Page 10 of Rosie and the Beast Next Door

Bennett: Are you home? Are you okay?

Jules: I’ll try calling her.

Jules: She’s not answering.

Bennett: I’m going over there.

Haydn: Wait for the police.

Jules: No, they’ll be too slow. Go in. Take the taser.

Haydn: DO NOT TAKE YOUR TASER GUN.

Haydn: Rosie’s location says she’s at the shop.

Jules: She shared her location with you?

Haydn: I may have turned it on when she let me use her phone last time I was there.

Jules: Wait …

Jules: Bennett, check your phone. He turned mine on too.

Bennett: Kind of busy here.

Haydn: With or without the taser?

Bennett: I’m hiding behind the Lazy Swimmer.

Jules: The who?

Bennett: The boat right next to Rosie’s. Two men and a woman are on her boat. They don’t look like thieves.

Jules: And what do thieves look like?

Bennett: I don’t know. But these guys are in their sixties, at least.

Haydn: WITH OR WITHOUT THE TASER, BEN?

Bennett: I left the taser on my boat. But I have my knife.

Jules: Better hope this is a knife fight, then.

Haydn: Or no fight. That seems like a better thing to hope for.

Haydn: Do I need to book a flight? I can be there in eighteen hours.

Bennett: They’re going inside. I’m going to follow.

The thing about owninga new pet when you’d never owned a pet before, was that it’s time consuming.

Buying her a bed, food, little sweaters and booties, a heated blanket, setting up her cozy living space in my bedroom, taking her to the vet, and agonizing over the perfect name—well, that all chipped away at the minutes I might have used to tell my brothers I was selling my houseboat.

Whoops.

Elizabeth Bennet (aka Lizzy, aka Mrs. Darcy, aka Eliza B) was sleeping in her sunny corner of the apartment above my shop, so I sneaked outside with my paints for some free therapy. Today’s cruise-ship had already come and gone, and I didn’t have to work at the restaurant until tonight. I kept a sign in my boutique’s window with my number, so if a tourist wanted tobrowse, they could give me a call, but that freed up most of my afternoon to break the law.

I rolled my paintbrush through the thick, white gesso, looked to my right then my left, and ran the bristles down with a satisfying glide.

---