by Diana Orgain
PRAISE FOR
A First Date with Death
“Loved it! Daring, funny, and unforgettable, Georgia is a protagonist you’ll identify with. Dreamy men, romance, and a plot that twists to the end. I was drawn in by the memorable characters and a glimpse into the crazy world of ‘reality’ television.”
—Nancy J. Parra, author of the Perfect Proposals Mysteries and the Baker’s Treat Mysteries
“A great vicarious adventure . . . Diana has a hit with this new series! I highly recommend this novel [to readers who] enjoy well-written cozy mysteries with more than a little bit of romance, strong female characters, humor, and a challenge.”
—Open Book Society
PRAISE FOR DIANA ORGAIN’S OTHER NOVELS
“Fast-paced and fun.”
—Rhys Bowen, New York Times bestselling author
“Stellar . . . A winning protagonist and a glorious San Francisco setting . . . Highly recommended.”
—Sheldon Siegel, New York Times bestselling author
“A fantastically fun read . . . Not only offers humor and suspense, but also makes sure to not solve the puzzle until the last pages.”
—Suspense Magazine
“An over-the-top good-time cozy mystery. With a feisty heroine and with lots of humor, plenty of intrigue and suspense . . . this novel is a delightful treat to read.”
—Fresh Fiction
Berkley Prime Crime Titles by Diana Orgain
Maternal Instincts Mysteries
BUNDLE OF TROUBLE
MOTHERHOOD IS MURDER
FORMULA FOR MURDER
Love or Money Mysteries
A FIRST DATE WITH DEATH
A SECOND CHANCE AT MURDER
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
A SECOND CHANCE AT MURDER
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2016 by Diana Orgain.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-14016-5
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market paperback edition / January 2016
Cover illustration by Bill Bruning.
Cover design by Danielle Abbiate.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Praise for Diana Orgain
Berkley Prime Crime Titles by Diana Orgain
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Excerpt from A First Date with Death
About the Author
Un beso y un abrazo fuerte para mi mamá, que siempre me apoya en todo. Te quiero.
¡VIVA ESPAÑA!
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my wonderful editor, Michelle Vega, and the entire crew over at Berkley Prime Crime for your never-ending support. Thanks to my agent, Jill Marsal, simply the best in the business.
Special thanks to my dear friend, KJ. I always know I can count on you no matter what. Your love and support have always been an inspiration to me.
Thanks to Marina Adair, who endlessly listens to all my plot twists, both real and imagined. You always make everything better!
Thanks to all my early readers, especially Mariella Krause and Chrystal Carver, for keeping me and the story on track.
Shout out and hugs to my Carmen, Tommy, Bobby, and Tom Sr. You all make life worth living.
Finally, thanks to all you dear readers who have written to me. Your kind words keep me motivated to write the next adventure.
One
The cold snap in the Spanish Pyrenees was a surprise. My sleeping bag had only been rated for forty degrees and it was already thirty, if not lower.
I shifted in the bag, hoping to share a little body heat with my boyfriend. The space beside me was empty, so I stretched my arms and reached across the length of his sleeping bag, thinking maybe he’d shimmied over to the side of the tent in his sleep.
“Scott?” I murmured.
When no answer came, I pried an eye open and scanned the dark tent. “Scott?” I said, bolting upright. My head rubbed against the microfiber of the tent, making my hair stand on end.
Where was he?
Perhaps nature called.
I sighed, shivering as the low temperature caught up with my brain. My back ached, too, and I realized I must have been sleeping directly on a rock. What in the world was I doing tent-camping? How had I gotten myself into this mess?
Oh, yeah. Becca.
After our stint on the breakout show Love or Money, where Scott and I had met, we’d agreed to appear on the reality TV show Expedition Improbable. The show was a series of races and competitions. Whichever team came in last in each leg would either be penalized or eliminated.
There were five teams of two people. Scott and I were up against an NFL player and his manager, two girls trying to break into the Nashville scene, a mother-son team, and a brother-sister team.
How or why I had agreed to be on the show was still a bit fuzzy—except that the prize money we’d won on Love or Money had seemed to evaporate into thin air.
First off, there was the issue of taxes, and then the matter of the medical bills Scott still owed for his deceased wife’s care. Finally, the drought in California had made the cost of water astronomical, so much so that my dad had nearly lost his farm. Scott and I had agreed that we’d loan him the money he needed to buy water from the state. That pretty much accounted for the prize money. And being that my recent resume lacked any marketable skills, I was hard-pressed to land a job. Not that I’d ever find a job as a cop again after starring on reality TV.
