Perilously Fun Fiction: A Bundle Pauline Jones (the red fox clan txt) 📖

if Kel came back? I didn’t want him to think I expected him to show up. I had my pride. Or what passed for pride. What the heck. Suddenly a bunch of kids looked easier to face than my own thoughts and the echoing silence of an apartment devoid of Kel, while being cluttered with memories of him.

I caught up with my fellow authors in Toledo, Ohio, and came to wish I’d missed them. I’d forgotten that the teacher from the convention and my “main man, Michael” lived in Toledo. When I left the next day for Omaha, I think I was engaged to the dysfunctional fourteen year old. With my fellow authors, people who were nearly as boring as I was, I hop-scotched across the country, signing roach butts in such diverse places as Poughkeepsie and Salt Lake City. Everywhere I went, Flynn was just ahead of me, only on a better class of talk show and minus the roach tushies. It took me two weeks to get to Las Vegas for my meeting with the roach animator.

It seemed much longer.

I was walking down the breezeway at the airport when I heard my name being called as someone who needed to pick up a courtesy telephone. I eyed it suspiciously. Courtesy and telephone were a contradiction in terms. When they called my name again, I gave in.

“Hello?” No answer. “Hello?”

“Hello, Bel,” Kel said from just above my right ear.

I jumped and dropped the telephone.

“I told you not to do that!” I think my adrenal gland was out of practice, because my heart tried to pound itself right out of my chest. I turned, glad for the wall to support suddenly wobbly knees.

He grinned. “Have a good flight?”

I collected my dignity and my cool, trying to appear casually surprised, like we weren’t two people who’d exchanged a volatile kiss on Fox News when last we met.

“The usual. What brings you to Las Vegas?”

“I came to see you.”

“Oh.” I swallowed. “How did you know I’d be here?”

“We still have our ways.” His blue eyes were lit with laughter and something else. He stepped closer.

There was no place for me to retreat with a wall at my back. Had he planned it that way? It was hard to think cool with my hormones fanning up a fire. Still fighting a rear guard defensive action, I arched my brows, taking care not to look at him as I trailed a finger down the side of the telephone. “I thought it was all over now.”

“It is. Did you get my fax?” I nodded, my eyes narrowing as I remembered his fax. He didn’t seem to notice. “I got shipped out of the country the next day. I’ve been bouncing around the Middle East for the last month.”

“I’ve been bouncing around the Mid West.” It seemed to symbolize our vast differences. Our vast, irreconcilable differences. He was a spy. I was a Baptist. Our twains didn’t know how to meet. Well, mine didn’t.

“I know. I’ve been keeping tabs on you.” He stroked my arm, sending shivers up it.

“You really do have your ways, don’t you?” Wonderful ways. “Kel…”

He put a finger over my lips, halting my words, then traced their outline. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you, too,” I admitted, without enthusiasm. His smile widened. “But it doesn’t really matter, you know. There’s no way anything could….I don’t…you, me—we’re too different. You’re a spy and I’m—”

“Amazing. You’re amazing, Bel.” He took my hand and kissed the palm, then said in a rush, “I’ve never known, never met anyone like you. I was going to ask you to move in, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it to you. I knew you deserved better than that, so I didn’t complain when I got sent to the Middle East.”

My head was spinning from his words. My heart was spinning from his smell, the look in his eyes and the feel of him seeped like honey through my veins. My veins had missed him. All of me had missed him. It had been so long. Too long.

“Kel…”

I think he heard the denial mixed with longing in my voice.

“You can’t run away from this. From us. I know. I tried. I thought a little distance would clear my head. But all that time away, all I could think about was you and how much I missed you.”

“This is crazy,” I whispered. My hands crept around his warm, strong neck. Now his heart beat against mine. So strong, so steady. For me?

“Maybe it is crazy, but I don’t care. All I know is, I want to come home to you. Tonight. Tomorrow night. Every night. You’re my other half. I need you.”

It was as if his words released the dam in my heart, letting the delight, the love I’d felt but been afraid to admit, even to myself. It rushed through me like a storm. “I love you, too. I didn’t want to, but I do.”

I think I started to cry, because he got a little blurry, but I was laughing, too. I touched him, his face, his hair, like I’d done in my imagination, but didn’t have the right to do in real life.

He erased the minuscule distance between our mouths, covering mine with a deep hunger that swept away any doubt that might have lingered. He loved me. I could feel it. I could taste it. It was wonderful, even without the fireworks and cameras and danger. I felt it all the way to my toenails. And I’d just trimmed them, too. There were no cameras to record the moment, but we weren’t without an audience.

“Hey, you two look like you could use my services,” a brash voice intruded upon our mutual delight.

We turned toward him. Some kind of shoeshine guy stood there, lean and scrungy, with an ingratiating smile.

“I’m wearing tennis shoes,” I pointed out, still dazed with new love.

“I’ve already been shined.” Kel sounded dazed, too.

“Not the shoes, dude!” He turned his kit around so we