by Alyssa Day
“But I do, lovely Rose. I have no idea why, but I do,” he said, but frustration drew his dark eyebrows into a frown, and he glanced down at his watch again. “No magic. How is this possible?”
His accent, which whispered through her like warm honey, deepened, and she had to almost physically slap her unruly hormones to keep herself from falling into his arms. She took a deep breath to dispel the haze of attraction that was fizzing through her brain, but it didn’t do a darn bit of good.
“You’re not the only one who doesn’t understand,” she admitted.
His eyes lit up and he laughed, and if she’d though his voice was sexy before, his laugh was sinful.
“I think I’m in trouble,” she said.
“I am right there with you,” he replied, staring at her mouth. “If I could only--"
But she didn’t get to find out what he was going to say, because Granny shrieked and then moaned; a long, mournful sound that snaked chills through the room.
“Not again,” Rose groaned.
“Oh, crap, she’s having another premonition,” Sue said, grabbing Connor’s vial of potion and rushing out.
Alejandro followed Rose down the hall after Sue. “What is going on?”
“My grandmother. She’s a Seer. And she evidently picked now to gift us with her latest harbinger of doom,” Rose said, sighing.
“You have quite a family,” Alejandro said, and she almost could have sworn he was laughing again, but she refused to turn around and look at him. Not for the first time in her life, and probably not for the last, Rose briefly wished she’d been born into any other family than hers.
When they got to the living room, Granny was in full bore Seer Mode, which involved her eyes rolling back in her head, her hair floating straight up in the air, and, for some reason they’d never been able to understand, her socks wrapped around her elbows. She was still shrieking and moaning, and Bob was standing on top of the back of the couch hissing at her. Connor, looking terrified, was edging backward behind the cat and the couch.
“Whoa,” Alejandro said, stopping suddenly. “This is--"
“Crazy?” Rose supplied bitterly. “Nuts? Bizarre? Ab-freaking-normal?”
“Unexpected,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders. “Is she in pain?”
“No. In fact, she acts kind of refreshed afterward,” Rose said, unhappily resigned to the fact that Alejandro would now never want to kiss the granddaughter of the crazy seer-witch from the nut job family.
“Mom!” Sue rushed forward and reached out for Granny, and then seemed to realize she was still holding on to Connor’s potion. She tossed the vial at Connor.
And then all hell broke loose.
Events unfolded simultaneously, almost in slow motion, and Rose couldn’t do anything but watch in horror as Connor tripped and fell into Granny, knocking them both backward onto the couch. At the same time, Astrid leapt through the air, arms outstretched to catch the vial, and accidentally elbowing Sue, so they both fell down, all tangled arms and legs.
The vial, flying through the air end over end, hit the wall and bounced, and the lid popped off.
Rose moaned, clutching her head, as the potion arced through the air in a shining stream and landed right in Connor’s face.
Unfortunately, he was holding Bob at the time.
Granny’s shriek-moaning cut off mid-screech, and she turned blind eyes toward Alejandro, pointed one long finger at him, and drew herself up. “Your eldest child will rule in an isle of myth,” she intoned in a deep, scary tone that was nothing like her normal voice.
Then three things happened:
Granny fell back on the couch and started snoring—loudly.
Connor began to recite the ABCs—loudly.
And Bob started meowing. Also loudly.
“I don’t actually have any children,” Alejandro said, as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on. “Why is the cat making that noise?”
“It’s a sparkling conversation potion,” Rose said sadly, wondering where she could buy earplugs. “Takes weeks to wear off.”
“To have kids, you have to have sex first,” Astrid informed Alejandro. “Have you ever had sex? Do you want to have sex with my sister? She’s probably no good at it, since her last boyfriend was a long time ago, and he smelled funny.”
Rose sat down, right there on the floor, put her head in her hands, and started to laugh.
“I actually smell pretty good,” Alejandro said, and then he started to laugh, too. “You realize that none of this is going in my report, right?”
“I like him,” Sue said, grinning.
