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“I’ve got to have dinner with my family, but I’ll try,” she said.
“Good.” With a pleased grin, Emmett kissed her soundly, then pulled away and leapt from the bed. She watched his firm, naked ass as he went into the bathroom and shut the door.
With the view gone, she decided she needed to move on. She gathered her clothes, slipping them on and making her way to the door. She was putting on her shoes, leaning against the kitchen counter when she saw Emmett’s cell phone lying there.
Suddenly, the worries that Lydia had so expertly planted in her head returned with a vengeance. A quick look at his phone might quell those doubts. She reached for the phone and then stopped herself. She couldn’t do it. That was an invasion of his privacy and she would hate it if he did the same thing to her. Maddie wasn’t about to ruin the good thing they had going.
With a shake of her head, she pulled on her other shoe and tugged her purse onto her shoulder. She was about to walk out the door when his phone started buzzing. Without thinking, she glanced over at it. The screen proudly declared that Adelia Chamberlain was calling.
Maddie swallowed hard and headed out the door before Lydia’s poisonous accusations could ruin her romantic buzz on a perfectly good Sunday afternoon. There was a reasonable explanation for her grandmother’s call, she was sure of it. As it was, it would be hard enough to sit across the dining table from her grandmother and not spend the entire time wondering what the hell was going on.
Logan was getting used to receiving strange phone calls on Sundays. Two weeks ago, it was to represent Emmett in court. Last week, it was to open the shop and hide away Maddie’s phallus-covered Mercedes. Today, it was a desperate-sounding Clark Newton on the line.
“I know it’s early on a Sunday, but I’ve gotten myself in a bit of a pickle, Logan. Do you think you could come down to the sheriff’s department and, uh, bail me out?”
“Bail you out? What have you done?” Logan asked, then stopped himself. “Wait, don’t answer that. Don’t admit to anything until I get there.”
“It’s a little late to play that game, but come on down anyway. I need all the help I can get.”
Logan got dressed as quickly as he could and then drove around the square to the station. He might not have the prestigious reputation the Chamberlain firm had, but people knew they could call Logan when they got into trouble and he would help them. In this case, it sounded more like he was there for guidance than to try and prove Clark’s innocence, but that was okay with him, too. Building a relationship with Judge Griffin would only help his clients in the future.
Over the last few months, he’d gotten familiar with the check-in process, ending up in the back where the final officer would buzz him through the doors to the containment and interrogation rooms.
“I’m here to see Clark Newton and pay his bail.”
The officer looked down at his ledger and nodded. “The Penis Picasso is down the hall to the far left in cell two. The officer will take you to the bursar to pay bail when you’re ready.”
The door buzzed open, muffling Logan’s groan. The Penis Picasso? Really? He had the damnedest luck in drawing the craziest cases in town. He found Clark in one of the two cells they had at the Rosewood Police Department. They served mostly as drunk tanks and holding areas, and today, apparently, they held the most notorious criminal in town since the Rosewood Peeper, one of Logan’s other clients.
Clark leapt to his feet, running to the cell bars and gripping them. The already thin man looked more gaunt than usual. He had gray circles under his eyes and his cheekbones were more pronounced than the last time he saw him. Clark looked like a man living through an incredible amount of stress.
“Thanks for coming so quickly, Logan. I didn’t know who to call about this.”
“No problem.” Logan slumped down into the chair just outside the cell. “Tell me why you’re in here, man. I have to admit I wasn’t expecting something like this from you.”
Clark sat back down on the bench and shook his head. “I wasn’t expecting something like this from myself, but desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s no secret that print media is dying. Everyone knows it. My paper’s stayed afloat for as long as it has because Rosewood is a time warp. A lot of the older residents still get the paper every morning and read each word. The younger folks, though, they get all their news on the Internet. The Rosewood Times will go extinct as the older subscribers die off.”
Logan knew the state of newspapers was a rough
one. Even in the bigger towns, papers were cutting back how many issues they put out in a week and condensing offices to save money. It wasn’t the greatest business to be in. He just wasn’t certain how spray-painted penises helped matters.
“About a month ago,” Clark continued, “someone spray-painted that penis on the side of the Piggly Wiggly. It was the first real piece of news I’d had in weeks. It wasn’t the kind of news I wanted to cover, but around here things are so quiet that any story is a story. I jumped on it, riding the wave of scandal. To my surprise, the issue with it on the cover sold double what the previous issue sold.”
“You didn’t do it?” Logan asked.
“Not the first one. But a couple of days later, I slipped out in the night and painted another one to keep the mystery going. That day, sales of the paper tripled and I picked up ten new subscribers. By the time I painted the third one, I came up with the idea to start calling the mystery graffiti artist the Penis Picasso. The picture of it debuted with the headline ‘The Penis Picasso Strikes Again,’ and suddenly the paper was performing better than it had in over a year. I couldn’t believe it, but with every instance my sales went up.”
“You were vandalizing public property, Clark.”
“I know. It was stupid.” Clark’s face dropped into his hands. “But I’d been on the verge of closing the paper. Everything I have is sunk into it and I was going to lose it all. I was desperate and in the scheme of things, it seemed pretty harmless. I wasn’t hurting anyone. I was only going to do it one or two more times, then stop, but . . . I guess I should’ve known better than to mess with a Chamberlain.”
Logan perked up in his seat. “Come again?”
“Well, I guess Maddie and Emmett started looking to catch me because they’d gotten tasked with cleaning up after me. Spray-painting the hood of her car was a little bold, I’ll admit, but I wanted them to back off. I waited a week, thinking they’d given up, and decided I would do just one more. I wanted it to pack a punch, and what would be better than to scandalize the fanciest, most uptight business in town? I know I shouldn’t have gone after her bakery, but I never thought she’d pull a gun on me.”
“Madelyn Chamberlain?”
“Yep. She threatened to shoot me in the junk. I think she meant it, too. That stick up her ass makes her very crabby. I kept hoping that Emmett would loosen a few of her screws, if you know what I mean, but even he couldn’t control her.”
