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

He wasn’t buying but was too polite to do more than look skeptical as he turned her toward the baggage claim sign.

As they descended via escalator, Luci studied Mickey. Pretty enough to be a calendar pin-up, he was lean, with shoulders just the right amount of broad, and a body just the right height to create symmetry. His cleanly-honed face was both reassuring and dangerous. The shadow of beard was sexy on his obviously stubborn chin, though she suspected the growth wasn’t a calculated effect but a temporary setback. The crisp cut of his light brown hair hinted at a clean-cut personality, and his tired blue eyes suggested he’d just come off a long stint of something—which probably explained the touch of irritability. Though even the strong and the well rested had tough going in the Seymour zone.

She stole another peek and got caught. He tugged at his now wildly askew tie.

“What?” Another flare of irritation erased the weary in his eyes.

“Excuse me?” She arched one brow, punctuating the question with another admiring perusal of his assets. Red crept out from under his chin and up his face. Dang, the boy was cute.

“Nothing.” He stopped by the luggage carousel and looked at the jumble of people and bags. He was too tired to do the bellboy thing if she had more than one bag. “Here comes the bags. Should I get a cart-”

“Why don’t we wait until we see if my stuff made it. My luggage likes to take side trips to Raratonga or Katmandu.”

“Okay.” He watched a bag circle, then said, “If it does come—”

“Well, will you look at that. There they are!”

Mickey was starting to suspect that she didn’t react to things the way normal people did. Her sincere delight at the sight of her luggage attracted almost as much attention as the pig and her legs. And did she have to bend over the luggage like it was lost children just found?

An unease filtered through tired and lust with distant words of caution. Green eyes, great legs and, a very nice ass—she was presenting it, so he took a good look before going to get a cart—were a temptation with a capital “T.” But trouble started with a “T,” too. If he had any doubts about the wisdom of steering clear, he had only to think of her aunts.

Insanity did run in families. No question it was running amok in hers.

“Donald.” Fern grabbed Donald’s arm and pointed as Luci Seymour came out the doors, walking next to a luggage cart. Perched on the two suitcases was a large pig, made lurid by the artificial light. She shuddered. “Someone should put that thing out of its misery.”

Donald compared reality to the photo Artie gave them. “Someone is going to.”

3

The hot air hit Luci in the face like a wet towel. She caught her breath, but it wasn’t catchable with air that thick. Memories stirred. Old, happy memories of long slow days under shaded trees with...Stu? She examined the name from all sides. It seemed to fit within the memory, which returned in a sudden rush. Stu, like Seymour males large and small, had been an utter weenie, but he’d also been someone to play with who took orders well. He got a dragon when she got the pig. Yeah. Luci gave the pig a fond pat, tried out another breath and found it was a little easier, as if her lungs were already adapting to the slower pace and water level in the air.

“Luci, you’re not in Wyoming anymore,” she murmured.

“Wyoming?” Mickey looked at her. “I know someone from Wyoming.”

Everyone, Luci found, knew someone from Wyoming. And expected you to know them, too. Granted it wasn’t an over-populated state, but Wyoming people liked a large area of personal space. Miles large.

“What—”

“Butt Had,” Luci said. No one ever knew anyone from Butt Had. If they did, they wouldn’t admit it.

“Butt...Had?” Mickey blinked, getting that shell-shocked look again.

“I’m afraid so.” Luci sighed. “You see, when they filed for incorporation, there was this broken “e” key on the typewriter—”

The white around the blue got larger, not smaller, and she decided to give it up as a bad job. “My mother won’t live there, which is far more important to my piece of mind than a few missing ‘e’s’.”

“Uh...huh.” Despite his words, he kept looking at her like she was from Mars instead of a small town in Wyoming that should have been called Butte Head. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the pig start to slip. She reached for it at the same moment as Mickey and ended up almost lip-to-lip with him.

He had nice lips.

She reined in her errant lips before they could take a taste. While he dealt with the pig, she stuffed her unruly libido firmly back in the box marked don’t open and slammed down the lid. This was not the time to find she had something in common with her mother besides a last name.

Mickey settled the pig and tried to keep his gaze away from Luci, but it kept straying back. Questions about her bubbled across the surface of his mind. He happened across one he could ask without being rude.

“What do you do in Butt—there?”

She stopped. He did, too. The underpass didn’t make the best backdrop for her, but it didn’t seem to matter. There was something so...so...he didn’t know—siren. That was it. She was like those mythical siren girls that called to men to crash on the—

“I’m a Do Wah,” she said.

—rocks. He felt the impact, but the pity in her eyes blunted the pain. He choked a couple of times, then managed to croak out, “A what?”

She licked her red lips, the tip of her tongue pink and moist as it traced the curve. Lucky tongue—

“I’m a Do Wah.”

Another crash against the rocks, but it didn’t hurt as much as it should have.

“What the—”