Free Ace Is Wild by Penny McCall Page A

Not that she blamed them. The second a man suspected she knew what was going on inside him, especially when he wasn’t quite sure himself, he ran in the other direction. True, most men didn’t believe in her “abilities,” but feelings were nothing to mess with.
    She looked in the window again. Nothing had changed, except Daniel decided to turn around and scope out the place, including the front window and who might be peering through it. Vivi managed to fade back into the crowd, at least enough to keep Daniel from seeing her before she came up against something that wasn’t moving and smelled like beer. The fuzzy-faced drunk, she discovered when she turned around.
    “Why haven’t you passed out yet?” she grumbled. “You look like you’ve drunk enough beer to fill Boston Harbor.”
    “There’s plenty more where this came from.” And in case she wasn’t sure what “this” referred to he lifted his mug to show her, and beer sloshed onto his shoes. He peered down, brow furrowing all the way back to the nape of his neck.
    “There’s plenty more where that came from,” she reminded him before he made an attempt at beer retrieval, “right in there.”
    He got that lightbulb-over-the-head look and started for Cohan’s, turning back before he’d taken more than a step. “Hey, that’s how you got rid of me last time.”
    “Really? Just by mentioning beer?”
    He gazed down at his glass again, saw that it was below the halfway mark, and mumbled something about being right back.
    Vivi watched him go, no second thoughts this time. First, she liked her men a bit taller—and less fuzzy. Second, he didn’t have what it took to be a stalker. For starters, he needed to be able to concentrate longer than ten seconds. Probably his skills of concentration would improve as his beer intake went down, but that was a different problem. That was a problem she wasn’t qualified to deal with. Another day or two of following Daniel Pierce around, and she could probably give lessons on how to be a stalker, but alcoholism would still be outside of her skill set.
    She went back to her surveillance, just in time to see Daniel turn around again. She ducked out of sight, and when she eased back to peek in the window he wasn’t sitting at the table anymore. But someone was breathing down her neck.
    “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” She whipped around and came face to chest with Daniel.
    Her breath wheezed out, and parts of her that should have been completely buzz-free were singing like electric wires in a thunderstorm. She’d never understood the fascination with toes as a sexual body part, but hers were definitely curling. And when she managed to get past her own reaction, she could tell he wasn’t unaffected, either. “Changed your mind about dinner?” she asked him. Or anything else?
    “What the hell are you still doing here?”
    “Increasing my stalker skills so I can get a gig at the Learning Annex.”
    “What?”
    “It’s a long story. What are you doing out here?”
    “That should be self-explanatory.”
    “It’s a free country. I can eat wherever I want.”
    “You’re not eating, you’re staring in the window and freaking out the people who are eating.”
    She pressed her nose to the glass. “They don’t look freaked out to me.” They didn’t look like alien spaceships erupting from the bedrock would freak them out. Bostonians were tougher than that, no matter what heinous slander Steven Spielberg tried to perpetrate on a gullible populace.
    “The voices in your head sounding off again?” Daniel wanted to know.
    “Something like that.” She turned back, and there, behind Daniel, was the leprechaun. She went with impulse, slipping her arm around Daniel’s waist and plastering herself to his side, and okay, there were other advantages, but mainly she was really tired of fending this guy off and nothing else had worked.
    She didn’t expect Daniel to play along, especially not by slapping a hand on her ass.