She doesn’t bother to acknowledge me, so we each tear into our mysterious black envelopes to find formal invitations printed in elegant gold script on black cardstock. The message is simple—our presence is requested at the Velvet Fox Hotel down in Leeds tomorrow night at seven o’clock sharp.
“What’s happening tomorrow night at seven?” I shout after Nona Jo, who has managed to travel approximately three full steps away in the time it took us to open the invites.
Nona Jo turns around and lifts her veil, revealing that she is indeed the woman doing her best impersonation of midnight. Her face, which happens to be lined with years of disapproving scowls and Italian curses, breaks into what might be a smile or possibly a grimace of indigestion.
“Be there and find out,” she shouts back, her voice carrying the distinctive rasp of someone who’s smoked cigarettes since they were invented. She looks my way with narrowed eyes. “Or I’ll put a hit out on all of you.” She winks at me and I gasp as she waddles toward the parking lot once again.
“Did your grandmother just threaten to have us all killed?” Cooper asks, momentarily distracted from the Loretta situation.
“In this family, it’s how we say please,” I explain.
Loretta seizes the opportunity and tugs at Lorenzo’s arm. “We should take off, honey. We have...plans.” She gives Cooper a glacial stare. “I expected better from you. I thought you’d be happy for me.”
“Happy that you’re marrying someone who could have been a character witness at the trial of Moses? Nothing suspicious about that archaeological find at all.”
Loretta gasps. “Cooper!”
Enzo’s bushy white brows hike into his forehead. “What are you implying, young man?”
“Nothing,” Loretta cuts in. “He’s implying nothing because he knows better.” She gives her brother a look that could peel paint. “See you tomorrow night, Cooper. Try to be less of a donkey by then.”
With that, she sashays away with Lorenzo in tow, his elderly hobble working double-time to keep up with her irate strut.
“Tomorrow at seven at the Velvet Fox Hotel.” Cooper shakes his head at the invitation in his hand. “Whatever it is, it couldn’t be worse than that.” He looks up where his sister and Enzo are heading toward the parking lot.
Watson nudges my hand with his cold nose, and I absently scratch behind his ears as I watch the retreating odd couple. Between my pending assassination assignment targeting Lorenzo, Cooper’s sister being engaged to said target, and Nona Jo’s mysterious summons, this holiday season is shaping up to be messier than my brother Nico’s attempt at wrapping presents while wearing boxing gloves.
I glance down at the black invitation again and the gold script gleams ominously in the festival lights.
Something tells me that tomorrow night at the Velvet Fox Hotel, something will be getting wrapped, all right—with crime scene tape.
CHAPTER 8
The heated tent here at the Frost & Frolic Festival smells like a collision between Nona Jo’s kitchen and a carnival midway—a glorious cacophony of garlic, sugar, and deep-fried everything.
“This is the life,” I say as Cooper and I hunker down at a wooden picnic table with a feast spread before us as if we were planning to hibernate through winter. Nona Jo just left us with yet another mystery and somehow managed to unleash our appetites all at the same time.
Watson sits at my feet with his golden eyes tracking each morsel in front of me with the precision of a missile defense system.
“I’ve died and gone to food heaven,” I announce, surveying our haul once again.
Okay, so we may have gone slightly overboard at the festival vendors. There’s a massive plate of arancini—fried risotto balls oozing with cheese and spicy Italian sausage—a steaming heap of zeppole dusted with powdered sugar, homemade cavatelli with vodka sauce, and some truly magnificent Italian meatball sliders on fresh-baked rolls.
The carnival side of our spread features hand-cut fries buried under a mountain of garlic and Parmesan, corn dogs that are mostly batter (the way the Good Lord intended), and funnel cakes that could be a part of Mrs. Claus’s doily collection.
For dessert, we’ve got chocolate-dipped candy cane cookies, gingerbread whoopie pies with eggnog filling, and peppermint bark so thick it could probably stop a bullet. Not that I’m planning to test that theory. Our beverages consist of peppermint hot chocolate for me and spiced mulled cider for Cooper—and the steam in the chilly air sends up ribbons of fragrant Christmas spices.
“I’m going to need a bigger gun holster after this,” I say, patting my stomach preemptively. Not that I wear one. Buttercup prefers to be cradled.
Cooper shakes his head, still looking shell-shocked from our encounter with his not-so-sweet baby sister. “I can’t believe Loretta Surprise is engaged to Fossil Fred.”
“Fossil Fred?” I snort. “Is that what we’re calling him now?”
“Among other things not appropriate to say in public.” Cooper tears into a meatball slider like it personally offended him. “Did you see that rock he put on her finger? It’s bigger than her entire dating history.”
“Which is really saying something,” I mutter, remembering the trail of ex-husbands Loretta has left in her wake.
“I heard that.”
