Fatal Fortune by Victoria Laurie

Author:Victoria Laurie [Laurie, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780698152502
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

• • •

I woke up to the soft snores of my husband. Blinking my eyes against the light filtering in from the windows, I saw that Dutch was now the one curled around Eggy and Tuttle, while I was left a small section at the edge of the bed. “Traitors,” I whispered to the pups as I eased quietly out of the bed and tiptoed from the room.

I found Brice sitting alone at the kitchen table, half of a cup of coffee in front of him as he stared blankly off into space. He didn’t even seem to notice me.

When I put my hand on his shoulder, he jerked. “Sorry!” I said softly. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

“Can I fix you something to eat?”

Brice shook his head. “Not hungry.”

I sat down across from him and waited for him to lift his gaze to mine. “She’s alive,” I said. “And that’s something, Brice. We have to hold on to that. While she’s breathing, there’s hope.”

Brice’s gaze fell back to the tabletop. “That’s just it, Cooper. Even if she made some kind of miraculous recovery, she’s wanted for murder. Either way we’ll never get Candice back. Either she’ll be a vegetable, or she’ll end up in jail for the rest of her life, and I’ve been sitting here for hours wondering which of the lesser evils to wish for.”

I had no answer to that, so we simply sat in silence for several moments before Brice said, “I still can’t believe this is happening. I mean, last weekend Candice and I were looking at lots for sale. We even interviewed a couple of builders.” Brice looked up at me again. “How did we go from there to here, Abby?”

I reached out and squeezed his hand. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But the one thing I do know is that there is more to this story. There has to be. I refuse to believe that Candice isn’t the loyal best friend to me, and devoted wife to you, she seemed to be.”

Brice’s eyes watered and he turned his gaze to the ceiling. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, all of this . . .” He waved his hand to indicate the magnitude of recent events. “If any of it’s true, then I’ve been living with a total stranger for the past two years. It’s like she’s not even the same person.”

Something clicked in my mind; maybe it was my intuition, maybe it was all my history with Candice, a woman who had never, ever let me down, but something made me get up then and say, “Brice, I’m gonna find out. I’m gonna get the other half of this story and put all this together so that it makes sense. Okay?”

But Brice was back to staring at his coffee cup, and he nodded absently. “Yeah, okay, Cooper.”

I squeezed his shoulder and headed back to the bedroom. Dutch had rolled over and slung an arm across my pillow, but otherwise he was still sleeping soundly.

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