Page 33 of Sinful Attraction

I recall one of her complaints from before. “Marriage and babies?”

She rolls her eyes, nodding thanks as I hand her one of the drinks. “You got it.”

“Shit. I get leaned on some, but not like that.” I grab my own drink and sit down next to her on the couch. “Doesn’t either of them get that you can’t just magic up a husband and a kid for them—and that you shouldn’t be expected to?”

“Nope.” She rubs her face distractedly, and I realize she’s getting teary-eyed at me.

Shit.“Okay. My point is, I’ve got your back. It’s the least I can do after everything.”

She swallows and nods. “Thanks. Fortunately, he isn’t pushing to meet my source. Right now, anyway.”

I take a swallow of my drink. I’ve gone heavy on the alcohol. There’s something about the tanginess mixed with the burn thatI like. “Well, the elephant in the room is, if either one of our families figure out we’re working together—”

“Or fucking,” she points out bluntly, and I stop short for a few beats before I find my voice again.

“Uh... yeah, that, too.”

She smirks at my expression. “You already know my family would go nuts about it.”

I nod. “Same here. Maybe not quite as nuts, but they would. They wouldn’t be able to understand it. We’ve been rivals forever.”

“Yeah, except now, I don’t have my job anymore.”

I wince and nod. “Yeah. I know I had a hand in that—”

“They were just looking for an excuse,” she sighs, surprising the hell out of me. It’s true, but I didn’t expect to be let off the hook, even partly, this fast.

Then again... maybe I’m not.

“You know,” I say as gently as I can, “after a while, there’s no real way to control anyone else’s reaction to you. You can influence it, but a rotten person is just a rotten person.”

She licks her lips. “I know. I have one foot out the door of that place. I even told him that today.”

“Oh, baby,” I sigh before I can stop myself. She lifts an eyebrow, and I shake my head a little as I take another swallow of my drink. “Mm. Look. Threatening to leave is not really going to bother him that much. It’ll probably bother your mom because she’s clingy, but your dad’s the one who burns bridges with people like it’s his favorite hobby. You know our dads used to be friends, right?”

She blinks at me in astonishment. “No, no, I did not.”

I laugh a little at her expression. “Okay. Yeah. Our families have been rivals for a while, but it didn’t get hostile until a few years ago. Your dad and mine started out Army buddies and really close.

“But then, Dad got married to my mom. Dad says your father started drifting away after that. It wasn’t until he got drunk and groped my mom at that wedding that Dad realized he was jealous. He’d wanted Mom for himself.”

She almost chokes on her drink. “Oh, God, that’s gross. Dad and Mom have been married longer than your parents, too.”

“Three years longer. My dad got drunk one night about six months ago and told me the whole thing. That was a really, really weird conversation.”

She’s blinking at me wide-eyed. “I’ll bet. What a fucked-up thing to want to drag us into a war over.” I can practically see her opinion of her father falling a few notches.

“Well, I’m sure they’ll go off pretty violently if they realize we’re seeing each other unless we find a way of handling it. Because my point is, your father’s wanted to fight over less.”

“Yeah.” She looks a little uncertain. “So, what do we do?”

“Play it by ear for now while we work to redeem ourselves, make sure not to let them know anything, and once we’ve found our perp and exposed them, we can work on figuring out what to do about... us. In general.”

She purses her lips slightly. “Us?”

The skepticism in her voice stings. Maybe she thinks it’s too early to talk about “us.” I shouldn’t take that personally, but I have to squash a bit of disappointment.

“Yeah.”

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