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

more than odd, I’m afraid. The fact that I didn’t have to deal with my father was a source of envy to my cousins. I’d still be blissfully unaware if Lila hadn’t called and I hadn’t told her about how my neighbor Helen met her husband by hitting him with her Volkswagen.” Luci shook her head. Lila had always been a less-than-satisfactory mother, but Luci had come to terms with that a long time ago. “She let slip that’s how she met my—him. Suddenly I found myself wondering—”

“Wondering...what?” Mickey asked.

“All the things anyone would. What was he like? Why he got involved with my mother when she almost killed him? Why he never tried to find me? If he’s the reason there’s this...split in my personality?” That was the biggie for her. She’d always been a Seymour, but not quite—since she seemed to be the only one who’d noticed they weren’t like the rest of the world. She wanted to know why she was like them, but not like them. She wanted to find out what it felt like to have a father, to be a daughter.

More than anything, she admitted now, she’d wanted him to want her, the way her mother hadn’t. The way her mother never had. In the ways that mattered, Lila never had been a mother. Luckily for Luci, she hadn’t needed that much care.

Then, like fate intervening, the invitation to Unabelle’s wedding had arrived. It had stirred up her memories of New Orleans, ignited a longing to come back and see if it was as magical as she remembered it. Or so she’d told herself, while the knowledge she had a father who lived there had burned like acid in her brain. Lila had freaked when Luci told her and asked if her father had a name. She’d clammed up, but Luci had been confident of her ability to smoke out her elusive dad. What she hadn’t counted on was the body count or the attempts on her life. Funny that it was what had been the catalyst that brought her father into her orbit. And Mickey.

“And did you?” Mickey asked, breaking into her thoughts right on cue.

Luci gave a kind of half laugh. “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I just hope she stays away until he has a chance to cool off. If he ever does.”

Mickey’s grin started the blood humming through her veins like electricity along a wire. “He has made...threats, but I wonder—”

Luci quit trying not to look at him. There were some things that just couldn’t be fought. This was one of them. Her eyes liked looking at him. Her brain liked processing what her eyes saw, and her nerve endings like reacting to what her brain came up with. It was a fact, like her Seymour-ness. “What?”

“I get the feeling he’d do it again if he got the chance.” He didn’t like admitting it. It was too close to how he felt about Luci. Any chance was better than no chance.

“It wouldn’t be...smart,” Luci said, her eyes widening with the flickering heat of desire caught.

Mickey stood and pulled her up. He brushed the dirt from her cheek, then used both hands to hold and position her head so that her mouth was an easy target. She didn’t object, didn’t fight him, just stared at him with that damn, curious Seymour gaze. If there hadn’t been so much heat in back of it and if her pulse hadn’t been humming like a revved up motor—

“Sometimes you gotta take a chance, even when it’s world class stupid,” he said.

Her mouth, normally so straight and so infuriating, curved into a smile that turned heat into fire as her arms slid around his neck.

“Well, as long as you’re talking world class stupid, not the ordinary kind—”

He kissed her to shut her up and to shut his brain off.

It worked like a charm.

“I have something, Mr. Dante.”

Dante looked up at Max, surprise a strange expression on his usually expressionless face.

He put down his pen and leaned back in his chair. “What?”

Max hesitated again, unlike him. “You’re not going to like it.”

“I haven’t liked anything since Cloris got involved with that bastard, Max. Spill it. I can take it.”

“We’ve got a name—Maxwell’s cellmate in stir.”

“And the winner is—”

“Reggie Seymour—”

Dante sucked in but didn’t speak, just indicated Max should continue.

“—small-time con artist with more convictions than successes.”

“Is he a relative of Luci Seymour?”

“He’s the body they just found in their garden, Mr. Dante. A coincidence?”

“I don’t think so.” Dante frowned. “This makes everything—different. Make sure the boys are packing when we go to the party.”

“Yes, Mr. Dante.” He started to turn away.

“Oh—and Max?”

“Yes?”

“Get me some mug shots of Maxwell from our man at the NOPD. Make sure everyone’s carrying a copy to that party. I have a feeling Artie Maxwell’s going to be there. And I don’t want him to get away.”

“Right, Mr. Dante.” This time it was Max that hesitated.

“What is it?”

“How shall I tell them to deliver him?”

“Dead, Max. I have nothing to say to him.”

17

It wasn’t easy for Mickey to concentrate on the case with his head and his heart hurting, but he had to try to find a common thread that would pull all the puzzling strings of the case together. Proximity wouldn’t help any of them recover from this visit to the Seymour Zone. Now that his ears had stopped ringing, he knocked back some more aspirin and started going through the information Pryce had brought them. Not that any of what he’d brought fit with any of the information they already had.

There was Benny the Book. His file confirmed he worked for Dante, but not where he fit into the mix. He had a feeling Luci knew more about this and the shoeboxes and why Dante wanted them than she was sharing with him. Someone in this house was gambling, but who? None of the aunts seemed likely to be secret gamblers, but they