Last Kiss Goodbye by Rita Herron Read Free Book Online

two women’s presence in town represented a bad omen.
    A middle-aged lady at the next table waved Daisy over to her side. Ivy ate her soup while she listened. “I heard that Mahoney boy has been released.”
    Daisy refilled their tea, ice clinking. “Some fancy lawyer got him out. I just hope he doesn’t come back to town and stir up trouble.”
    “Land sakes alive. We breathed a lot easier when he was in jail. We’ll have to go back to locking our doors at night.”
    “You’re right. We don’t need his kind around,” another woman said. “Although I thought he did us a service when he killed those Stantons. The woman was a slut. I heard she worked for Talulah on Red Row.”
    Ivy clenched her hands in her lap, anger knifing through her. Her mother had not been a slut! She’d loved Ivy. Had brushed her hair and played dolls with her and collected Santa Clauses. She’d strung glittery Christmas lights all around the trailer and tried to make it pretty. They’d even baked homemade sugar cookies and strung popcorn for the tree they’d cut down in the woods.
    She had not deserved to die.
    And what about Matt Mahoney? Had he deserved to go to jail for murder?
    Not according to Abram Willis and the judge who’d released him…
    ARTHUR BOLES BURIED his face behind the local newspaper and sipped his coffee, unable to focus on the words on the printed page for studying the young woman talking to Daisy. Ivy Stanton.
    He would have recognized her anywhere. After all, he’d kept tabs on her all these years that she’d lived with Nellie. Years during which he had worried that she would remember something, that she’d return to Kudzu Hollow, see his face and spill her guts about that night. Years where he wished he’d silenced her already.
    Years where he’d thought of her mother’s lush wanton body, the way Lily Stanton had taken him into her nest and given him pleasure without asking for anything but money. God, he’d missed her over the years. Missed her lips touching his, her mouth closing around his cock, the sight of her spreading herself for him to bury his length in. Missed the way her tits had swayed when she rode him, and the way she’d use her tongue to make him come. And the way her eyes had gone all melting and soft when he’d returned the pleasure.
    Not that there hadn’t been replacements. Red Row still stood to serve its customers. The anonymity was an important part of the business. And if one of the whores did decide to talk, well, hell, he’d shut her up like he had the others.
    And how ironic. Talulah, that old root doctor and Ivy Stanton all in one room together. All held the secrets to his past. Maybe the key to his future.
    All expendable…
    But he still couldn’t help himself from staring at Ivy Stanton all grown up. She’d turned into a beautiful, seductive woman. Not in the same bold, untamed way her mama had, for an air of innocence surrounded her. A naivete her mother had never possessed. Oh, maybe she had once, but she’d lost it long before he’d come along. Lily had not been lily-white. She had even taken the innocence of others and been proud of it. Young boys ripe for a woman’s body had come to her, and she had taught them well.
    His cock swelled, and he rubbed it beneath the table, grateful it was dark and he’d taken a booth in the back corner. He could almost taste the sweetness of Ivy Stanton, the unbridled passion she had yet to discover. The fear and tension radiating from her slender body. The feel of those silky blond curls tickling his bare belly.
    Maybe he would toy with Ivy a little. See if she did remember him. And just as her mother had taken the innocence of the young men in town, his son for one, he’d steal that innocence from her daughter….
    UNEASY WITH THE CLIMATE in the diner, Ivy paid her bill and rushed outside, tugging her raincoat around her. Suddenly aware of the shadows, she darted toward her car, climbed in, locked the door and started the