Rose wondered if there were any spells that could make her entire family disappear. “Abraca-freaking-dabra,” she muttered. “Welcome to my life.”
7
An hour later, when everyone was finally gone and the house was finally quiet, Rose finished cleaning up spilled potion and then carefully discarded her rubber gloves. The last thing they needed was any more conversation, sparkling or otherwise. She could still hear Bob loudly expressing his displeasure somewhere out in the garden.
She sighed and poured herself a fresh cup of coffee, sat down at the kitchen table, and tried to mentally prepare herself to brew more potion when all she wanted to do was sleep.
She looked up, unable to suppress a twinge of hope, as Alejandro came back in from checking on Mac.
“No change,” he reported, shaking his head.
“I didn’t really expect there to be any. I’ll get started on the new batch in a minute. I just needed a caffeine break.” She sipped her coffee. “There’s more in the pot if you want any.”
He poured himself a cup and then joined her at the table and they sat in silence, drinking coffee, and to Rose’s surprise it wasn’t the least bit uncomfortable. It was almost . . . pleasant.
Something she could get used to. Waking up to Alejandro’s beautiful face; drinking coffee with him in her kitchen.
She caught herself before the fantasy carried her away. The last thing the gorgeous Agent Vasquez wanted or needed in his life was a moderately successful garden witch with a crazy family.
The last thing he needed . . . Rose suddenly put her coffee mug down with a thud. “What do you want?”
He blinked, and even his eyelashes were beautiful. It was so not fair.
“What do you mean? I want Mac to be back to human--"
She shook her head, determined not to let him distract her with important stuff. “No. I mean, what do you want? What is your deepest desire?”
A slow, sexy smile quirked up the edges of his lips, and Rose had to clutch the edge of the table to keep herself from leaping over it at him.
“That’s kind of personal, don’t you think?”
She rolled her eyes. “No. Well, yes, but you don’t understand. That’s my gift, and I don’t feel you.”
“You want to feel me? This is kind of sudden, Rose, but I have to admit I’m not opposed to the idea,” he said, grinning wickedly.
She blushed, but it only made his eyes light up with glee. This was bad. Really bad. Hot guys with great senses of humor had always been her weakness. And this hot guy—oh, boy. He pushed all her buttons.
Distraction again. Darn it.
“No, stop distracting me with your . . . argh. No. Listen. My gift is that I can sense a person’s deepest desire within a few minutes of meeting him. Or her. Or, um, you. Except, not,” she said. Eloquently.
Except, not.
Alejandro stared at her for a few seconds, and then he pushed away from the table and walked over to the coffee pot. He looked really, really good walking away.
He poured himself another cup, raised the pot and one eyebrow to ask silently if she wanted more, which she just as silently declined, and then he leaned back against her counter before answering.
“Ah, English is not my first language, so perhaps I don’t understand the nuances of what you’re trying to say to me,” he said, in perfectly fluent English.
Rose blew
out a sigh and then laughed. “Hey, I don’t think anybody would understand what I was saying. Okay, let me try again. My gift doesn’t work on you. Your partner, I could read almost before he got out of the car. Connor, the guy who was here earlier? Took under a minute, the first time I met him. But you? I’ve been around you for hours, and I still don’t have a clue.”
Alejandro looked intrigued. “What does Mac want? No. Don’t answer that. It’s none of my business. Which, to the point, is also true of you. Don’t you feel like a spy? Listening in on other people’s thoughts and desires without giving them back any truth about yourself? It seems unfair to me, Rose.”
She looked down at the table, chagrined. Of course it was unfair. She often had felt like a spy, eavesdropping on the privacy of others. But she’d been so intent on Alejandro that she’d broken her own number one rule: never to let anyone know about her gift.
“I never wanted this,” she blurted out, shame and humiliation burning a path through her stomach up to her throat. “I didn’t ask for it. I have tried all my life to be able to block it—to give people the privacy they deserve—but there’s no way to stop it. I just know. The way you know my eyes are blue. It just pops out at me.”
