Chapter 1
“So there you have it, folks! Adrien Stewart! This is this year’s Holiday Valentine’s Day Exchange and Raffle Hottie King of Hearts!” Juniper held up Adrien’s hand with one of her own. With the other, she egged the crowd on into offering hoots, hollers, catcalls, and whistles while Adrien grinned at all the attention he gathered from a veritable sea of Crescent Cove female eligibles.
Juniper couldn’t blame the female Covians for hooting. Adrien was quite handsome, with velvety brown eyes, a square jaw, and arms like a lumberjack’s. He didn’t smell too bad, either, like a cross between dark, spiced cinnamon and the ocean. A scent which one lucky female would be savoring on their date later in the evening.
It was the Juniper Holiday annual Valentine’s Day raffle, a charity event she put on every year. So far, everything about her Valentine’s Day party had gone off without a hitch... unlike previous parties that had ended in murder.
But this one, held in the ballroom of her mansion, was going quite well, Juniper thought as she glanced around the room at the pink and red streamers and the heart and Cupid decorations. The tables were draped in white linen with a pattern of little hearts, and each had a centerpiece of red roses. The guests all looked happy as they eagerly anticipated the drawing for the lucky lady who would be Adrien’s date.
After a moment, Juniper released Adrien’s hand. “And now, ladies… let’s get to the moment you’ve all been waiting for!”
Victoria Cooper, Juniper’s goddaughter, pressed a button, and a digitized drumroll poured from the speakers placed strategically around the ballroom while Juniper herself turned the crank on an old bingo roller, inside of which was the name of every eligible female in the room, printed on little slips of folded paper.
Each person had paid a premium to be in the raffle, and there would be three winners of lesser prizes, with the grand prize being an all-expense-paid date with Adrien.
The drums stopped, and all the ladies waited with bated breath while Juniper reached in to pull out one of the slips of paper. She grinned. “Are you ready?”
The crowd of ladies all yelled together, “Yes!”
Juniper chuckled at their eagerness. “Very well, here we go. Our third runner-up—Miss Delilah Fontaine!”
Delilah, a cute little brunette wearing low-cut hot-pink silk bell bottoms and a short white shirt that showed off the belly-button ring in her navel, hopped up and down with excitement then turned to her left to hug her friend.
“Delilah, you win a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate to Just Jewels!” Just Jewels was a popular jewelry store in Crescent Cove.
Once the cheers faded and everyone got quiet again, Juniper nodded to Victoria. Drums again, then silence, then…
“Our second runner-up is… Miss Tracy Muller! Tracy wins a five-pound box of premium chocolates from Decadent Delights, and don’t throw out those gold hearts—they’re twenty-four carat!” Juniper had the premium chocolate store in town design special chocolates with little genuine gold hearts on some of them. “Yay, Tracy! Woot! You go, girl! Come on, everyone, give her a hand.”
The crowd erupted in clapping, and Juniper grinned. Tracy Muller was a little more than a tad on the shy side. Her face was already three shades brighter red than it had been a moment before, and her eyes were wide despite telltale signs of excitement. Juniper figured she’d already started to sweat at the thought of winning a date with hunky Adrien Stewart, but hey, at least she was still smiling. Truth be told, Juniper had been hoping Tracy would win the date; she didn’t hang with the popular crowd and rarely dated. It would have been nice for her.
Nodding for Tori to hit the drums again, Juniper waited for the dramatic stretch of silence. “Okay, girls, this is the last runner-up before we pull the grand prize winner!” Juniper reached into the drum and pulled out a paper. “Miss Clarice Bellmont! You win gift certificates to Crescent Cove’s finest restaurants—RarelyDone Steakhouse, Dusty Buns Bakery, and the Rotgut and Ruin local bar.”
A whole section of ladies hooted and hollered in support of Miss Bellmont. Juniper didn’t say a word, but she definitely knew why. Those snobbies, the little socialite “daddy-bought-me-a-BMW”
girls, expected Clarice to win because, well, she was Crescent Cove’s new mayor’s daughter. The old mayor, Floyd Berkshaw, had been shot and killed by his wife, and the vice mayor had served for only three weeks before quitting and necessitating a quick election, which was won by Clarice’s father, Johnny Bellmont.
Despite winning the best runner-up prize, Clarice didn’t look happy. She’d probably been expecting to win the grand prize. Juniper was glad she hadn’t. Clarice, along with her friends, Emma Porter, Lacey Hines, and Tiffany Davenport, had always been entitled. They were a few years younger than Tori, but Juniper remembered Tori telling her how they’d been rich mean girls in high school. Even though they were almost thirty now, Juniper could tell not much had changed.
Secretly, Juniper wouldn’t have been surprised if the entitled ladies had tried to sneak in and rig the final roll, but she’d seen to it that they couldn’t. Not only had she put the rollers under strict lock and key, she’d had Jacobi haunt the room where they were being kept—as a wholly cautious, totally preventative measure.
Tori had pressed another button on the machine, as per Juniper’s prior direction, and a short interlude of music played while the runners-up took a moment or two to celebrate their positions before they pulled the big prize winner.
Silence fell, and right on cue, Tori started the drumroll up again. Juniper gave the crank a couple hearty spins and then clapped while it settled to a stop on its own before she stuck her hand in to choose this year’s Queen of Hearts, ...
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