by Alyssa Day
He tried to focus on the job. He told himself that she’d probably have a terrible personality. He reminded himself that she was a witch, and then it hit him. She projected a sense of power—a feeling of barely leashed magic—that somehow had transformed her into the most fascinating woman he’d ever seen. Maybe it was a spell? She was a witch, after all, and he had never reacted like this before.
His libido didn’t care about the why. It just wanted to get her naked, which was damn stupid under the circumstances and therefore made him suspicious.
“So. You must be the P-Ops guys. Let me guess; you’re from the government and you’re here to help?” Sarcasm and something else, maybe annoyance, coated her words, but her voice was musical and so sexy that he wanted to hear her talk all night long.
Well. Maybe not all night.
She was breathing hard, and Alejandro tried not to notice the way her breasts pressed against her shirt. He was a professional agent, damn it, not a horny kid. He fumbled for his badge, but Mac beat him to it.
Mac moved around the car, holding out his hand. “Mac Henson and Alejandro Vasquez, ma’am. You have a basilisk problem?”
Right. The basilisk. Alejandro snapped into action and opened the trunk of the car. He pulled out a shotgun, extra ammo, and a helmet with a darkened visor to protect himself from the basilisk’s deadly gaze.
“Where is it? Is anybody injured? Any fatalities?” he asked, heading back toward the house.
The woman’s mouth twitched, and he could have sworn he saw a smile curve her lips, but it was gone so fast that maybe he’d imagined it. “I’m Rose Cardinal. Are you sure you’re ready for this? That might not be enough protection.”
Alejandro’s gaze snapped to Mac, who strode back to the trunk to suit up.
“We’re ready, ma’am,” Alejandro said, his confidence in his skills and training overriding his tongue-tied fumbling. She must have put a spell on him. He’d never reacted to a woman at first glance like this before. Not even to Maria.
“Are you presently casting any spells?” he asked bluntly. Surely that much charisma had to be helped along by magical glamour.
She laughed out loud this time. “No, officer, I’m not bewitching you in any way. Don’t you have some kind of magic meter?”
He did, in fact, have a dial on his agency-issued watch that reacted with different colored lights in the presence of magic. He’d forgotten about it, like an idiot. He glanced down at it and saw that the dials remained dark. No magic detected whatsoever.
“It’s agent, not officer,” he said. “But you can call me Alejandro.”
“Call me Rose,” she responded, and an intriguing hint of pink appeared on her cheeks.
Before he could say anything else, she turned and went back into the house, motioning to them to follow.
“You may as well come through here. I’ll call my mother, since she was the one who was so hot to get you people on the job,” she called back over her shoulder.
Hot was an unfortunate word for her to use when he was staring at her lushly rounded ass. He could feel his internal temperature ratchet up to about a thousand degrees, and he blew out a deep breath.
Back to business. No staring at the civilian’s ass.
He followed Rose into the house, determinedly looking at the back of her head. He glanced back to see that Mac was headed around the corner, signaling that he’d meet Alejandro on the other side. There was no way the basilisk was indoors and, anyway, the woman who’d filed the report had stated that its location was in the garden.
The house was warm and inviting and gave him clues to its owner’s personality. A soft cream color covered the walls, which were bare except for a stunning art piece made of glass and aged wood that hung behind the bright scarlet couch. Books were scattered across a brass trunk that served as a coffee table. Framed photos were arranged in groupings on most available flat surfaces; the majority of them featured a variety of blond women who must be related to Rose, although a few were of various cats and dogs.
He took all of that in during the few seconds it took him to cross the room, and then he followed Rose to her kitchen, noting that she hastily closed a door halfway down the hall. The door opposite to the closed one held a small room lined with walls of books. The other one must be her bedroom.
He shoved the idea of Rose in her bed, all that glorious hair streaming across the pillows, out of his mind and watched as she crossed the room to a window seat, where an oddly arched statue of a cat stood.
