Indecent Suggestion Read Free Page B

thought. Because what she said next was, “I’ll make a bet with you.”
    It was the perfect way to respond. Turner was just arrogant enough in his masculinity to never, ever, back down from a challenge. But he was also just arrogant enough in his masculinity to hardly ever win a bet he made with her.
    “What kind of bet?” he asked.
    Bingo, she thought with satisfaction. Aloud, however, she kept her smugness under control and told him, “Tomorrow’s Saturday. If you can make it through the entire day tomorrow—from the minute you wake up until the minute you go to sleep—without once having to light up, then I won’t say another word about quitting, and we can take our habit outside whenever we feel the need at work. But if you break down and light even one cigarette tomorrow,” she quickly continued, “then you have to go with me to a hypnotherapist ASAP.”
    He grinned, clearly thinking he would have no trouble sticking to such a challenge. “Piece. Of. Cake,” he said.
    Becca grinned back. Yeah, it would be a piece of cake, all right, she thought. And she made a mental note to go ahead and check the Yellow Pages, under H for Hypnotherapist, as soon as she got home. No sense waiting until the last minute.

2
    T URNER WAS DRAPED ACROSS his couch, dozing off despite the fact that it was barely ten o’clock, and the TV was blaring the closing credits of The Zombies of Mora Tau, when he heard the ungodly thunder of what he suspected, in his half-coherent state, must be the pounding of one of those very Mora Tauian zombies. Even though Ray Milland had taken them all out with an angry, torch-bearing mob in the final scene, which Turner had witnessed at least a half-dozen times. And it occurred to him as he struggled to a sitting position and knuckled his eyes that he really should find some other way to spend his Friday nights besides feeding bad B-movie monsters into his DVD player.
    The zombie pounding at his front door kicked up again, and he wondered where was an angry, torch-bearing mob when you needed one? Not so much to take care of the zombie at his front door, but because at least a few members of the mob also might be bearing cigarettes, which, coupled with the torches to light them, would set Turner up for the rest of the weekend. Then he remembered Becca’s bet. So much for the weekend. Or at least tomorrow. And even though it wasn’t Saturday morning yet, he ignored the half-full pack on the end table and went to see who the zombie knocking at his front door was.
    But as he rose to standing and his heart began pumping blood into his bleary brain, he decided that the knocking probably wasn’t coming from anything as lame as a zombie. If what Turner suspected was true, his visitor was way more dangerous than that. More dangerous, even, than the Magma Creature from Milwaukee. Or the Lizard Man from La Jolla. Or the Wasp Woman from Walla Walla.
    Stumbling barefoot across the living room, he mentally cued the Twilight Zone music, tugged down his T-shirt that read Vinnie’s House of Hubcaps, and made sure the drawstrings of his faded black sweatpants were suitably tied. Couldn’t go meeting one’s destiny with doom looking like a slob, after all. Well, not too much like a slob. Peeking through the peephole, he saw that he had been correct in his suspicions. Because the beast lurking on the other side of his front door was indeed the scariest, most perilous creature known to mankind.
    Or at least to this man, kind of.
    With a sigh of resignation, Turner curled his fingers over the doorknob and swiveled it, then pulled the door toward himself with an ominous creeeeeeak . And even though it probably would have been more appropriate for him to say, in his best Boris Karloff voice, “Gooood eeeeveniiiing,” he instead only smiled and said, “Hi, Becca,” to the woman who stood on the other side.
    She smiled brightly, a response more dangerous than the heat lasers shooting out of the eye sockets of the