Read All Together Dead for Free Online

afterward, I was feeling a little frazzled from the unaccustomed sociability. I also faced the prospect of telling Amelia about her new invented background. But when I saw the pickup standing in my yard, all such thoughts flew out of my head.
    Quinn was here—Quinn the weretiger, who made his living arranging and producing special events for the world of the weird—Quinn, my honey. I pulled around back and practically leaped out of my car after an anxious glance in my rearview mirror to make sure my makeup was still good.
    Quinn charged out of the back door as I hurried up to the steps, and I gave a little jump. He caught me and whirled me around, and when he put me down he was kissing me, his big hands framing my face.
    “You look so beautiful,” he said, coming up for air. A moment later, he gasped. “You smell so good.” And then he was back into the kissing.
    We finally broke it off.
    “Oh, I haven’t seen you in so long!” I said. “I’m so glad you’re here!” I hadn’t seen Quinn in weeks, and then I’d been with him only briefly as he’d passed through Shreveport on his way to Florida with a load of props for the coming-of-age ceremony for a packleader’s daughter.
    “I’ve missed you, babe,” he said, his big white teeth gleaming. His shaved head shone in the sunlight, which was coming at quite an angle this late in the afternoon. “I had a little time to catch up with your roomie while you were at the shower. How’d it go?”
    “Like showers usually do. Lots of presents and lots of gossip. This was the second shower I’ve been to for this gal, plus I gave them a plate in their everyday china for a wedding present, so I’ve done them proud.”
    “You can go to more than one shower for the same person?”
    “In a small town like this, yeah. And she went home to have a shower and a dinner party in Mandeville during the summer. So I guess Andy and Halleigh are set up pretty well.”
    “I thought they were supposed to get married last April.”
    I explained about Caroline Bellefleur’s heart attack. “By the time she was getting over that and they were talking wedding dates again, Miss Caroline fell and broke her hip.”
    “Wow.”
    “And the doctors didn’t think she’d get over that , but she survived that, too. So I think Halleigh and Andy and Portia and Glen are actually going to have the most-anticipated wedding of the Bon Temps year sometime next month. And you’re invited.”
    “I am?”
    We were heading inside by this time, since I wanted to take off my shoes and I also wanted to scout out what my housemate was up to. I was trying to think of some long errand I could send her off on, since I so seldom got to see Quinn, who was kind of my boyfriend, if at my age (twenty-seven), I could use that term.
    That is, I thought he would be my boyfriend if he could ever slow down enough to latch on to me.
    But Quinn’s job, working for a subsidiary of Extreme(ly Elegant) Events, covered a lot of territory, literally and figuratively. Since we’d parted in New Orleans after our rescue from Were abductors, I’d seen Quinn three times. He’d been in Shreveport one weekend as he passed through on his way to somewhere else, and we’d gone out to dinner at Ralph and Kacoo’s, a popular restaurant. It had been a good evening, but he’d taken me home at the end of it since he had to start driving at seven the next morning. The second time, he’d dropped into Merlotte’s while I was at work, and since it was a slow night, I’d taken an hour off to sit and talk to him, and we’d held hands a little. The third time, I’d kept him company while he was loading up his trailer at a U-RENT-SPACE storage shed. It had been in the middle of summer, and we’d both been sweating up a storm. Streaming sweat, lots of dust, storage sheds, the occasional vehicle trolling through the lot…not a romantic ambience.
    And even though Amelia was now obligingly coming down the stairs with her purse over