Mistletoe & Mayhem: Mistletoe & Mayhem / Santa's Sexy Secret

“Well, you’ve got me now,” Sophie replied. “Why don’t you ask Shane if he can get hold of a two-headed coin? He seems like an enterprising young man to me.”

“You’ve known him less than a day, and you’re on a first-name basis with the handyman?”

“Mr. Sullivan sounds a little formal when he’s going to be joining us for meals.”

The thought of Shane Sullivan sitting down to one of Irene’s culinary creations had Jodie’s lips curving. She doubted he’d be taking many of his meals with them in the future. Then wrinkling her nose, she asked, “What could possibly smell that bad?”

“She’s calling it meat loaf.”

Lazarus moaned.

Jodie knelt and ran a sympathetic hand over him, then when he turned, began to scratch his stomach. He’d been nearly dead the night she’d found him lying along the road, and Doc Cheney, the town vet, hadn’t been sure he’d make it.

“What does that dog have to complain about?” Sophie asked. “If he doesn’t like the meat loaf, he can eat his canned dog food. We’re stuck.” She glanced down at the pile of correspondence. “Anything interesting in the mail.”

“No,” Jodie said as Sophie began to sort through it. Thank heavens she’d stuffed the letter in her pocket. “Just some circulars.”

“Oh, you’re home,” Irene said as she breezed into the foyer. Flour streaked her hair and seemed to hover in a little cloud around her. “You just have time to change before dinner.”

“Change what?” Jodie asked.

“Your clothes. Shane is joining us for dinner.”

“We have to dress up for the handyman?” Jodie asked.

Irene shooed her toward the stairs. “He’s a guest, too. And he’s worked very hard all afternoon. Haven’t you noticed all the mistletoe he’s hung?”

Jodie glanced up to see that mistletoe indeed now hung from the chandelier, as well as from every archway and door that led off from the foyer.

“We put it in every room,” Irene explained. “There was quite a bit we didn’t use for the ball, and we didn’t want it to go to waste. What do you think?”

“Very…Christmassy,” Jodie managed to reply.

Irene beamed a smile at her. “After you change, I could use your help in the kitchen. You could let me know what you think of my new gravy recipe.”

“Actually, I was planning on starting on my snare trap,” Jodie quickly improvised. “In the attic. Remember?” Grabbing the rope, she hopped over Lazarus and started up the stairs.

Once in her room, Jodie locked the door, set the rope down on her bed, then pulled the letter out of her pocket. It was Billy’s handwriting all right. She hadn’t been wrong about that. Staring at it, she sank down on the foot of her bed.

She hadn’t lied to the sheriff. Billy hadn’t tried to contact her after his arrest. But he’d given Irene a note for her shortly before the police had arrived at the house to take him away. In it, he’d asked her to believe in him, to believe in his love for her, and he’d promised she’d get her money back.

Even now, she could remember how much she’d wanted to believe him, how she’d clung for two months to her fantasy that he would keep his word. She’d checked the mailbox each day hoping for a letter until the day the bank had foreclosed on her house.

What did he possibly think he could say now? Tearing open the envelope, she unfolded the letter.

My dearest Jodie,

I haven’t written to you before because I didn’t want to put you in danger. But I’ll have your money for you soon. Please don’t tell anyone about this note. My life could depend on it. Yours, too.

I never lied to you about my feelings for you.

I’ll be in touch.

Billy

Slowly, she lowered the note to her lap. Damn Billy Rutherford. What she wanted to do was rip his words into shreds. But she would keep the note because it would inspire her more than one of Sophie’s calendar slogans ever could. She wasn’t going to be that big a fool again. Ever. She glanced at the note again.

“My life could depend on it. Yours, too.”

A ripple of fear moved through her. It was probably a lie. She doubted that Billy could tell the difference between the truth and a lie anymore.

Carefully folding the paper, she slipped it back into the envelope. It was only then that she recalled what Shane had noticed. It didn’t have a stamp. Had Billy delivered it himself?

Rising, she began to pace back and forth. It meant that Billy was definitely back in Castleton. It must have been him in the attic, and he hadn’t gotten what he was after. “I’ll have your money for you soon.” That meant he had to come back.

She was reaching for the phone next to her bed when she snatched her hand back. If she told the sheriff now, she could picture exactly what would happen. He’d have his distant cousin Shane watching her like a hawk, and she might miss the one chance she had of catching Billy by herself. She couldn’t allow that to happen. Turning, she began to pace again. Catching Billy would allow her to kill two birds with one stone. She could change her image in the town forever, and she could get the money back that Billy had stolen from his aunts. They needed it. Because if they couldn’t make their bed-and-breakfast work, they could lose Rutherford House.

Pausing, she sank back down on the foot of her bed. The money was probably in the attic. Otherwise, why go there? So she’d set the trap. In her mind, she pictured Billy swinging back and forth from the rope she was going to string up in the attic. Once he was in it, she’d make him cough up the money and then she’d call the sheriff.

“CLYDE, I can’t thank you enough,” Jodie said as she followed him out onto the porch. “I never could have figured out how to weight it properly.”

“No problem, ma’am.”

And it hadn’t been. Jodie drew her coat more closely around her as she watched the skinny young man climb into his battered pickup truck and back down the driveway. In less than an hour, he’d adapted a trap designed for use in woods or jungles to something that would operate very efficiently in an attic. Clyde was a talented young man. What he needed was someone to give him a push into an engineering school; that just might get his mind off joining one of the militia groups he was always researching on the Internet. Tomorrow, she’d see his advisor at the college. And later in the week, she was going to have a talk with Nadine Carter and see if she could convince her to come back to school.

And tonight? Drawing in a breath of the crisp, cold air, she glanced up at the sky, polka-dotted with stars. Then crossing her fingers for luck, she wished on the biggest one. Please, let her catch Billy Rutherford III in her trap tonight.

But someone else might catch him first.

With a frown, she sank down on the top step and glared at the garage. In the moonlight, she could see that the space beside Sophie’s car was still empty. The red convertible had disappeared shortly before Clyde had arrived.

Jodie resented the idea that, just because there was now a man about the house, he would be the one to nab Billy. It struck her how much she really wanted to be the one to turn Billy over to the authorities. How much she didn’t want Shane to beat her to it.

Her eyes widened at the thought. Where had it come from? She’d never before thought of herself as the type of woman who had to compete with a man. And she wasn’t. There were plenty of reasons why she wanted to be the one to turn Billy Rutherford over to the police—and they had nothing to do with Shane Sullivan. In fact, she was going to put him out of her mind.

Just then a car pulled into the driveway and the headlights pinned her. Shane. She could just make out the red convertible in the moonlight. The urge to get up and run was almost overpowering, but she couldn’t bear the idea of him getting that look of amusement in his eyes at her expense. It wasn’t until he parked the car that she noticed the top was down and Lazarus was sitting in the passenger seat.

Lazarus, the dog who could barely get himself out of a prone position except to eat? And who in the world rode around with the top down in the middle of winter? She was still staring as the man and the dog started toward her.

“How did you bribe him to go with you?” she asked when Lazarus plopped his head into her lap.

“He followed me to the car,” Shane said.

“You never follow me to my car,” she said, leaning closer to scratch the dog behind his ears. “And I pay your vet bills.”

“Evidently, he prefers convertibles. There’s no accounting for taste.”

Jodie glanced up at him. “It’s a taste for French fries that lured him into your car. I can smell them on his breath.”