Free A Veiled Antiquity (Torie O'Shea Mysteries) by Rett MacPherson

Absolutely not.”
    He rolled over on his back, paws in the air and panting. Clearly, he wanted his belly rubbed.
    “My husband will file for divorce and my mother will go live with her sister and then I’ll have to listen to how miserable she is because her sister’s nuts. I can’t keep you,” I said to him.
    I rubbed his belly. “Of course, my children will elevate me to sainthood.”
    I shut the door and the dog jumped in my lap, put his paws on the steering wheel, and prepared to drive. “Sorry, we’re not going anywhere,” I said to him. “We’re going to lock the doors and wait until somebody drives by. It should only be a minute or two,” I assured him.
    He turned around, evidently smelling the blood on me. His nose went to my forehead and he licked at it slightly. I didn’t have the strength to stop him. He whined a little and looked back at the road in front of him.
    I managed to lock the door and put my hazard lights on. I waited impatiently for a passerby and did not fight the sensation as the road in front of me turned into a dreamlike mist.

Nine
    “Roses are red, violets are blue, you wrecked the car and your pretty head, too,” Rudy said.
    I opened my eyes and found Rudy standing over me with a bouquet of red roses. He smiled. His smile was the kind that was contagious. It took up the majority of his face and his whole body seemed to smile with him.
    “Hi,” I said. I remembered Deputy Newsome telling me that they were taking me to Wisteria General Hospital. I glanced around the hospital room, painted in that perfectly boring gray that only hospitals seem to use. It was either that or the dull cream. I think I actually preferred the gray.
    Okay, yes, I was still in Wisteria General. Fairies had not come and taken me home in the middle of the night like I wished they had.
    “I told the doctors that the reason you weren’t dead was because you were too hardheaded,” Rudy said.
    “That’s the oldest line in the book,” I answered.
    “But in your case, it’s the truth. So are you in any pain?”
    “I have a headache,” I answered. “It’s nothing serious. Just a bump on the head. I was only out for a few minutes.”
    “I was here last night, do you remember?” he asked.
    Vaguely, I remembered him being here. “Yes,” I answered.
    “We have a problem,” Rudy said.
    “What’s that?”
    He put the roses in the vase on the windowsill. “Well, there’s this dog … a wiener dog. He was in the car with you and I’m not sure what to do with him.”
    “Oh.”
    Rudy came over and rubbed my face with the back of his hand. “Colin wants to speak to you.”
    “I bet he does,” I answered. “What did you do with the dog?”
    “He’s at the house for right now.”
    Rudy walked around the room, and I got the distinct feeling that there was something that he wanted to tell me. Or ask me. He wore jeans and his T-shirt with the Coca-Cola polar bear on it that the girls got him for Father’s Day this year. After ten years of marriage I still say he’s got the sexiest butt in a pair of beat-up jeans I’ve ever seen.
    “Look, Colin’s outside and he wants to see you. Now,” he said. “I told him it depended on how you were feeling.”
    “I’m fine. Send him in.”
    Rudy came over and kissed me on the forehead. “You two need to call a truce. I think your mother is really falling for him, Torie. Besides, I know you. Something that starts small eats at you, until you’ve got a full-blown festered sore.”
    “He arrested me,” I said, indignant.
    “I know. And even though I don’t agree with him on that, it’s something you’ve just got to get out of your system. He sees you as a woman who thinks she is above the law because most of the time, people here don’t make you go by any rules. He decided he’d show you that you do have to answer to the system,” Rudy said.
    “Yeah, but…”
    “Don’t but me, Torie. He picked the wrong time to do it, I agree. But it was still