A Good Day for Chardonnay (Sunshine Vicram #2) by Darynda Jones

“I have faith.” Sun knew that no one would be harder on Auri than she would herself. Maybe even a little too hard, but maybe that was what she needed. A harsh dose of reality.

After a fresh round of tears, Auri nodded in agreement.

It took a while but they finally got the whole story from her. It demolished Sun’s heart to hear her daughter try to explain what it was like to find Mrs. Fairborn tied up. How she rushed in without even thinking, putting everyone in even greater danger. How she watched as the knife sank into Cruz’s abdomen.

Sun decided right then and there the fiery minx learned her lesson in the hardest way possible. She would’ve given anything to protect her from it, too. Still, what she did could not go unpunished. Sun saw several thousand hours of community service in her future.

Possibly worse, for Sun anyway, she had to tell Auri about Cruz’s father. Levi held the pixie for a long time while Sun stroked her hair, worried she’d broken her. They cried together and waited as they brought Cruz, barely conscious, to his room across the hall.

“What do I say to him, Mom?” she asked between sobs.

“Just be there for him, honey. That’s all you can do.”

Sun checked on her other stabbing victim, Keith Seabright. They’d downgraded his prognosis from critical to serious but stable. With that bit of good news, Sun had to get back to the office.

She took her parents aside before she left. “Okay, guys. She is connected to an IV. Her ass will show if she tries to make a run for it and that will mortify her. And she literally had brain surgery. Do you think you can keep her from sneaking out?” She had to ask.

The guilt on their faces was priceless.

“And I’m teasing you because you have to stop, too. This was not your fault. Any of it.”

Her mom’s expression told Sun she was not convinced. “We showed her the articles.”

“No, she found those articles all on her own because she’s a true-crime aficionado. You have no idea how many times I’ve had to drag her away from the Investigation Discovery channel. She knows more about hiding a body than I do.”

“We’re sorry either way, Sunny,” her dad said. “If we could change what happened—”

“I would do it, too. And as many times as I’ve plotted your deaths for something that actually was your fault, this is not one of those times.”

“You’ve plotted our deaths?” her mom asked.

“So many times.”

“Like, how recently?”

“Remember Carver?” she asked, giving attitude.

“Oh, yeah.” Her dad scratched his chin. “Our bad.”

“Your bad?” she asked. “You set me up with a hitman and it’s your bad?”

Her mom shrugged. “He seemed okay at the time.”

She leaned in and kissed her cheek, then gave her dad a bear hug. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

She had to get to Del Sol to check on the progress of the Kent and the Fairborn cases. Billy Press’s family was on the way from Amarillo, and they apparently wanted that damned necklace. They were about to be sorely disappointed. Sun decided right then and there to hold that thing in evidence as long as humanly possible. As soon as she could find it.

She promised to be back by nightfall and left Quincy in charge, only because he refused to leave. She took Levi with her. He had a business to run, after all, and he needed to get some rest that did not involve a plastic lounger that reclined about as much as a seat on a jetliner.

On the drive home, her mind spiraled in a thousand different directions. The irony was not lost on her. Kubrick Ravinder stabbed her rescuer fifteen years ago before her rescuer won control of the knife and slid it into Kubrick’s chest.

And now Cruz. The saying that truth was stranger than fiction had never been more accurate.

Her thoughts, as they always did, eventually circled back to the man sitting beside her. The way he cared for Auri. The way he held Sun in the shower, completely unfazed by the fact that she was soaking him through. And the way he looked in the red T-shirt she bought one size too small, swearing it was all they had. It showed every muscle. Every dip and every curve. Every ounce of perfection.

Rojas called and snapped her out of her musings. The Bluetooth in her cruiser automatically picked it up and blasted the ringtone throughout the speakers. Levi had been just as lost in his thoughts as she was hers, but it was impossible for him not to hear the conversation.

“We got this, boss,” Rojas said. “You do what you need to do. We have everything covered. Also, Randy set fire to the station.”

“Damn it,” she said, only half paying attention to him and more paying attention to the way Levi’s biceps stretched the hem of the sleeve. “He didn’t set off the suppression system, did he?”

“Only in the locker room.”

“Okay, good. Who’s Randy again?” She loved saying that. It was too bad Carver turned out to be an assassin and not a pest control technician. And that he was dead. She could’ve used him to trap the little guy.

Not thirty seconds after she ended her call with Rojas, her phone rang again.

“Hey, Sunny Girl,” Royce Womack said.

“Hey yourself. What do you got?”

“So, you were right. My contact looked into one Mr. Carver Zuckerman. He wasn’t so much a famous hitman as a wannabe famous hitman.”