“Alejandro, meet Bob,” Rose said, and he quickly looked around the room, only to confirm that nobody was there.
“Bob? Who is Bob?”
“Bob is my cat,” she said, that quicksilver grin again crossing her face and then vanishing. “The basilisks got him just after I rescued Ninja.”
“The basilisk attacked your cat after you rescued a ninja?” he repeated slowly, realizing he’d been right. There was no way a woman this beautiful could have a personality to match her looks.
She was nuts.
Totally insane. Probably made up the entire thing as a way to get attention.
“Ninja is the name of my sister’s dog,” she began, but Mac shouted something from outside the kitchen, and Alejandro hit the door running.
He dropped the safety gear and ran outside into the garden, lifting his gun to his shoulder, prepared for the worst, and wondering why Rose had been so calm when a monster was in her back yard. But he was too late. Mac, pistol in hand, had been transformed into a life-sized stone garden statue.
A small, lizard-like face with an improbably long snout peeked out from behind a flowering bush and hissed at Alejandro, before disappearing back behind the leaves in a flurry of flapping wings.
“What the hell was that?” Alejandro asked Rose, who’d walked up behind him and was staring at Mac with a kind of resigned fascination.
“That was a basilisk,” she said, raising one eyebrow and giving him an “are you stupid” look. “Didn’t somebody tell you why you were coming? A whole family of them invaded our garden.”
“But that creature was tiny--I thought--” he began, and then his mind flashed back to the supervisor who’d assigned them this case. He’d kept coughing until finally Mac had asked him if he needed a cough drop, which had made the man turn red in the face, silently hand over the file, and rush out of the room.
Realization hit, and Alejandro muttered a few choice words under his breath in both Spanish and English. The supervisor hadn’t been coughing.
He’d been laughing. At Alejandro and Mac, as they discussed all the weapons they’d need for the task. Basilisks apparently weren’t huge, man-eating monsters, as he and Mac had thought. They were the size of a chicken.
“Initiation rites for the new guys,” he said, half admiringly, half-disgustedly, as he lowered his shotgun.
He turned to Rose. “You called P-Ops for a lizard-chicken?”
She raised her chin defiantly and then nodded her head toward Mac. “Actually, my mother called you. I’d have been happy to deal with this myself. And since it’s your partner who’s turned into stone, and I’m the one with the remedy, maybe you should be a little nicer to me.”
She was right, which annoyed him even more, so he deliberately swept his gaze up her body from her feet to the top of her head before answering.
“Oh, trust me, Sunshine. I’d like to be very nice to you.”
4
Rose stalked back into the house, very deliberately not slamming the door behind her. Arrogant, pompous, sexist excuse for a law enforcement officer. Although, from what she’d seen in her very limited experience, those qualities were the norm, not the exception, in men carrying badges and guns. Look at the stupid sheriff.
She calmed down inside the kitchen, and her innate sense of fairness started to kick in. The officers who’d come to the house and told them about Daddy’s car accident couldn’t have been nicer or more considerate. One of the men--Officer Engel, she’d always rem
ember his name, though she’d only been twelve at the time--he’d sat and held her mother’s hand while she cried.
Okay. Fine. Then only Alejandro and the Garden City sheriff were arrogant asses. Although, speaking of asses, Alejandro’s was really something to behold. Not that she’d looked on purpose, but it had been hard to miss when he’d run outside to find his partner.
“Why am I even thinking about this, Bob?” she rhetorically asked her stone cat, who naturally didn’t answer.
She didn’t need the cat’s response to figure it out, though. Agent Tall, Dark, and Dangerously Hot was too sexy for his own good—and far too sexy for her balance to remain steady. He was ridiculously good looking, as if Hollywood had cast him in the role of action hero. Muscled in all the right places, silky black hair that was just a hint too long, and dark eyes that looked at her as if she were an especially juicy piece of fruit he’d like to suck between those sexy lips.
