Sweetheart in High Heels Read Online Free PDF

week, so she gave me the number for emergencies.” She rattled it off, and Dana punched it into her own cell.
    We thanked Celia for her time, then as soon as we got back in the Jeep, Dana dialed the boyfriend on speaker phone.
    Four rings in, he finally picked up.
    “Hello?” came a gravelly voice.
    “Vic? Hi, my name is Dana. I was a friend of Peach’s.”
    The guy on the other end sniffed loudly. “Oh,” he said. Then did another sniff. “It’s terrible, huh?”
    Dana nodded in the car. “Terrible. Look, I was wondering if maybe we could meet. I have a few questions I’d love to ask you about Peach.”
    “Yeah,” he said, his voice low. “Sure. I guess so. For Peach.” I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard his voice crack on that last statement. If it wasn’t actual grief consuming him, he was doing a hell of an acting job.
    We agreed to meet up at a coffee place near his house, and twenty minutes later Dana and I had our second round of lattes for the day. We settled into a table near the back and a couple minutes later a tall, dark haired man walked in. His eyes were rimmed in red, and his shirt was miss-buttoned, leaving an extra hole on one side. Taking a wild guess, I hailed him over to our table.
    “Vic?” I asked as he approached.
    He nodded, then said, “Hi,” in a somber voice, shaking hands first with Dana then me.
    “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, feeling like a broken record.
    He nodded again. “Yeah. Thanks,” he said. His voice came out as a cross between Ross from Friends and Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh . Then again, considering the circumstances, I hardly expected peppy.
    “You were friends of hers?” he asked us.
    “Dana was,” I said gesturing to her.
    “I can’t believe she’s really gone,” he said.
    “You’d known Peach a couple months?” I asked.
    “Yeah. We met at club on Sunset. I was drawn to her immediately. She was just so sweet.”
    That seemed to be the consensus. On the other hand, sweet people usually didn’t have the kind of enemies that stabbed them to death.
    “You had a good relationship?”
    “The best!”
    “So good you were going to propose, right?” Dana asked.
    Vic blinked at her, shock registering clearly on his face. “Propose? God, where did you hear that?”
    “So, you weren’t going to ask her to marry you?” I clarified.
    “No. God, no. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I totally dug Peach. But we’d only been dating a couple months. No way were we ready to get married.”
    “Peach thought you were,” Dana said. “She thought you were going to pop the question soon.”
    Vic shook his head. “Why on earth would she think that?’
    I cleared my throat. “Uh… apparently she found a ring box in your sock drawer.”
    Vic did some more blinking, then sat back in his chair. “It was an earring box. I bought her earrings for Valentine’s Day. Geeze, she really thought I was going to propose?”
    Dana leaned in and whispered to me, “I knew no man could propose in two months!”
    I ignored her, instead asking Vic, “The morning Peach died… where were you?”
    “Home, I guess.”
    “Alone?”
    “Yeah. I telecommute. Why?”
    I shrugged. “No reason. Just checking.”
    We thanked the still shocked Vic for his time, told him again how very sorry we were for his loss, and left.
    “So,” I said when we got back to the car, “we have a boyfriend who isn’t proposing, a roommate who isn’t being kicked out, and a business partner who isn’t losing money.”
    ”And a victim everyone described as super sweet,” Dana said.
    I turned to her. “Did you think she was sweet?’
    Dana bit her lip. Then nodded. “Yeah. She really was. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.”
    Which left us back at square one. This was proving to be a much harder Valentine’s anniversary present than I’d thought.

    Chapter Four

    Dana had to meet Ricky for a “thing in the Hills”, so I dropped her off at her place. She gave me a