Reborn Yesterday (Phenomenal Fate 1)

“Anyway, I know what you’re thinking. She’s brought up my legion of female fans three times now. She must be jealous.” Ginny stopped beside Dreamboat and looked down at his regal brow, the masculinity of his jaw, and a horrible welling started in her chest. “I think you’d be right,” she whispered in a red-cheeked rush. “I think if you’d smiled at me even once on the subway a decade ago, I’d be out avenging your death right now. Isn’t that crazy?”

Just to be sure a terrible (wonderful) mistake hadn’t been made, Ginny lifted her right hand, letting two fingers hover over Dreamboat’s pulse. Her heart rate spiked at the prospect of touching him, which didn’t bode well for tonight’s task of filling his veins with formaldehyde. How could she give him the proper care he deserved if she couldn’t stop shaking?

A bracing breath passed between her lips.

She touched her fingers down to his pulse.

Nothing.

There had been no mistake.

He was thoroughly, devastatingly dead.

“I’m so sorry,” Ginny managed, her tears welling at such a rapid pace that one escaped, glopping heavily onto the man’s stone cold torso.

His eyes shot open.

His…eyes shot open?

Shock seared Ginny’s blood, dizziness rocking her. Around her, the room narrowed and expanded like a funhouse, fireworks popping off in her ears. She stumbled back a step and careened into the cinderblock wall, watching in piercing shock as Dreamboat came back to life. No. No. This had to be her imagination. She’d been lonely so long, her brain was crying out for human interaction and no way, no way, no way was the corpse sitting up—

Only he was.

Unless she’d completely and totally gone bananas, he was sitting up, his stunning musculature flexing in the harsh, clinical lighting. She should have screamed, called an ambulance, got him a glass of water. Something. Instead, she clutched at the middle of her chest and whispered, “Oh, thank God.”

Slowly, Dreamboat’s head turned and eyes of deep emerald green found Ginny’s, narrowing almost on a flinch. “N-not a fan of plaid?” she quipped, ridiculously.

His attention ticked down to the fabric in question, burning the skin beneath like an iron, before returning to her eyes. “Where am I?”

How was she supposed to answer simple questions when his voice sounded like a curl of smoke? When he was approximately thirty times more beautiful while alive? Where his shirtless status had been functional before, he was now sitting up, exuding masculinity with a sheet pooled around his hips and therefore, his bare chest had become a sensual attack. Thick hair, black as sin, was brushed away from his face, but a few pieces had escaped to caress his forehead. His jawline flexed over her perusal, but Ginny couldn’t stop staring. It was as though she’d been starving for the sight of him.

The cultivated sadness inside of her lifted so quickly, leaving lightness behind, she almost felt hysterical. Like she’d been slingshotted through a tank of helium. “A better question is, where have you been?”

Ginny’s hand flew to her mouth trying to trap the question far too late. Where had it come from? Maybe she was hysterical. After all, a corpse had just come back to life in front of her very eyes. She’d earned the right to be tongue-tied.

“I’m sorry. What I meant was, you’re at the P. Lynn Funeral Home in Coney Island.” She sounded winded, yet official, like a weather girl reporting live in front of a tornado. On cue, a rumbling started overhead and she pointed at the ceiling. “See? There’s the Q train. Do you want to talk about this?”

“About the Q train?”

His accent was hard to place, but it was spun through with hints of the south. “No. No, I mean…” She separated herself from the wall and stood shifting in her ballet flats. “The fact that you just came back from the dead.”

“Yes,” he responded slowly, regarding her in way that made her skin feel hot and sensitive. “First, I’d like to talk about why you’re not screaming.”

Honestly, Ginny didn’t have a good answer for his reasonable and very direct question. So she rambled, as she often did in situations where her normalcy was called into question. “If I scream, I could scare you back to death and I think that might make me a murderer.” Thus making it obvious that she was quite abnormal and making the conversation even worse for herself. “Anyway, it’s a happy occasion. You’re alive! You’ll get right back in the saddle.” Her pep talk died on her lips when something terrible occurred. “You didn’t happen to hear anything I said before. Did you?”

A spark of humor lit his gorgeous eyes. “You were talking to a dead man?”

“Oh good, you didn’t hear anything.” She swallowed. “But now you think I’m nuts, anyway, so what’s the difference?” He watched her curiously as she crossed the room and picked up the receiver of the landline phone. “We should probably call an ambulance. Or at the very least the medical examiner to inform her she needs to keep her day job—”