Page 48 of Bad Seed
“A date. A real one, in public. With people around. Seeing us.”
He almost hides the wince enough so I won’t see. “Okay.” A hostage date is still better than what I had before.
Jerking my finger at him, I lay down my last demand. “But you have to text me back every time I message you. Got it?”
“I will,” he promises.
“And there better be cute cat pictures.”
A hard laugh shatters his stone face. “That is no problem.”
I stick my hand out like this is a business deal. “Tomorrow. You can pick me up at my place.”
Am I really doing this? Am I giving him a second chance?
Aubry glances his fingers up my palm before he catches my hand. Pulling me close, he whispers while staring into my eyes, “The wait will be excruciating.”
I’m gonna need an iron chastity belt to get through this.
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
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AUBRY
I flip down my visor and lean back to inspect myself in the mirror. This damn piece of hair refuses to do anything but stick up. I fought with it for an hour in the bathroom and hoped it would just figure its shit out on the drive.
“This is insane. Why am I nervous?”
Probably because there’s a long list of rules she sent me. If I break even one, then it’s all over.
One. I take her somewhere nice in public.
Two. I am to reply to her texts and not leave them to be answered a day or two later.
Three. No sex.
I’ve got the first covered, and have been keeping up with the second to the point Astin goes running if I pull out my phone. But the last one is going to be worse torture than when the Brussels cornered me in an abandoned warehouse and tried to send a message to my boss. I still limp when it rains.
“Okay. I can do this. Just…don’t look at her breasts, or ass, or those juicy thighs I want to wrap around my head and—” I spy a face on my periphery and put on a smile. “Hi,” I call out then check my watch.
Seven oh five.
Fuck. I’m late!
I leap out of my truck and nearly walk into the street. A pair of motorcycles go blaring past at eighty. We’re not in Loomis anymore. A handful of blocks down is housing for a local college with lots of jacked up twenty-year-olds puking on their front lawn. The chances of any of the old crew stepping foot here, much less staking it out, feels impossible. Goji wrinkles if he so much as smells stale vomit.
Still, I check both ways, then snap to check behind me. No shadows duck into a corner to hide. The weird thing about being followed is, after a while, you kinda miss the feeling. Like if you’re not being trailed by a mob enforcer, are you even real?
Not the time for a philosophical debate. I need to do some groveling. Apology flowers in one hand, I approach the crowded duplex with cars double parked until one’s nearly in the street. After ringing the bell, I slick back down my hair and wait.
I was halfway to Mexico, parked on the side of the road in my vegetable form. Sleeping wasn’t an option, but at least as an eggplant I could rest my nonexistent eyes. My brain could have tumbled over a thousand jobs, the ones that went wrong, the ones that went right. The last one that’s been haunting me every night since. Or the fact that the men who I swore my life to, who adopted me into their family, who let me into the truth of my condition are hunting me to the ends of the earth.
But no. All I could think about was her. Massive criminal guilt versus hot girl in a white dress. When I’d worked through every permutation of her face as she came, my brain invented more. Like those thighs of hers squeezed into tight shorts, the pockets straining across her ass. Her little smile giving way to a huge one while talking about anything. That perfect little divot on her left cheek, like a spherical dimple. How silky her hair felt wrapped around my fist.
Then the guilt shifted. Sure, I may have been a fixer for a man who runs anillegitimatebusiness and have had to do things that’d make people faint to hear about, but how could I live with myself for ditching Sadie?
