Dark and Deadly: Eight Bad Boys of Paranormal Romance (27 page)

“Guess you’re hungrier than you thought.”

The host, a short, middle-aged man wearing a dark suit and a welcoming smile, patted Rose’s cheek. “You bring Gianni a nice young man to inspect, my Rosa?”

Rose blushed, and Gianni turned his affable smile on Alejandro. “Welcome, welcome. Any friend of Rosa’s and all that.”

Alejandro nodded his thanks and started to follow Rose to the table, but Gianni’s hand shot out and he grabbed Alejandro’s arm in a punishing grip.

“I don’t know you, but I know trouble. You’ve seen it, and you’ve dealt it,” Gianni said in a low tone.

The man’s eyes flashed gold, and Alejandro tensed to reach for his gun, but Gianni only shook his head. “You might want to watch yourself. You’d be dead before you hit the floor,” the older man warned him. “I only want to tell you to have a nice dinner, and then get the hell away from Rosa. She’s too good for you.”

Alejandro laughed, but there was no amusement in it. “Don’t you think I know that?”

After that admission, he’d had enough of being polite. He broke Gianni’s hold with an ease that clearly surprised the man. “And
you
might want to watch yourself. Maybe I’d be dead, as you say, but I wouldn’t be the only one.”

Gianni nodded, and there was a hint of respect in it, but Alejandro wasn’t fooling himself that he’d made a friend. And he already had far too many enemies, so he’d be happy to count this one a draw. “I’m glad she has you in her corner.”

Alejandro made his way to their table, and he and Rose talked a little, about nothing much, until the food arrived. The pizza tasted even better than it smelled, and he devoured several slices before coming up for air. Rose, who’d eaten three slices herself, finally sighed and reluctantly put her napkin down.

“You were right. We needed food, and this was amazing,” he said.

She nodded, but he could tell her mind was elsewhere. Far away from him, maybe. He was surprised by how much he didn’t like that thought.

“Tell me about her,” she said quietly. “The woman who left you for your friend.”

Alejandro turned the question over in his mind as he studied her. The candlelight made her beautiful, but also different, in a less approachable way.
Too
beautiful. Too
not-for-him
.

He didn’t like that, either, and he didn’t understand why a woman he’d only met that morning was having such a strong impression on him.

“Maria,” he finally said. “She was young and beautiful, and I think she wanted me because she was afraid, and I made her feel safe. Not because she loved me.”

“I’m sorry. You must have loved her very much.”

“Is that what your
gift
tells you?” He regretted his harsh tone the second he saw the hurt shimmer in her eyes, but he’d never known how to make pretty words or gentle speeches, and he was probably too old to learn the art now.

“I’m from a tiny town in Guatemala you’ve never heard of, and vampires killed most of my family and friends before I was old enough to learn how to fight back,” he said flatly.

“That’s horrible. I’m so sorry. I lost my father when I was young, too, not that I’m comparing a car accident to your village’s overwhelming tragedy. I’m just saying that I know how hard it is to lose even one person you love.”

“It is horrible. But it’s in the past, and it’s why I do what I do now.” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter, but Rose probably saw right through his pathetic pretense.

Thankfully, she didn’t call him on his crap.

“We’ve never had a problem with them here, because, well, witches. We’re a pretty vibrant community, and the vamps in this region all know we can hurt them very badly if they ever try anything. So they leave us alone, and we leave them alone as long as they behave,” Rose said.

“How
civilized
of you.” The bitterness in his voice hung in the air between them.

“I’m sorry. It must sound horrible to you, but the vampires I know personally aren’t like the ones who killed your family. They’re just trying to figure out their place in a society that suddenly knows that they really exist,” she said, and the kindness in her eyes disarmed him, making him want to be someone else. Someone who belonged in a place like this with Rose.

Someone he could never be.

She reached for his hand and held it in both of her own, and he knew he wasn’t imagining the electric sense of connection between them, because her eyes flared wide at the sensation. In the soft candlelight, her eyes were dark pools of mystery. The curve of her cheek was a poem; the fall of her hair was a song.

But he had no talent for poem or song; he was nothing more than rage fashioned into a blunt weapon.

