GUNNER (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 5) Read Online Free PDF Page B

thought one of the waiters was going to douse her with a pitcher of ice water. I kept waiting for her hand to slip under the table.”
    “As you’ve uncharitably pointed out in the past, it was probably the booze.”
    “Ordinarily I’d agree with you. But not this time. That lady is on the prowl. There didn’t seem to be much warmth between her and her husband. I don’t know how they once were, but I’d say it’s a marriage of convenience now.”
    She said it with assurance. I tended to agree with her on matters of the heart. Alice was usually spot-on when her female antenna picked something up.
    “Well, he’s a good deal older than she is,” I said. “Mid-60’s by my estimation. Maybe the fire is going out.”
    “His, maybe. But not hers. Gal like that needs her embers constantly stoked.”
    ***
    “I think that was a pretty good stoke,” I said an hour later, a bit breathlessly.
    Alice looked down at me. We were in bed. She had been particularly energetic in her lovemaking.
    “I knew I shouldn’t have used that word,” she said. “You’re like a dog with a bone when you hear something you like.”
    “Arf. Have you ever noticed how much harder you stoke after another women pays a lot of attention to me?”
    “Would you rather I pull a Lorena Bobbitt?”
    Alice did something with one of her internal muscles to reinforce her point. The word ‘snapper’ came unbidden into my mind. 
    “You’d never do anything to endanger your chief stoker,” I said.
    I leaned up and licked one of her nipples.
    “Well, there’s that,” Alice said, laughing. She began to move her hips. “How old did you say that Yorke broad was?”
     

CHAPTER 4 - STAGE FRIGHT
     
    I woke up Sunday morning to the smell of breakfast sausage. If there are better smells to wake up to, I’d like to find out. The only downside was knowing that unless there was a fire in the kitchen that had reached the meat drawer in the fridge, Alice was cooking breakfast. Of course, that didn’t rule out the possibility of fire. Deciding to hope for the best, I threw on some shorts and a t-shirt and headed downstairs. As I got closer, I also detected the odor of biscuits, as yet unburnt. What the hell was going on? I sped up.
    She was standing over the stove, putting the sausage on paper towels, wearing her own shorts and one of my t-shirts. When I had last seen her a few hours earlier, she was naked and sleeping contently with one arm on my chest. Life was good.
    “Life is good,” I said.
    She looked at me and smiled.
    “Can you do the coffee?”
    Ten minutes later we were eating on my deck. Eggs, sunny side up, no yolks broken; sausage; buttermilk biscuits with butter and maple syrup; orange juice and coffee with cream. It was a tad chilly, but I couldn’t have cared less. Neither did Scar, “my” feral cat. He was on his third sausage. My coffee had cooled. I went over and poured what was left in my mug into his bowl. Then I refilled my mug from the porcelain pitcher on the table.
    “I never knew a cat that drank coffee,” Alice said.
    “He would drink Sterno.”
    “I have some raspberry Kringle warming in the oven,” she said.
    I order the traditional Danish pastry from Wisconsin. It comes in a big ring and I cut it into sections and freeze them. Thawed and warmed in the oven they taste just as good as fresh. I have no idea why.
    “All right, lady. What have you done with Alice?”
    I moved my legs out of kicking range.
    “It’s our last morning together, for a while,” she said, laughing. “I wanted to do something special for you.”
    “I thought you took care of that last night.”
    “Oh, that. I thought you didn’t notice.”
    “Notice? I just made an appointment with my chiropractor.”
    She colored slightly. I had noticed that her blushes diminished in direct proportion to her growing sexual capacity.
    “I’ll get the Kringle,” she said. “Then I have to pack a few things.”
    Having sublet her Greenwich Village