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

“I met Lila Seymour the summer before I shipped out for Nam.”

Ross and Delaney hadn’t asked, but Pryce seemed to need to talk while they waited in the garden for Luci. It couldn’t be easy for him to discover in just under one minute that he had a daughter and that someone wanted to kill her. He’d aged twenty years in twenty seconds.

“She’d stalled her car and I stopped to help. It was her battery. I tried to push her with my truck—that’s how we jump-started cars back then—but she couldn’t get the hang of what I wanted her to do. Hopeless with machines, but with legs like hers, well, she didn’t need to be skilled.” He stretched his legs out in front, his mind’s eye seeing a distant past instead of the azaleas. “I decided to switch places with her. Have her push her car with my truck. Told her to get going about thirty-five and then pull over when I got hers going.” A slight, reminiscent grin softened the line of his mouth.

“What happened, sir?”

Because, of course, they all knew something had happened. The Seymour apples didn’t fall far from the family tree.

“She was going exactly thirty-five when she hit me.” He chuckled. “She’d backed it up so she could be up to speed. Saw her coming in the mirror. Barely had time to brace myself.” The smile turned wry. “Should’ve known then she was trouble and just walked away. But I didn’t.” He shrugged. “I would’ve married her before I shipped out. Never understood why she just took off.” The lines around his mouth deepened and his fists clenched. “Damn the woman. I could kill her—”

They all heard the door to the patio slide open. Mickey watched his Captain turn to see his daughter for the first time.

She walked toward them in the failing light, gone “gypsy” with some kind of loose wrap skirt and a soft blouse that drooped off her shoulders. She’d tucked a flower behind one ear and carried a tray of sandwiches and drink, despite the elastic wrapped around her left wrist. She didn’t look like someone in the sight line of killers as she lowered the tray with enough expertise to give credence to her claim of being a waitress. She looked—

Things he didn’t dare think in the presence of his Captain and her father.

“I know you’re primed to ask me scores of tiresome questions, but don’t until—”

Luci stopped. The silence got long, the gravity of her presence pulling his gaze from the ground in time to see her studying them as intently as they were studying her. As always, her thoughts remained her own behind the calm reflection of her green eyes, but she had to see it, he thought. The likeness was practically neon now that they were together.

Luci thought it was the humidity that was too thick to cut when she came out, but it was now obvious that the humidity was losing, big time, to something else. Mickey looked like he wished he were in a galaxy far, far away. Delaney was trying, without success, to blend into a hibiscus. And the third man?

She turned toward him with an odd reluctance. Much of the tension emanating from the three men seemed to originate from him. Her first thought was that he looked ill. Her second, he looked...like she should know him.

Despite the grayness to his lean cheeks, he had a strong presence. A man used to giving orders and expecting to have them obeyed. Not someone who could spend too much time in the Seymour zone without developing a twitch. She tried to imagine him in the same room with her aunts, but couldn’t. They were incapable of recognizing an order, let alone obeying one. His gaze burned her with its intensity. His hands were clenched as if he wanted to grab her and do—

“What?” she asked, the single word falling like a stone into the weighted silence.

They all looked away, shrugged and mumbled patently false denials, but within seconds they were all staring at her again. She felt like checking to see if she’d grown another head. Instead she crossed her arms over and said, “If you’re hungry, maybe you should eat the sandwiches.”

“They look good, don’t they, Ross?” Delaney asked, his voice too hearty. He clumsily helped himself. Mickey followed suit, in his haste almost tipping over the tray. And why were they both being so careful not to look at the man eating her up with his eyes but without any sexual overtones?

Something was up. They all looked like deer caught in headlights as they stared at their sandwiches like they didn’t know what to do with them.

“You put them in your mouths and chew,” she prompted. “Or you could tell me what’s wrong?”

Each man took a bite, chewing like it hurt. Swallowing dryly. Without speaking, she poured each of them a glass of lemonade and got a round of far too grateful smiles. She turned to Delaney. He was the mediator of the partnership and, as long as Gracie stayed out of sight, could be counted on to be coherent. She arched her brows.

He kind of twitched a couple of times, then produced, “We think someone is trying to kill you.”

“So you said.” She arched the other brow when he didn’t follow this up with anything else.

The source of their discomfort cleared his throat and Delaney rushed to add, “This is the Captain of the Homicide Division, Henry Pryce. Captain.” For some reason, introducing her appeared to cause Delaney some pain because his voice got hoarse when he finished with, “This is Luci...Seymour.”

Luci took the hand the captain extended, felt it close forcefully, painfully over hers, as if he wanted to hang on to her. She met his gaze, then freed herself because she needed the distance to ease the choking sensation clogging her throat. She sank into her usual, boneless recline on the slider swing. Could