Deadly Sting Read Free

color?” he asked, picking up the purple pump once again. “Don’t you think it would look fabulous on her?”
    “Fabulous,” Red agreed, her eyes wide and dreamy.
    I might be standing right next to Finn, but I was as invisible as the moon on a sunny day. I sighed again. It was going to be a long afternoon.
    * * *
    Twenty minutes later, after being dragged from one side of the store to the other, Red showed me to a fitting room in the back. Rightfully insisting that he knew more about fashion than I did, Finn had picked out several dresses for me to try on. Red placed the gowns on a hanger on the wall before brushing past me.
    “I’m going to check on Mr. Lane and see if he needs anything,” she said.
    “Of course you are.”
    Red hightailed it over to the jewelry case, where the other saleswoman, a well-endowed blonde, was leaning over and showing Finn the diamond bracelet he’d been admiring earlier—along with all of her ample assets. Red stepped up next to Blondie and not so subtly elbowed her out of the way. Blondie retaliated by shoving her breasts forward even more. The two of them might as well have filled up a pit with mud and settled their differences that way. That would have been far more entertaining than the petty one-upmanship they were currently engaged in.
    I rolled my eyes. Finn was the only man I knew who could inspire a catfight just by grinning. But it was a show that I’d seen many times before, so I stepped into the fitting room, closed the door behind me, and started trying on the dresses. The sooner I picked something, the sooner I could get back to the Pork Pit.
    Too tight, too short, too slutty. None of the garments was quite right, not to mention the fact that Finn had chosen more than one strapless evening gown. My cleavage had never been all that impressive—certainly not on par with Blondie’s—but of more importance was the fact that strapless gowns were not good for knife concealment. Then again, Finn didn’t particularly care about such things. He didn’t have to. He could always tuck a gun or two inside or under his jacket, which suited him just fine, as long as the weapons didn’t mess up the smooth lines of the fabric.
    I was just about to take off the latest fashion disaster—this one in that awful canary yellow that definitely wasn’t my color—when I heard a soft electronic chime, signaling that someone else had come into the store. I wondered how long it would take Red and Blondie to tear themselves away from Finn to see to the new customer—
    A surprised scream ripped through the air, along with a sharp smacking sound. The pain-filled moan that followed told me that someone had just gotten hit.
    “Don’t move, and don’t even think of going for any of the alarm buttons,” a low voice growled. “Or I’ll put a couple of holes in you—all of you. Maybe I’ll do that anyway, just for fun.”
    Well, now, that sort of threat implied that the person making it had a gun—maybe even more than one. I perked up at the thought, and a genuine smile creased my face for the first time today. For the first time in several days, actually.
    I cracked open the fitting-room door so I could see what was going on. Sure enough, a man stood right in front of the jewelry case. He was a dwarf, a couple of inches shy of five feet tall, with a body that was thick with muscle. He wore jeans with holes at the knees and a faded blue T-shirt. A barbed-wire tattoo curled around his left bicep, which looked like it was made of concrete rather than flesh and bone. He held a revolver in his right hand, the kind of gun that could definitely put a large hole in someone, especially if you used it at close range.
    Since it didn’t look like the dwarf was immediately going to pull the trigger, my gaze went to the other people in the boutique. Blondie was the closest to the gunman. She had one hand pressed to her cheek, probably from where the dwarf had reached across the counter and slapped