Rose stumbled over her own feet when a surge of heat whipped through her at the thought of him sucking on any juicy parts of hers.
“Oh, goddess, I’m in trouble here. Focus, Rose,” she whispered to the empty room, more proof that she was losing it, as if she’d needed evidence.
Focus. Right. She crossed to the refrigerator and retrieved another vial. At this rate, if they didn’t get rid of the basilisks soon, she’d have to make another batch. Not to mention she didn’t know if the potion was strong enough to rescue a grown man. The paperboy had been a close one, not that she’d admitted it to anyone. He’d taken longer to transform back from stone to human than she’d hoped.
Plus, he’d refused to deliver their paper ever again.
Ungrateful little monster.
Alejandro walked in, and the air in the room changed and grew heated; charged as if the electric potential of a summer storm had centered itself over her kitchen counter. The skin on the back of her neck tingled with a delicious feeling of anticipation.
Stupid neck.
“Fix him. Now,” he ordered.
She threw her best ice-cold glare at him, but he didn’t even flinch. Huh. He must be tougher than most people. That glare had scared off one mugger, seven door-to-door solicitors, and three mall product testers.
Rose realized she was mentally rambling, and she shook her head to clear it of distractions like tall, muscular, terrific-smelling P-Ops agents who heated her up in all the dangerous places.
“Excuse me,” she said, as she slipped past him in the narrow space between her sink and the center island. She couldn’t help but brush against him, though, and she gasped when the zing of electricity from the touch of his chest against her shoulder went straight to her nipples.
She involuntarily looked up and realized that she hadn’t been the only one affected. His dark, liquid brown eyes had darkened, and his oh-so-male broad chest expanded as he took in a deep breath, almost as if he were inhaling her scent.
“You smell like sunshine, too,” he said, so quietly she almost didn’t hear him.
Rose inhaled sharply and took a step back. Back away from the crazy man who talked about how she smelled. Who looked like a fierce warrior and dressed like one of the Men in Black.
The dark, conservative suit seemed like a disguise meant to mask the predator wearing it. He moved with lethal grace, but his face had the hard lines and angles of a soldier. Everything she’d never wanted anywhere near her, in other words. So why were her thighs clenching against a rush of sensation?
Right now, those deliciously dark eyes were staring at her with a heat that had nothing to do with anger, and a sense of awareness deep within her went on high alert.
“I can fix him,” she said, dropping her gaze; taking the coward’s way out of the moment. “I just need another vial of this restorative potion.”
She ducked past him to the refrigerator, not sure whether she was relieved or disappointed when he moved back to let her pass.
“That pink stuff will bring Mac back?” His eyebrows shot up. “The sparkly pink liquid in that tiny vial is enough to counteract a basilisk’s stare?”
“Well, no, it will probably take at least two,” she said, mentally crossing her fingers. Actually, she wasn’t as certain as she pretended. Two vials had barely brought the paperboy back. It had taken too long, too, and she’d breathed a deep sigh of relief when he’d finally reanimated.
Mac was a full-grown man. On second thought, she grabbed a third, then fourth vial. Bob still needed to be restored, after all. Her eyes widened when she realized that Alejandro’s closeness had driven all thought out of her mind, even her concern for her cat.
Gritting her teeth, Rose berated herself for letting a man mess with her mind like that. She was the reasonable one of the Cardinal witches, after all.
Rose the Rational. The only one in the family with any common sense.
As she brushed past Alejandro again and inhaled his exotic scent of spice and something else—something purely masculine—she resented it all, though. Just once, she’d like to be the wild child. The one who threw caution out the window and ran straight at whatever she wanted, both arms open wide to grab it.
She almost laughed, imagining what Alejandro’s expression would be if she dropped the vials and jumped him. The poor man would probably run for his helmet and witch-proof vest.
Still grinning, she knelt down next to Bob and carefully put three of the vials on the floor next to her and uncapped the fourth.
