The Kissing Game Read Free Page A

least!”
    Clay held up his hands as if to ward off a potential physical attack. “I'm sorry. I didn't even know Great-Aunt Alice had a house down here until after she was gone.”
    Frankie turned to Simon, and he saw that she actually had tears in her eyes. Man, she was an emotional fireball. She always had been. Quick to accuse, quick to throw down a challenge, quick to the defense, quick to attack. But also equally quick to forgive and forget.
    Gazing into her emotion-moistened brown eyes, Simon found himself wondering not for the first time what Frankie would be like in bed. Not for the first time? Hell, not even for the first time today. What it would be like to make love to Francine Paresky was something that he'd wondered almost every single day for the past twelve years. And lately it seemed as if he were wondering it with more and more frequency. Like when she startled him by stripping down to her bathing suit right in front of him, the way she had upstairsnot more than a few minutes earlier. Like when he saw her walking toward him on Ocean Avenue. Or when she smiled. When he heard the husky sound of her laughter or the velvet-soft rise and flow of her southern accent. When he woke up in the morning. When he fell asleep at night ….
    “You remember Alice Winfield, don't you, Si?” she asked.
    He could picture her in that sexy-as-hell black dress, the soft fabric clinging to her lithe body— an incredible body she was careful always to keep hidden beneath baggy T-shirts, loose shorts, and utilitarian bathing suits. He could picture her without the dress—her mouth hungry, her fingers in his hair, her body eager beneath his ….
    “Yeah.” He cleared his throat and shifted slightly in his seat. “Alice Winfield. Of course I remember her.” More precisely, he remembered that she owned that huge Victorian house on Pelican Street, the one he'd suspected was loaded with the kind of well-cared-for, impeccably made old furniture that was the staple of his diet as an antiques dealer. He'd been dying to get inside that house for years. He should be thinking about
that,
not focusing on insane sexual fantasies. “She used to be a schoolteacher, right?”
    “I used to go over and help her weed her garden,” Frankie said. “I took care of it for her in the summer, when she was up north. She was the sweetest, kindest lady. If I had known she was still alive, I would have kept in touch.”
    “I didn't know her that well myself,” Clay Quinn admitted. “But her husband apparently left her quite a fortune when he died, and she invested it well. Her estate is substantial, and she's been quite generous in distributing it among her relatives. She had no children of her own, you know.”
    Frankie nodded, her full attention on Quinn.
    Simon caught himself staring at her again. Man, what was wrong with him? Sure, she was extraordinarily pretty—despite the fact that she usually dressed like a longshoreman. But so what? Hundreds of pretty women were walking up and down Sunrise Key's crescent-shaped beach right that very moment. And maybe that was his problem. Maybe it had simply been too long since he'd wined and dined—and seduced—one of the lovely visitors to this island. Tonight he'd go to the restaurant up at the resort, find himself a dinnerdate, and he wouldn't give Francine Paresky another thought.
    “Alice wrote in her will that the property here on Sunrise Key be given to a man named John,” Quinn was saying, “who vacationed down here for two weeks each spring for a period of about seven years in the late 1970s, early 1980s. Ac cording to Alice, he rented one of the cottages near her house on Pelican Street. Apparently, while his wife spent time on the beach, he helped Alice with odd jobs and repairs. She wrote that he never took a dime for all the work he did for her, and that he used to drop by in the evenings and play gin rummy. Alice wasn't sure she ever even knew his last name. She thought his wife's