The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance

by Trisha Telep

  One

  Freetown, New York, present day.

  Jen Cassaday pushed aside her grandmother’s yellowed lace curtains and stared out at the stranger in her front yard. He stood, legs apart, arms hanging easy by his sides, head tipped back as he studied the house. Faded jeans, scuffed leather jacket over a dark brown T-shirt, dark hair, hanging in long, ragged layers. From this distance she could see great bone structure and a frown. Maybe it was the frown that kept him from being pretty. Or maybe it was the scar that ran across his chin, an angry white line against tanned skin. Either way, he was something to look at.

  In one hand he held a newspaper, and the sight of it made Jen’s pulse twitch. He was not at all what she’d meant to attract when she placed an ad for a handyman. And with any luck, he wasn’t here about that.

  “Make your own luck,” she muttered, automatically quoting one of her mother’s favourite phrases. Then she snorted. What else besides the promise of work would bring him all the way out here? She was miles from town.

  Instinctively, she looked beyond him to the dark woods that flanked the field across the highway. Her skin tingled and her belly twisted in a tight little knot. The sensation had repeated itself over and over in the past few days, becoming stronger and more frequent. The sixth sense that was her legacy warned her: something bad was coming. She glanced back at the guy in her yard, watched him fold the newspaper and tuck it into his coat pocket, and wondered if he was the source of her unease.

  With a sigh, she let the curtain fall back in place. Angling on her crutches, she headed down the stairs just as his knock sounded, hard and bold. She took her time. No sense rushing. It was haste that had landed her in this mess in the first place. She’d taken a tumble down the stairs and ended up with the terrible triad: two torn ligaments and a torn meniscus in her knee. And in Jen’s opinion, they were taking their sweet time about healing, though her specialist disagreed.

  “Your recovery is remarkable, Jen. I’ve never seen damage like this heal without surgery. Certainly not this quickly. It’s something for the medical journals.” His comments had made her laugh. Her capacity to heal was nothing compared to some of her relatives.

  Setting the rubber tips of her crutches, she leaned her weight forwards and dragged open the front door. The sun was at her visitor’s back, and for a second Jen blinked against the glare. Then her eyes adjusted and she raised her head to meet his gaze. She was 5 feet 10 inches and she had to tip her head back to look in his face. It was an unfamiliar experience. Up close, she saw the dangerous edge to him. It was in the way he held himself, the tightness at the corners of his mouth, the way his eyes - a blue so clear and bright she’d never seen the like - took in every nuance of his surroundings in a glance.

  “You here about the job?” she asked, wanting him to say no, knowing he’d say . . .

  “Yes. Name’s Daemon Alexander.” He offered his hand.

  “Jen Cassaday.” She didn’t see a way around it, so she shook briefly. His palm was callused, his grip pleasantly firm. Something inside her yawned and stretched, an unwanted awareness of him as a man. As though in silent response, his grip tightened ever so slightly. She pulled her hand away as quickly as she could without seeming rude.

  For weeks she’d had that ad in the paper and he was the first person to apply. No surprise there. Everyone in town whispered about the haunted Cassaday place, and they were halfway right, only the elements that haunted these walls weren’t the spirits of the dead, but a different power.

  Daemon Alexander either hadn’t heard the talk of hauntings, or he didn’t care. He wasn’t from town; she’d have recognized him if he was. In a place this small, you got to know faces if not names, particularly a face like his. He was a stranger passing through, most likely in need of cash. Her gaze slid to the rusted-out clunker in the driveway. Cars weren’t her thing, but she guessed it for something American-built and decades old.

  “You have painting experience?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  “It’s an old house. Some of the walls need repair and I’d like to go with plaster to match the original rather than drywall. I don’t suppose you have experience with plastering old houses?”

  “I do,” he said again. “I like old things.” He sounded amused.

  She wasn’t getting any sense that he was evil, and she knew that if he were she’d spot it. She always spotted it. Her built-in early warning system had never failed her.

