Kiss Me Hello (Sweetest Kisses) Read Online Free PDF

window, the better to watch Luis shuffling across the yard to the barn.
    He hadn’t wanted to move out here either, but where else were they to go?
    For the thousand millionth time, the thought “if Tony hadn’t died” tried to take root in Sid’s mind, a useless, stupid thought. She pushed it aside, and brought the cat with her down the hall to her bedroom.
    Sid hadn’t chosen the largest bedroom in the house, but rather, had taken the one at the back, with a high ceiling, a private balcony, and a view out over the fields and pastures that comprised her property.
    “I will learn to appreciate it,” she informed the cat. “I may not like it, but for now, it’s home.” She put the cat down on her bed, a big fluffy four-poster that went well with the room, and sat beside him.
    To close her eyes would feel heavenly. To enjoy for a moment the quiet of the house without male feet—teenage or otherwise—stomping through it, to know somebody else had an eye on Luis for even a little while.
    Sid lay down, the cat curling up against her side, and let herself drift.
    * * *
    “How long you been taking lessons with Adelia?”
    Mac posed what he hoped was a neutral question. With teenagers, anything, anything could become grist for the drama mill. He recalled his younger brothers’ adolescent moodiness as if it were yesterday, and gave thanks they’d all weathered those storms without irreparable injury.
    “I’ve been taking lessons for a few weeks. Before we moved here, Sid brought me out on weekends once she signed me up with them.”
    Nothing more, no polite overtures, no small talk. Maybe they’d get along after all.
    “You muck your horse’s stall at the riding school?”
    “And scrub the water buckets, groom my horse, throw hay, and clean my tack.”
    “Then you’re just the man these ponies have been looking for.” Mac walked into the barn’s understory. The good news was the structure was built of chestnut beams and fieldstone and likely to last forever with minor maintenance.
    The bad news was the minor maintenance probably hadn’t been done for ten years. Cobwebs hung everywhere, dust accumulated in sedimentary layers on every surface, and little light came through windows larded with fly specking and dirt.
    “Water’s back here,” Mac said, going to the sidewall of the barn. The frost-free spigot was barely discernible in the gloom, a bucket festooned with cobwebs still hanging from the hook. “Say a prayer it works.”
    He spoke in Spanish, a little to keep Luis’s attention, a little to practice. A criminal defense attorney with some bilingual ability had an advantage, both in garnering business and in earning trust with Hispanic clients. Then too, Spanish was easy and pretty.
    “People who live beyond civilization’s borders can’t be expected to speak civilized languages.”
    Mac looked up from the rusty water gushing into the old bucket, because Luis had spoken in the soft, lilting French of the islands.
    “People who are new to a territory ought to do more listening than judging,” Mac replied in the same language, and he went on in French, because the look on Luis’s face was positively comical. “I dated a girl from Toronto in high school, and she helped me with what I’d learned in class. I also spent a couple summers crewing on a sailboat in the Caribbean. Dump this, would you? I’ll find us some brushes and rags.”
    Luis took the bucket without another word and disappeared out into the sunshine.
    Mac rummaged in the old dairy, which had been made over into a tack room of sorts, and came up with more buckets, muck forks, old toweling, and a bucket brush.
    “Let’s focus on the run-in stall,” he said—in English—when Luis came back. “The rest of this barn needs a crew and some serious cleaning equipment.”
    “May we speak French?” Luis asked, using what was apparently his native language. “I seldom hear it, and I don’t want—I prefer it.”
    Luis didn’t want