Apples, Appaloosa and Alibis by Maria Swan (feel good novels TXT) 📕

I had driven to their house all pumped up, full of romanticized antics, ready to snoop around in every room, plus a special in-depth tour of Tristan’s quarters. Thankfully, the alarm was off. Apparently, Angelique controlled that thing remotely. Modern-day magic. But I had barely set my car keys and my folder on the glass top of the console in the spacious vestibule when the gray-haired nuisance had shown up and messed all my plans.

Now I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Plus, what if there were surveillance cameras in the house? Just because the security system wasn’t there when they bought the home, there had been plenty of time to add cameras when they upgraded.

Nah, I would have known about it. Right?

With the mail neatly stacked on the table in the den, I let myself out, making sure to lock up, then headed down the same paved path as the strange visitor had. Before getting into my car I turned to take a last look. I couldn’t quite see the fenced area where Tristan kept his horse, but it felt sort of lonely and abandoned.

There was hardly any traffic on 40th Street this time of the day. I hated, hated the stupid rented SUV. About everyone had tried to convince me it should be my next vehicle. No way. I still missed my Fiat 500. It was the perfect size. No need to adjust and readjust the seat, mirrors, and above all, my attitude. It was a small car for a small driver—ME. And the color, hot pink, was unique. It was thanks to my now-wrecked Italian car that Tristan Dumont had nicknamed me Fiat. Tristan. I sighed as I drove into the parking lot of Desert Homes Realty.

The black Maserati was hard to miss. What was Double Wide, oops, I meant Dale Wolf, doing there? Visiting Kay Lewis, my mentor and Realtor extraordinaire? Nah, the two of them were old friends, he wouldn’t come to a competitor’s office for a chat, would he? The usual suspects’ vehicles were all sitting in plain sight. Kassandra’s beat up Kia, Sunny’s (my boss) Cadillac, and a few four-door sedans I wasn’t familiar with. Before I locked the rental vehicle, I found myself staring at the ripped business card with gray-hair’s scribbling on the back. The only thing the woman had written was a phone number and two words: Tristan’s father.

Reading his name slammed me with a tsunami of emotion. How I missed him. I left the card on the dashboard, locked the SUV, and headed toward the office thinking that the nameless woman had lovely handwriting—the old-fashioned kind, like you see on those Masterpiece Theater British shows with servants and fabulous staircases in all the homes and secret messages written in elegant cursive on rich paper with yellowed edges. Cursive—what a strange word.

What was it she wanted from Tristan? His father had been dead for... what? Two years? Three? Maybe more? I had never met the man. He died before the Dumonts had moved to Phoenix. That part I knew for sure. The poor soul had died in Mexico, supposedly of a heart attack. Tristan said his dad had never gotten over losing his wife, Tristan’s mom, so the heart attack seemed like a natural consequence.

You always read about the mate dying of a broken heart. Sort of romantic in a weird way. Not that it made the loss any easier on Tristan. He’d confided that to this day he couldn’t forgive himself for not being there for his dad through the difficult period of mourning. Instead, when his mom died, he dived into years of self-destructive behavior—his words—not mine. At the time of his father’s death, Tristan had been in Colorado, getting high on weed, throwing himself down dangerous ski slopes by day, and sleeping around with casual hook-ups by night. He hadn’t been back to Colorado since.

“Oh, there you are.” Kassandra sat at her desk, stone-faced. The desk and her chair were on a raised platform that had been there when Sunny opened for business. It was a little unnerving for first-time visitors and had been an endless subject of jokes among us, the Realtors. Kassandra hardly needed help to look imposing. She was tall for a woman, had large breasts and lots of tarnished copper locks. I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t have a boyfriend or two. She also read tarot cards, seriously.

The lobby and the front part of the office were as quiet as a church on Monday morning, but I could see a few agents in the very back by Sunny’s office. They seemed to be just standing around chatting.

“What’s going on?” I gestured toward the group by the back office.

Kassandra nodded and tilted her head in the direction of the kitchen. Got it. Without a word I headed that way. Our small kitchen, also known as our Swiss place, was off limits if we had discussions or arguments. The kitchen was the no-fights zone. Neutral, like Switzerland, get it? And today it was empty.

“Did you see it?” she asked me.

I nodded. “Double Wide’s Maserati?”

She nodded, her eyes studying my expression. What was going on? Kassandra was almost my best friend and certainly my ally at the office, which translated to gossip sharing.

“We better start addressing him by his proper name, Dale Wolf, Associate Broker and co-owner of Desert Residential and Commercial Realty.”

“Huh? What have you been drinking?”

But by the look on her face I knew she wasn’t joking. I sat at the lunch table, trying to make sense of what she said.

“It’s a merger,” Kassandra explained. “His business is mostly commercial, while ours is strictly residential. With the way the city of Phoenix and the population of Arizona are growing, and with Kay as the matchmaker, they figured they can expand on their existing business and stellar reputations without having to invest a ton of cash. Ok, the cash