  “I have references,” he offered, angling his body so that she’d catch his arm in the door if she decided to slam it, as though he sensed her hesitation and wanted to hedge his bets. But he didn’t infringe on her space, didn’t step inside. She caught the faint scents of leather and citrus shaving cream. They lured her to lean a little closer, breathe a little deeper. “I spruced up Mrs Bailey’s porch last week. And Doc Hamilton had me paint his office the week before that. You can give them a call.”

  “How long have you been in town?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “How long you planning to stay?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Till the job’s done.”

  For a second, she had the odd thought that he wasn’t referring to a job working for her. He was talking about something else entirely. The air between them crackled, an electric sizzle, and she let her senses reach for him. Not sight or smell, but her inner senses, the ones that knew things most people didn’t.

  She came up empty. There was no good reason for her to turn him down. She wasn’t getting any sort of bad vibe from him. He had references and she desperately needed the help, especially with her knee torn up. Still, she almost told him no.

  “Eight tomorrow morning,” she said at last. “If your references check out, you can start then. If not—” she shrugged “you can head back the way you came, Mr Alexander.”

  “Daemon,” he said, softly. “Call me Daemon.” He studied her with those clear, lake-blue eyes, and something hot flared in their depths. She felt the lure of that heat, and already regretted her offer. The last thing she needed was a to-die-for handyman hanging around and turning on the charm.

  Either he sensed her preference that he not look at her like he wanted to take a taste, or he had similar thoughts to hers about mixing business with pleasure, because his gaze shuttered and he stepped away.

  “See you at eight.”

  Jen hobbled out onto the porch as he walked to his car and drove away. Even then, she didn’t go back inside. An odd sense of expectation held her in place. The air felt . . . wrong. Deep inside, restlessness stirred, an edginess that coiled tight and left her feeling that something was trying to crawl to the surface. Her every sense tingled as she looked again to the thick forest that banded the flat field across the road.

  The sun was warm and bright, but a chill slithered through her. Because there was someone out there, in the woods. Watching.

  Three days later, Daemon was up on a step stool in the parlour, putting blue paint up the wall to the ceiling, when the stumping of Jen’s crutches announced her arrival. The air hummed with an electric charge, a zing of power that ramped up a notch the closer she got. He knew that hum. It heralded magic, and right now it was purring like a stroked cat.

  Which made no sense, because Jen Cassaday wasn’t a sorcerer or a demon or anything in between. She was a human woman. An incredibly attractive one with her long runner’s legs and her pretty brown eyes, her sleek, dark hair that hung to her shoulders in a heavy curtain and the freckles that dusted across her pert nose. He had an urge to kiss those freckles, to peel her white T-shirt over her head to see if they sprinkled her chest and the tops of her breasts. And those thoughts were way off limits.

  “Hey,” she said. “Lunch is ready.”

  Then she headed for the kitchen, the air around her crackling. That was a mystery, because a human woman couldn’t cause the slightest twitch in the current of magic that crossed dimensions. He knew that sorcerers called it the continuum or dragon current. Persona
lly, he didn’t bother to name it, though in the beginning, he’d called it his own personal hell.

  His gaze slid to the window and the forest beyond. Maybe it wasn’t Jen that affected the current. Maybe it was something else. A demon, here in this small, pretty town?

  That was exactly what he was here to find out. He’d tracked the thing to Liberty and then lost it. His gut was telling him it had come here.

  He wrapped his brushes to keep them from drying out and tidied his work area, then washed his hands and face before joining Jen in the kitchen. She’d made him a turkey sandwich on a bun with Boston lettuce and some sort of sprouts.

  “Thank you,” he said as he took a seat. He enjoyed having meals with her, talking to her. Hers was an easy sort of companionship.

  “I didn’t know if you preferred mayo or mustard, so I took a chance on both. I suppose I should have asked.”

  “I’m fine with both,” he said, taking the top off the bun and carefully scraping the sprouts onto the plate. He looked up to find her watching him with a faint smile. He shrugged. “Some things a man—” or a creature that was more monster than man “—isn’t meant to eat.”

  She laughed. “I feel that way about tomatoes.”

  “Do you? I have a fondness for tomatoes on a turkey sandwich.”

  “I’ll remember that.” She took a bite of her own sandwich. They chatted about easy things. Light things. The weather. The progress of his work for her. Then she mentioned that her grandmother had loved the wallpaper in the bedroom under the eaves, and she wished there was a way to save it.

