Page 66 of Haystacks and Hoaxes

“Bah!” He brushed off her concerns. “Happiness is my rest, kid. And seeing you this happy is the drizzle on my cinnamon buns.”

They shared an emotion-charged chuckle over his reference to the dessert bar and feast awaiting their guests in the big barn outside.

Mila leaned back in his arms. “Promise me you’ll rest up after the wedding,” she begged. “Because if there’s any truth to the rumors flying around, you’re about to have an avalanche of requests to reserve your farm as a venue for, well, everything!”

“The avalanche has already begun.” He pretended to stagger backward beneath its weight. “It’s a good thing, too, since I’m not getting any younger.” He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial tenor. “In case you haven’t heard, the town council voted to keep the autumn festival and Christmas lights displays going as official community functions. I’m not one hundred percent sure what that means, though your councilman brother insists it’s to take the lion’s share of the work off my shoulders. And that I will gladly get behind!”

So would Mila. She was so happy about all the good things happening that it was making her lightheaded. She waved Mr. Monty excitedly toward the window on the side of the room. “I should’ve brought a spare sketchpad with me,” she murmured, drinking in the scene on the other side of the glass.

Since it was February, the frost outside was real. However, he’d ramped up the atmosphere with a pair of snow machines. They were artfully hidden in the trees, raining white crystals down on the milling guests. It made them look like they were walking in a snow globe.

There were some rustling sounds as Mr. Monty rummaged through his desk against the wall. “Here.” The dear old farmer pressed a notepad and pen into her hand. “Have at it, kid.”

“You’re the best!” She opened the cover and flipped through his scrawl of notes to the first empty page. Then her borrowed pen moved over the page,and his freshly recovered hay huts appeared. Men, women, and children dressed in hats, coats, and mittens moved in and out of them with steaming beverages in hand. It was just like the old days, but better.

“At the mayor’s advice, I advertised for an event manager,” Mr. Monty drawled in her ear. “There she is.” He pointed out the window.

Mila followed his white-gloved finger, wondering why this was the first she was hearing about an event manager. Instead of the shrewd-looking businessman her mind conjured up, she found herself staring at a woman dressed as Mrs. Santa — a very young, very slender, very elegant version of her.

“Whoa there, cowboy!”

The musical voice stopped Johnny Cuba dead in his tracks, but only because the woman it belonged to had stepped directly in his path. The sprightly Mrs. Santa in her ridiculously long red dress was lucky he hadn’t plowed right through her.

“I’m used to people not seeing me,” she joked in such a sweetly regretful voice that he took another look at her.

The glare he’d been attempting to roast her with disappeared. She was younger than he’d been expecting, alotyounger, as in a good fifty years younger beneath her cherry-cheeked makeup. It was skillfully applied. He was betting she’d paid a professional to do it.

“The perils of being four feet eleven and a half inches and not a hair taller,” she continued in the same mournful voice. It was accompanied by a mischievous twinkle in her eyes that tugged at his heartstrings. He, too, tended to crackjokes to cover what he was really feeling. Over the past two years, he’d become an expert at it. It was far better to be the guy who kept the room laughing instead of the guy everyone pitied.

“Eh, you make up for it in other ways.” He winked at her to let her know he found her attractive. The platinum blonde curls wisping against her cheeks weren’t from a wig. They were real. Dyed, but real. He was guessing she was a natural brunette from the color of her roots.

She didn’t seem to have noticed his wink. She was too busy casting a longing look at one of the cups of hot chocolate he was clutching. It was a miracle he hadn’t dumped them all over her.

Though he’d grabbed the second cup for Hawk, he held it out to her. “Who are you, and why haven’t we met before?”Hawk, buddy, this is a clear case of beauty over duty.Surely, the tall, dark, and broody Native American bodyguard would understand. Just in case, Johnny made a mental note to watch his back…and his scalp for the next few days.

“Are all cowboys this bold?” Mrs. Santa gave a merry chuckle that reminded him of sleigh bells as she greedily accepted the cardboard cup. She wrapped both white-mittened hands around it, dipping her head over it to breathe in the delicious chocolate steam.

“Pretty much.” Johnny snorted. Much good it had done him the last two times a gorgeous woman had blown into town. The Hefner brothers had been all too quick to edge him out of any shot at dating either Ella Lawton or Mila Kingston. But today was their wedding day, so maybe it would improve his chances.

“In that case...” Mrs. Santa gave a ballerina twirl in her red velvet gown, drawing his attention back to her. “I’mCaro Madison, the new event planner for Chester Farm.” She gave another one of her tinkling laughs. “Technically, I was born Caroline Bennington Madison, but my mother is the only person who’s ever called me that.” She peeked at him from beneath her impressively long, dark eyelashes. Probably fake. “And only when I was in trouble.”

He waggled his eyebrows at her, since he could certainly relate. As the only child of a pair of rodeo champions, he’d wallowed in the attention that came with being a spoiled only child — right up to when tragedy had struck. Afterward, their well-meaning sympathy had become unbearable. He’d moved hundreds of miles away to escape it.

“And you are?” she prodded coyly when he fell silent.

He gave her a look of mock surprise. “Are all southern belles this forward?”

“Not at all!” She fluttered her lashes at him, looking mildly abashed. “I’m actually pretty rusty at it.” She glanced away from him, growing pensive. “I lost my husband some time ago. It’s been…difficult.” She drew a shuddery breath and lapsed into silence.

Private investigator Ashley Perkinswatched Mrs. Santa from a distance. It had been easy to join the flood of townsfolk pouring into Chester Farm this morning. No one had even bothered checking her ID. The moment she’d pulled up to the gated old homestead in her borrowed pickup truck and Santa hat, she’d been waved on through.

Her mission was simple — to keep Mrs. Santa in her sights. It had taken over two months of intense detective work to locate the former housekeeper of the late Mr. Clark.However, his daughter and son-in-law were sparing no cost in finding the man’s killer. Assuming, of course, he’d been murdered at all. The coroner said it was suicide. According to Ashley’s digging, however, the same coroner had labeled three other deaths in the greater Dallas area as suicide during the past five years. All of them elderly men. All of them wealthy. All of them connected, at least in passing, to the grieving widow, Caroline Madison —the tireless queen of personal services. Her company, Sunrise Solutions, offered everything from dog walking to meal preparation to one-on-one personal trainer sessions. And now event planning, apparently.

It was possible the woman was every inch the professional jack-of-all-trades she claimed to be. She was certainly adept at changing her colors to match her environment. The Mrs. Santa costume was a nice touch. If the late Mr. Clark’s family was correct, however, Caroline Madison was using Sunrise Solutions as a cover for a much darker set of activities — one in which she used her personal services to ingratiate herself into the lives of wealthy older men, helped herself to their bank accounts, then murdered the key witness before moving on to her next target.

It was the same behavior exhibited by theLatrodectus, the scientific name for the black widow spider — a venomous arthropod known for cannibalizing its mates.

Ashley sipped the hot apple cider someone had thrust into her hands. It was good. Fresh. Possibly made from the apples that were grown in the orchard beyond the fence up ahead. The limbs of the apple trees were bare right now, stretching like the arms of skeletons toward the morning sun.

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