Page 52 of Stitched Up in You
“I need you to stop ruining my imaginary vacation. I just came out here to see the sunrise, and then I noticed there’s more carnival tents at the fair than there were yesterday,” she gestures toward the rear of the house.
I scowl.
“Are you okay?” she asks with a cute tilt of her head.
“Do you always leave your door unlocked?”
Her eyebrows hit the red of her hairline. “Ya know, where I’m from, people have this thing that they do, where they sort of knock on the door,” she says, forming a fist to knock at the air, “and they do that to see if anyone’s home before opening the door.”
I scowl harder, and her green gaze rolls with annoyance.
“Jeez, Frank, no I didn’t lock the door, I just got back from pouring a cup of coffee from the kitchen. Excellent staff by the way, not that I’ve actually seen anyone who works around here,” she says.
“Lock the door from now on,” I tell her. “This isn’t a vacation, you work for me now, remember?”
She leans against the balcony wall and crosses her legs at her ankles. “Working vacation then. So, what’s on the agenda today, my little dreamboat? More horseback riding across the countryside? Or maybe you want to show me your baseball collection,” she says, batting her eyes.
“Not a vacation, and I don’t have a baseball collection,” I mutter.
“I know,” she says with a wink, and her gaze drops to my pants.
Shit.
I cross my wrists over my crotch, and she grins. A woman who knows I’m a monster, she may not know what kind, but she does know I’m supernatural in nature, and still is more than willing to allow me to take her.
Who put her up to this. Someone had to have planted her here.
“When you hacked my company, who put you up to it?” I ask.
“No one put me up to it. It wasn’t like that at all, no one paid me to hack your little company. Sorry,bigcompany,” she says, making air quotes.
“What was it like then? Start from the beginning,” I tell her, crossing my arms over my chest, enjoying how her gaze drops to my chest.
“Theres not much to tell. My best friend went through a breakup, long story short she met Vlad who was supposed to be a rebound, and so I did some digging into him, which ledme to Talbot, and I found that odd. A contract more than a couple hundred years old, tied to a guy who doesn’t exist on the internet, but I guess we all know why that is now, eh?”
“No one asked you to do that for her?”
She shakes her head. “Nope, no one.”
I grimace. There’s no way in hell I’m waiting for a human to gain her immortality, especially not this reckless hellion who seems hellbent to get herself into every hazardous situation around her like magnetized to trouble.
My stomach sinks at what it was like when I lost my last mate.Anna. I haven’t thought of her in decades, and it’s been so long I can’t bring the image of her face to mind, but I know she was magnificent.
I glance down at the diminutive human still gesturing wildly about some frivolous list of things she wants to do on her imaginary vacation.
How is it that I was once mated to the best and brightest in the field of anatomy in the early seventeen hundreds, and now I’m beset by this one?
Even though I destroyed most of it and the city block when she died, without Anna, Talbot wouldn’t be what it is today. A lung disease she was researching how to cure took her before the mate bond had a chance to take hold, and what happened next caused a rift in the supernatural community that’s lasted centuries.
The pact I proposed then was formed with the knowledge that any supernatural being with considerable power who loses their mate is a ticking time bomb, which makes mating with humans dangerous.
Vlad, the oaf, has already proven himself too weak to keep his shit together, entangling himself with a human headfirst without taking any precautions.
I stare down at the small woman, her gaze narrowing.
“Are you even listening to me Frank?” she asks.
Humans come with far too many problems to put up with their flaws and issues.