I guess you could say, When reality TV comes to an end, reality kicks in!
Grabbing my phone from the end of my sleeping bag, I clicked on the flashlight app. I unzip
ped the tent and poked my head out. The frigid air snapped through my hair, leaving me feeling cold and exposed. My vision adjusted to the darkness and I could make out the other tents scattered across the campsite.
The ten contestants were all camped out here along with a skeleton crew who looked out for us. This was our first camp. Tomorrow we would be given the first quest to locate something—like a scavenger hunt—and we were warned it would include an extreme sport. God knows what the producers would cook up for us.
The rest of the crew was staying at what was considered “base camp,” a bed-and-breakfast in a nearby town. In short, they got to sleep in warm beds, drink sangría, and gorge on tapas, while we poor slobs froze. My best friend, Becca, the show’s producer, was probably out flamenco dancing at this very moment.
I shrugged on the down jacket the crew had provided me with earlier and zipped it up, shoved my feet into cold-weather boots, and put on a knit cap. All bundled up, I’m sure I wasn’t the epitome of sexy, but hey, at least I wasn’t shivering out a samba beat with my teeth.
I left the tent and took the dirt trail toward the outhouse. Scott had probably just taken a quick trip and hadn’t wanted to wake me. I watched my breath float out around me as I hiked toward the outhouse.
“Georgia!” A deep voice called out.
I whipped around and came face-to-face with Parker, one of the contestants who’d come on the show with his sister, Victoria.
I lowered the flashlight, so as not to blind him. “Hey, Parker. You can’t sleep, either?”
He shook his head. We wore matching gear: down jacket, black boots, and knit caps. We probably looked like stalkers. “Something woke me. Did you hear it?”
“Hear what?” I asked.
I hadn’t actually heard anything—but why had I awoken in the first place?
“Something like a roar. Do you have bear spray on you? We probably shouldn’t be walking around unarmed.”
A chill edged up my spine and the hairs on the back of my neck tingled.
I was unarmed, save for the pitiful cell phone I wielded in my hand. We all were unarmed and, come to think of it, it made no sense. Who camped in the mountains completely vulnerable to nature?
Goodness, I hate the reality TV show business.
Parker stepped closer to me. “Do you have a weapon?”
I shook my head before questioning the stupidity of admitting I was unarmed to a relative stranger in the dark woods miles away from civilization. “Do you?”
His eyes flickered to the left, shifty-like. “No.”
I remembered earlier in the day Parker had seemed overly interested in Scott and me and I’d found it odd. My former cop instincts took over and I subtly moved away from him.
Where was Scott?
Why was Parker walking around the campground? If there had really been a roar why wasn’t everyone else clamoring around to see what it was?
Parker took a step toward me, but I was faster. I swept his knee with my booted foot, pitching him forward. He tripped over himself and fell to the ground, letting out a wail before dropping his light in an effort to break his fall. I dove on top of him, my knee pressing on his throat. I shined my flashlight at him. His eyes were wide and there was a look of dumb confusion on his face.
Damn.
Had I just made a mistake?
No. Something was off about Parker and after my last experience with murder on the show, I needed to stay on my toes.
His hands faltered against my leg, the stupid fish look still on his face.
I suddenly felt bad. I eased up on his throat, enough to let him speak.
“Georgia,” he squawked out. “What are you doing?”
“What the hell are you doing?” I hissed. “Wandering around camp in the pitch dark and asking me if I’m armed.”
He swallowed, his throat constricting under my knee. “I heard the roar—”
“Liar! There was no roar.”
Anger flashed across his face and he found his strength, pitching his hands against my shoulders and toppling me to the side. He slipped out from under my grasp and pinned my arms to the ground. My phone dropped, skittering away; blackness engulfed us.
The cold earth clawed at my back; the freezing ground stealing warmth from my body. That would show me. How many times did I have to learn the same lesson over again? I had to be smarter. Tougher, not lenient just because he looked pitiful. His grip on my wrist let up a bit and he said, “I couldn’t sleep, okay? I woke up and wanted to take a walk.”
I wiggled out from under him and he let me go.
He backed off and I got up from the ground. When he let his guard down, I shoved him hard. “Don’t you ever tackle me again, you creep. Understand?”
