Recipe for Love (Entangled Select Suspense) by Dyann Love Barr Page B

while she licked the barbecue sauce free, first from one finger, then another. He gave a little cough to loosen the knot in his throat. He wasn’t usually this awkward and uncomfortable around a woman. It put him off his game. Dinner conversation—that’s what he needed to get her off his mind. “I’m not surprised Olivia is a suspect. That woman has a nasty temper.”
    “No. I can’t see her as a killer.” Her face scrunched into a frown and she shook her head in disagreement. She gave a small shrug of her shoulders and focused on her plate. “Besides, she’s a single mom. Why would she jeopardize losing her children over a cooking contest? ”
    “Who knows why a woman kills a man?” He sipped his beer to give him time to answer her question.
    “Hmm.” Tilly rested her chin in her hand and her eyes had the faraway look of someone lost in thought. She absentmindedly squished her baked potato into an unappetizing mess. “There could be a lot of reasons for Ethridge’s murder. Power, money—those are pretty standard motives.”
    “Believe me. It was sex, pure and simple. Don’t forget, she slept with him to get an edge in the cooking contest.”
    “Granted, he used her badly, but she used him as well.”
    “Please, she had the motive and the evidence points to her. Add all that hot Latin blood into the mix.” He couldn’t help rolling his eyes as he forked up a bit of coleslaw. “I mean, didn’t you get a good look at the body?”
    She smoothed her napkin on her lap with crisp, ladylike pats of her hand. “It’s not easy to forget a dead man who’s missin’ his winkie.”
    The coleslaw went down the wrong way. He grabbed the bottle of beer by his plate in a desperate attempt to quell his coughing fit. “Winkie?” The word came out in a strangled mess. “I doubt that’s what they called it on the autopsy report. It’s a penis. Just call it what it is—a penis.”
    “I don’t care. I prefer winkie.” She worked the potato goo with her fork in small, ladylike swirls. “Penis. There, I said it.” Tilly’s crystalline blue eyes threw out a challenge. “Now are you happy?”
    “I’m delirious with joy.” He nearly did a victory dance at the feistiness in her voice. Gone was the pale, subdued woman of a few moments ago. This was the Tilly he knew. His chief competition at the network, the person he traded barbs with over everything under the sun. “And I still say she did the deed.” There, that ought to get her dander up.
    “Oh, I forgot, you’re the amateur sleuth on top of bein’ Satan’s Chef.” She pointed her fork at him with deadly intent. “That has got to be the rottenest name for a show that I’ve ever heard. Tell me, when is your next anger management course?”
    “Very funny.” He took another swig of beer. “Ha, ha.” He leaned back in his chair with a smile on his face, but his eyes betrayed his irritation. “The police probably have her in custody right now.”
    “We don’t know that. I don’t care if her fingerprints were on the container, something doesn’t feel right.” She smoothed her napkin over her lap.
    “What doesn’t feel right?”
    “She sat in the front row durin’ the tapin’. Yes, she was angry, but the look on her face when she saw Ethridge’s winkie on the screen was real.” A frown wrinkled her forehead. “Someone is framin’ her.”
    “Wow.” He clasped his hand over his heart and goggled his eyes. “That’s amazing. You deduced this from her reactions? Tilly, the woman laughed when his missing winkie showed up.”
    “Exactly.” She nodded and leaned back in her chair with a challenge in her eyes.
    “That doesn’t make sense.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Educate me, and don’t give the ‘oh, you’re a not woman, you wouldn’t understand’ crap either.”
    “It was the reaction of a woman who was angry at him, and probably at herself as well. Like I said, they used each other, but she did it in good faith.