Hot button. Though, Jeannie still couldn’t quite grasp why. So he liked one-night stands? At least he was free enough about his needs to pursue them. That was something to be admired. One-night stands implied he never gave too much of himself. Never allowed himself to be lost in a sticky entanglement. “So the pack and its antiquation . . .”
His lips turned up on either side for a brief, shining moment. One she filed away in her brain to recall when he wasn’t smiling. Which was often. “It’s not as antiquated as it was. Since Marty and her quote-unquote ‘accident,’ the pack’s loosened up a little. She’s helped them to see that love conquers all or some such crap.”
“You don’t believe in love?” OMG. Shut up, Jeannie. Why would you care?
“Do you?”
“I asked first,” she said with a small, teasing grin, avoiding any focus on her.
“I asked second.”
Jeannie looked down at the floor, her eyes counting the slats of her wood flooring. “I can’t say for sure. I haven’t experienced it.”
“You’ve never been in love?” Sloan sounded surprised.
She was, after all, thirty-five. Most would naturally assume she’d been in love at least once. At one point in time, she’d thought she was, but she’d learned. Oh, she’d learned. “And you have?”
His smile was fond and it stirred something inside Jeannie similar to a green-eyed monster. “Yeah. I have.”
“I feel faint.” She hid her ridiculous notion of envy by joking.
“Want me to wish you up some smelling salts?”
Jeannie smiled, then immediately frowned when she thought about Sloan’s brother and how angry he’d be if they didn’t find Marty. “I want you to wish me up a way to keep your brother Keegan from killing me for shipping his wife off to parts unknown.”
Sloan sat up and placed his elbows on his knees; his eyes were intense when she caught his gaze. “I won’t let him kill you.”
“Chivalrous.”
He shrugged his shoulders, the leather of his jacket crinkling. “Probably not so much. I’m really just looking out for my best interests. Who knows what could happen to me if something happens to you. We’re sort of connected.” He used a finger to indicate the space between them.
“What was I thinking?”
“You were thinking like a woman—wishfully. Something I hope never to do again.”
She let her chin fall to her chest with a snort. “Too much estrogen, not enough logic?”
“Undoubtedly.”
Jeannie shook her finger at him. “We ain’t the sissy gender, and don’t you forget it.”
“How do you stand all those highs and lows? It was brutal. And those heels? Jesus . . .” he muttered, though he was smiling again and that somehow made everything shiny.
“I think you just got a huge dose of it all at once. It’s not always like that.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“So wishing for Marty to come back—what should we do?” The knot in her stomach returned, tightening into a painful coil of nerves.
Sloan’s hands gripped the arms of the chair he sat in. “We should word the wish very carefully. The trouble is we have no way of knowing if Nina used up my last wish, or if you’re Wishes-Unlimited—or if you’ll never be able to grant another wish again. We need to find out more about your origins before we take chances. If you were a werewolf, this would be easy. We’d have a steak. You’d learn to shift, find the best the market has to offer in razors, and you’d find some nice guy in our pack and discover the true joys of falling in love with some lucky pack male.”
She mocked a huge sigh. “Bummer that. Every girl who’s turned into a werewolf wants love and steak—oh, and a good razor.”
Sloan didn’t laugh, his expression somber. “We can’t afford to waste or mince words with Marty at stake.”
Jeannie shuddered. “I’m afraid . . . for Marty. Where do you think she is?” Again, the feeling that she could be somewhere dark and dank made Jeannie’s heart race. She hated the dark—and dirty sheets. Not necessarily in that order. Thus, she imagined everyone else did, too, and it was all she could do not to crawl out of her skin with the memory of it or the fear that Marty was somewhere unmerciful, feeling that way, too.
Sloan’s look was thoughtful, but then he grinned. “I think, wherever she is, she’s making someone crazy with her color wheels and makeup advice. But Marty’s pretty tough. I promise she can take care of herself.”
