The Lady in Pink - Deadly Ever After 2 Read Online Free PDF Page B

least for now. But I vowed to talk some sense into Izzy as soon as we were alone. She might be a whiz when it came to making money, but I knew what our clients wanted, and it sure as hell wasn’t a Fairybook presence. “Okay, then,” I said flatly. “Izzy, when you’re done here, I’d like to talk to you about a couple of things . . .”
    She nodded. “I’ll come to your office.”
    “Thanks.” I turned to Clark again. “Nice to meet you.”
    “You too,” he answered. “Very much so.”
    At his words, a vague sense of uneasiness filled me. I nodded once and then walked out of Izzy’s office. I could feel Clark’s eyes on me, watching, assessing. I didn’t like the feeling one little bit. Something was up with that guy. I wasn’t sure what, but I suspected it had something to do with his interest in my partner.
    The thought of them together left me cold.
    Odd when one burned just above a hundred degrees.

CHAPTER 7
    I walked down the long corridor to my office, my footfalls swallowed up by the thick carpeting, with the exception of the sharp crackle of static electricity building around me. Outside my office door, I pulled to a stop. The shiny nameplate on my door brought a smile to my lips—“Blue Reynolds, CEO.”
    Not that the title mattered. I could say I was a CEO all I wanted, but when the chips were down, Reynolds & Davis was Izzy’s baby. I appreciated her attempt at including me in the daily operations, but I was and always would be a PI, a private dick, ready and willing to kick ass and take names in order to solve a case, not some corporate stuffed shirt. Not that there was much ass kicking to do. Investigating in this day and age was all about computers, the Internet, and electronic clouds filled with everything a PI needed to know.
    I missed the old days.
    But I wasn’t a true Luddite. I used computers and other electronic gadgetry when the investigation called for it, which seemed like more and more often.
    I sat down in my high-backed office chair, running my hand over the desktop, feeling as worn as the wood under my fingers. The desk was the only piece of furniture from my old office. Each pit, scar, and fingerprint scorch mark told a story I’d explained when Izzy first protested my choice in furnishings. I’d pointed to a gouge mark on the side where I’d smashed a gnome’s head into the wood when he failed to pay for an array of photographic evidence that his lovely bride-to-be had quite the billy-goat fetish.
    In the end Izzy had agreed to keep the desk, but everything else in my office, including the half-empty bottle of year-old scotch, had gone straight to the Dumpster. Though I missed my old office at times, missed the smell of mold and case files, I had to admit my new office wasn’t too shabby. For one thing, it was three times the size, smelled like a new car, and lacked the general chaos and clutter of the old office. When I needed a file now, I pressed the intercom buzzer and some lowly file clerk set it on my desk a few minutes later. Sort of like an investigational drive-through.
    To my surprise, when I opened the laptop computer on my desktop it flickered to life. Odd, since I could have sworn I’d shut it down the day before so it could do some random updates or whatever it was computers did when their users weren’t around. I suspected it was something to do with plotting to take over the world.
    A file folder sat open on the screen, displaying it for the world to see. Not that the world cared one way or another about my quest to find a former nurse at the New Never City Hospital named Christine Connors. Only I cared about her, since she very well might hold the key to finding out my true identity and ending my electrified curse.
    Not that I’d had a single break in my search for the elusive Ms. Connors. The file I kept locked in my bottom desk drawer, a file only three people knew of—well, two now that James was dead—was only about an inch thick, but it held