Page 17 of Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

That was when I’d discovered the damage she’d done. Her unrealistic demands had painted me as a diva and first-class bitch, andno onewanted to work with me. While I’d still managed to land a few small roles and product endorsements, it hadn’t been enough to pay the bills. I’d even gottenregularjobs, but none had ever panned out, mostly because my face was too well known, and people hounded me for autographs. Employers don’t care much for divas…even when you’re not trying to be one.

So, at the ripe age of twenty-nine, I’d been on the brink of bankruptcy when Lauren Chapman had shown up at my door, offering me the show—to play on my earlier fame and let cameras follow me around as I solvedrealmysteries in my Alabama hometown. Only it turned out the show was heavily scripted…until I’d found a few mysteries of my own.

But none of that would have even happened if I hadn’t been forced to accept Lauren’s offer. I’d rather have filed for bankruptcy than sign that contract if not for one thing—my grandfather’s balloon mortgage on the farm.

A decade prior, my grandfather had come to me, telling me he was about to lose our farm, which had been in our family for nearly two centuries. At the time, I had the money to bail out the farm, but he was a proud man, and he wouldn’t take a handout. Instead, he’d asked me to cosign a balloon mortgage. I was in the height of my career and I loved Pawpaw more than any other person on Earth, so I’d instantly said yes. But then shortly after, he’d died in a fire that had also killed my aunt and uncle, and while he’d sworn me to secrecy, apparently he hadn’t told anyone else in the family about the balloon mortgage. And then my career tanked.

Fate must have been laughing, because Lauren showed up as I was not only about to be foreclose on my house, but the due date of the balloon payment was closing in on me. I was a desperate woman and my options had been to either pose nude or take the reality TV show gig.

It wasn’t an easy choice.

So I’d come back home in April, found my own murder mystery to solve (which my cousin Dixie and my cameraman Bill had secretly recorded) andDarling Investigationsbecame an overnight hit.

I’d made up with my family—well, everyone except for my mother—and had permanently moved to Sweet Briar back in June, just in time to film a quick turnaround for season two.

I’d also officially moved back to my grandmother’s small farmhouse. While I was grateful to have my grandmother and two cousins back in my life after a decade-long estrangement, it was a little too much forced togetherness. So back in July, I’d hired a contractor to renovate the previous overseer’s house. It had been built in the late 1800s and then renovated several decades later. It had started as a one-bedroom house with a small living room, bath, and a pathetic excuse for a kitchen. With my renovation, I added a second bedroom and bath, and hadthe kitchen extended and the original bath remodeled. But one of my favorite additions was the covered front porch—complete with ceiling fans—that had a view of the cotton fields.

My boyfriend Luke had told me there was no way the contractor would meet the promised end-of-October deadline, and while I was pretty worried Buddy Bolton wasn’t going to make it, he’d picked up the pace after I’d promised him a cameo in the third season ofDarling Investigations…but only if he finished in time. Now, not only was he working double time to meet the deadline, but he was also working out at the downtown gym so he’d look buff by the time season three started filming in November. Given that Buddy was fifty-two years old and likely fifty pounds overweight, that seemed like an unrealistic goal.

Just like getting the house done in time.

But now my grandmother was glowering at me, demanding a response.

“I’ll still be on the land, Meemaw,” I said, for what had to be the hundredth time. “Just like Aunt Merilee and Uncle Stanley when they lived here.”

“Yeah,” she snapped. “And look what happened to them.”

This was an old story it seemed my grandmother was bringing up as some sort of cautionary tale. But the deaths of my grandfather and my aunt and uncle in the barn fire a decade ago, while tragic, had little to do with my living in the overseer’s house, and discussing it could only stir up bad feelings now. Because Meemaw and everyone else had mistakenly blamed my cousin Dixie—who had been high on drugs and couldn’t remember a thing—until the truth had come out in June. Dixie had been set up and convicted of a crime she hadn’t committed. After Dixie had been exonerated, Meemaw had sidestepped the issue, so it surprised me she was bringing it up now, yet the look on her face suggested that there would be no discussing this either.

I sighed. There was no winning the house argument this morning, or likely ever. She considered it an extravagant waste of money to fix up the overseer’s house, let alone to make it “so fancy.” Meemaw was a frugal woman who made coupon clippers look like they were tossing money out of moving cars.

“I have to go into the office today, and I’m seein’ Luke tonight, so I don’t know when I’ll be home.” Which was my delicate way of telling her I was spending the night at his place.

Her upper lip curled. “Livin’ in sin.”

I gave her a sassy grin. “And lovin’ every minute of it.”

She scowled in return, but the corners of her lips tipped up slightly. Shehadto protest me flaunting sleeping with him, like any good Southern Baptist would, but she was not-so-secretly thrilled I had rekindled my teen romance with the Sweet Briar chief of police.

“I think Dixie will be home later today.”

“Another one of ya livin’ in sin,” she said, shaking her head.

“Dixie’s got herself a good man,” I said, pouring coffee into two travel mugs. “And after the last ten years, she deserves every bit of it, so don’t you begrudge her one moment of happiness.”

Her lips pressed together so tight I worried she’d split her lip, but I knew better than to comment. My grandmother wasn’t an easy woman to live with—hence me redoing the overseer’s house—and she was definitely a choose-your-battle kind of opponent, otherwise I’d spend every moment of the day in conflict with her.

“Have a good day, Meemaw,” I said as I snatched up my purse and headed out the back door with both coffees.

She grunted something behind me, which I took as a good sign. If she were truly pissed, she would have given me the silent treatment.

Teddy was leaning over his open engine, cursing a blue streak as I walked over to him.

“Why don’t you use your royalties fromDarling Investigationsto buy a new truck?” I asked as I approached him.

My twenty-eight-year-old cousin had turned out to be quite popular on the series, despite his obvious disdain for the show, and Lauren had been forced to cough up more money to keep him.

“Just because something needs fixin’ doesn’t mean you toss it out, Summy,” he grunted as he pushed all his weight into the wrench that was attached to some part of the truck engine.

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