With Extreme Pleasure by Alison Kent Read Free Book Online

You’re the interrogatee,” he said, then bit away a good third of his burger.
    “I suppose that’s only fair,” she responded, then bit away almost as much of her own.
    In silence, King watched her flinch and grimace as she chewed and swallowed, watched her wash down the food with a long gulp of her soda, chase the drink with enough French fries to choke a horse.
    He chuckled under his breath, went back to feasting on his own greasy heart-attack-in-a-box.
    “I’m hungry, okay?” she asked, around a mouthful of food. “And I’m rarely Miss Manners even when I’m not starving to death.”
    “Then who are you, Cady Kowalski? Why don’t we start there?”
    “You know just about everything there is,” she said, reaching for her napkin and gently dabbing her mouth. “I’m an unemployed, homeless, twenty-nine-year-old woman with no real friends and no family ties.”
    That sounded a lot like where he’d been a year ago. Except for the woman part. And the twenty-nine-year-old part.
    And the part about having a home; the trailer he’d been living in could’ve been a cardboard box for all the comforts it gave him.
    “No family ties.” A good place to start. “Tell me what went wrong there. What happened to make your mother think a fist is any way to greet her daughter?”
    Cady shrugged, tore off a big hunk of her sandwich, and popped it into her mouth. King waited.
    A lifetime ago, he’d spent four years in Angola. He still had the patience of a saint, and the tenacity of an inmate determined to come out of that hellhole in one piece.
    No black-eyed waif, fine ass or not, was going to get rid of him by blowing him off.
    Once she was through her food and staring wistfully at what he hadn’t eaten, she seemed to realize it, too. “Are you going to eat that?”
    He nodded. “But I’m happy to order you seconds.”
    She deflated like a bike tire hitting a nail. “As long as I tell you what you want to know, you mean.”
    “Sounds like a fair trade.”
    “To you, sure,” she said, snitching one of his onions. And then she sighed. Capitulated. “Okay. A junior burger and an order of onion rings for this. I got my older brother killed. There. Is that enough?”
    It was enough to hold him while he headed to the counter to place her order, leaning back while he waited and watching her wolf down the onion rings he’d left on the table.
    Bottomless pit. Nervous eater. Starving woman. He wasn’t sure that she wasn’t all three.
    But a killer? That he would never believe.
    He’d lived with killers behind bars. He knew what they thought, how they thought. Cady might be capable of massacring a cheeseburger, but that was the extent of her murderous tendencies.
    Hell, she was sporting railroad track stitches across her cheekbone and two of the blackest eyes he’d ever seen—all that without filing assault and battery charges against any of her assailants.
    She hadn’t even wanted to bring the heat down on Alice for the incident with the gun.
    Added up? The girl was on the run. She might not have defined her lifestyle in those terms, but she didn’t have to. He’d just done it for her.
    “Order two-seventy-two—”
    “I’ve got it,” he told the woman at the counter before she started in with the attitude, adding a “Thanks” that earned him an unexpected smile.
    Back at the table, he gave Cady the burger, but kept half of the onion rings for himself. “What happened to your brother?”
    “He was shot during a home invasion. Killed. Bled out all over the floor of the front room.”
    Whoa. He’d expected to hear that she’d rolled the car she’d been driving. Or that she’d given him pneumonia. Maybe that she’d sent him on a late night burger run and he’d interrupted a robbery. But not that. Not that.
    He held her gaze, genuinely sympathetic. “I’m sorry. Truly.”
    “So am I,” she said, staring down at her food. “Kevin was a real sweetheart. He didn’t deserve to die that