Read Death, Taxes, and a Chocolate Cannoli (A Tara Holloway Novel) for Free Online Page B

sofa.
    I shooed him away. “Stop that!”
    He pulled his claws from the fabric, leaped up to his favorite roost atop the armoire that housed my TV, and gave me a look of absolute feline derision before settling down to lord comfortably over the room.
    Alicia sat at the kitchen table, running a hand over the back of my other cat, Anne, who lay on Alicia’s lap, shedding her creamy fur on my roommate’s black yoga pants. Alicia’s platinum head was ducked as she pored over a seating chart for her wedding dinner. As maid of honor, I’d sit at the head table along with the best man, the bride and groom, and their parents. Nick, on the other hand, would be seated among the general riffraff.
    “Hey, Nick!” Alicia called. “Would you rather sit with Daniel’s Uncle Joe who’s going to regale you with tales of his gall bladder surgery, or my snooty cousin Melody who’s going to complain about everything from the food to the napkins to the champagne?”
    “Gall bladder,” Nick said. “Definitely the gall bladder.”
    I waved a hand at Alicia as Nick and I walked into the kitchen. “Finish that later. I need your help with Nick’s hair. You’re better at this stuff than me.”
    As far as style was concerned, Alicia had me totally beat. While my chestnut hair hung to my shoulders in a standard layered look, she wore her hair in a funky, short, asymmetrical cut. Her clothes were always cutting edge, too. Mine tended more toward clearance rack. Not that I couldn’t hold my own when I had to. I just tended to balance frugality with fashion.
    Alicia picked Anne up from her lap and set her on the kitchen floor. “Sorry, girl. Your mommy needs me.”
    I grabbed the manual kitchen timer from the counter. As we went upstairs to my bathroom, Anne skittering along ahead of us, I explained the situation to Alicia.
    “You two are going after the mafia?” she cried. “You just took down a drug cartel! Can’t they assign you some easy cases for a change?”
    “That would be a waste of our talents,” I said with false bravado.
    “Yeah,” Nick agreed. “Besides, we’d be bored with easy work.”
    It was the truth. Call us crazy, but we thrived on the challenges presented by cases like the Fabrizio investigation. The more difficult it was to take someone down, the more determined we were to do it.
    Turning back to the immediate matter at hand, I said, “Nick needs a style that says ‘Look at me! I’m artsy.’” I splayed my fingers jazz-hands style. Nick sat down on the closed toilet seat, while I placed the boxes of hair color on the counter and pulled out all of my hair products. “Here’s what we’ve got to work with.”
    Nick glanced over at the assortment. “This goes against everything I believe in. The only thing a man needs is shampoo and a comb.”
    “Hush,” I chastised him. “You sound like an old fuddy-duddy.” The fact that my use of the antiquated term made me sound like one, too, wasn’t lost on me.
    Anne ventured to the doorway and sat down to watch the goings-on in my bathroom.
    Alicia looked at the two boxes of hair color. “Please tell me the red isn’t for Nick.”
    “The red is mine.”
    “Good,” she said. “A ginger might work on him but that shade is way too bright for his skin tone.”
    I directed Nick to take off his shirt so it wouldn’t be stained by the dye. After enjoying a quick glance at his rock-hard pecs, I wrapped an old bath towel around his shoulders.
    Alicia opened the frost-and-tip box and pulled out the plastic cap, having to fight to get the thing over Nick’s head. “It’s a little small.” With a final grunt and tug, she managed to yank the cap into place and tied the strings tightly under his chin.
    Nick turned his head and looked at himself in the mirror. “I look like a woman about to take a swimming lesson.”
    “A woman from an Eastern bloc country,” Alicia teased.
    “With a severe hormone problem,” I added.
    Nick was an attractive man, but as a