the fence.

“Oh, my word,” Kristen said for the third time since she’d stepped from Levi’s car.

“I know,” Merry said solemnly. “It’s crazy. You should probably call an emergency meeting and decide how to proceed from here.”

“What we should do,” insisted Jeanine, “is call the sheriff!”

Merry’s stomach twisted as the whole group murmured agreement. “Call the sheriff? I wouldn’t say this was a crime.”

“It’s vandalism!” Harry said.

“Well… It’s really just an old scrap of wood nailed to an even older fence post. I don’t think anything’s been damaged.”

Jeanine sniffed. “Maybe not, but it’s a threat.”

“Yes!” Kristen added. “It’s intimidation!”

Merry felt her fingers go numb and looked down to see that she’d twisted them into a knot. She forced herself to let go. “It only says No More Tourists! That’s not exactly threatening anything. The sheriff has real crime to fight. We shouldn’t bother him.”

They all looked at her like she was crazy. Merry squirmed and fought the urge to blurt out a confession. “How about we take pictures of it? File a report so there’s a record.”

Levi seemed to consider it. “There could be fingerprints. Tire prints.”

Oh, good Lord. Why did they have to make everything so difficult? “As far as I know, that doesn’t really happen in a case like this. My car was stolen two years ago, and when they found it, even then they didn’t take fingerprints. Department funding and things like that. But you guys do whatever you think is best.”

“I’ll call the sheriff,” Jeanine said firmly.

Merry felt sweat drip down her neck and sneak past her shoulder blades.

She hadn’t done anything illegal, per se. A sign wasn’t vandalism. She’d been careful not to make the message scary. And she wasn’t the one reporting it as a crime. Surely she couldn’t go to jail. How would they even know it was her?

Her mind latched with a vengeance onto the hundreds of hours of television she’d watched over her life. The little clues that TV detectives always found. A hairpin. A stray drop of paint. A certain curlicue in the letter E that she couldn’t help but make even when she was trying to disguise her writing.

Oh, God. Merry ran a surreptitious hand through her hair just to reassure herself that she hadn’t worn any barrettes or ponytail holders. No. Her hair was just long and straight as usual. And she’d already checked for paint drops like she was looking for ticks after a camping trip.

Still… She stared down at her hands. Did paint traces show up under a blacklight like blood? There were no telltale smudges of black, but would she stand up to a good swabbing? What if they could test for latex paint the same way they tested for gunpowder residue? What if—?

Jeanine snapped her phone closed and walked back to the group with a frown. “The dispatcher said there’s a grassfire outside town and we should just take pictures and file a report.”

“Oh, thank God,” Merry gasped.

Five pairs of eyes looked straight at her.