Life Is A Beach (Mills & Boon Silhouette): Life Is A Beach / A Real-thing Fling by Pamela Browning Read Free Book Online Page B

never liked sauerkraut, and I can’t imagine eating green tomatoes.”
    Karma pulled a face. “I can’t imagine not eating them. I’m a vegetarian, so maybe that’s why.”
    “You don’t eat any meat?” He’d never known a vegetarian before; he’d always thought such a person must be slightly deranged. Not to scarf down a thick prime rib, drowned in natural gravy? Not to sink your teeth into a big juicy burger with all the trimmings? Never to know the joys of pork tenderloin cooked on a grill, or leg of lamb, or succulent spare ribs?
    “Nope, no poultry, no mammals. I eat fish, though. I love fish.”
    Fish. He’d been known to eat catfish in the Glades, and he liked a tuna sandwich now and then, but he couldn’t imagine fish as a steady diet.
    “I’ve never eaten in this place,” he said, looking around at the clientele, who ranged from jewel-encrusted elderly matrons with shellacked hair to sunburned tourists whose skin looked like raw hamburger.
    “My uncle—you met him this morning—and my aunt used to like to bring me and my sisters here when we visited as children. I guess I came by my liking for Kosher food naturally, since my mother was Jewish.”
    He welcomed the chance to know more about Karma’s personal life; he couldn’t imagine what could produce a woman like this.
    “With a surname like O’Connor, your father was Irish, right?”
    “Mmm-hmm. He and my mother married in college. Both families predicted the marriage’s immediate failure, but my parents had four daughters, including me, and lived happily for years. Until my mother took up cake decorating, that is, and they split up. She changed her name to Saguaro, like the cactus, and moved to Arizona.”
    “They divorced because she became a cake decorator?”
    “Kind of.” Karma seemed reluctant to elaborate.
    “I’ve heard of many reasons to divorce, but that one takes the cake.” He grinned at her, pleased with his play on words.
    The corners of her mouth twitched as if she were suppressing a smile. “Dad didn’t approve of Mom’s new occupation. You see, she worked for a bakery that specialized in cakes that look like body parts.” She looked embarrassed and seemed as if she expected him to be shocked, but he was still operating in the dark.
    “You don’t mean—”
    “Ido mean,” she said. “The body parts weren’t arms and legs, if you get my drift.”
    He did. He tried to picture in his mind a cake that looked like a pair of breasts or—well! He cleared his throat.
    “So, uh, what does your father do?” he asked, sensing that they had reached a conversational cul-de-sac.
    “My father found a new life after Mom left. He works on a cruise ship, plying wealthy widows with booze and blarney while pretending to enjoy teaching them the tango.”
    Slade chuckled. “We should all be so lucky.”
    Their food arrived, and they dug in. Once the corned beef sandwich had taken the edge off his hunger—and it was a delicious sandwich—Slade managed with some difficulty to overcome his aversion to the subject of his chakra.
    “Suppose you tell me more about my second chakra. Like, where it is, for example.”
    “Your second chakra is located in your abdomen.”
    “Why would it have problems?”
    Karma inhaled a deep breath, and looking as if she doubted the wisdom of explaining, she plunged ahead anyway. “Well, you know how these days we store information on disks—with computers, I mean? I told you that chakra means ‘disk.’ So it stores information, too. If a chakra is blocked, it needs reprogramming.”
    “Reprogramming,” he repeated, thinking that this was worse than he thought.
    “The issues of the second chakra are change, movement, pleasure, emotion. If the chakra is blocked, it can be difficult to form attachments, difficult to experience the right emotion. I can match you up with the perfect person,” she said, “and if you can’t change, or get no pleasure out of the relationship, or can’t