“Your eyes are very, very blue,” he murmured, and she glanced up at him and was immediately caught in his gaze. His intense, heated gaze.
“But I don’t get anything from you,” she said, desperate to clarify. “So, your secrets are safe. Either you’re witch-proof, or you don’t have a deepest desire.”
Alejandro put his mug down on the counter and then turned back to face her, his face suddenly drawn in bleak lines. “I wanted something once. Someone. She waited all of three months after I left for the P-Ops Academy before she married one of my friends. So I learned not to want anything too deeply, ever again.”
Rose caught her breath at the reflection of remembered pain that vibrated through the air—she could almost taste it, rusty and jagged in the back of her throat. Even a far less powerful witch would be able to tell that here was a man who did feel—and feel deeply. She swallowed the lump in her throat.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I’m sorry,” she repeated, knowing that she had to keep her distance.
A totally hot guy who was all surface and no depth was easy to resist. Alejandro . . . he was something else altogether, and she didn’t want to get tangled up in the net of emotional entanglement. She’d seen what that had done to her mother, after they’d lost Rose’s dad.
“It was for the better,” he said, shrugging. “For the best, as you say. Maria was afraid of the supernatural, with good reason. Vampires fed on our village for a long time. It wasn’t until the Atlanteans came that we finally defeated them. My job would have terrified her, but I was done with simply surviving. I needed to fight.”
“And so you became a P-Ops agent.” Rose understood more than he was saying. For a long time after her father died, she’d thought she wanted to become a doctor so she could save people.
So she could save other little girls’ dads.
“So I did,” Alejandro said. “Now, shall we make that potion?”
Rose recognized the “let’s change the subject” underlying his words. She stood up and smiled at him. “Only if you tell me all about the Atlanteans. Do they have gills?”
He burst out laughing, and a wave of warmth that felt far too much like contentment shimmered through her.
That’s when her door slammed open, and the crazy man stormed into her kitchen.
8
Alejandro’s gun was in his hand almost before he realized he’d drawn it. The wild-eyed man who’d burst into Rose’s house looked deranged. The red-rimmed eyes. The crazy bush of long gray hair. The bare feet.
The pink flamingos embroidered all over his bright green silk pajamas.
“Who the hell are you?” Alejandro demanded, moving to block the intruder’s access to Rose.
“I am Harold, the one who will destroy you,” the man said melodramatically, sneering and doing his best impression of a cartoon villain in one of the TV shows Mac’s nephew liked to watch.
Alejandro, prepared for almost anything else, blinked. “Harold?”
Rose squeezed around Alejandro and stared at the guy. “Why?”
Harold paused, mid-sneer. “Why what?”
“Why are you going to destroy me?” Rose glanced at Alejandro, and she didn’t look nearly worried enough to suit him.
Harold might be loco, but crazy people could still be very dangerous.
“Um. I don’t actually know the answer to that,” Harold said, biting his lip. “I’m under orders. I’m new.”
Rose nodded like she understood, and Alejandro had to fight to keep from being impressed about how calm she was about the whole thing. Unless this kind of thing happened to her all the time? He’d never met a family of witches before, so who the hell knew?
“You need to leave. Now,” Alejandro said, determined to take control of the situation. He was the P-Ops agent, after all. He tried not to think about how Mac would be laughing his ass off if he could see this. Mac’s stone ass.
Alejandro gritted his teeth.
Rose gave Alejandro a look, and he knew that look. It was the universal female expression that meant “you’re not helping.” He narrowed his eyes at her, and she had the nerve to flash him a smile before turning back to the intruder.
“How about a cup of coffee, Harold?”
Alejandro groaned. “Do you routinely offer refreshment to crazy people who burst into your house and threaten you?”
“I don’t do anything routinely,” Rose said, and if it hadn’t been for the threat of destruction, Alejandro almost would have thought she was flirting with him. Which was impossible, because what woman would flirt with a man who had a gun trained on a silk-pajama-clad intruder?
