Dark and Deadly: Eight Bad Boys of Paranormal Romance (25 page)

Alejandro swept the room with his “I’m a cop and I really want to arrest everybody” gaze, and Rose wondered why it gave her shivers in places that had no business shivering.

“I don’t even like alpha males,” she whispered, whirling around to face the stove and her pot of Connor’s conversation potion.

“Ha,” Sue said, crowding into Rose at the stove. “That’s what I said when I met your father and next thing I knew, I was pregnant with you.”

“Mom,” Rose hissed, more than a little freaked out. “I so don’t want to hear about your sex life.”

“She was a wild one,” Granny said, suddenly able to hear perfectly for someone who spent a lot of her time yelling “what?” at everyone around her. “I was glad your dad married her before she got knocked up by some wandering poltergeist.”

“Granny!” Astrid shrieked, covering her face with one hand but peeking up at Connor through her fingers and looking intrigued. “Poltergeists can have sex?”

Connor stared wildly around, probably looking for the best way to make a break for it.

Alejandro came down with a sudden coughing fit, and Rose glared at him, realizing perfectly well that he was trying not to laugh his ass off at her crazy family.

“You are never going to be invited over here again if you don’t behave,” Rose told Granny sternly, trying desperately to take charge of the situation.

“Ha! You need a hot man yourself to take the edge of that crankiness,” Granny retorted.

Rose’s gaze involuntarily went to Alejandro, and his eyes darkened with a surge of heat that nearly seared her clothes off. She raised her chin and tried to pretend her knees hadn’t just gone shaky.

“Okay, that’s enough. Everybody out,” Sue ordered, in full-on
Mom
—or drill sergeant--mode. “Mom, you and Astrid go sit on the couch. Connor, go with them. We’ll bottle up this potion and bring it right out to you. It’s on the house this time. Alejandro, go—go outside and check on your partner.”

While Rose watched in disbelief, everyone did exactly what her mom had told them to do, even Alejandro, who smiled at Sue and touched his forehead in a kind of salute. But when Sue turned to the stove to dish up the potion, Alejandro caught Rose’s arm and pulled her along with him. When they reached the door, he bent his head down to hers, and Rose had to catch her breath at the thought that he meant to kiss her.

“I don’t know what or why or how, but you are singing along my nerves,
Querida
, and I would be very happy to volunteer to take off any . . . edges . . . that you need me to,” he murmured in her ear.

Rose caught her breath as a shiver traveled up her spine from her hoo-hah. “I don’t . . . I don’t . . .”

“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 nutjob 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.”

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.