The Protectors Christmas Box Set (sexy paranormal romances) (9 page)

"The last two chapters gave me tingles and goosebumps..." ~ Joyfully Reviewed

The old gypsy woman ran her gnarled, wrinkled finger over Dallas St. John’s hand and then glanced up with a look of surprise.

“You’re one of them.” Her ancient voice cracked.

“We want to know about love,” Janice, Dallas’s closest and dearest friend in the world, leaned forward and whispered. “Is she going to find a guy…soon?”

The gypsy’s gaze narrowed. “Love? You’re not looking to cause trouble?”

“
Trouble
?” Dallas rolled her eyes. “This is silly, Janice. I don’t know why I let you talk me into these things.” The heavy scent of incense in such a cramped room was starting to make her head hurt. She closed her hand and tried to pull away from the old woman’s claw. “Here’s my future—I’ll find a lover when I find one. Let’s get out of here.”

The gypsy moved with amazing speed and strength as she uncurled Dallas’s fingers.

“There.” She poked her pointy finger against a spot in the center of Dallas’s palm. “That’s your love line and it’s about to bisect with—” She threw up her hands and gripped her throat. Dallas had to give her points for theatrics. “
The Fish
,” the old woman wheezed as if the word strangled her.

“A fish?” Janice scoffed. “My friend is going to end up with a fish. You’re right, Dallas. This is a waste of money.”

“Money I don’t have,” Dallas pointed out.

“Not
a
fish.
My
Fish.” The old woman’s voice, though soft, made the knickknacks cluttering the room’s shelves shudder. “You have a strong spirit. That’s what will draw him to you. Take care, young one. Loving that man will be the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done.”

Brendan Cromerty didn’t need Opportunity to slap him in the face before he took advantage of it. He’d seen right away that this opportunity was one of those once-in-a-lifetime-life-changing-events. And it was heading toward him like a freight train.

Well, perhaps it wouldn’t be
life-changing
, but tonight had certainly promised to be one crazy night, the kind of night that prompted guys to write to the dirty magazines: “I never believed this would happen to me…”

He balanced himself over the slim, gracefully nude woman who’d all but begged him to take her back to his apartment. She was buxom, blonde and horny as hell. With her tongue playing games in his mouth, she’d wiggled her shapely ass on his lap the whole cab ride home. And now, as she sprawled across his bed’s satin brown bedspread, a playful gleam sparkled in her soft brown eyes. Her hips rose up and bumped his rampant cock. Oh, she knew what she was doing. She knew exactly how tease him to the point of losing control.

Damn, he was one lucky bastard. His best bud Horace wasn’t going to believe a word. If Brendan weren’t such an honorable guy, he’d consider taking pictures. Okay, perhaps it wasn’t simply his honor stopping him. Being a lawyer—a damned good one at that—he knew too well the danger of creating photographic evidence of a wild, sexually heated night...even if she’d suggested more than once that she wouldn’t mind.

He worked his way down her body, placing a line of kisses down her elegant throat, which led to her full, luscious breasts. When he swirled his tongue around a taut nipple, she gripped the sheets as her hips rose off the bed. His cock jumped in anticipation.

“You have the world’s most perfect bellybutton,” he whispered. Everything about her was perfect. An image straight out of his wettest, hottest dream.

A wicked look of promise darkened her eyes as she licked her fingers and wrapped them, still warm and moist, around his cock. She stroked his full length with torturous care. Once. Twice.

“Are...are you trying to kill me?” Not that he minded. In fact, he couldn’t think of a better way to die.

The woman murmured an answer as she pulled his mouth back up to hers. Her hand still working his cock, she nipped his lower lip and whispered how she wanted him to take her.

“Baby, if I don’t do that to you soon and often, I think I might explode.”

He’d barely uttered that desperate plea when...

Son of a bitch.

Not. Now.

A blinding pain stabbed him right behind the eyes so strong that it nearly jerked his head clean off his neck.

A vision slammed into him with surprising force.

“
Not fucking now
,” he groaned. He rolled off his gift from the heavens and flopped onto his back. Pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes, he tried to will the bastard of a vision away.

But that damned vision refused to let go of him.

Bright flashes of light made the blurry images forming in his head move in a jerky motion as if caught in front of a strobe light.

Brendan’s head was pounding by the time a raven-haired woman, petite and fragile, flitted through his thoughts. He’d never seen her before, but she felt familiar.

No, dammit, he didn’t need this right now. Not fucking now. The universe could just go and find someone else to fucking take care of her. He already had a beauty in his bed. And he planned to be busy with her for several more hours.

The raven-haired woman stubbornly refused to leave him alone. Behind the flickering blur, Brendan could just make out that the woman was running down a narrow, half-flooded alleyway. She kept glancing over her shoulder as if someone or something was chasing her. He felt her stuttering as if it beat through his own heart.

He jerked as he recognized the fear, the panic.

He knew what she was running from.

It was a monster that made the terrifying creatures lurking under children’s beds look harmless. The others,
Protectors
like Brendan, all knew the monster by only one name—
the darkness
.

“Baby,” he said to his lovely and creative bed partner, his hands still pressed against his aching eyes, “I need to go do something.”

“
Now
? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I wish I were.”

She grabbed his arm as he eased himself out of the bed. “Can’t it wait? I’m on fire for you.”

“I know, baby, I know.” He felt hot enough to send the entire apartment building up in flames. “This is important.”

