Free Scene of the Crime: Return to Bachelor Moon by Carla Cassidy Page A

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    On Monday morning, Gabriel was still in bed when Jackson and Andrew knocked on his door and asked if he wanted to go with them for breakfast at a café in town. He declined, but as he went downstairs to the dining room and heard Marlena humming from the kitchen, he was sorry he hadn’t gone with his two partners.
    As he poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot in the dining room, he realized he liked the sound of her humming. It was an unfamiliar but pleasant feminine noise he’d never enjoyed before.
    He followed it into the kitchen and paused and watched as she stirred a big pot of what smelled like rich spaghetti sauce. He noticed that her bottom wiggled with each stir of the big spoon.
    “I checked out your boyfriend last night,” he said.
    She whirled around, obviously startled by his presence. “You scared me.” She placed the spoon in the spoon rest. “And he’s not my boyfriend.” She grabbed a cup of coffee that was on the nearby counter, then sat at the table and motioned for him to join her.
    He hesitated. He could smell her scent, clean from a morning shower, sprayed with the fresh floral fragrance that had imprinted itself into his head. Her scent, combined with the tomato-and-herb odor of the sauce, somehow brought to his mind what home might smell like.
    Stop it, he mentally commanded himself. He sat at the table and tried to staunch the alien thoughts that drifted through his mind.
    She sat across from him and looked at him expectantly. “So what did you find out about Thomas, and how on earth did you do it so quickly?”
    “Ah, the wonder of the internet and the magic of the FBI’s powers.” He paused to take a drink of his coffee and then continued. “Thomas Brady, thirty-seven years old. Never married, no criminal background—the man appears on paper to be squeaky clean.”
    “That’s good to know.”
    “I still need to have a face-to-face meeting with him and check out his alibi. Just because somebody has managed to keep a clean record doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not a bad guy.”
    Marlena frowned, the dainty line dancing in the center of her forehead doing nothing to detract from her beauty. “I can’t imagine Thomas being so upset that he would do something terrible to the family.” She got up from her chair. “You want some breakfast? I’ve got bacon already cooked, and it would take me just a minute to fry up a couple of eggs.”
    “Okay, if it isn’t too much trouble,” he replied. Maybe he would find her less distracting if she was doing something instead of sitting across from him and gazing at him with her amazing eyes.
    “Sam and Daniella never talked about having a will?” he asked as she moved across the room to the refrigerator.
    “Never. It wasn’t something we would have talked about.” She carried the egg carton to the counter next to the stove. “Scrambled, over easy or hard cooked?” she asked.
    “Scrambled is fine. Pamela seemed to think that if Sam and Daniella had a will, then Macy would be a beneficiary and so would you.”
    Marlena laughed and turned to face him. “I told you before, there’s no way I would be in any will. Daniella would never do that. This bed-and-breakfast was her dream from the time she was a teenager, but she knew it was never mine.” She turned back around to the counter and placed two slices of bread in the toaster, then moved an iron skillet over a heating burner.
    “Daniella knew that my plan in the next couple of months was to move to either Baton Rouge or New Orleans. She and Sam paid me a good wage, and I’ve managed to squirrel away most of it so I can go to college and get my teaching degree. I’ve even made Cory put half of his paycheck each week into a savings account so that when we get to the city, he can enroll in a trade school. Daniella would have never left me this place because she knew I wouldn’t want it.”
    She looked at him again with a wry smile. “I guess that removes me as a