He nodded slowly and then he sagged like a deflated balloon. “My sister’s not in our tent,” he confessed. “I came out to find her. She’s got a bad habit of going off on her own and I want to win this stupid contest. If I don’t get control of her, I can kiss this thing good-bye.”
A nervous energy wiggled through my stomach.
His sister was missing and so was Scott.
Okay, maybe missing was an overstatement. But he sure as hell wasn’t where he was supposed to be and according to Parker, his sister, Victoria, wasn’t, either.
I picked up my phone. “Where do you think she skulked off to?”
He shrugged. “I was going to check the outhouse. She’s probably not there though, because she would have come back by now, right?”
I remained silent. Silence was usually the best way to get information out of people. At least that’s what they’d taught us at the police academy.
“Anyway,” Parker continued. “I figured I’d walk down the trail to the restrooms, then check the path that goes to the mountain stream. It’d be just the kind of thing she’d do alone.”
My stomach churned as I considered that perhaps she wasn’t alone. A midnight stroll to the mountain stream would be right up Scott’s alley, too. I flashed my light against the dark soil, illuminating a small circle. “Let’s get a lantern,” I said. “If we’re going down to the river, we’ll need more light than this.”
Parker disappeared back into his tent. I returned to my own tent, tossed my cell phone onto my sleeping bag and grabbed my lantern. When I left my tent, Parker was already at the picnic table, igniting his gas lantern. He stretched out his arm and blue light shined across the path.
Before we left camp, I grabbed a slim log near the fire pit. Parker gave me a strange look, then picked up his own log. “If we come across a bear, we’ll be prepared, eh?” he asked.
I didn’t answer him and we set off in silence. It was so dark I could make out the stars. I hadn’t seen the Little Dipper since I’d been home at Cottonwood. One of the things I hated about living in a city was not being able to appreciate the stars. It had to be country dark in order to see the constellations.
The dirt trail crunched under my boots as we walked. I cursed myself again for letting Becca talk me into the show. What exactly was I doing walking in the pitch dark next to a stranger I didn’t trust, freezing my derriere off, and carrying a stick?
Looking for my boyfriend, that’s what.
Scott.
My heart did a little flip-flop as I thought of him. He’d been excited about the trip, looking forward to seeing places he hadn’t traveled to yet. Spain was only the beginning of our journey. The final locations hadn’t been disclosed to us, but we knew we could expect at least five destinations.
Parker and I reached the outhouses, which were as we’d expected: dark and empty.
Earlier in the day we’d all arrived at camp by bus. It’d been hot in the afternoon and we’d gotten filthy pitching our tents. The crew had suggested a short hike to the river and even though everyone was exhausted from the day of travel, we’d enjoyed the time by th
e water.
Parker turned toward the stream. “Everyone thinks you and Scott are particularly tough competition.”
He was making small talk to ease his nerves. I knew the feeling.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because you won the other show.”
“The other show had been a glorified version of The Dating Game. If that’s even the right way to describe it. I mean, we didn’t have to do anything. No zip lines or rafting or whatever extreme things they have in store for us here.”
“You guys rock climbed,” he said.
I didn’t want to tell him the rock climbing had been staged. After we’d had a disaster with the bungee jumping, the producers didn’t want to risk the liability. Anyway, what good would it do to argue my limitations? That would be silly.
We walked down the steep path in the dark, the lantern barely casting light a few inches ahead of us.
“I think we should be noisy,” I said. “That way any critters drinking by the stream will know they have company and skedaddle.”
Parker called out loudly, “Victoria? Vicky? Are you here?” He glanced nervously at me. “No offense, but if we find the two of them in a compromising position, you won’t hold it against me, will you?”
Fear jolted through me.
What an idiot I was!
Until that moment, the thought of Scott getting to know Parker’s sister in the biblical sense hadn’t occurred to me. Could it be that my brand-new boyfriend, the one I’d fallen for so hard at the end of the last show, was cheating on me? I felt sick to my stomach.
“Don’t say that. Why would you say that?” I asked.
“Well, don’t get me wrong, I love my sister, but she plays fast and loose with social mores. Like she wouldn’t think twice about getting together with someone else’s boyfriend. She’ll just excuse the behavior by saying she’s breaking down the competition.”
A howl pierced the night, stopping Parker and me in our tracks. It’d come from the direction we were headed. I tightened my grip on the log I carried.
