Wicked Games (Hartley Grace Featherstone Mysteries Book 3), Gemma Halliday [free ebooks romance novels txt] 📗

mislead investigators into incorrect assumptions regarding cause of death. The appearance may mimic the results of battery, for example."

"Oh yuck," the girl said.

This time I didn't even try to hide my irritation, giving her a pointed look.

"This is where the inspection of root systems can be valuable," he added.

"I knew I should've dropped this class," the girl muttered.

"Shh," I whispered. "I want to—" My phone buzzed with an incoming text message. I glanced at the screen.

Guess who's late for work?

I checked the time readout and pulled in a sharp breath. I didn't have to guess. I'd lost track of time again. Moving fast, I gathered up my things, slipped past the girl who was paying no attention—to Dr. Osterman or anyone else—and left the room, disappointed that I had to go just when it was getting interesting. It wasn't every day that I had access to one of the most brilliant minds in the forensic sciences.

Unlike Candy Crush, I unfortunately was neither the child of an alumni nor anyone with deep pockets. Or even shallow ones. The words "college fund" hadn't exactly been in my mom's vocabulary as I was growing up, her concerns usually ranging more toward "food on table" and "roof over head." Not that I was complaining. My hard-working single mom had done the best she could. But it just meant that instead of four years of sorority rushing and mid-term cramming, I had to resort to "non-credited" class auditing—translation: crashing them—and working at the campus bookstore coffee bar. I glanced once more at my phone. A job I should have been at ten minutes ago.

I pedaled my bike furiously across the campus, my blonde hair whipping at my cheeks as I wished I'd had the chance to ask Dr. Osterman some of the questions I'd jotted down. I'd been looking forward to his presentation for weeks, and it annoyed me to have to cut it short for something as mundane as coffee. Not that it mattered all that much in the bigger picture. I had no papers to write or tests to take, because I wasn't technically a student. While that meant I could sit in on my choice of classes and avoid the evil specter of GPAs and final exams, it also meant I'd never have the holy grail of a degree either, which did put a slight crimp in my job prospects. Working as a barista wasn't my first career choice, but it paid the bills for now. Barely.

I locked up my bike and hurried into the bookstore and up the stairs to the second-floor loft coffee bar, which was bustling as usual. I took a moment to look over the sprawling bookstore below, the shelves sprouting from a garden of gleaming hardwood, the students busily picking through Stanford hats and shirts and other logo'd gear.

Then I stashed my bag and quickly tied an apron over my average five-five-on-my-tiptoes and 120-to-125-pounds-give-or-take-a-holiday-meal frame.

I was wiping down one of the tables when Pamela Lockwood tapped me on the shoulder. Pam was round and soft with pink cheeks and fine brown hair, and she'd worked at the coffee bar for the past two semesters.

"Hey, Marty."

While my given name was Martha Hudson, everyone had called me Marty for as long as I could remember.

"Hey," I answered back.

"I hope my text didn't interrupt something important."

I shook my head. "Thanks for sending it. I'd lost track of time."

Pam grinned. "What was it this time? Astrophysics? Linear algebra?"

"Forensic anthropology."

"Oh yuck."

Yeah, I'd heard that a lot lately.

"Dr. Bennett Osterman was speaking," I said. "He was showing this slide of a skull with—"

"Again," Pam interrupted, "yuck."

I sighed. No one appreciated the finer things in life anymore.

"Why don't you just break down and register already?" Pam asked. "If you're going to listen to this stuff, you might as well earn something for it."

"What, and give up all this?" I asked, my hands sweeping to include the sandwich wrapper and discarded paper cups at the next table.

Pam grinned. "You know, you could work here and attend classes. Some of us do."

I shook my head. Attending would mean (a) somehow getting accepted and (b) somehow paying tuition. High school was a good handful of years behind me, and I hadn't had the most stellar grades then. While I'd aced classes like biology and physics, things like PE and dissecting Shakespeare's early works to the point even he'd have no idea what we were talking about had bored me to tears. As a result, my grades had been all over the place, resulting in a GPA that was less than impressive. And then there was the whole tuition thing. Which, if I had it, I wouldn't be picking up dirty cups for a living.

No, slipping (hopefully) unnoticed into the lectures of my choice worked much better all the way around.

"I don't know how you can listen to that forensics stuff anyway," Pam said. "It'd give me nightmares for sure."

I shrugged. "It's interesting."

"I'll tell you what's interesting." Pam pointed. "See the blond guy down there with the Cardinal T-shirt on? He's interesting."

I looked and thought, Not so much. He was the typical California dude, with curly blond hair, surfer tan, and unnaturally white teeth. You couldn't walk across campus without running into a dozen just like him. He wasn't half as interesting as Dr. Bennett Osterman.

"Maybe he'll come up for coffee or something." Pam wiggled her shoulders around and patted her hair. "How do I look? Am I frizzy?"

I smiled at her. "You look fine."

"I'm going to go floss," Pam said. "You never know if he'll come up, and I don't want cinnamon bun in my teeth if he does. By the way, we need more cinnamon buns." She rushed off, scrubbing at her front teeth with a finger.

I went back