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

she might vanish at any moment. More ghostly than Gracie, like a sleepy cat, her thicket of lashes drooping over her eyes. The eyes, however, were anything but sleepy. Emotions appeared and disappeared like flashing lights on a dark highway, appearing and disappearing too quickly for him to read. But he thought he saw regret go by and it gave him hope.

Maybe, just maybe, he could be the guy to—he realized where he was going and stopped. It was just the challenge, he told himself, wanting what you can’t have. It’s a guy thing. Everybody says so. He wasn’t...in love. Love was for fools, optimists and the pages of novels. Love didn’t last. Didn’t need a crystal ball to read the odds against anything lasting in this world, and something as breakable as love? Right.

Did he know, Luci wondered, how very readable his thoughts were, how clearly they played out in his too-blue eyes? In the space of five heartbeats, he’d almost talked himself into, and had talked himself out of, doing something about what was simmering between them. Gracie was right. It wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge into acting. Her own blood stirred just thinking about what he might do. He was just so dang cute when he was all stirred up. And he was more likely to let down his guard and kiss her. Kissing seemed like a good place to begin. When he kissed her, she felt Seymour fade and brave creep in. In his arms, maybe she could be brave enough to live the way Gracie urged.

He rubbed the back of his neck and asked on a sigh, “Why don’t you just ask me if you want to know something?”

And if I asked you to do what I’m thinking, she wondered, would you do it? Gracie was both right and wrong. Luci did need to begin, but not with the complications from the murder still hanging fire. They both needed their wits about them to sort it all out. If the aunts got hauled off to jail, what would Gracie do?

It was either good logic or a cowardly rationalization.

She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table, and propped her chin on her hands. “You’re still miffed about the extra body thing, aren’t you?”

The smooth columns of her arms only partially shielded the dipping curve of her tee shirt that exposed the shadowy slope of her breasts.

Mickey swallowed dryly. “Miffed?” He shook his head. “The ‘extra body thing’ could get you charged with evidence tampering—”

“I had no intention of tampering with anything. The drunken hallucinations of Boudreaux are hardly evidence, and since you haven’t found another body—”

“We haven’t found one yet.” They had found an interesting variety of appliances, everything from the “I’m falling and I can’t get up” gizmo to an early model of an electric toothbrush. The “I’m falling and I can’t get up” gizmo still worked, to everyone’s surprise but the aunts, who had ordered it removed from their property. The aunts must be tough to shop for at Christmas, he decided.

“You dug up most of the garden, Mickey.” She leaned back again. “Not that I’m complaining. Miss Hermi’s wildly excited about embarking on a new round of landscaping. It seems her—exposure—to the male physique has inspired her. She wants a fountain—complete with a statue of David—”

“I’ll bet Delaney would appreciate your input in the garden—”

“Do you really think so?” She rebuked him with her eyes.

His fingers closed in fists. He looked down, saw the fists and deliberately straightened his fingers. He rifled a few papers. Picked up a pencil and made a mark on a page that didn’t need a mark.

“Besides. Gracie’s fulfilling that function. I haven’t seen her so animated since—” She stopped.

And he had to look up. Just in time to catch the full force of her smile. The lashes lifted just enough to give her eyes a sultry depth full of invitation that had the edges of his mouth curling before he was hardly aware of it. The ground beneath him shifted off center. The room grew unaccountably warm around him as she held his gaze.

“Actually,” she said, her voice dropping to a husky, confidential level, “I’ve never seen her animated. But Miss Weena assures me she used to be before she died.”

The smile got lost in the painful thump around his temples. He threw down his pencil and grabbed the bottle of aspirin. “What do you want?” It was almost a wail.

“Information. If we pooled our resources—”

“You don’t have resources—”

“Not true.”

“Oh?” He arched his brows as he looked at her. It was a mistake. Caught once more in the full force of her velvet-fisted gaze, coherence shattered like broken glass. And somewhere deep inside, in the place where honest thought meets honest emotion, he acknowledged that Luci Seymour did far more than drive him angry. But before honest thought could get out of hand he started a rear guard action with anger. “Damn it, Luci—”

“I’m half- Seymour.” She marked each point with a raised finger. “I’ve played a sleuth on the stage. I have friends who are in law enforcement. And my aunt was a security guard—”

She shrugged, leaned back and crossed her arms as if daring him to question her credentials. The movement rumpled the edge of her tee shirt, revealing more of her smooth, curving flesh. He forced his gaze away and chewed harder on his tablets, then remembered he had a glass of water and downed that. Used the surge of lust to fuel his anger as he groped for the pencil again. Work. Work would be his salvation from this unaccountable, bewildering temptation. His fingers closed over cool wood.

“Those aren’t credentials! Those are—” He didn’t even know what to call them.

“Face it. You need my inside information if you’re going to crack this case.” Luci’s voice was a siren call to pleasure with its sweetly offered entreaty to reason. “Be fair—”

The pencil snapped in two. “Fair?” This time he didn’t