Fun with Brady and Angelica (Kit Tolliver #10 (The Kit Tolliver Stories) Read Free Page A

walked into Eve’s Rib, and now it struck her that she’d made the perfect choice. It was properly soft and girlish, submissive Missy, and that ought to be catnip for this one.
    “A few minutes ago,” Angelica said, “I thought you might need rescuing.”
    “Why would I—oh, that woman. Bobbie.”
    “I couldn’t help noticing that you weren’t interested, and that she rather emphatically was.”
    “She’s not my type.”
    “No, I wouldn’t think so. You’d want someone secure in her identity as a woman.”
    “Yes.”
    “But strong,” Angelica said. “Someone a few years older than yourself, I should think. Someone who’d be prepared to lead, and allow you to follow.”
    Angelica turned to look at her, and Missy hesitated, but only for an instant. Then she met Angelica’s eyes and returned her gaze, holding nothing back, letting herself drink the woman in through her eyes.
    For a long moment they sat on their stools, gazing silently into one another’s eyes. Then Missy drew a quick breath, and said, “Wow,” and took another breath, and said, “I’m not sure what just happened, but—”
    “You and I,” Angelica said, “just happened.”
    “Wow.”
    Angelica put an arm around her, cupped Missy’s shoulder gently but firmly. “You’re a beautiful girl,” she said.
    “You’re the one who’s beautiful. I’m just—”
    “Stop it. You’re extraordinarily attractive, and I’m going to make it my personal business to make you realize how stunning you are. Missy?”
    “Yes?”
    “You and I,” Angelica said, “are going to have a perfectly wonderful time.” And her index finger tapped three times on Missy’s bare shoulder.

    Brady was spinning a fantasy when Angelica put her arm around the girl, but it didn’t keep him from spotting his cue. The index finger, tapping three times.
    He got to his feet, put a twenty on the table top, weighed it down with his wine glass. He’d scarcely touched his Chardonnay, and Angelica had taken no more than a sip of hers. Twenty dollars for two sips of so-so California wine, and worth every penny, because his woman had just connected with a sweet young thing who was going to make them both very happy.
    He slipped out the door, found Angelica’s Honda squareback in the lot, and drove off in it, leaving his own Lexus for her. It was a much more luxurious car, and would make more of an impression on his wife’s new friend. While it hardly mattered what car got him back to their house.
    They always took two cars. On the rare occasion when their connection was effected as a couple, they’d leave the Honda and come back for it in the morning.
    Before the signal, tap tap tap on the bare shoulder, he’d imagined what might have been. Suppose, just suppose, that Angelica had headed not for the sweet little ingénue but for the swaggering butch. That one, with her short hair and her broad gym-muscled shoulders, would have thought she’d missed the brass ring only to get a solid gold one dropped in her lap. Angelica, supermodel-beautiful Angelica, picking her out and hitting on her? Butch would have thought she’d died and gone to heaven.
    He didn’t know about heaven. But she’d have to die.
    Because the only way he’d be able to have her was by force, and he couldn’t delude himself that he could make her learn to like it. It would have to be rape, and while that wasn’t altogether unappealing, it made for complications at the end. They couldn’t just drop her off on a streetcorner and expect her to be so ashamed of herself that all she wanted to do was forget the whole thing. If she didn’t go straight to the cops and the newspapers, then she’d come back with a couple of friends and a gun.
    He couldn’t let that happen. So he’d have to kill her.
    And he knew just how he’d do it. He’d read descriptions of the method, and he’d seen it demonstrated more than once in action films. You used your hands, you took the chin in one hand and gripped