Read Online Deadlocked: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel by Charlaine Harris - Free Book Online Page A

brightened when my own brother walked in just as Kenya was leaving. Instead of sitting at the bar or taking a table, he came up to me.
    “You think I look like a Holland?” I asked him, and Jason gave me one of his blankest stares.
    “Naw, you look like a Sookie,” he said. “Listen, Sook, I’m gonna do it.”
    “Gonna do what?”
    He looked at me impatiently. I could tell this wasn’t how he’d expected the conversation to go. “I’m gonna ask Michele to marry me.”
    “Oh, that’s great!” I said, with genuine enthusiasm. “Really, Jason, I’m happy for you. I sure hope she says yes.”
    “This time I’m going to do everything right,” he said, almost to himself.
    His first marriage had been a mistake from the start, and it had ended even worse than it had begun.
    “Michele’s got a good head on her shoulders,” I said.
    “She’s no kid,” he agreed. “In fact, she’s a little older than me, but she don’t like me to bring that up.”
    “You won’t, then, right? No jokes,” I warned him.
    He grinned at me. “No jokes. And she’s not pregnant, and she’s got her own job and her own money.” None of these facts had been true of his first wife.
    “Go for it, Brother.” I gave him a quick hug.
    He flashed the grin at me, the one that had hooked scores of women. “I’m asking her today when she gets off work. I was gonna eat lunch here, but I’m too nervous.”
    “Let me know what she says, Jason. I’ll be praying for you.” I beamed at his back as he left the bar. He was as happy and nervous as I’d ever seen him.
    Merlotte’s began to fill up after that, and I was too busy to think much. I love being at work, because I get to be around people and I know what’s going on in Bon Temps. On the other hand, most ofthe time I know too much. It’s a feathery balance between listening to people with my ears and not listening to them in my head, and it’s not too surprising that I have a big rep for being eccentric. At least most people are too nice to call me Crazy Sookie anymore. I like to think I’ve proved myself to the community.
    Tara came in with her assistant, McKenna, to order an early lunch. Tara looked even bigger with her pregnancy than she had at Hooligans the night before.
    Since she’d brought McKenna along, I couldn’t ask Tara what I really wanted to know. What had happened when she talked to JB about his second job at Hooligans? Even if he hadn’t seen Tara in the crowd, he’d have to know we were going to tell her.
    But Tara was thinking about the shop with great determination, and when she wasn’t planning to restock the lingerie counter, she was concentrating on the Merlotte’s menu—the very limited menu that she knew back and forth—trying to figure out what she could digest, and how many more calories she could ingest, without actually exploding. McKenna’s brain wasn’t any help; though McKenna loved to know every little snippet of information about Bon Temps happenings, she didn’t know about JB’s moonlighting. She would have been vastly interested if I’d told her. McKenna would have loved to be a telepath, for about twenty-four hours.
    But after she’d heard stuff like I can’t take it anymore, I’m going to wait till he’s asleep and slash him or I’d like to take her and bend her over the bar and drive my … Well, after a day or two of that, she wouldn’t love it so much.
    Tara didn’t even go to the ladies’ room by herself. She towed McKenna along. I looked questioningly at Tara. She glared at me. Not ready to talk, not yet.
    When the lunch rush was over, only two tables remained in use, andthey were in India’s section. I went back to Sam’s office to work on the endless paperwork. Trees had died to make these forms, and that seemed a great pity to me. I tried to fill out anything I could online, though I was very slow at it. Sam came back to his office to retrieve a screwdriver from his desk, so I asked him a question about an