Seducing Philly: Seduction In The City, #2

By J.F. Lowe

Escaping prison might not have been an option, but escaping him would turn out to be impossible.

 

Nobody would have thought a degree in Criminal Psychology would end up with her behind bars, on death row of all things. It was his fault if he hadn't have been so damm... Nope, she wasn't going to think about the brute of a man that thought he was good enough to flirt with her. He's the most infuriatingly lazy and self-assured man she'd even met, and now she was stuck in this cruel and callous hellhole.

 

He might not be a knight in shining armor, but where did she get off thinking she's so much better than him? If he just had an hour alone with her, he could correct her behavior, and the world would thank him. Not violently, obviously. There are much more effective ways of bringing haughty women down to their knees. The problem is that just the thought of putting Miss Sophia in her place because that was an idea that he could not afford to entertain if they were to get through this catastrophe alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seduction and Sin Publishing
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645102048

J.F. Lowe

USA Today bestselling author, J.F. Lowe is renowned for writing spine-tingling thrillers, heart-Wickedly Innocent military romances with laugh-out-loud dialogue, alpha males, and absolutely sizzling sex scenes.

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Seducing Philly

By J.F. Lowe

Seducing Philly

J.F. Lowe

Published by Seduction and Sin Publishing

Copyright © 2021 J.F. Lowe 

Edited by Bailey Macks

EBook ISBN: 978-0-6451020-4-8

Print IBSN: 978-0-6451020-5-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or establishments is solely coincidental.

Warning: The contents of this book for a mature audience.

Acknowledgements

I want to say a special thanks to the people who make this series work. As my husband and I traveled around the United States of America in 2019, we were lucky enough to go to some of the amazing places and to meet some absolutely fabulous people. These places and people were my inspiration. Like the other books in this series Seducing Philly was brought about by our intriguing experience at the Eastern State Penitentiary.

The stories of some of America’s most notorious lawbreakers were held in Eastern State’s cells, are what brought to life Seducing Philly when I read about how gangster Al Capone and bank robber Willie Sutton, also incarcerated at Eastern State, joined eleven other men in a doomed tunnel escape in 1945.

About this Book

Escaping prison might not have been an option, but escaping him would turn out to be impossible.

Nobody would have thought a degree in Criminal Psychology would end up with her behind bars, on death row of all things. It was his fault if he hadn't have been so damm... Nope, she wasn't going to think about the brute of a man that thought he was good enough to flirt with her. He's the most infuriatingly lazy and self-assured man she'd even met, and now she was stuck in this cruel and callous hellhole.

He might not be a knight in shining armor, but where did she get off thinking she's so much better than him? If he just had an hour alone with her, he could correct her behavior, and the world would thank him. Not violently, obviously. There are much more effective ways of bringing haughty women down to their knees. The problem is that just the thought of putting Miss Sophia in her place because that was an idea that he could not afford to entertain if they were to get through this catastrophe alive.

Chapter 1

Ethan Brooks had never really expected to end up in prison. It wasn’t so much that he assiduously kept to the right side of the law, but rather that he never really expected to get caught for what he’d done. As such, he found it rather amusing that he was standing in one of the most storied and infamous prisons in the country.

His meandering journey up from Baton Rouge to NYC had been pleasant enough so far, if not a little crowded for his tastes. Here though, was a crushing sense of finality and oppression that made him long for the lesser irritants of big crowds and tourists that jawed far, far too much. The concrete surrounded him, and he couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to be actually trapped inside Cell Block 15 for the rest of his life.

Shivering, he strolled past the row of dilapidated cells, wondering exactly how one might escape. Could one fashion something into a lockpick? A leftover utensil from dinner perhaps? It wouldn’t take all that long to file the metal down to the right size, would it?