“You’re almost as crazy as he is,” he said, shaking his head, which was suddenly aching. If he spent much more time with Rose, he was going to need a bottle of pain relievers.
Or tequila.
“Hey, I’m not crazy,” Harold interrupted. “I’m misunderstood.”
Alejandro had to laugh. “Really? You can stand there in those clothes and say that with a straight face?”
“Coffee?” Rose held up a mug.
“Yes, please,” Harold said politely. “Do you have artificial sweetener?”
“No, but I have raw sugar,” Rose said to the crazy man who had just threatened to destroy her. “Please have a seat.”
Harold sat down.
Alejandro swore under his breath and lowered his gun, beaten but not defeated. “Okay, if we’re going to do this, who the hell are you and why did you burst in here like that? Harold what? Orders from who?”
Rose handed Harold his cup, and the man took a small sip before responding. “Wouldn’t it be ‘orders from whom’? I don’t think ‘orders from who’ is grammatically correct.”
“I. Will. Shoot. You,” Alejandro said slowly, finally understanding the expression “I’m at the end of my rope” that Mac used so often.
“Veeno,” Harold said hastily. “Harold Veeno. I’m not sure who issued the orders. We have an email loop.”
“A what?”
Rose’s façade of calm finally cracked a little. “An email loop. You have an email loop,” she said, her voice a little higher than normal. “What’s it called? Assassins Are Us?”
“I’m not an assassin,” Harold said, pouting his lips out a little. Alejandro might have thought the man’s feelings were hurt, if he gave a shit whether or not the man’s feelings were hurt.
Which he didn’t.
And he still wanted to shoot him.
“Then what are you? And what was that ‘destroy you’ crap about?” Alejandro said, at the end of his patience. “And why the hell are you wearing that?”
Rose put a hand on Alejandro’s arm, and he inhaled a long, deep breath.
“Start again. Make sense this time. Or I will shoot you,” he told
Harold.
The man turned a little pale and cleared his throat. “My name is Harold Veeno. I’m an actor. I have my SAM-G card.”
Alejandro didn’t know the acronym. “SAM-G?”
“Screen Actors with Magic Guild,” Rose said.
Harold beamed. “Yes! It’s the highest honor in my craft. Would you like to see it?” He started patting his pants, probably for the wallet that wasn’t there, since he didn’t have any pockets.
“Another time,” Alejandro gritted out.
“Right. Well, we got a request from PETMA—but I don’t know from whom at PETMA--that somebody put a scare in the Cardinal witches to make them stop hurting the basilisks,” Harold blurted out all in a rush, darting a smirk at Alejandro during the “from whom” bit.
“I might shoot you just for fun,” Alejandro said, aiming his widest smile at the man, who promptly fell off his chair.
“Now look what you did,” Rose scolded, rushing over to the fallen psycho actor. “He fainted. You actually made him faint.”
“What I did? This lunatic was threatening you for somebody he didn’t even know for--" he paused. “What is PETMA?”
“People for the Ethical Treatment of Magical Animals,” Rose told him as she checked Harold’s pulse. “I can’t believe you made a man pass out just from smiling at him.”
Alejandro couldn’t believe it, either. It usually took the careful application of fists or shotgun shells to put a man down. But Rose was acting like he was in the wrong, instead of the crazy man on her floor.
“You can’t? How about this smile?” Alejandro put his gun back in its holster, circled her wrist with one hand, and pulled her up to stand in front of him. He smiled down at her and put every ounce of the combined frustration and attraction he was feeling into it. “Does this make you want to pass out?”
Heat flared in Rose’s cheeks, and her beautiful blue eyes widened.
“It makes me want to kiss you,” she admitted.
“I would never refuse a lady.” He brushed his lips against hers, a gentle touch, meaning to do just that much and no more. But she tasted of sunlight and sweetness, and he went back in, deeper, harder, and took her mouth like his suddenly ragingly hard cock wanted to take her body.