Her head cocked to the tone in his voice. “Is that admiration I hear?”
“She’s my sister-in-law.”
“Doesn’t mean you have to like her. I know plenty of people who hate their in-laws.”
“Fair enough,” he conceded with a nod. “For all her clothes, makeup, hair, and damn well annoying perkiness, she’s been good for our family and the pack. She lightened them up with her jokes and why-does-everything-have-to-be-so-doom-and-gloom-all-the-time attitude. Since she joined the pack, a lot has changed, including the strict no werewolf-human relationships. I also admire that she can get my brother, a diehard tight-ass, to do almost anything if she just bats her eyelashes and smiles. He was pretty uptight before Marty, but he’s a whole helluva lot easier to be around now. And she gave him Hollis—who also wraps Keegan around her toddler finger. If I’m honest, she does the same to me. Hollis, that is.” Sloan followed the admission with a doting smile.
Jeannie bit back a disturbing sting of disappointment. She’d never experienced that kind of romantic hold on a man. Because you’ve only experienced one man, Jeannie, and that didn’t work out so well, now did it? “God, I feel shitty now.”
“This isn’t your fault, Jeannie.”
The sympathetic tone in his voice made her flush with an uncomfortable heat. She slapped her hands on the pillow in her lap. “You know what? I absolutely know that. I didn’t ask to be thrown in a bottle. I also didn’t know taking me out of that bottle would cause so much harm. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in thera—” She shook her head. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s to place blame where it deserves to be placed. I place it squarely on MC Hammer pants. What I mean when I say I feel shitty is simply this—Marty’s obviously a good person. She came over here the moment you called her, and she was only trying to help me—a virtual stranger. That says something about a person’s heart and the good contained therein. The last thing she deserved was to vanish into thin air.”
Sloan snorted, crossing his ankles. “Yeah. Maybe you could have just made her mouth disappear?”
Jeannie chuckled, but the lighthearted moment didn’t last for long before reality settled back in by way of a cold lump of trepidation in her stomach. She squeezed the pillow tight, digging her fingers into it. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to not panic, but we are going to think rationally.”
“The bottle.”
His head shook emphatically while his eyes chastised her. “Nuh-uh-uh. No booze, young lady. We need your brain to be fully functioning on the off chance someone slips and makes a wish from, say, the far-off regions of the Netherlands.”
She sighed, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t mean booze. I mean the bottle I was stuck in. Maybe there’s a clue in it? Maybe I can get back into it somehow and look around? Please say it’s still in your car.”
“What’s left of my car,” he mumbled bitterly.
Jeannie made a face of admonishment. “We have a missing werewolf. Bad time to grudge.”
Sloan was up on his feet and heading for her front door before she could stop him, his long legs taking big strides. “Good idea. Lemme go check. Sit tight.”
Jeannie slid off the couch in a rumpled heap before she could catch herself, cracking her head on the coffee table on the way down. “Wait!” she yelped
as she was dragged across the floor like a dust mop, swishing into some tossed-aside shoes.
Sloan stopped short and whipped around; his face held dismay when she crashed into the wall and bounced back. “Shit! You’re bleeding.”
Her hand went to her forehead and her fingers felt a small gash. Sloan knelt down beside her. “I forgot we’re—you know . . . Damn. I’m sorry.” He bracketed her face with his hands, only to have her tense up and reach for his wrists. “Let me see,” he ordered, gripping the sides of her head and letting his thumbs run over her temple.
Panic, as unwarranted as it was, swelled deep in her chest, rising up and threatening to choke her. “Don’t! I’m fine,” she said, pushing his hands away with a frantic shove.
Confusion glittered in his blue eyes. “Just let me look to be sure you don’t need stitches.” Sloan’s grip, by no means harsh, tightened ever so slightly, and again Jeannie attempted to scurry away, thrashing her head from side to side, making it pound.