He dragged his T-shirt on over his head and tugged on his jeans. Thanks to his burning erection, the fit was tight and the zipper gave him a hard time. He gave her a quick, hard kiss on the lips and then grabbed his shoes and his jacket.

“I wouldn’t mind if you stayed,” he said on his way out, though he knew she’d be gone before he returned.

Once-in-a lifetime-opportunities never waited around for anybody.

* * * * *

Why? Why did this have to happen to her
today
of all days?

Was she cursed?

That must be it, Dallas decided.

She was cursed.

She hopped on one foot and then the other as she ripped her brand new $400 hand-tooled leather pumps off her feet. The two-inch heel on her right shoe had gotten jammed in a storm grate. Before she knew what had happened, the damned heel had snapped off.

None of this would have happened if she hadn’t been hurrying. But the bus had been late and that had made her miss her connection with the train. What luck—what rotten, stinking luck.

She’d made this trip into downtown Chicago hundreds of times. Never, ever had she run into any trouble. None at all.

God, she needed this job. Her bank account
desperately
needed this job.

Perhaps the sticklers over at Hamlet, Hamlet, and Golf would overlook that she was—she glanced at her watch—twenty minutes late for her interview.

And shoeless!

If only she could snap her fingers, turn back time, and start the morning over. Just in case she’d suddenly discovered a set of powers she didn’t know about, Dallas closed her eyes and gave her fingers a snap. She pried open one eye. She was still on the sidewalk three blocks from the HH&G Tower.

“I am
so
not going to be Hamlet, Hamlet, and Golf’s newest rising star.”

Getting in with HH&G could make a young attorney’s career. Unlike her current internship where she worked like a slave for a small personal injury firm that barely paid enough to cover her expenses and where she served mainly as the office copy girl, this was a position to which Dallas had aspired every grueling day of law school. A real chance to make a difference. She’d gambled with her rent money in order to buy the $1,500 fitted suit and matching $400 shoes because this position was going to be hers...she’d been born to work at HH&G…until twenty minutes ago when she didn’t show up for her once-in-a lifetime golden opportunity.

There had to be a way to salvage this. She wanted the position so badly her soul ached. Finally, she’d get the chance to prove to the teachers who’d sneered at her ambition that, despite her rotten childhood, she could make something of herself. That the scholarships and grants given to her—the poor orphan girl—weren’t wasted. Dallas’s life had meaning. She was going to be important.

“There has to be a way to—”

Snap
!

* * * * *

Dallas yawned and rolled over in her bed.

The red numbers on her bedside digital clock read five-fifty-nine. A few seconds passed and the clock clicked over to six o’clock. The alarm started wailing.

Dallas pushed herself up in the bed and breathed out with relief. It had been a nightmare…just a horrible, horrible nightmare. She shouldn’t have let Janice talk her into ordering the large gyro plate with extra onions for dinner last night.

Nothing to worry about, she assured herself and sank back into the cocoon of her soft bedding, hitting the snooze button on her way down.

* * * * *

“I expected to find you here,” Frank Stone said. He handed Brendan a piping hot cup of coffee. Although Stone claimed he didn’t get visions, he always seemed to turn up where trouble was brewing. The two men continued down the sidewalk, turned a corner and entered a narrow alleyway.

Brendan recognized the alleyway from his vision.

It was the same alleyway where—

No. He didn’t want to think about that.

“It’s hard to imagine that thirty-four years ago we found you over there.” Stone pointed toward a dumpster.

“How should I remember that?” Brendan said irritably. “I was a damned helpless newborn.” It wasn’t until his mid-twenties before he learned the date he was “found” and the circumstances of his first years of life.

“Damien once told me Lady Czarina insisted she name me Fish because I was born a Pisces,” he said as a few of the memories that he kept carefully locked away seeped back to the surface.

Stone snarled at the mention of Czarina’s name. “Damien would have never given you to her to raise if we’d known what she was going to do.”

The faded sign, ‘Lady Czarina’s Mystical Curios’ swung above a boarded up storefront in the alleyway.

“It took us twenty years to find you,” Stone said. “But we never gave up. Never would have, either. We protect our own.”

Brendan knew Damien and now Stone, the leader of their motley group would put their lives on the line for anyone of them. But that still didn’t make him happy. He’d much rather be enjoying the morning with the sex kitten who’d picked him up at the bar last night than freezing his ass off in this alleyway that stank of sour milk and used kitty litter.

He’d much rather be working up a sweat while—

Suddenly, he was back in his bed with a warm hand curled around his cock.

He groaned knowing that that damned vision was about to hit him...
again
.

* * * * *

“Has someone been shifting the dimensions in this area?” Brendan demanded as he took the cup of coffee from Frank Stone who’d once again joined him as he entered the damp, stinky alleyway. “It’s taken me nearly all night to get here, and you know I only live five blocks away.”

“That would be our target,” Stone said. He sounded grumpy as hell about it.

“Our target? A New One?” That didn’t make any sense. “She is a New One, right? She doesn’t know who we are or
what
she is?”

“She doesn’t know anything,” Stone confirmed.

“Then how in the hell is she pulling off trans-dimensional shifts?” It took Brendan four years to master the skill, and he was considered a freaking prodigy.

“I don’t know how it’s possible. Perhaps she’s improvising because she can sense that her life’s at risk. I do know this, though—
the darkness
senses her. And it’s intrigued.”

Brendan rubbed the back of his neck. His head ached worse than a hangover, an aftereffect from getting slammed with that damned vision over and over and over. “That’s why I’m here, I suppose. I just hope I can stick around long enough to grab onto her this time.”