Unfinished Business (Kit Tolliver #12) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) Read Online Free Page A

huh?”
    “Safe?”
    “Well, nobody’s ever safe. Like earthquakes and tornadoes and, I don’t know, tsunamis? Not that I spend a lot of time worrying about tsunamis, but you never know, do you?”
    Where was this going? “And there’s always sinkholes,” she said.
    “That’s right! No warning, nothing, and the ground just opens up underneath you. Gone, no forwarding. Just like that.”
    “But you guess you’re safe.”
    Ree was looking off to the side. “What I figure,” she said, “is if you were going to kill me, you’d have done it by now.”
    “Ree!”
    “Well, you killed everybody else you ever slept with. Kimmie, I knew you weren’t planning to do it, but suppose you couldn’t help it? Suppose it got under your skin, and you couldn’t rest as long as I was alive?”
    “That only happened with men.”
    “You’ve killed women.”
    “My mother, and I explained that to you. And I never had sex with her, anyway. It was just—”
    “And what about Angela?”
    “Angela.”
    “She picked you up in the dyke bar, and her husband was hiding in the closet—”
    “Oh, Angelica.”
    “I was close.”
    “And his name was Brady. He wasn’t in the closet, he was hiding behind a Japanese screen.”
    “Thanks for clearing that up, Kimmie. The point is you slept with her and you killed her.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Strangled her with a scarf or something.”
    “A silk scarf.”
    “Herpes, I think you said.”
    “Hermés.”
    “I know, silly. Ehr-mehz. Poh-mahr.”
    “Ree, they were going to murder me. He wanted to do me just for the thrill of it, and she loved the idea.”
    “I know, you told me.”
    “She was one vicious cunt. She brought me home so her husband could rape me, and when I turned out to be eager and willing, they decided the only way to keep it interesting was to kill me. She had it coming.”
    “I know.”
    “And how could I let her live once I’d killed him?” She frowned. “Okay, I have to admit I enjoyed it. Doing her with the scarf, feeling her squirming underneath me. But it’s the way I’m hard-wired, Ree. Killing gets me off. I can’t help it.”
    “Kimmie, it’s one of the things about you that gets me hot.”
    “I would never, ever, hurt you. Not for anything.”
    “But how could you know you wouldn’t feel the need? The only woman you ever went to bed with wound up with a scarf around her neck and her eyes bulging.”
    “That’s not true.”
    “It’s not?”
    “Boise.”
    “Huh?”
    She took a breath. “After Provo,” she said, “I went to Boise. That’s in Idaho.”
    “And?”
    “All I wanted,” she said, “was to come here. To you. But I couldn’t do that if it meant putting you in danger. So I had to find out.”
    “How could you do that? What would—oh, you slept with a woman! In Boise? They have lesbian bars in Boise?”
    “Well, they had at least one of them. They made it hard to find, I’ll give them that. But I went there and I found a woman to go home with.”
    “And you had sex.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “And she’s still got a pulse?”
    “Unless she stepped in front of a bus.”
    “You didn’t mention it.”
    “No. I thought you might be jealous.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Well, yeah. Or that it might trivialize what we’ve got, or something. Stupid, huh?”
    “So how was it?”
    “A successful experiment, because I had absolutely no desire to hurt her. Not at the time and not afterward. I didn’t want to see her again, either, but I had, like, warm feelings toward her.”
    “What was she like?”
    “I don’t know. Late thirties, dark hair. A little dykey, I suppose.”
    “Was she better than me?”
    “Absolutely. That’s why I spent the rest of my life in Boise and never gave you another thought.”
    “What was the sex like with her?”
    ‘Sort of vanilla. Kissing, touching. You really want to hear this?”
    “Of course.”
    “Let’s see. She went down on me and I came. Then I went down on her, and she couldn’t