Page 34 of Sinful Seduction
The heat is still woeful. The sun, still beating down on Copeland despite it being dinnertime. In the winter, it would be pitch black already, and our faces would hurt from the freezing wind. But in summer, the road hoards the heat and bounces it back at a man, trapping him between bad and worse as brick building after brick building provides nothing but a lid on the oven we’re stuck inside.
But Minka and I walk home anyway, braving the single block and naively hoping that the fact it’s nearly seven o’clock would provide us a modicum of relief.
Not so lucky.
“You should try wearing a ribcage outside your body.” Minka fists the bottom of her dress, bunching the excess fabric and exposing shoes that don’t suit her gownat all. But at least she has her color again, and better yet, her bandage remains stark white.Her stitches are holding.“Our ribcages are made to protect our organs, Archer, not squeeze them. This one is trying to give my body a whole new unnatural shape.”
I peek across at her curvier-than-usual hips. It’s not like she has a wide stomach normally, but the dress cinches her in and shaves off at least an inch on each side. “You’ve tried the dress on, rescued a couple of people, terrorized an emergency room, and almost-interrogated a seventeen-year-old and her parents, all while wearing the outside-ribcage. I’m proud of you.”
“There’s no way I was alive two hundred years ago when these thingswere the norm. And if I were, there’s no way I wasn’t burned for being a witch.”
I snort. “Ya don’t think?”
“They expected good, submissive wives back then, and beat them when they didn’t comply.” She looks up at me, squinting under the sun’s brutal attack. “I couldn’t imagine a world where I’m quiet or you’re whipping me for disobeying your orders.”
“Sometimes I wanna.” I take her hand and tangle our fingers together. “I can’t go a day without your smartass comebacks and blatant defiance. Stokes my temper, for sure.”
“Mmhm.” She walks closer, laying her head against the ball of my shoulder. “You might wanna smack my ass, but you would never do it. Not in the context we’re discussing.”
My lips curl higher, and my cock stirs in my pants.Not in this context, no. But it happens.
“If reincarnation is a real thing, and if I was alive before modern plumbing, then I know I didn’t have a good time of it. But then again, Patek and Taylor had not yet discovered anti-hemophilic factor two hundred years ago. So, going by that theory, I would have been one of the countless babies dying soon after birth, anyway, for reasons the practitioners of the time wouldn’t have been able to understand. Dumb baby,” she snickers. “I would have been stuck on a loop, born and deceased. Born and deceased. Round and round and round I went until the nineteen-thirties.”
“Guess the earlier versions of yourself never had hemophilia.” I drag our hands up and press a kiss to her knuckles. “Because if reincarnation is real, then I would’ve found you, even then. And seeing as how I was four when you were born, my dumb four-year-old self was probably still filling his diaper and walking around clueless to the fact you existed.”
She snuggles into my side, giggling.
“We knew each other in our past lives, Minnnka. I refuse to believe otherwise.”
“You’re feeling especially romantic today, huh?” She wraps herself around my arm, dropping the ends of her gown so the fabric becomes a tripping hazard, and the heat of our bodies pressed together only makes the summer sun all the worse. But she nuzzles against my shoulder the way our cat does at night. “Do you believe in that stuff?”
“I dunno.” I bury my nose in her hair. Just to get a whiff. Just for a moment. “Maybe. The idea of a redo sounds nice, considering some of usare born into shitty circumstances. I’d like to believe that if I saw your witchy self on trial in Salem, I would’ve stepped in and saved you.”
“You might’ve thrown rocks at me. Cato would have, for sure.” Pulling back, she peers up at me with eyes glittering with mischief. “We had words today.”
“You and Cato? I know. I saved his life, remember?”
“After that. I called him after I last spoke to you and told him to check on Steve.”
“Okay…” Her phone is still dead, tucked away in my back pocket. Dark and deactivated, silent when it so often isn’t. “You blasted him again for the coffee thing?”
“I blasted him because he answered mid-relationswith some random chick inside our apartment.”
I come to a sharp stop, my feet skidding on the hot concrete and my heart thumping with a bad mood. “He what?”
“On our couch.Probably.”
My lips peel back into a sneer. “He spoke to youwhilehe was doing that?” Furious, I start walking again. “I’m gonna kill him.”
“I already verbally killed him,” she groans. “I was a total bitch. And then I demanded he go downstairs and do the damn thing I asked of him. As in, check on Steve.”
“I’m gonna kick his ass out and send him to Tim’s for the night. I told him he wasn’t allowed to do that in our apartment. I fuckin’ told him not to disrespect?—”
“I was already mean.” Minka tightens her grip on my hand and drags me back to a slower pace, forcing me to simmer instead of bubble over. “He called me out on it.”
“He calledyouout for calling him out for fucking in our apartment? He had the audacity to flip that back on you?”
“He called me out for being a bitch. Which,” she exhales. “I absolutely was. I feel bad, even if I can’t remember half the shit I said anymore, since my brain got busy with the other stuff.”