But no, he mused as he passed cell after cell. Some of the men that had filled Death Row had been stupid, but many had been clever. They would have sat there for years on end, with nothing to do but ponder ways to escape. In all that time, they’d never figured it out. Then again, maybe they’d just given up. Looking around, he could imagine the drip of failing plumbing, the rhythmic clanging of a guard striking the bars, and the whimpering of men trapped for the rest of their lives. Yes, it would be rather easy to abandon all hope in a place like this, wouldn’t it?

Raised voices came from somewhere down the block. They weren’t getting closer, but they were certainly getting louder. Lacking anything better to do, Ethan ambled in that general direction to see what was what.

He figured out who they were before he actually stumbled upon them. He vaguely recalled hearing some university students chattering amongst themselves outside while they’d all been waiting for the tour to begin. At least he assumed they were students. One or two of the twenty-somethings had been talking about papers and scheduling, while the others had been flirting and paying more attention to their phones than one another. If that didn’t sum up college students, he didn’t know what did.

The group in question, when he finally did find the cell they were currently inspecting, was engaged in something of a one-sided argument. One woman, perhaps a little older than the others, was raising her voice and trying her best to imperiously order the others about. Her British accent was charming, and her stiff posture caught the eye, but the effect was rather undone by the contempt and irritation that oozed from every word. This was a woman that knew herself to be better than everyone else in the room, facts or etiquette be damned.

The rest… clearly didn’t care. Not even a little bit. It was an eclectic assortment that made up her little group of a half dozen, but not a one was listening as she listed tasks for each member. At most, she got a grunt or a lazy wave of a hand, but most were just pointedly ignoring her.

Without warning, Ethan was struck by a moderately unkind thought: it would be absolutely terrible to live with such a woman. As to why the image might have crossed his mind, he had a couple of ideas. All involved him showing the woman another way to occupy her overactive mouth.

Good lord, it really had been too long if he was thinking about that sort of thing. Maybe he’d go to a nearby bar tonight and work some things out. With that moderately cheering thought in mind, he strode off to somewhere a little quieter.

Sophia Wales was vexed. In truth, there were much more creative words to describe her present emotional state, but she was well-bred enough to refrain from unladylike language. Thus deprived of choice words, she had to settle on tone and volume to convey her decidedly foul mood to her collection of useless charges.

Vigorously rubbing her temple, she looked to the five that shared the cell with her. Their names were irrelevant, and while she did technically remember them, it made everything so much easier if she just gave them rude labels in her head instead.

The first of the four undergraduates was straightforward enough. Phoney was a mousy, bespectacled girl that had earned her name twice over, first by being perpetually attached to the screen in her hands and scarcely looking up for any length of time, and second because phony is such a quintessentially American word. While colloquialisms on this side of the pond being silly was normally a mark against the country’s bastardization of the language, she was fully prepared to admit that it made for charmingly rustic insults.

Phoney was presently doing a rather good job of ignoring everything around her, which was normally an irritant, but now that she thought about it, Sophia was rather glad that this love triangle hadn’t turned into a love rectangle.

The other three students were Star, Sun, and Moon, which may not sound much like insults if one is unfamiliar with Sophie’s distaste for all things astronomical. Star amorously circled Sun while Moon looked on wistfully. Mooning, if you will. Mostly, Sophia’s little geocentric naming scheme amused her primarily because she imagined that these three fools understood the basic tenets of science about as well as they understood Criminal Psychology, their major, and the reason why they were at Eastern State Penitentiary in the first place.

And then there was Vicky. Alas, there was no way for Sophia to forget the name of her grad student peer. Her insufferable, useless, lazy, hungover peer. God, how she wished that she could have been burdened with someone a little more functional for this herding of idiotic underclassmen.

But Vicky wasn’t all bad. She had offered Sophia a drink on the bus ride over, which was probably the only reason that she hadn’t already torn all of her hair out at the roots already.

With a sigh, Sophia took one last look at the five as they aimlessly stood in the empty cell. They probably couldn’t get up to too much trouble in here, right? She considered admonishing them one last time, but they wouldn’t even hear her anyway. And with that, the exchange student