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

“Yes.”

“Before or after the long kiss.”

I smiled. “It wasn’t that long—the light is green now—isn’t it kind of hard on your transmission to grind the gears like that?”

He accelerated, deliberately abusing his transmission again. “Every time I turn around you’re getting cozy with those boys.”

“Not every time. It was a rehearsal.”

“Is that what you call it? Sounded more like soliciting to me.” I liked the aggrieved edge to his voice. If I had to be baffled, then he should be aggrieved. “It’s dangerous to encourage them like that. Young men’s hormones, well, they can get out of hand.”

“Really?” He ground his teeth, so I added soothingly, “Actually I was trying to discourage them.”

“I don’t think it worked.”

“They were just high on the idea of liking me. I removed the mystery—”

“Mystery?”

“Yeah. I think they thought it would be, like amazing to kiss me or something. I disabused them of the idea and now we’re all just good friends again.”

“They didn’t think kissing you was amazing?” He pulled through the light and stopped in front of the same Mexican restaurant where we’d been shot at before.

“No.” I turned to look at him, found myself nose to nose with him. He removed his glasses, then mine and snared me in the glow of his hot, blue gaze.

“I find that hard to believe.” His voice husky, he leaned close, his hand sliding over mine nestled in my lap and lifted it to his mouth.

All I could do was stare, the breath stealing from my lungs in a gentle whoosh as his mouth slid across the back of my hand.

“Oh.” It was not brilliant, but it was all I could manage. I started to lean towards him, surrender in my heart. Apparently he didn’t want surrender. He wanted lunch. He turned and slid out of the car. I watched him walk around to open my door, pique replacing passion. Again he had failed to take advantage of a lady in the front seat of his car? The man wasn’t doing his part to improve the CIA’s bad image.

I managed to drown my pique in the excellent lunch. Feeling mellow and much more forgiving, I leaned forward, pushing aside my water glass, my hand idly playing with the petals of the flower that drooped in the center of the table as we chatted about everything but what brought us together. Kel leaned forward, linking his hand with mine, both our elbows on the table, we stared at each other across the minimal space, like arm wrestlers waiting the starting gun—

The thought must have formed in both our minds at the same time because we both started straining, turning our table into a mini-battle field of the sexes. Of course I lost. I hadn’t been rigorously trained by the government. But sometimes losing can be winning. With my arm down on the table, our faces ended up just millimeters apart. He shortened the distance. I let him, fluttering my lashes down on my cheeks in what I hoped were alluring half-moons. But instead of kissing me he jumped to his feet like he’d heard a gunshot.

“Mother!” His hand went to his tie.

For one awful moment, I thought it was my mother. Then it hit me. I jerked back from my draped position on the table and knocked over my water glass.

“What are you doing here?” He tugged his tie again.

I saw her attention turn toward me and braced for it, but her eyes were as clever as Kel’s at disguising what she was thinking.

“You played at Ellie’s funeral,” she said, her voice as coolly elegant as her dark suit. She looked like the perfect political wife, but probably wasn’t with a name like Kapone. I braced for a more polite form of my mother’s dismay, but she startled me by adding, “It was lovely. You’ve been to New Orleans?”

“I taught school there for several years,” I admitted.

Mrs. Kapone slanted a look at her son that was both charming and mischievous. He blushed. A real, honest-to-goodness blush.

“Kel had the most darling crush on his teacher…Elspeth Carter when he was ten,” she confided. “That’s how we met. She invited me in to discuss a poem—”

“Mother!” Kel protested.

I found myself exchanging an amusing, faintly superior female look with Kel’s mother. I will confess I didn’t just enjoy it, I reveled in it.

She left us to finish our business, with an admonition to Kel to come home for Sunday dinner this weekend. He kissed her cheek, murmured something soothing, but noncommittal, then escorted her to a seat with her friends. When he’d rejoined me, he managed to avoid making eye contact by pulling the computer sheet from his inside jacket pocket. Instead of serious spy, he looked sort of boyish. I knew how he felt. When your mother was watching, it just didn’t matter how old you were. All that mattered was how old you felt.

I was thinking how endearing he was until a movement gave me a glimpse of the gun nestled inside his jacket. It was a timely reminder of who and what he was. This wasn’t just the man I’d most like to kiss. This wasn’t just a man with a truly classy mother who could be as embarrassing as my mother. This was a CIA agent. A man who carried a gun and who used it in the service of his country. I’d seen him shoot it. He’d probably killed with it. A girl who got mixed up with him was likely to find herself featured on a made-for-television movie of the week. I should look at the stupid computer sheets and then hie me back to my roach as quickly as I possibly could. I was out of my league.

In pursuit of this goal, I asked, “Kel, you don’t still think the Kenyons are mad plotters, do you?”

He paused in the act of unfolding the sheet. “I don’t know about the elder Kenyon. I know his son, Dag, is not squeaky clean.”

This