Fontanas Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Fawn?”
    “Short for Fontana.”
    Fawn. Her great uncle had
shortened her name to Fawn. He’d died when she was ten, and Mason was the only
person to still call her by the nickname.
    Brent hugged her close, and
Fontana wanted like hell to give in to her first impulse and fall asleep in his
arms.
    “That was as close to perfect as
it gets,” she said.
    “Give me a few minutes, and maybe
we can top that.”
    “Not possible.” Her heart still
pounded out a fast rhythm.
    “We’ll see.”
    Brent gave her a hard kiss on the
mouth, then rolled off her onto the mattress and slid an arm beneath her
shoulders, pulling her close. She snuggled against him, touching as much of him
as possible—hot, perspiration soaked, and still hard. That was good enough to
prove he was a professional. What the hell. He’d given her a ride she wouldn’t
soon forget.
    He nuzzled her neck. “Fantastic.”
    She made a halfhearted effort to
push him away, then gave up and melted into him again. Maybe she could talk him
into staying awhile. If they got tired of fucking, they could get around to
discussing quantum physics, philosophy, maybe even business logistics.
    A commotion sounded from the
hallway—shouts, scuffling—and a ridiculously robotic voice boomed, “Surrender,
Brent Yari.”
    The door to her room vanished. A
six-armed security sentry floated into the room. Fontana bolted upright. The
robot’s three eyes swept right and left.
    Brent leaped from the bed,
pulling the sheet from her grasp.
    “Stop, Brent Yari,” the sentry
ordered.
    Brent sprinted to the French
doors and disappeared outside. Fontana stared. Was he actually running through
the streets nearly naked a second time?
    A laser beam spit from the
sentry’s middle eye and hit the door frame. Faux wood splintered. Fontana dove
for cover on the far side of the bed. The robot glided out the French doors
after Brent. An elderly couple in the hall gawked through the open hallway door
to her room.
    “Close door,” Fontana ordered.
    Nothing happened.
    She cursed. The damn robot had
overridden voice command. The elderly couple still stared. Fontana, naked and
shielded by the bed, waited, but they wouldn’t move on.
    “Stupid tourists,” she muttered
and rose.
    Fontana strutted toward them. The
smile on the man’s face was priceless. She punched in the code on the panel
beside the door, and the door rematerialized. The sound of a slap and the
woman’s incomprehensible curse filtered through the door. Fontana turned back
toward her room. Damn Brent, streaking again. He better not take a coat from
another woman.
    * * * *
    That afternoon, after thirty laps
in the pool, Fontana sat at the vanity in her room in a luxurious white terry
robe, scrolling through the restaurant and nightclub listings on the desktop
display. The resort specialized in Earth communities, from Albania to Zaire,
and all eras from ancient Egypt to the ultramodern.
    Irish pubs were out because Jenny
had been an Irish redhead. Wild West saloons reminded her of Rigil IV. Anything
spacecraft related made Fontana think of Jenny’s remains in that S-warp drone
speeding through the cold vacuum of space alone. There had to be some news of
the freighter that had disappeared after customs challenged her. What did the
freighter have to do with Jenny’s murder, and what had Gaelen Castor thought
Jenny knew that made it worth torturing and killing her?
    Fontana paused on a page that
displayed black-and-white headshots of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
Rick’s Café Américain, the best gin joint in Morocco.
    She had copies of seventy-four of
the seventy-five feature films Bogart had acted in on her data-cube. The
missing one was an army training film lost to time and decay. He had starred in
fifty-one of the films, but Bogie was a man she couldn’t get enough of, and
she’d tracked down his first twenty-nine films and bought them for a small
fortune.
    If she dressed in costume for
Rick’s, would Brent