My Paranormal Valentine: A Paranormal Romance Box Set

by Michelle M. Pillow

  He shifted in his seat and pushed the tantalizing image out of his mind. When she bent her head to sip her coffee, he watched her, entranced. The curve of her cheek was so heartbreakingly lovely…

  He was either losing it or his overactive protective instincts had gone amok. Probably both. Whatever it was, he didn’t have time for it. He didn’t have time for much, knowing the Dark Angels and what they probably planned for those girls. It wasn’t human trafficking he was worried about, not with this particular gang.

  It was human sacrifice.

  Linda brought their food, and they made small talk with her for a few moments while she unloaded plates from her tray. When she was gone again, off to serve the table of chattering teenagers that had just arrived, Flynn took a deep breath, inhaling all that buttery goodness.

  “Man, I love diner food. Fills a man up for a while.”

  Eva’s lips quirked up at the corners. “Not a salad guy?”

  Flynn laughed. “I eat plenty of salads. The vegetables back home—”

  He stopped abruptly. He, Jake, and Griffin were undercover, but Denal had never said anything specifically about whether or not to admit they were from Atlantis. If they used any of their powers over water, however, it would be easy enough for people to tell. Especially in light of all the media coverage Atlantis’s rising had gotten from the human press.

  Besides, he needed something from this woman, and he’d found out over the course of his life that the easiest way to help someone trust you was to trust them first. Give something to get something.

  “Okay. I’m gonna tell you something that I shouldn’t be telling you, because I need help. And I think you could use our help too. I’m actually from Atlantis.”

  She stared at him for a long moment and then abruptly started laughing. “Oh, wow. That was awesome. I really needed a laugh after this week. Do you know you are the tenth man this month to tell me that he’s from Atlantis? It’s the new ‘what’s your sign?’ around bars. I’m to the point where I want to put a sign up: No, you are not from Atlantis. It’s not going to work. No, you’re not going to get laid.”

  Hearing get laid from Eva’s sensual lips shredded the edges of Flynn’s tightly leashed control. She seemed to realize what she’d said after the words came tumbling out too, because she flushed, all that delicate creamy skin turning pink from the edge of the fairly low neckline of the Copper Cantina T-shirt clear up to her hairline.

  A sudden fantasy of what she would look like in his bed, all that gorgeous red hair splayed across his pillows and her arms and legs splayed across his body, nudged at Flynn insistently, and he had to forcibly shove the idea away.

  “That’s a thing? I can’t believe that’s a thing.” He shook his head and thought about it. “On the other hand, of course it’s a thing. Any line to get lucky.”

  Eva nodded, using her fork to toy with a piece of egg.

  “The thing is though, I really am from Atlantis.” He looked around again, but still nobody was paying any attention to them. Linda was back behind the counter, chatting with the cook over the pass-through window. Flynn put his hand flat on the table and then turned his palm over so it was facing up. With a slight motion of his fingertips, he called to his power and pulled a stream of water out of Eva’s water glass and sent it twirling in a long, spiraling ribbon across the table and up around the fork she was holding.

  She flinched and dropped her fork, which clattered on the table. Flynn reached across the table to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, conveniently using that arm to block the sight of the water rippling back into the glass. Sure enough, when he glanced over, Linda’s sharp gaze was on them. He didn’t need her to see any magical water tricks and come over to start asking questions.

  He didn’t know why in the nine hells he’d been showing off either. “So I’m from Atlantis, and I need your help.”

  Eva picked up her fork and placed it carefully on the rim of her plate. Then she took a long sip of what might laughingly be referred to as the coffee in her cup, put the cup down, and finally nodded. “I don’t know why, but I believe you. Maybe the water trick, but a human magic user could do that too, I think. Maybe I’m desperate, but I’ve been desperate for a long time, and this feels different. Of course, trusting my instincts is probably the stupidest thing I could do since I’ve proven that my instincts are utter and complete crap. On the other hand—I feel I’m up to the third or fourth hand by now—I need to talk to somebody. I need to decide what to do. At least you’d be objective. I can’t bring Mrs. M into this. I don’t want her to get hurt.”

