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

try not to wail. He pushed his chair back, half-turning away from her. Was it fair for her to have this effect on him when he’d done nothing, nothing to provoke it?

The room was too close, too warm, too full of her scent and her uncomfortable gaze. Too full of her. With her lean, graceful body and her slumberous eyes. He leaped up, tugging at his tie.

“You’re leaving?” She straightened in her chair, giving him a heady view of the long, smooth angle of her neck and the fragile tracings of her shoulders and collar bone that naturally directed his gaze down—

“I need some air—and I’ve got to talk to Delaney about—something.” He strode to the door, jerking at his tie and then ripping the top button from its mooring to allow air into his painfully constricted lungs.

He didn’t slam the door behind him. But only because he lost his grip on it too soon.

Luci looked at the closed door, her shoulders rising and falling in a sigh that fell somewhere between relieved and regretful. Gracie would be disappointed in her. She was disappointed in herself. She’d tried to be brave, to be bold. Instead she’d tripped over Seymour and fallen flat on her face.

She picked up a folder, using it to fan away the heat Mickey had sent coursing through her body. “How’s a girl supposed to know what to do? Do I take advice from a ghost? Listen to my heart? Or just give in and follow the Seymour imperatives?”

She dropped the file, leaning on the table while her fingers beat a reflective tattoo against the table. Her hand brushed against the discarded file. The tapping slowed, stopped. A distraction was good right now. She ran her finger along the edge and glanced towards the door. Surely he wouldn’t have left her alone with this stuff if he hadn’t meant for her to look at it.

He wants my help, she decided, but he can’t bring himself to ask for it because of the other stuff. The lust stuff. She smiled slowly, then shook herself. Concentrate, girl. With another glance towards the door, she picked up a file. Nothing terrible happened, so she opened it.

And still the day proceeded on its usual course.

She started to read.

“Interesting.” So Reggie had collected his bucks through some kind of a chain letter. She read the chain letter, once, then again, this time focusing on the list of names and addresses at the bottom. The letter directed the receiver to send one dollar bill to each of the twenty names on the bottom of the letter, then remove the top name and add their name to the bottom and send it out to a bunch of their friends. After a few weeks, they’d receive dollars in the mail.

She’d done something similar with panties in high school. Not a pleasant memory. There were a lot of people out there with very strange taste in underwear. It had pretty much cured her of chain letters.

Artie’s offering reaffirmed that conviction. What he’d failed to tell the people receiving the letter was that all twenty names were AKAs for Reggie. Mickey had also found phone books from cities across the country. Enterprising, Luci concluded, with a take small enough to operate under the radar of the Postal Police. Who was going to complain when they lost a couple of bucks on a scam they should have been too smart to fall for in the first place?

Mickey had plenty of the chain letters, boxes of them, so she pocketed one to study later and picked up the next file.

This belonged to Arthur Maxwell, who had been masquerading as Reggie. Luci studied his picture, then found the dead woman, Harriet’s picture. The snow in her head turned to a blizzard, but despite the debris of too much input, she had a feeling that the shadowy Truth would soon emerge from the drift. Or was she suffering from a massive attack of hubris? Only time would tell which.

In another file were pictures taken at the party. The one of Dante and his aunt caught her eye. Luci frowned, the whirling snow dipping to let her get a peek at an interesting piece of the puzzle. She closed the file, her tapping fingers keeping time with her thoughts. Mickey and friends had a plan in the works, but would it take into account the Seymour Factor? Even as she asked the question, she knew the answer was a big negative. Mickey was working overtime to factor them all out. It had become his primary goal in life.

“I wonder—”

The door opened and Pryce walked in. Though they had tacitly acknowledged their familial connection, she wasn’t yet comfortable calling him anything fatherly out loud or in her mind. Not yet. Maybe not ever. It felt so weird, like a pair of shoes that should have been the right size, but didn’t quite fit. Or maybe she was the one who didn’t fit?

His preoccupied frown gave her time to distance herself from the files before he noticed her. The worry in his eyes deepened. His gaze did a quick survey of the room, then, reluctantly it seemed, returned to her.

“I thought Ross was here.” He seemed like he wanted to say more. When he didn’t, Luci pushed her chair back and stood up.

“He went outside to talk to Delaney.” She refrained from looking at the pile of folders. Perhaps she refrained too much.

“Oh.” His gaze narrowed. He looked at the files, then at her.

Luci tried to hold her innocent look, but she’d never tried to face down a father.

“Been doing some reading, have you?”

It was lucky for her he hadn’t been around when she was a teenager, she decided. The thought was followed by regret. It would have been nice to have someone around who cared what she did. She tilted her chin against the regret and the question. “No one said I couldn’t.”

A smile flickered on his face as he gathered up the