Free Hell, Yeah by Carolyn Brown Page B

so much better than it had been the night before. She picked up a few scattered tissues from the floor and tossed them into the kitchen trash before she started making coffee.
    She hummed as she put extra grounds in the pot to make it stronger than normal. The battery operated clock on the kitchen wall said it was noon. No wonder she was so hungry. She reached up in the cabinets and pulled down a fresh box of strawberry Pop Tarts and tore open a package.
    As soon as the coffee finished dripping she poured a cup and looked out the kitchen window. No deer. No rabbits. She hadn’t seen the possum or even a stray cat since the trailer arrived.
    A moan and movement not three feet from her made her slosh the hot coffee out on her pajama top and drop a Pop Tart on the floor. She jerked her head in that direction, adrenaline putting her into flight mode as it plowed through her body like a bulldozer through a kid’s sandbox.
    “Holy hell! You just scared the shit out of me,” she said.
    “Didn’t mean to. I hope you’re cooking a pound of bacon this morning.” Travis sat down at the table and stared at her with big blue puppy dog eyes. “I feel like hell and I’m starving.”
    “Electricity is back on. Go cook your own breakfast,” she said when she could breathe again.
    “Please. It was a tough night. If you were starving and you’d driven on the ice to a motel only to find no vacancies, I’d cook you breakfast.”
    He had a pitiful look on his face, which was even sexier without the wire-rimmed glasses.
    She bit back a grin. He wasn’t about to see her smile after keeping her awake most of the night—partly out of guilt and the rest out of nothing but pure lust. “Stop acting like you are dyin’. Where were you anyway? You weren’t on the sofa.”
    “I am dyin’. I ain’t got the energy to make it to the door much less across our yards and then cook my own breakfast. Nearly frozen and then starved. It’s a sorry way to die. Reason I wasn’t on the couch is the damned thing is too short. I curled up in the corner of the floor with the quilt and pillow. Call the undertaker. Tell the coroner that I died of starvation because you were too stingy to feed a hungry neighbor. God can decide whether to lay murder to your list of sins when you die,” he said.
    “How hungry are you?” she asked.
    “Just shy of passin’ plumb out.”
    She poured a cup of coffee and set it in front of him. “You can stay for breakfast but only because I don’t want to drag your dead body out in the yard.”
    “You are an angel. A pound of bacon and six eggs over easy might keep me out of the undertaker’s reach.”
    She set the box of Pop Tarts in the middle of the table.
    “That’s not eggs,” he said.
    She opened it. “Pretend it’s one of Denny’s Grand Slam specials or a McDonald’s sausage biscuit meal deal. I really don’t care which. It will keep you from starving. I’m not cooking breakfast today.”
    He moaned again and tore into the package. “They’re cold.”
    “Bitch, bitch, bitch. Coffee is hot. Dip ’em if you want a hot breakfast.”
    “You are mean,” he muttered.
    “Me? I let you sleep here when it was against the rules. I’m feeding you breakfast. You better play nice or I’ll throw you out in the slush pit in your bare feet.”
    He dipped the strawberry flavored pie dough in his coffee. Pretending couldn’t make it bacon and eggs and he couldn’t stretch his imagination far enough to make it a warm cinnamon roll straight from the oven either.
    “Talk to me while I eat this sumptuous meal,” he said.
    “I cooked. You talk.”
    “You already know about me. I told my family story at the dinner table on Sunday,” he said.
    “And you know mine. Daisy and I are all that’s left of the family. Her dad died before she was born and her mother in a car wreck. Cancer got my dad. Heart attack got my mother. All died young. The end.”
    “How long you been a bartender?” he asked.
    “Legally,