  Flynn sat still and silent, waiting for Eva to talk herself into trusting him. He knew better than to interrupt because he could feel she was leaning his way. Anything he could do at this point would just ruin it.

  Finally she took a deep breath and looked at him. “Okay. Okay. But not here. We need to talk somewhere where no one can hear us.”

  “We have a house—” he began, but she shook her head before he even finished the sentence.

  “No. No, I don’t want to be on your turf… Anyway. I feel safer at my place. Nobody knows where it is. At least not yet,” she said bitterly. “He always finds me in the end.”

  “Who is he?” Flynn’s protective instincts were already beating in triple time. Somebody had scared this woman. Somebody had put those dark shadows under her eyes and the haunted expression on her face. Someone had made her afraid, and if he had anything to do with it, that someone was going to pay.

  “Not here. Let’s go.” She started to reach into her purse, but Flynn stopped her with a hand on her arm.

  “No, please. I ordered all this food. Let me at least pay for it.” He stood, tossed cash on the table, and held out his hand to Eva. She bit her lip again, but then she took his hand, said goodbye to Linda, and followed him out into the cold, clear night.

  Once again, Flynn got on the bike to follow Eva across town. She pulled into the driveway of a surprisingly large and well-tended home. He wouldn’t have expected from her job and her car that she owned a house like this.

  But after he parked and got off the bike, he realized the house wasn’t her destination. Instead, she beckoned him up a narrow set of stairs on the side of the two-story garage. At the top of the stairs, on a tiny landing, she unlocked the door and let him inside. He could hear her breathing, which had shortened and sharpened until she was almost panting with distress. As he watched, puzzled, she took a quick sweep through the small living area, into the kitchen and behind the counter, and then into the bedroom, opening her closet door before pausing and then ducking into the bathroom to look behind the bathroom door. When she came out to the living area again, her breathing had slowed to almost normal.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, a flush rising in her cheeks.” It’s a routine I started after the first time he found me. He was hiding… One of his thugs was hiding in my closet. Only after he’d knocked me down and tied me to a chair… Well. That’s when Scott showed up.”

  Flynn realized he’d clenched his hands into fists while she was talking. Scott. Now he had a name to go with this anger.

  “Scott’s in the Dark Angels?”

  “Yes.” She laughed, and the bitterness in her laughter sliced through the air between them like a dagger strike. “Go ahead. Tell me what an idiot I am for dating one of them. Tell me I’m a fool. It’s not something I haven’t already told myself a thousand times. But he wasn’t in the gang, or at least I didn’t know he was in the gang, when we met. When we started dating. And once he did become active, it was only little things. He wanted to build up his magic, you see?”

  Flynn crossed a few paces to the opposite wall and leaned against it to help him fight his instinct to grab her and shake her. Getting involved with the Dark Angels? On any level at all? It was something only a fool would do. Or someone so greedy for power and magic that he or she was willing to overlook the hideous things necessary to earn it. And if Oriax, a Grand Marquis demon of hell, really wa
s the leader of the gang, then any humans involved were soon to be dead. One of the leading generals of hell might toy with humans—even magic users—for a while, but he’d soon tire of them, and then they’d all be food for his warrior demon clans before long.

  It was like the old joke.

  You ask any supernatural being: Do you like humans?

  And they all say: Sure! Humans are great! They’re crunchy with ketchup.

  He figured he’d spare Eva the joke. She didn’t seem like she was in the mood. Instead, she seemed lost in thought or in some awful memory, standing there in the middle of the small apartment.

  She blinked and then focused on Flynn. “Do you want some coffee? I have some, but it’s really old and probably tastes terrible.”

  “I hate to pass on such a tempting offer,” Flynn said dryly. “A glass of water would be great though.”

