Free It Never Rhines but It Pours by Erin Evans Page B

“You need more practice,” I smirked.
    He threw his hands up in the air. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed in mock horror. “Please, anything but that!” He snagged my waist and pulled me close, “ I’m very happy that you’re home. I’ll show you how happy later.”
    I giggled and rubbed up against him, “Promise?”
    “Promise!”
    “Mommy,” Megan interrupted. “We are waiting patiently.”
    “You are,” I agreed. “And here is your present!” I pulled out the two princess coloring books I had purchased for them. The girls were ecstatic and ran off to color.
    “I’m a genius,” I informed Mark.
    “I never said you weren’t,” he said and then all further conversation was impossible.
    “How was your weekend?” he asked me later, after the girls were in bed, and we had sufficiently demonstrated how much we had missed each other.
    “Good,” was my evasive reply.
    He was running his finger along the outside of my earlobe. “I love your ears,” he said, completely apropos of nothing.
    “Really?” I asked, flattered.
    “Yeah,” he kept playing with them, “they remind me of something.”
    “What?”
    He thought for a moment. “You know that movie where they go off in the jungle and find that little dinosaur? Baby! That was the dinosaur’s name.”
    I sat up. “That dinosaur was a brontosaurus. They don’t have ears.”
    “I know,” Mark grinned, “but if it did have ears, it would have had ears like yours. It just had cute little holes in its head.” He pulled me close and nibbled on my ear. “It just reminded me of you.”
    I took his finger off my ear and bit it lightly. He snuggled me closer and took a deep breath of my hair. “So, what’d y’all do?” We were back on the topic I would rather avoid.
    “Umm,” I was glad we were spooning and he couldn’t see my face. “You know, the usual. Ate out, shopped, things like that.”
    He was losing interest. Men’s eyes start to glaze over whenever you try to talk about things that women find fun. Mark was an only child, so he had an even harder time understanding a weekend spent with a sibling. He knew it was important time; he just couldn’t imagine what in the world we talked about for three days.
    He had no idea that magic really existed in the world, much less that his wife was cursed with a special ability. Or that his sister-in-law had changed his memories on occasion in the past. If we truly had been just shopping and eating, I might have worried about running out of conversational topics with Sarah. Since we had little time to talk about much other than the Synod and our hit, I felt like I had hardly spent time with my sister at all.
    I was feeling very stressed again. Joining the stupid USB had been bad enough. Working for them was giving me an ulcer. Why couldn’t they come up with a more creative punishment than death? Not a member of the USB? We’ll kill you. Don’t fulfill your hit? Ditto. Let people know about magic? Ditto again. It was annoying. Every time I turned around I was facing another death sentence. Couldn’t these people just leave me alone?
    So I hadn’t killed Pravus. Big whoop. He was innocent. Five minutes in court and he would have been able to prove his case and walked out. But, oh, no, not in the USB. In the USB we don’t believe in mundane, human things like trials , or a jury of your peers. What was it that Cecily had said once? Oh yeah, here we act preemptively to fix problems. Preemptively. Good thing that none of us were telepaths. I could just see how that would go. Instead of covering up magical messes, we’d be working as the thought police.
    Even with all the worry and stress, I still managed to sleep well. There’s something about your very own bed that is a beautiful thing. Your bed, your pillow, your usual night sounds, and of course, your husband cuddling you in the night. Well, cuddling until he tells you that you are hotter than a blazing furnace in hell and could you please scoot