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

“Is it a good idea to draw scurrilous pictures of people who can sedate you?”

“I’m not going to draw pictures,” I informed him, “I’m going to write my Will.”

“Bel,” he sighed heavily, “you’re as safe in this room as…as—”

“As my money in an S&L? My tax dollars with Congress?”

“Nothing is going to happen to you in this hospital.”

“Great,” I fell back with my arms crossed, “what little chance I had is gone.”

“What?” He shook his head.

I hated to do it, because I don’t like to use clichés, but he deserved it. “Famous, last words.”

He kissed my forehead. “I’ll come back when you’re calm.”

At least I’d confirmed what I’d always known. There’s no such thing as a perfect man.

20

A hospital is not the place you want to be if someone’s out to kill you.

In the first place, everyone and their dog wants to take your blood pressure or look at your body parts. And then they want to drug you senseless. The only really useful thing anyone did was to remove the tubes and wires so I could sneak into the shower—with the Phisohex. My skin needed moisturizing, not disinfecting, but did they care? I dabbed most of the water from my person with a minuscule towel and then shuffled back to my bed, my wet hair slapping against my back and turning the hospital gown completely transparent. I didn't even have a TV. I guess I shouldn't have been in such a hurry to get unhooked from the heart monitor, at least I could have watched my heart beat.

Dripping hair and wet clothes were the perfect attire for a good wallow in self-pity. My friends could have at least come to visit, to assure me of their delight I hadn't been blown up. And they should do it while I was still alive. I felt like a target had been hung around my neck. Like I had a “kick me” sign on my back that said “shoot me.” How could the “spy who lusted after me” not see that? How could he leave me here alone?

Only I wasn’t alone. I felt a presence and looked up. A dark figure stood in the doorway to my bathroom. I let out a squeak that tried, and failed, to be a scream.

“Are you, like, all right?” The threatening figure hurried over to me, dissolving into a cute little candy striper.

“Yeah, sure.” It was good for my heart to leap into my throat and beat wildly. A good thing I wasn’t hooked up to the monitors anymore or an alarm would have gone off and the heartless nurses would have come back. With all the years I’d lost off my life this week, I should have died last year. I made sure my gown was tucked securely around my bare butt, then looked her over.

Blonde hair, vacant blue-eyes and a stripe-crossed bust-line of near Akasma proportion. The air escaping from her brain ruffled my hospital and bomb hashed hair. My pity wallow had been disturbed by a walking, talking cliché.

And Kel thought this wasn’t a dangerous place.

“How did you get in here?”

“There’s like, well, this other door in your bathroom and they aren’t guarding it, so I just, like, came in.”

“Really.” A candy striper, slash bimbo, had beaten the CIA’s security system. How comforting. “Why?”

“Some of your friends,” she blushed deeply, an indication which friends, “asked me to tell you they came to visit, but the police, like, won’t let anyone in.”

That explained my isolation. Not content with leaving me at the mercy of killers, Kel had made sure I wouldn’t have my young men to comfort me while he was off saving the world from terrorism. I had to suspect his motives for banning their visit.

“I would’ve liked to see them.”

“They’re like, downstairs in the lounge.” She smiled vacantly. “They thought maybe you could, like, come down?”

I smiled evilly. “Like, I think I will.”

We stuffed a bunch of pillows under my blanket, dimmed the lights, and slipped quietly out through the bathroom. My guard was reading a magazine and didn’t notice me. He did pause to leer at the candy striper.

I found the dreary lounge brightened by a banner that read, “Get Weel, Stanley!”

Good thing I wasn’t interested in their brains.

They were huddled over a table with their backs toward the door, giving me a rejuvenating view of the way their jeans stretched across their slim hips. And I could only applaud their decision to wear white tee shirts with the sleeves rolled up their pecs.

The intro to “Wild Thing” began to pulse out of the Karaoke machine they’d brought. Tommy turned, a microphone in his hand and flashed me with his smile.

It was just what the doctor hadn’t ordered.

When they started singing and shaking their young booty, more than my heart was singing. Let me tell you, bumping and grinding with three buff young things is a great way to get rid of a headache. I'll be the first to admit it probably wasn't smart of me to start dancing so soon after being nearly blown up. But when would an over-the-hill woman like me ever again have the chance to dance with three young men at the same time? I had to do it for all the women of the world who'd ever been wallflowers. It didn’t matter that I was dressed in a puke colored hospital gown and ratty robe or that the patients and guests scattered around the room were pointing and staring. It didn’t matter that my mother would be pissed or that someone was trying to kill me. I let the music and the guys’ hungry looks wash over me, shimmying and swaying, lapping up soul food like an Israelite going after that first manna.

Jerome twirled me around, then pulled me against his virile chest and whispered in my ear, “So, Stanley, we gonna tie it?”

Our hips moved together as neatly as Swayze