  She went into the tiny kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and got bottles of water. After she came back out to the living room and handed him one, she set the other on the table and shrugged out of his jacket.

  “Thank you. This helped.” She put the jacket carefully on a chair and then sat down on the very end of the faded blue couch. He figured getting too close to her wouldn’t help oil the conversational wheels any, so instead of sitting next to her on the couch, he took his jacket off the chair where she'd put it, tossed it on the other end of the couch, and then sat down in the chair. Facing her was better for this discussion anyway. He tried to think of clever ways to tell her what she needed to know, but in the end, he just went with the truth.

  “I’m going to trust you with something that could get a lot of people hurt or killed if the information gets out.” He studied her face, trying to gauge if she really understood the seriousness of what he was saying. He didn’t know her well enough to decipher the flicker of emotion in her eyes, but she nodded, folding her hands in her lap.

  “I understand. Well, I don’t understand yet, but I promise I won’t say a word of whatever you tell me to anybody. In exchange, I’m hoping you won’t say a word about me to anyone either. I need to get out of town and fast.”

  Something in Flynn’s chest flinched at the idea. “You’re leaving? You’re going to run?”

  He’d tried to make his voice as nonjudgmental as possible, but Eva’s mouth twisted in a grimace.

  “Yes, I’m going to run. That’s what I do. I run. I tried to fight back once, and he broke my arm. I tried staying in one place and calling the police, over and over, but— Do you know what a restraining order is?”

  He shook his head. He had no idea. Sounded important though. He didn’t understand anything about human legal systems, but if the king gave an order of restraint, you could bet your ass somebody would be restrained.

  From the look on Eva’s face, this was not the case Topside.

  “It’s a piece of paper,” she said bitterly. “Nothing but a piece of paper. And Scott laughed at it, and then he snatched it out of my hand and pinned it to my front door with a knife. He drove that knife so far into the door that I couldn’t get it out, even before he smashed my face into the doorjamb.”

  Flynn’s muscles were trembling with the need to find this Scott and kill him. Slowly. He forced himself to stay silent and listen—this story was definitely not about him.

  “I had to call a repair person and ultimately wound up buying my landlord a whole new door. You can bet he wouldn’t renew my lease after that. That was maybe four, no, five towns ago. So yes, I run, because running is the only thing that’s going to keep me alive,” she finished, her head held high.

  She’d seemed like a mouse back in the bar. A terrified, trembling little mouse. But she’d shown flashes of defiance even then, and the woman he sat across from now was talking about running even while her body language said that she wanted to fight. He’d known a lot of fighters in his life, and she had many of the hallmarks of one. He just needed to push her along; help her realize that she didn’t always have to be prey.

  On the other hand, she was one small woman against a black-magic user and his buddies in the Dark Angels. What chance had she really had?

  He studied her, sitting there curled up on the corner of the couch, and realized a single hard truth. Whatever happened, now or in the future, Eva was never again going to have to face this Scott or his Dark Angel pals alone.

  Flynn was going to protect her from them. He was going to succeed this time, even though he never had before.

  This time failure was not an option.

  “I need to tell you about me. About us. Atlantis and Poseidon’s Warriors. About how I accidentally wound up being one,” he admitted, leaning forward, elbows on knees and hands loosely clasped. “Their—our—sworn duty is to protect humanity, and I need to wrap my head around that. I spent most of my life running, so I do understand you. I spent a lot of time being completely selfish in all ways too. But that ended when Poseidon himself marked me—when Denal told us about the girls.”

  She leaned forward. “Tell me about the girls.”

  So he did. He told her everything, honestly, even the truths that made him look bad. He told her about going home to find his brothers, about Denal and the warriors, and about the mission.

  He didn’t tell her about his childhood. Not yet. He figured both of them had made enough painful confessions for one day.

  Eva listened intently and asked a few clarifying questions but mostly just took in everything he had to say. When he finally finished, she jumped up and started pacing.

