Family Treed by Pauline Baird Jones Read Free Book Online

to the uncertain care of three batty old ladies? He studied each small, whining arrival, wondering which one was his. A security guard loomed up on one side and he had to produce his badge.
    The case against Eddie just kept building.
    A woman emerged from the breezeway and paused to get her bearings. Mickey straightened in an utter and complete moment-of-silence respect for the best legs he’d ever been privileged to lay eyes upon. The cop part of him was vaguely aware she was in her late twenties, maybe early thirties, almost of a height with him and the possessor of a slender build. Her hair was dark and cut short around a face made interesting by its square jaw and straight dark brows. Mouth was nice, too. Full and lush and lined in red.
    He left off admiring her legs to contemplate her mouth, but his attention was drawn lower again when the legs went into motion. Brief appearances by her thighs, between the slash of her dark skirt, had him tugging at a too-tight tie. It took him a few seconds to realize that she’d stopped right in front of him.
    With extreme reluctance, he dragged his gaze back to eye level. Her head was angled, her gaze directed toward the pig with a seriousness it didn’t deserve. Just for a moment, something in the angle of her jaw had him wondering if he’d met her, but he dismissed the notion. A guy couldn’t forget those legs.
    His gaze drifted down again, but he flashed back to attention when she stepped closer, her nose bare inches from his, her lashes lifting with lust-building slowness to reveal emerald green depths.
    His tie tightened to near strangulation level, but he couldn’t move, let alone do something about it. Green eyes were always trouble for him. Too bad proximity and hormones took the edge off caution. If his partner, Delaney, were here, he’d recognize the signs of Mickey on the verge of falling in lust again. But Delaney wasn’t here. The lucky bastard was in bed.
    Carpe diem. Mickey knew his smile was his best opening gambit and produced it with practiced ease. “Hello.”
    Luci studied the smile, recognized the confidence and the intent behind it. She’d met smiles like this one. Smiles that were confident of their charm. Smiles that expected weak knees and a cessation of rational thought. It was fortunate she had a built-in immune system to charming smiles and didn’t ever do rational thought. It went with being a Seymour, though her knees, just for a moment, signaled a willingness to depart from the norm. She reminded herself she was the result of a departure from the norm and said, “That’s my pig.”
    This deviation from the opening pass widened his admittedly wonderful blue eyes and erased the smile. Luci took a moment to admire those eyes while the struggle to understand played in them.
    â€œYour—pig?” he managed.
    His voice was also wonderful, despite a certain strangled quality. Husky, it had a nice mix of bass and baritone. Confusion gave him a little boy aura to which even a Seymour couldn’t be immune. Perhaps it was a side effect of her non-Seymour parentage. According to her mother—when her mother could be persuaded to talk about Luci’s paternity—there were several annoying things she’d picked up from her father. It was, in fact, a moment of rare, though limited, openness about that paternity that had prompted her visit to New Orleans. The wedding was the perfect excuse, since she wasn’t ready to admit to her family that she was father hunting.
    The telegram from Boudreaux, her aunts’ handyman, had provided assurance that they did understand she was coming, but no surprise it had been sparse on details, which explained the pig. Only her aunts would have kept it, remembered it and produced it in lieu of identification. She studied it with remembered fondness, noted the tightening ribbon, and looked up to tell him, “You’re choking it.”
    Mickey gave