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.”#p#分页标题#e#
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.”
Dark and Deadly: Eight Bad Boys of Paranormal Romance by Jennifer Ashley, Alyssa Day, Felicity Heaton, Erin Kellison, Laurie London, Erin Quinn, Bonnie Vanak and Caris Roane
CHAPTER 12
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.