Perilously Fun Fiction: A Bundle, Pauline Jones [top 100 novels of all time .txt] 📗

the window, trailing chilled air in her wake. Luci looked up from the newspaper and her thoughts, relieved to have the thoughts interrupted and even more relieved to have Gracie blunt the muggy warmth of the room.

“Something wrong?”

“It’s awfully quiet. Where are the girls?”

Luci smiled at hearing the aunts called “girls.”

“They’re getting ready for their monthly visit to your grave. Didn’t you see the flowers in the entryway?”

Gracie shook her head. “I’ve been avoiding the hallways since...” She sighed, sending a cold chill into the too warm room. “How’s Delaney?”

Luci put the paper down and rose, stretching the kinks from her back, wishing she could so easily rid herself of the kinks in her thoughts. “He’s...pretty bummed.”

“If only...” Her words sent another chill swirling around the room.

“You weren’t dead?”

Gracie nodded. “You’re lucky...”

“That I’m not dead?” Luci shook her head. “You couldn’t be more wrong.” She had to move to stay ahead of thoughts. “I’m beginning to think we Seymours are all born dead.” She came up against a wall and had to turn toward Gracie. “Or maybe we’re just born afraid.” Luci headed toward Gracie until she felt the chill from her presence, then turned and stalked away.

“Um, Luci,” Gracie said, amusement threading through the sad in her voice. “You’re pacing.”

“We don’t pace,” Luci pointed out, doing her turn at the wall. She was halfway across the room when it hit her. “I am pacing. I’m freaking pacing! I can’t believe it! Do you know what this means?”

“That you’re not as dead as you thought you were? That you can still change the course of your life? You can still live?”

“Can I?” Luci felt the agitation in her. It was like being possessed by an alien being. “Can I change who knows how many centuries of family conditioning? My brain is hard-wired to do Seymour until I die! To never marry—”

Luci spun around and faced Gracie. “Why is that? Why don’t we marry? Why did Lila—who was not designed by nature or nurture to be a mother—leave him, leave me to grow up without him? Why did she do that? Freaking inquiring minds would freaking like to know!”

Luci felt her chest, which had only ever heaved from exercise, heaving with raging emotion. Heaving with...rage. Felt her eyes blur with unfamiliar tears. Felt like, what? She mentally poked the emotion ball and realized what she wanted more than anything was to go fetal and whine. And then find him, her father. She wanted him to hold her and tell her it was going to be all right. Even if it was a lie.

Her mind shifted. So did her body as she stared at Gracie, who lost her cohesion in the storm of emotion coming at her. When she reformed, her eyes were deep and sad. “I’ve spent a lot of years trying to come up with a good answer to that question.”

Luci drew in a trembling breath. “And...did you?”

“Not a good one.” She turned and stared out the window.

Luci joined her and saw Delaney talking to another cop in the garden.

“I never meant to hurt him,” Gracie said. “I never thought...”

“He’ll...probably...get over...you.” It seemed cold comfort.

Gracie looked at Luci. “But will I get over him?”

“I’m so sorry, Gracie. So very sorry.”

Gracie’s gaze sharpened. “Then do something.”

“What?”

“Live. Love. Go find Mickey and—”

“And what?” Luci could feel panic replacing agitation.

“Everything you’re afraid of.” Gracie’s gaze bored into her, seeing everything. Luci felt wide open, exposed and raw. “He’s in the parlor pulling his hair out. Go to him.”

“I can’t—”

“Yes, you can. Begin. You don’t have to do it all right now, but begin. Before it’s too late for you!”

Begin. She could do that. That was just...talking. As if Gracie sensed her capitulation, she smiled. It was like the sun coming out. No wonder Delaney had fallen hard. “I love you, Gracie.”

“Get out of here,” Gracie said, but Luci could have sworn she blushed. If a ghost could blush.

Mickey, concentrating on a new stack of papers, didn’t hear the door open, wasn’t aware of movement until he smelled Luci’s perfume tangling in the air around him. It was not unlike her: contrary, mysterious, with an underlying and almost irresistible charm. Mickey hunched his shoulders as she came around and leaned on the back of his chair, tossing a folded newspaper down in front of him.

“If I didn’t know you to be the soul of upright, though excitable honesty, Detective Ross,” she said, her voice soft and sultry, her lips so close to his ear that he felt her warm breath puff against the side of his face, “I’d accuse you of dissembling with the press.”

“Huh?” Concentration scattered, but the will to not react to her remained firm. Without looking at her, Mickey shoved the newspaper aside, tried to focus on the typed words of the report he’d been reading just fine until she came in.

“Why would you deliberately try to live down to the public’s low opinion of the NOPD? Is it a plot-in-the-making?”

His chair creaked again as she withdrew, padded around the table and sank with unsettling grace into the chair opposite. Mickey sighed, rubbing his tired eyes in an effort to postpone as long as possible the moment he’d have to face her green enigmatic gaze. It was getting harder and harder to remember all those good sensible reasons not to get involved with her when it felt so damn right just to be in the same room with her.

He was a grown-up. Surely he could control himself and his heart around someone who was so bad for him? At this rate, he’d be doing the late afternoon talk circuit with a label under his name on the screen that read: Love left him for dead. Or something equally humiliating. He felt her gaze and her sympathy, as if she followed his thoughts and was sorry for disrupting his life. He gave in and looked at her, since not looking hadn’t helped any.

She sat lightly in the old-fashioned chair, as if