“I don’t—I’ve never felt that before. And I don’t understand why I do now. You’re not even my type,” she said, laughing a little but looking confused.

Anger flared through him at the thought of any other man being her
type
; a hot, almost feral emotion that he had no right to feel. “What is your type?”

“Nerdy guys with a good sense of humor, pretty much,” she confessed. “And you’re
so
not that.”

He had to think for a few seconds to come up with the definition of nerdy, but then he smiled grimly. “No. Never that.”

“She must have been crazy,” Rose blurted out. “To leave you for anyone else. You’re special. I’ve only known you a day, and I know that.”

He didn’t know what to do with the feelings she caused to rise up in him, so hopeful and tentative, so he pushed them aside, down deep where he kept painful memories and his knowledge of the viciously real nature of the world. But sunlight was the enemy of pain; it brightened shadowed corners and gave a gleaming polish to the battered edges of what he supposed might be called his soul.

So naturally he doubted it; his soul was long since blackened beyond repair. Ever since he’d shirked his duty to steal a private moment, and people had died because of it.

His fault.

His burden.

His guilt.

“We should get back,” he said abruptly, standing up. “Your cat is still outside, yes? Who knows what the basilisks are doing to it.”

Rose’s small flinch of hurt added another scar to his burden, but he took it gladly. It was what he knew. What he was meant for. Not sunlight or hope, but vengeance.

“Bob is way too smart to get caught by the same trick twice, or I never would have let him roam,” she said, raising her chin. “I’m sorry you think I’m so uncaring.”

He reached out for her, but she turned away, and his hand missed her arm and touched the curve of her hip. A storm of want battered its way through him, and he had to fight not to let himself show it.

“I don’t think that at all, Rose Cardinal. I think, instead, that you care too much,” he said gently.

He put money on the table for the bill, and they walked back to her house in a silence that was far too vast to breach.

Rose tossed and turned for a few restless hours, unable to sleep with Alejandro right down the hall. Her skin was still vibrating with the sensation of his touch on her hip; nerve endings she’d never felt before had flared into almost painful existence.

But her inability to sleep was caused by more than the physical wanting. He’d let her see him—really
see
him—and now she couldn’t pretend, even to herself, that he was nothing more than an arrogant alpha male come to create havoc in her life.

Although the
havoc
part was true enough . . .

Impatient with herself, she threw off the blanket and took a quick shower, then dressed in her usual jeans and top and headed for the smell of freshly brewed coffee coming from her kitchen. Alejandro stood at the back door, staring out into the yard.

“They’re getting bolder,” he said without turning around, and she could read the anger in the straight, hard line of his stance without even seeing his face. “I had to chase a few of them off Mac. With all due respect to Astrid Buttercup, it was pretty hard not to shoot them.”

“The potion should be ready by now. We can go turn Mac back into Mac, and you can be on your way to the next P-Ops problem.” She wouldn’t let the absence of this man disrupt her life. She
wouldn’t
.

She couldn’t.

Instead, she’d do something useful. She marched over to the cupboard and reached for the rack of clean vials, and then paused.

“No need to bottle this. Let’s just take it all.” She started to lift the heavy pot, but Alejandro was there first.

She followed him out to Mac’s statue, which was almost pretty with touches of rose light on it, and wasn’t even a little bit surprised to see her mother and grandmother heading toward them.

“We thought you could use the moral support, honey,” Sue said, rushing up and giving Rose a hug. She aimed a narrow-eyed glance at Alejandro, who glared right back at her.

“Time to work some magic,” Granny said, grinning madly. Her socks were back on her feet, instead of her elbows, at least.

Rose shook her head. Her family members might be maddening, but they were hers. Alejandro’s story had given her the gift of appreciating them all a little bit more. She’d have that, still, after he was gone.

She squared her shoulders and took the lid of the pot. The sweet aroma of the sparkling pink potion wafted out into the early morning air, and she heard a loud meow from the side of the house.

“Bob’s telling you that it smells good,” Granny said.

Rose ignored her and focused on her mother’s reaction.

Sue stared down at the potion and then closed her eyes and took a deep sniff. “Smells perfect, looks perfect—let’s do this!”

