Perilously Fun Fiction: A Bundle by Pauline Jones (best fiction novels of all time .TXT) 📕

his cool. Nothing like a urinal to put things in perspective. He leaned his aching head against cool tile and spent a few glorious moments mentally strangling Luci—until he started hurting himself. Then he pulled his clothing and his brain together and made a few decisions. First, he would check out her outrageous claim about Gracie. He stopped and used his cell phone to call in a request for any background info on Grace Seymour. He felt somewhat better, but wouldn’t be one hundred percent until he had food in his stomach. Only then would he question Luci about Dante. After that, well, he’d just have to see.

His food was there when he joined Luci, and he could see that she had made a run at the salad bar. To his relief, she just smiled at him. Did she sense how close he was to losing it? He hoped so.

Luci ate quietly, aware of how close Mickey was to losing it. She deflected his brooding looks with bland ones. When he wiped his mouth and hands and tossed his napkin aside, she knew the truce was over. The question was, how much of what she suspected about Dante should she share with him? Until she knew how far her aunts were involved in whatever was going on, did she dare let him start stomping around in things?

The men in her family had not prepared her to trust in male finesse. The men she’d met outside her family had only re-enforced her conviction there was no such thing as male finesse.

She met his determined gaze with a disingenuous one. He wasn’t going to be easy to sidetrack. Or to fool. But she’d never backed down from a challenge before. She wasn’t about to start now.

“What were you doing with Dante, Luci?”

“Looking at his enormous boobs?”

“Don’t mess with me, Luci. I’m not in the mood. Just tell me what I want to know. Or I’ll arrest you for obstruction of justice. You ever been strip-searched?”

“Not by a cop.”

“You surprise me.”

Luci gave a mock sigh. “And I thought I couldn’t anymore.”

He glared at her, but instead of wilting Luci found herself thinking that even mad he was darn cute. Those little wrinkles fanning out from his eyes made the pads of her fingers tingle with a desire to trace them. And his mouth, well it was tantamount to carrying an unconcealed weapon.

She realized he was picking up on her thoughts because his glare started filling with a different kind of heat. Heat, she was beginning to discover, could be caught. In the space of a heartbeat, a tidy blaze started in her mid section. It started to do an arc between them but got stopped by the waitress coming up to clear their table. Mickey waited until she was gone, then pulled his handcuffs out and dangled them in front of her. Somehow she didn’t think he had bedroom games in mind.

“All you have to do is ask,” she said, not sure she was talking about Dante or the games.

She saw him swallow. It seemed to take a long time. He had to do it again and shove his hands into his hair before he managed a hoarse, “Why were you with Dante?”

Luci eyed the spiky ends he’d created in his hair, wanting to smooth them back in place, knowing it could lead to more than a better hairdo. Focus, she reminded herself. She felt a need for something to occupy her hands and picked up her discarded napkin, folding it once, then again as she said in the tones of one making a confession, “I don’t know, but I promise it wasn’t fun. The guy’s an octopus.”

She gave a delicate shudder. “Yuck.”

She couldn’t resist a peek to see how he took this news. His reaction was better than she expected. His hands clenched into fists and his eyes turned from a blue glare to something that was almost...green? Was it—jealousy? She couldn’t stop her smile anymore than Canute, whoever he was, could stop that flood.

“An—” He stopped, cleared his throat. “Did he say why?”

The glare turned blue again and irate. She refocused on the question. “Something about Benny and shoeboxes?”

“That would be Benny the Book, but—” Mickey gave her that look again. “Shoeboxes?”

Benny the Book. Gambling? And Unabelle? Her mind was getting boggled again. Must be some kind of record. Luci nodded, then studied the folded napkin. She began to tear it. “He told me he liked what was in them.”

He blinked several times and sort of looked like he was...counting. “I don’t think so.”

“He had his gun-toting henchmen looming over me. What was I supposed to do? Tell him he’s full of crap?” She made the last tear in the napkin and realized she’d made a question mark. Symbolic and possibly Freudian. Mickey was having a most unsettling effect on her. She fashioned a circle to add to it.

“So what did you do?”

She shrugged and smoothed her question mark. “I invited him to my aunt’s party on Sunday. It’s their shoeboxes he wants. I figure they can deal with him better than I can.”

The thought of Luci’s aunts and Dante in the same room gave him a twitch next to his right eye. He stopped it with his hand and tried to think his way to sanity, but he was too close to her. She created, he decided morosely, a sanity-free zone for at least a yard or so around her.

“I did some thinking while you were freshening up.”

Mickey braced himself. “Oh?”

For a long beat, Luci stared at him. With some effort, Mickey managed to meet her look without flinching or lusting.

“You are,” he said, finally, “on the inside there.”

“That’s true.” Luci picked up the pen the waitress had left for Mickey to use to sign the credit card receipt. “One thing I was thinking. I know we found Frosty the dead man first, but I think Reggie is really victim number one.”

“There’s no forensic evidence to support it,” Mickey said,