“Do you want me to come with you?” Frederick asked. “It could be dangerous.” He flexed his small bicep.
Across the room, Coral saw Bettina staring at Frederick, and then deliberately turning her back and hunching over a magazine she’d been reading.
“Oh, I beg your pardon, were you talking to me? The jealous one?” Coral asked coldly, raising an eyebrow.
“You’re not being fair. You made it sound like I’m some kind of loser, like there’s no way that woman like Melinda would go for someone like me. You wouldn’t like it if I said that Flint didn’t like you,” Frederick protested, sounding petulant.
“From the body language I saw at the restaurant, you were clinging to her arm and she was completely ignoring you and staring at me and Flint. If you want to make a fool of yourself, though, go ahead. You’ll figure it out soon enough. I just wish you weren’t hurting Bettina’s feelings in the process.”
“It’s just…I’ve never had anyone like Melinda even give me the time of day. She’s like this beautiful Amazon goddess.”
“Bettina’s a good person, and you guys were having a great time together, and you’re going to throw it all away on a woman who is clearly using you.”
A hurt look puckered Frederick’s narrow face. “For your information, Melinda got called away on family business, but she still called me last night and again today.”
“Sounds like true love. Good luck with that,” Coral said, as she headed out the door. Love makes fools of us all, she thought.
Speaking of which…Flint had tried to call Coral half a dozen times the evening before, and she’d glanced out her window before going to bed and spotted his car parked down the block. He was sitting out there watching. Making sure she was safe.
Or was he? She suddenly wondered as she walked out to her car. Was he watching to make sure she was safe, or just watching to see what she was up to?
She tried, and failed, to put him out of her mind as she drove to Crystal Grove. The sun was shining and the back roads looped through lush green woodlands, past citrus groves, and miles and miles of farmland. Massive grain silos towered over herds of cows grazing behind barbed-wire fences like a scene out of a cowboy movie. It was beautiful, but again and again Flint’s face swam before her vision, and the memory of his hands and his mouth on her sent unwelcome ripples of desire running through her body.
Finally, she arrived at Crystal Grove, a town so tiny it barely deserved the name. It was nothing but a tiny collection of one story buildings clumped on either side of a rural back road.
Coral parked in front of a feed and grain store, and quickly found the address she’d been looking for – in a small white bungalow-style house on a weed choked lot.
She walked in , and the clerk behind the desk glanced up. He was an older human, skinny, wearing glasses. He squinted at her suspiciously. Apparently he didn’t get too many visitors.
“Can I he’p you?” he asked.
“I’m looking for Redbird Investments,” she said.
He shook his head. “Never heard of ‘em.”
“This is the address they gave,” she said. She glanced at the bank of mailboxes on the wall behind him. “Is this an address rental business?”
He shrugged. “What if it is?”
She shot him a skeptical look. Why was he being so weird and cagey? “I imagine they’re one of your clients. They must rent this address.”
“Like I said.” He repeated it slowly, with a hostile edge to his tone now. “Never heard of them. Who’s asking?”
“The Blue Moon Junction Tattler. We’re doing a story on the purchase of a number of properties around our county. One of the purchasers gave this address for their business. That’s fine, we’ll still put the address in our story, and say that an employee at this address denied that they’d ever heard of Redbird.”
“You can’t do that.” He tried to sound menacing, and pushed his chair back, standing and glowering at her.
“Since it’s the truth, actually, yes I can. And please, don’t try to intimidate me. I’m a wolf.” Actually she was feeling kind of intimidated, not by him so much, but by the fact that she was in a tiny backwoods town in the middle of nowhere, and she could practically hear the banjo music from Deliverance playing. However, she was damned if she was going to let this jerk see that he’d rattled her cage.
He glowered at her, puffing out his narrow chest. “Are you threatening me? I think I’ll just call the sheriff.”
“Please do,” she said coolly. “My sister is married to the sheriff of Blue Moon Junction, and my newspaper publisher is expecting me back at the office. And believe me, we’re not done digging.”
She walked out and then in a fit of pique, she pulled her point and shoot camera from her purse and took a picture of the building.