A Bad Day for Scandal Read Online Free PDF

there, Stella knew, and she was well aware that she was playing with fire, and that one unfortunate coincidence or not-easily-dismissed lead too many might push the sheriff too far, and he would have no choice but to end their budding romance and turn her over to the justice machine, presumably to fry.
    A smart woman would probably do everything in her power to keep away from the sheriff. She certainly wouldn’t spend her days trying to figure out how to get in his pants. She wouldn’t invite him for dinner or drive past his office on her way home from the sewing shop just for a chance of a glimpse of his fine lanky form striding across the parking lot.
    But ever since Stella had got her first gander of Goat’s glinting blue eyes and his smooth bald head and his work-rough hands, she’d been a goner. Reasonable wasn’t a consideration when you had it this bad, and the fire between them didn’t show any signs of settling down. So Stella had to find a way to make sure the sheriff never saw the pictures. Which meant she had to figure out how to get the flash drive from Priss.
    Okay. She’d already ruled out option number one, which was to hire on as Priss’s body-disposal service.
    Option two: Find something to hold over her. Something threatening enough that Priss would be willing to trade to make it go away.
    Well, that body in the trunk might make a fine start. If Stella could connect it definitively with Priss, she’d have the kind of threat that might get things moving in the right direction.
    Only, something told her it might not be as simple as it appeared on first blush.
    Stella thought back to the Porter siblings’ school days and remembered Priss winning every spelling bee, every geography challenge, every speech contest the Prosper school system put on. Her methods had been simple: a ruthless evaluation of the competition followed by its decimation based on whatever weaknesses Priss could discover. Stella had been a young mother at the time, and she read about Priss’s accomplishments in the Prosper Standard and heard about them in the grocery line and, at first, felt a sort of regional pride that one of their own had made good, and even hoped that Noelle might someday look at Priss as a sort of role model—until she began to hear the other rumors.
    When Priss was competing for a space on the Mathletes team, Minnie Seevers mysteriously fell in a ditch the afternoon of tryouts and missed a chance to vie for the spot that went to Priss.
    When the master list of final-round words went missing before the school spelling bee, no one believed the innocent expression on Priss’s face. And when the Kiwanis offered a scholarship to the student voted most civic minded, Priss forced her way onto every highway cleanup, nursing home visit, hospital caroling, and food drive until even the Kiwanis ceded defeat and handed over the scholarship check.
    So was it really such a surprise that Priss had found a way to set herself up with a backup plan that featured Prosper’s one and only career criminal?
    And, Stella had to ask herself as she walked through the light snow that had begun to fall, up the drive to Mindy’s front door, was it really so different from the contingency plans that she herself had set up for circumstances such as these?
    Before she had a chance to give herself an answer, Mindy came walking around the side of the house in rubber boots and insulated overalls, a hand raised in greeting. She was a sturdy, no-nonsense woman in her thirties, and she made a nice living for herself raising and selling alpacas to clients all over the Midwest as well as hiring herself out for shearing and grooming. Mindy’s alpacas routinely won all manner of competitions, their bloodline having been proudly overseen by Mindy’s mother and grandmother before their retirement. Alpaca tending, it seemed, ran only in the matriarchal line of the family; Mindy’s younger brothers were pursuing more conventional careers in the