Breathing a sigh of relief, Rose nodded to Alejandro. “Okay, you can pour it on him. Slowly and carefully, being sure to get as much on him as you can.”

“One, two, three,
abracadabra
,” Granny shouted.

Alejandro shot her a look. “I thought you said--”

“Witch humor,” Rose said, sighing. “Just go ahead. And hope for the best.”

It was triple the amount that should be needed. Just in case. But Rose surreptitiously crossed her fingers behind her back, anyway, as Alejandro carefully poured the entire pot of potion on his partner’s stone head.

They all took a step back when the statue started to shake and shudder.

“Thank goodness,” Sue said, beaming. “I knew--”

“Too soon, Mom,” Rose snapped. “Look.”

And Rose’s heart sank to somewhere in the vicinity of her ankles, because the statue was settling back down, and the tremors were subsiding.

And Mac was still stone.

Alejandro abruptly turned and hurled her potion pot across the garden. It smashed into a low stone wall with a resounding crash, but the noise was almost drowned out by the sound of Alejandro loudly and viciously cursing in at least two different languages.

“I’m so sorry,” Rose said. “I don’t know—we’ll brew another potion. I’ll get Mom and Granny to help, we’ll--”

“What were you doing when you were supposed to be brewing this so carefully last night?” Sue put her hands on her hips and stared down her nose at her daughter; a neat trick since she was several inches shorter than Rose.

Rose, who’d been on the last frayed edge of calm all night, threw her hands up in the air. “Sex, Mom. We were having hot, sweaty, fabulous sex all night. There. Are you happy?”

She stalked over to Alejandro, grabbed his face in her hands and planted a hot, R-rated, definitely-don’t-do-in-front-of-your-mother kiss on him and then fled to the house before she burst into tears. The last thing she heard before she reached the refuge of her kitchen was Granny’s long whistle and Alejandro’s terse announcement.

“Now, I think we call the Atlanteans.”

Alejandro called a number that Lord Justice had once given him—a number that he’d never used. The line rang twice, and then a sequence of clicks and beeps sounded, and then the line went dead, and he was left listening to dial tone.

Well. He’d known better than to expect help from anyone but himself. Now he just had to figure out how the hell to work magic and save his partner.

“Incoming,” Granny sang out, and she and Sue both took several steps away from the statue.

Alejandro looked around, ready to draw his gun, but he didn’t see anything. “What are you talking about?”

Sue pointed to the area just to the left of Mac, where an oval shimmer of light was starting to form.

“I thought you warded this garden against magical entry,” Rose’s grandmother accused.

Sue nodded, rolling up her sleeves. “I did. Watch out.”

Alejandro looked at the oval again and grinned. He held up a hand before Sue could try to blast it.

“It’s okay. It’s the cavalry.”

Lord Justice of Atlantis, half-brother to the king, stepped through first. His long braid of swirling blue and black hair still reached his waist, and his very deadly sword still stuck up from its scabbard on his back. His sharp gaze swept the area before returning to Alejandro, and he bowed.

“You called us, and we came,” he said, and Alejandro knew it was just as likely that the “us” referred to the dual natures of Justice’s personality as it did to actual other people. But Ven stepped through the portal, and then Alaric, and Alejandro blew out a sigh of relief.

Now things would definitely work out. The King’s Vengeance, also King Conlan’s brother, and Alaric, High Priest of Atlantis, were each as deadly and magically powerful on their own as Lord Justice. The trio? Unstoppable.

“Thank you,” Alejandro said when the portal winked out of existence, so he knew nobody else was coming through. “I have a big problem.”

“Oh, honey, you are a cutie patootie,” Granny told Alaric, sidling up to him.

Alejandro’s head nearly exploded at the sight of the expression on the face of the five-hundred-year-old high priest—the most powerful Atlantean of all time, or so he’d heard—as Rose’s grandmother leered at him.

Alaric’s green gaze was ice. Grown men would run screaming for their mothers at the sight of that gaze. “I beg your pardon, Sorceress?”

Granny grinned and reached up and pinched Alaric’s cheek.

Ven howled with laughter. Howled. There was no other word for it. He doubled over and slapped his knee and still kept laughing.