Kiss of the Blue Dragon Read Online Free PDF

Yvette Mimieux, was a classic. It was in color, but I still liked it.
    The fact that Bogie had been programmed to send me to the moon diminished the afterglow, but not by much. With a compubot produced by AutoMates, the premiere manufacturer, satisfaction was always guaranteed. And I was lucky enough to get exclusive dibs on the star attraction of Rick’s Café Americain, the reality bar down the street.
    Yet I’ll admit the physical satisfaction did little to relieve my loneliness. That’s why I always sent Bogie home before morning. The emptiness of our so-called relationship always glared in early daylight. The problem was I just wasn’t sure if I could handle a real man again. I wasn’t exactly lucky in love. While on the outside I looked fearless, my heart was about as tough as a bowl of cherry Jell-O.
    I made coffee, and when I had a steaming cup in hand, I went into the garden, thinking my martial arts trainer would give me a break from training today. Mike’s savage attack cry promptly disabused me of the notion.
    “Haieeeeyaaaa!” he screamed.
    My every muscle tensed. I knew what was coming next. Nevertheless, as the stimulant-dependant occidental that I was, I managed to take a slurp of my treasured caffeine before going into defensemode. Not only because my sluggish brain desperately needed it, but because it made Mike mad.
    As a former Buddhist monk, he’d prefer I ate no meat, drank no caffeine, engaged in no sex and slept on a straw mat. He wanted me to live like a…well, a monk. It was my lifelong determination to prove to him that I could be every bit the fighter he was even while maintaining my status on the top of the carnivorous, lecherous and indulgent food chain.
    I saw a tornado of sienna-colored robes rounding a bank of blooming pink azaleas.
    “Aaiiiyeeee!” he cried again, every tendon straining as he squatted and assumed a pose of steel.
    “Oh, hell.” He was opening with the iron buffalo ploughs the field . That classic Shaolin kung fu move was enough to make me want to dig a foxhole. I took one last slurp of coffee and tossed my mug into the grass. “Hey, Mike, can we talk about this?”
    His typically enigmatic Oriental expression, boyish for his thirty years of age, was distorted into a mask of savagery. Boy, he wasn’t kidding around. My dalliances with Bogie always pissed him off. Mike believed compubots could suck the chi out of you for days. He was trying to teach me a lesson. But while I was sporting the just-laid look, I had more energy than he suspected. The question was, what move?
    I cleared all thoughts as Mike had taught me, making way for instinct. He blazed toward me—jumping, squatting, rolling on the ground and flailing. But just before he downed me with a blue dragon tail-wag move, I leaped and grabbed the twisted tree branch that was shading a bed of hostasand pulled myself up with catlike grace. Squatting barefoot on the branch, and wearing nothing more than a tank top and boy-short briefs, I pounced down on him—now the tiger—and flattened him.
    “Ha!” I cried out when he sank back in defeat. I stood on my adrenaline-pumped legs. “I told you never to do that before I’ve had at least two cups of coffee.”
    He sat up, not the least the worse for wear, and smoothed a hand over his shaved head. “I make sure you are awake.”
    “Well, it worked. But I lost a perfectly good cup of coffee. And I’m going to have more,” I said emphatically as I combed through my sprigs of platinum hair and headed back to the kitchen.
    “Wait, Baker.”
    His somber request stopped me cold. It was more his tone than the words that worried me. He always called me Baker. Ever since I’d rescued him from a prison camp in Joliet, Illinois, he’d called me by my last name, thinking it was my first. The Chinese put their last names first. His was Pu Yun. Yun would be his first name, except he’d taken a classic American nickname.
    “What is it, Mike? Can’t it wait for