Big Kiss-Off Read Online Free Page A

fingering the silver leaf on her shoulder.
    “Colonel,” she smiled at him.
    “Ex,” Cade reminded her.
    She touched his wings. “And flyer.”
    Cade picked a clean shirt and a pair of new white duck pants from the litter of clothes on the bunk and laid them on her lap. “Put these on,” he said gruffly. He opened the door of the forecabin and lighted a small lantern. “In here.”
    Mimi stood up dutifully.
    Cade looked at a smear of levee mud on one small cheek. “You’d better wash that mud off. I’ll get you a bucket of water while you peel.”
    Mimi was worried, “Peel?”
    “While you take off your clothes,” Cade explained. He picked up a bucket attached to a length of quarter-inch nylon line.
    Mimi was relieved. “Oh,” she smiled, “for wash.”
    Out in the open cockpit, Cade lowered the bucket overside. The dog on the far bank of the river was still howling. As he hauled up the filled bucket, there was a clanging of ship’s bells in the channel and the steamer he’d seen drop anchor earlier, the ship Mimi must have come from, began to move up river through the fog.
    The door of the forecabin was closed. He rapped on it and Mimi opened the door a crack and reached out with a bare arm and shoulder for the bucket, smiling, “
Gracias
. Thank you ver’ much.”
    Cade was relieved when she’d closed the door. He made coffee, then added water to the canned soup and put it and the hash to warm. The rum in the bottle was gone. He sucked the last few drops and pushed the empty bottle out the open port over the sink.
    The things that could happen to a man.
    He set the small table, debated a moment and broke out a bottle of port and two glasses. A small glass of wine never hurt anyone — unless the Squid worked him over afterwards. Even under the thin layer of rum, Cade could taste the orange wine he’d drunk in Sal’s.
    Damn the Squid. Cade felt the butt of the gun in his waistband. The Squid wanted to have a good time. The Squid didn’t want him to leave. He’d do what he could to please the Squid. The next time they tangled, he’d be prepared. He’d kiss him all over his pointed head with the barrel of the .38.
    The watched soup finally came to a boil. Cade turned off the burner and rapped on the forecabin door. “Okay. Come and get it.”
    Mimi opened the door, still smiling. She looked even more fetching than before. She’d braided her wet hair and coiled it around her head. The top two buttons of her borrowed shirt were open and she had discarded the wisp of wet lace. The white pants were tight to the point of bursting around her rounded hips. “Okay, I know,” she said, “but what is this, come and get it?”
    Cade forced himself to look away from her. “Just what it sounds like. Sit down. Soup’s on the table.”
    He looked back, as she touched the adhesive tape on his cheek and nose with feather light fingertips. “Someone has hurt you. You have been in the fight.”
    Cade wished she hadn’t touched him. “Yeah. Something like that.” He sat across from her. “Okay. You said you were hungry. Eat.”
    The table was narrow. The benches were close together, so that their knees brushed as they ate. The cabin was small and intimate. What might happen tomorrow was a hundred years away. Cade poured two glasses of wine. It was nice sitting across the table from a pretty girl again.
    He raised his glass to the girl across the table. “To strangers that met in the night.”
    She touched his glass with hers.
“Saludos!”
    He drank his wine. She sipped at hers and spooned her soup away from her, eating rapidly but daintily. She wasn’t a tramp. Hungry as she was, her table manners were perfection.
    Finished with her soup, she smiled. “You are being ver’ kind and ver’ gallant.”
    Cade tried to eat and couldn’t. It wasn’t food he wanted. He wanted love and companionship and someone warm and soft in his arms. He’d lived with men so long, bitter and angry men, in an alien land.