Kicks for a Sinner S3 by Lynn Shurr Read Free Book Online Page A

you and the kids away from me.”
    “Ain’t gonna happen, Tink, but having her here is making you tense. I say we go away for a while, just the two of us. We’ll go to Phoenix, and you start taking those drugs to make the implantation work.”
    “Joe!” She slapped one solid pec and doubted if he felt the blow at all. It took a three-hundred pound lineman to get his attention.
    “Hear me out. Then, we travel to the Grand Canyon and stay at that old lodge at Bright Angel. We hike, watch sunsets, drink mojitos, relax. We don’t come back until the procedure is done, and Cassie has to face the fact we are having more children made from our love for each other. Let’s send her that message, Nell. Let’s do it.”
    “What about the children we already have?”
    “You know Corazon and Knox Polk will take good care of them. Cassie can be here every weekend and not get on your nerves. And I just might ask Howdy to stay here and help out with the ranch while I’m gone. He grew up on one and knows the ropes. He and Cassie could keep the horses exercised.”
    “Cassie will see right through that.”
    “So, she can stay away if she wants. What do you say, my tiny Tink?”
    She burrowed her face into his chest hair. “Joe, what if I lose all three babies?”
    “I thought you were afraid to have three? But it don’t make no never mind to me. I suspect we got a big, strong angel watching over us.”
    “Yeah, bribed by your mother. Fine, let’s do it.”
     

SIX
     
    His discomfort growing by the minute, Howard McCoy sat sweating under a plastic salon cape. He clutched a cup of strong espresso in a cup so small it made his hands seem huge and clumsy. Playing in the background, show tunes from Mamma Mia! brought back ABBA and disco from oblivion. More than one person in the various booths, both hairdressers and clients, sang along to Dancing Queen. Brian Lightfoot hummed the tune from his self-assigned seat on a café chair to Howdy’s left rear.
    “Could you shut up?” Howdy growled, showing his nerves.
    “But it’s such a great song from a fantastic movie starring Colin Firth as a gay man who might have fathered a daughter. What’s not to love?” Brian sang the chorus aloud.
    Joaquin, the stylist assigned to the kicker at the unisex salon, sunk his thin, artistic fingers deep into Howdy’s scalp and began massaging conditioner into the roots of his damp hair. “Such lovely thick hair ju got. Ju never go bald,” he raved in his heavy Latino accent. “An’ my favorite color, ches-nut. Ches-nut. Not auburn, doan you think, Brian? Auburn got more red.”
    “Yes,” Brian replied. “I think you nailed it.” Howdy squirmed in the barber chair and slopped some of the coffee on his bib.
    “Ju must sit still now. Finish drinking, and we begin to cut.” Joaquin peeled off the transparent gloves he’d used to apply the treatment and flung them into a tall, red waste can, an accent piece in the mostly black and silver décor. He lifted a few locks of hair and considered his next move. “What ju think, Brian?”
    Howdy swallowed the coffee in one gulp. He prayed he wouldn’t need to use the restroom in this place, though not everyone here was gay. Perfectly at ease women filled some of the booths, but all the stylists and even the shampoo boys, especially the shampoo boys, swished when they walked. He didn’t think he’d be able to go if they only had urinals on the wall and not private stalls, the least of his worries right now. What did Joaquin and Brian have planned for him—maybe little spikes and red highlights, God forbid!
    “Ah, can’t we just put some goop in it and comb it straight back if you want it out of my eyes?” he suggested, trying to escape anything worse.
    “No, that is so last year and does not suit ju. Your fabulous look is All American Boy, no, Brian?
    “Nailed it again, Joaquin.” Brian kept saying “nailed” to irk him, Howdy knew it. “How about a razor thin semi-part low on the