“Please stop!” she cried with rising panic, but catching the concern on his face made her force herself to tamp down her fear. She softened her voice, struggling to paste a smile on her face, though her eyes couldn’t quite meet his. “I’m fine. Promise.”
Sloan let her go, holding his hands up like white flags. His eyes weren’t filled with the anger she expected, but something else. She just couldn’t figure out what. “I would never hurt you, Jeannie. If we’re going to be stuck together like this for an unforeseen amount of time, I need you to know that.”
She scooted backward on her haunches, finding the couch and using it to shimmy her way upward. “I know that. Of course, I know that. It just hurt a little when you touched it, that’s all.”
Jeannie heard herself try to convince Sloan, but it was weak and pathetic and ridiculously overacted. Of course you know, Jeannie. You know that rationally. So how about you give that mostly dormant monster inside you a final resting place? Don’t let down your guard, but seriously—ease up.
Smiling, she looked Sloan directly in the eye with determination—purposely—so that all her dark secrets would remain just that. Dark and secretive. “Now let’s go find that bottle.”
He swept his arm toward the door, but the tentative ease between them had turned tense and uncomfortable. “After you.”
* * *
SLOAN shook the bottle much the way he had when he first found Jeannie, keeping a good distance between the two of them on the couch. While he tried to focus on the possibility there was something that could help them inside the bottle, he was having trouble keeping that focus for the flat-out fear he’d seen in Jeannie’s eyes when he’d tried to help her.
Prying wasn’t his thing. He never asked questions of the women he’d once dated because he really didn’t want to know how they felt or even if they felt. They knew that going in. It was an unspoken rule of the one-night, at most, weeklong stand.
Yet, this was different. He was officially different, and that was the only explanation he could find to explain this irrational, exceptionally unfamiliar feeling he had for Jeannie.
She’d touched something in him—something primal and protective—without saying a word about her feelings. Now he found himself wanting to know what or who had done something so heinous to her that she’d display such raw fear toward him.
And he wanted to hear how she felt about it.
He tried to chalk it up to the residual girl-factor that might still linger inside him after his bout as a woman, but watching her do whatever it took to avoid any kind of physical contact with him was tearing up little pieces of his gut.
Jeannie interrupted his train of thought with a question. She poked him in the arm, making him look up at her cute, heart-shaped face and really see it. See how blue her eyes were. Note how full her lips were.
She waved a hand in front of his face and pointed to the gin bottle. “Hello in there? How do you suppose I get back in there? If I can get back in, maybe I’ll find out who was in the bottle before me under a pile of dirty socks or something. You know, like a pay stub or a bill . . .”
“Do genies pay bills? Collect genie unemployment?” Sloan teased just to see if he could make her smile again.
Instead, she wrinkled her cute nose. “I don’t know about the former resident of that bottle, but this noob genie does and she really wants to be able to keep doing so without you stuck to her. No offense. So abracadabra me back in. You’re in charge.” She waved her fingers at the bottle, indicating he should somehow know how to get her back in.
Sloan cocked his head. “How do you propose I do that?”
“Well, what did you do to get me out?”
“I rubbed it.”
“Right. So rub again already.” She waved her delicate hands at the bottle in a circular motion.
No. He didn’t like this. What if they couldn’t get her back out? What if she was stuck in there forever, alone and afraid? What if you’re turning into a pussy, Sloan?
No. That wasn’t it at all. Concern for her safety wasn’t pussy. “This is too fluky for me. How do we know if there’s any consistency to this, Jeannie? What if you get back in and can’t get back out? It’s not like we’ve had any rhyme or reason to any of this. You granted Nina a wish you didn’t even hear, for Christ’s sake.” He warred with his words, trying to keep them even, but some of his worry seeped out in his tone anyway.
She closed her pretty eyes and tucked a piece of her dark hair behind her ear like she was dealing with a toddler who required more patience than she had to offer. When she opened them, her words were laced with a definite hint of desperation.