“You’re going to help your cat before Mac?” Alejandro’s voice held an ocean of disbelief.
“Bob has been frozen longer,” she replied evenly.
Holding her breath, Rose offered up a silent prayer and carefully poured the sparkling liquid on Bob’s head and then rocked back on her heels to wait.
“Aren’t you going to say something?”
Alejandro had moved closer, so the fabric of his pants leg was almost touching Rose’s shoulder. She turned toward him to answer, which brought her face just about level with the fascinating bulge in his pants.
She froze, and one of them, possibly her, gasped, and Alejandro quickly took a step back. Rose whipped her head away so she faced her cat, and so Alejandro wouldn’t see the blush flaming its way up her neck to her cheeks.
“Be my guest,” she snapped. “Try abracadabra. That’s always a crowd pleaser.”
“Look, I didn’t--"
But the Bob statue finally began to show some movement. At first a shudder worked its way through the stone, and then it slowly dissolved, until only one perfectly furry and very cranky cat remained. Bob hissed at Alejandro and then leapt down from the window seat and stalked away down the hall, head and tail held high to show his disdain for the entire ordeal.
“That took a little longer than I’d like,” Rose said, biting her lip. “Will you please grab one more vial out of the fridge?”
She didn’t wait for his response, but ran outside, and by the time she began to uncap the first vial, Alejandro joined her. Mac stood, solid and imposing, exactly where she’d left him. Not that she’d expected anything else, but Rose’s stomach clenched at the sight of what must be hundreds of pounds of stone.
“I hope that’s enough,” she said, suddenly very worried.
Alejandro opened his hands to show her that he’d brought all of her remaining vials.
“I figured that if Mac outweighs the cat by a factor of ten or so, you might need all of it,” he said, but then he blew out a deep breath. “It was probably stupid. I have no idea how your magic works.”
Rose stared up at him, intrigued. A word had been floating around the edges of her consciousness, and she finally realized what it was.
Fierce.
That was the word. Fierce suited him perfectly. He was beautiful and ferocious, and she wanted to run away and step closer all at the same time.
“It was a good idea,” she told him, because part of her wanted to soothe and comfort this man who quite clearly had never needed either. Instead, she took a deep breath
of her own.
“Let’s give it a try.”
One by one, she began uncapping vials, pouring each carefully on stone Mac’s head. One by one, the potion failed to do anything but drip, in pink sparkly failure, off of Mac’s nose and ears and on to the grass.
Finally, when she’d used every drop of potion, she and Alejandro waited and watched for several long minutes. At some point, she realized she was holding his hand—or he was holding hers—and her breath caught in her throat at the feel of his strong, elegant fingers wrapped around her own. At that moment, two things became very, very clear:
Alejandro was trouble, and Mac was still a statue.
5
Alejandro clicked his phone shut and stared at it in disgust. He’d checked in with the office and told them a flat-out lie. Three, in fact. He was fine, Mac was fine, the mission was going great, and very funny on the basilisk.
He stared at the slightly pink stone statue of his partner and realized that everything was very far from fine. Rose had turned about seven shades of pale, yanked her hand out of his, and run back into the house, muttering something about stirring up a more potent spell. Alejandro was back to wondering whether she was crazy or just incompetent.
No. After all, he'd seen the cat transform from an ugly statue to a scruffy and enraged live animal. The potion worked. It was just something in the proportion that was off. Or at least, that was what he had to tell himself, because any other result was unacceptable.
He patted Mac's stone arm. "We are going to fix this, buddy. You can count on it."
Then, feeling like a complete idiot for talking to a statue, he turned to follow Rose inside. A flicker of movement at the edge of the bush where he'd seen the lizard chicken caught his eye, and he whirled around, raising his gun at the same time.
"Oh no you don't, you ugly little flying rat," he said. "Not this time. I've brought the true death to hundreds of vampires. You can bet I'm not going to let a rodent get the better of me."