  “I think it’s admirable what you’re doing, and—hey—it’s still hard to wrap my mind around the ‘you met Poseidon’ part of this.” She flashed a smile at him. “But what I don’t understand is what you expect from me. I don’t know anything about this chapter of the Dark Angels. I just got into town a couple of months ago. Like I said, I understand what you’re doing, but I don’t see how I can help. So I’m still back at where I was: I need to run, and I need to run now.”

  Flynn, quite admirably, he thought, resisted the urge to pound his head into the wall in frustration. Instead, he stood and faced her. “I get it. Your situation is terrifying, and the best way you’ve found to cope is to run. It even makes sense. I did it for years. But here’s the thing: these girls can’t run. They’re prisoners. And the things that the Dark Angels will do to them are worse than any torture you can imagine.”

  She spun around, turning her back as if she couldn’t bear to look at him. “I know she cried. “Don’t you think I know? But what can I do that the police can’t?”

  “You can help me figure out a way in. You learned something about the hierarchy of the chapter back in Oregon that Scott was a member of, right?”

  “Snake.”

  He blinked. “What?”

  “Snake.” She turned back to face him and blew out a sigh. “When Scott really got in with the gang, they started calling him Snake. Snake and Monkey: the dynamic duo.”

  Flynn rolled his eyes. “Poseidon’s balls. I don’t care if his name is Snake, Worm, or Lizard. You don’t understand how bad these guys can get—”

  She took a step toward him and poked him in the chest, her face almost incandescent with anger. “Of course I understand these men—”

  “No. You don’t.” Flynn caught her chin in his hand, forcing her to look at him. “You don’t understand them because you’re still calling them men. The upper echelon of the Dark Angels—do you know why they call themselves that? Dark Angels? Because they’re demons. Actual demons. Oriax, who’s rumored to be the head of the entire operation, is one of hell’s most-trusted generals.”

  She wrenched her face out of his hand and shoved him, or at least she tried to shove him. It would take more effort than she had to actually push Flynn back a step. He caught her hands and held them against his chest.

  “Please listen to me. Tell me what you know, as much as you can, and then you can run. Help me find a way in so we can get these girls before it’s too late.”


  She stared at him for a long moment and then sighed. Ever so briefly, she leaned forward and rested her forehead against his chest, giving him the oddest sensation. Almost as if he wanted to wrap his arms around her and hold her close for a very long time.

  This time though, he was the one to back away. Tender emotions were vastly more terrifying than demons, and much harder to understand than even the insane sexual attraction between them that was silent now but pulsing just beneath the surface of his skin. He was afraid of what might happen if he touched her—really touched her—afraid he’d lose all control.

  Better to stay away because he would never, ever take a chance on frightening this woman.

  “I’ll help,” she told him. “I’ll tell you whatever you need to know. We need to save those girls, you’re right. I can’t live with this on my conscience.”

  “Thank you.” He touched her face gently. “Thank you.”

  He started to say more, but then he heard Griffin calling to him on the Atlantean mental communication pathway. A few seconds later, the knock sounded at the window.

  Eva gasped, stumbling back a step. “They found me. No, wait. That was— What was that? That’s the window over the garage. There aren’t any steps there.”

  Flynn crossed to the window and jerked the curtains open to reveal Griffin’s face on the other side of the glass. He looked down and realized that Griffin was floating in midair outside the window.

  Of course he was.

  Mages. They were all a bunch of damn show-offs.

  Flynn jerked his thumb to the side of the apartment where the door was, and Griffin nodded. He shut the curtains and turned to face Eva, whose face was pale. She was close to cracking, and he needed to tell Jake and Griffin: no more weird shit for a while.

  Not that “no weirdness” would be easy to pull off with a mage and a mermaid rescuer for teammates.

  He sighed.

  “It’s okay. He’s with me. Sort of. He’s a mage, before you ask, so he’s odd, and he’s got these freaky silver eyes and white hair, but he’s definitely on my side. Not only is he sworn to Poseidon, but on top of that, mages despise demons.”