“Please, Sloan. We have to help find Marty. I’ll never be able to live with myself if I don’t at least try. There has to be something in there that tells us who was in that bottle. Aside from the fact that the prior tenant was a complete slob, and last I checked, Hoarders Anonymous didn’t have a list of its members we might peruse, I don’t recall many clues as to who this mystical dude was. But I also wasn’t looking for clues because I was panicked. I just wanted to get the hell out. I can only vaguely remember what he looked like. It did happen fast. So without much of a physical description to put on Genie Land’s milk cartons, we need something to go on. If he was stuck in that bottle for even just a short period of time, he must have left behind some clues to his identity other than an ass-load of laundry.”
“Seriously. Do genies have forms of ID? Driver’s license—social security card?” he asked, his sarcasm intentionally biting to hide his earlier wussylike response.
“Well, it would seem werewolves and vampires do . . .” she countered.
Touché. His gut tightened again, uncomfortably so, whether she had a point or not. “I don’t feel good about this.”
“Then think about big be-hootered blondes and beer while you rub. I hear that always makes you feel good.” Her words were sarcastic, but the twinkle in her bright eyes was amused, and it relaxed the tension in his shoulders a little.
Yet, her urgency to take one for the team puzzled him. But maybe she was right, and finding Marty before Keegan knew she was missing was probably the healthiest course of action for all concerned.
Keegan was fiercely protective of his wife. Sloan wasn’t so sure he’d remember Jeannie was a woman when he found out her mishap had created Marty’s disappearance. “Okay, look, any small sign of trouble and you’re out. Take your phone and call me if you feel even a little apprehensive.”
She patted the pocket of her bathrobe, showing him the lump her cell made beneath the flannel stripes. “The only thing I feel apprehensive about is digging through his pile of filthy socks. I mean, I’m messy and disorganized, but he’s an epic sock hoarder. Or he has an adverse fear of Clorox.”
Sloan chuckled. Whatever haunted her, she did her best to keep it at bay with her sense of humor. He held up the b
ottle. Its simple lines glowed amber in the living room light. “Okay, here we go.” He placed it between his palms and gave it a brisk rub, almost hoping nothing would happen.
Their gazes met, Jeannie’s filled with disappointment. She rolled her eyes at him. “Oh, c’mon, Flaherty. Weak. Very weak. You can do better than that. Rub harder,” she demanded, planting her hands on her luscious round hips.
He gave it another go, forcing himself to focus on the bottle rather than how petite Jeannie was all swallowed up in a bathrobe that was three sizes too big for her while she demanded he rub.
The floor beneath his feet gave a slight rumble and the lights blinked on and off as though they were winking conspiratorially.
Jeannie’s small gasp rang in his ears, and then she was gone in her trademark puff of lavender-colored smoke.
Sloan didn’t have time to worry she’d landed somewhere unsafe. His phone vibrated in his jacket pocket two seconds later. “Jeannie?”
“We did it!”
Her joyful response made his chest tight. He scratched at it as though it would relieve the stupidly foreign feeling. “We did.”
“Okay, here we go.” There was a pause and a couple of grunts before she was back on the line. “God. I should have brought a shovel with me. There are piles everywhere.”
He smiled. “Men,” Sloan muttered his solidarity with her into the phone.
She snorted, filling his ear with a crackle. “Filthy animals, the lot of you.”
“Okay, so aside from the obvious male-pattern piles, tell me what you’re seeing.” Sloan held the bottle up to see if he could actually catch a glimpse of her through the amber glass.
“Well, it’s just as dreadful as it was when I saw it earlier. I’m seeing a strong indication that some genie AA might be in order. There are a million beer cans in here—and cigarette butts, mounds and mounds of them. It just figures I’d inherit the ghetto bottle.” She paused again, and Sloan found he was content to listen to her rhythmic breathing while she rifled through this mysterious genie’s personal belongings.
The Accidental Genie Page 8
