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kitchen. She had fly-away caramel hair and large brown eyes on a sharp face. It took me a full minute to recognize her and then I collapsed, laughing.
“What?” The little elf-baby looked taken aback.
“You’re very clean.”
Julie pulled my sweatpants up before they slid off her butt. “I’m hungry. We had a deal.”
“Watch the water for me. When it starts boiling, put everything in except the shrimp. Don’t eat the shrimp, it’s better warm, and don’t let the water boil over and drown the gas while I take a shower.”
I gathered a heap of clothes and crawled into the shower. There was nothing better than a nice hot shower after a long day. Well, maybe a hot shower followed by hot sex, but my memory in that department was getting a bit fuzzy.
It took a while to get all the dirt out of my hair, and when I popped into the kitchen, the water was boiling. I hooked a piece of corn on the cob with a giant fork. Steaming hot. Good enough. I dropped the shrimp into the pot, let it boil for a quarter of a minute or so, turned the gas off, and dumped the whole thing into the strainer.
The magic fell. On, off, on, off, make up your mind already. “Ever had a low country boil?”
Julie shook her head.
I put the colander in the center of the table and put salt and a stick of butter next to it. “Shrimp, sausage, corn on the cob, and potatoes. Try it. The sausage is turkey and deer meat. I was there when it was made. It doesn’t have dog or rat in it.”
Julie snagged a piece of sausage, tasted it, and attacked it like starving wolves were snapping at her food. “Thish ish good!” she announced through a mouthful of food.
I barely had a chance to finish the first cob, when a knock echoed through the door. I looked through the peephole. Red.
I opened the door. He glanced at me, eyes narrowed into tiny slits. “Food?”
Kate Daniels, deadly swordswoman and rescuer of hungry orphans. “Come in. Wash your hands.”
Julie burst from the kitchen and threw her arms around him. Red stiffened and put one arm around her.
Her face over his shoulder took on a sweet dreamy look. Her mother’s disappearance had to have hit her hard, but losing Red would crush her.
“I missed you!” she said softly.
“Yeah,” he said, his face flat. “Me, too.”
Twenty minutes later I had two full kids and no boil. That meant I’d have to cook something tomorrow.
Oi.