  “This house. It was your grandmother’s?”

  “And my mother’s and mine.”

  The wistfulness in her voice reminded him just how short human lives could be.

  “You miss them.” He knew about that, knew what it was like to miss loved ones from his past. It was hard for an immortal to form friendships with humans, hard to watch them age or sicken and die. He almost asked her how they had died, but ancient, ingrained manners from a time long past prevented him from prying. Some instinct made him reach across and close his hand over hers. “They never leave us, the people we love. They come to us in dreams and memories that keep them alive as long as we’re alive.”

  He let more pain leak into those words than he had meant to.

  Her gaze shot to his and, for a frozen moment, they just stared at each other. Then she pulled her hand from beneath his and glanced at the window. “Looks like something’s coming this way.”

  Following her eyes, he saw the storm clouds - the horizon. But it was something else that made him wary - a wrongness, a foulness that oozed towards them like an oil slick. Premonition slithered through his limbs and set the dark creatures that were part of him quivering with excitement. Beneath his skin, the trinity stirred, restless.

  Yeah, something was coining — a storm that had nothing to do with the weather.

  Two

  Over the next two weeks, Jen watched her house bloom as Daemon worked at the repairs. Problem was, she hadn’t expected to be so drawn to him. He was there, in her space, tall and broad and distracting. She caught herself glancing at him again and again, watching the play of muscle under smooth tanned skin, asking him questions just to hear him speak in that low, sexy voice.

  She could hear him now, whistling as he worked in the bedroom under the eaves, the one that had been her grandmother’s favourite. The sun had set at least an hour past and creeping shadows darkened the hall. Pausing, she flipped the light switch, and gave a hiss of frustration as she realized the bulb must be burned out.

  She made it to the base of the stairs when her insides knotted up tight. Breathing through the cramp, she rested her weight on the crutches, waiting for the twisting coil of pain to pass. Her body was changing, fighting for life. A new life. The one she needed to pass through an agony of fire to achieve. She sighed, wishing there was an easier way. For weeks, the pain inside her had flared and peaked at random times. She’d come to think that it was a good thing that she was on crutches. At least the sudden shards of agony didn’t send her to her knees. But as the pain passed and she contemplated the darkened stairs, she decided that, at the moment, her crutches were a hindrance. They made climbing the steps to talk to Daemon a bother, so she called his name.

  She waited, looking up, and frowned. An odd blue light shimmered from the room under the eaves, the one Daemon was working in today. A spotlight of some sort? She meant to ask him about it when he stepped onto the landing, but her words died in her throat. For a long moment, she simply stared. She still hadn’t gotten used to the physical impact of seeing him in her home, especially not the way he looked right now. He was bathed in shadow, his dark hair tousled, his jeans slung low on his hips. A white tank top hugged his muscled torso, and she could see dark tattoos on his skin: a dragon on his left shoulder, another on his right biceps, the hint of a third on the bulge of his pectoral where the tank top dipped.

  “You’re working late today,” she observed.

  “Just want to finish this room.”

  Her gaze flicked beyond him to the dark hallway. There was no sign of the blue light now. Odd.

  “I’m heading out to do some grocery shopping. I want to make it to the Shop Rite before they close at nine. If you’re done before I get back, leave by the side door. It’ll lock behind you.” Turning away, she positioned her crutches to make her way to the door. “See you.”

  “Jen.” His voice, low and rough, stopped her. The way he said her name made her shiver.

  “Mm-hmm?” She glanced back over her shoulder. He’d hunkered down at the top of the stairs so he wouldn’t lose sight of her. God, he was gorgeous. And he wasn’t for her. No man was for her. Not right now. Not ever. A different future waited for her and it could never include a mortal man.

  “It’s dark out. Do you . . .” He raked his fingers through his hair. “Do you want me to take you to town?”

  Wow. Chivalrous. “Not necessary. I’m a big girl, Daemon. I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time. And, hey,” she laughed, “it isn’t as if I need to watch out for monsters.”

  She was almost at the door before she heard the creak of the floorboard behind her. The air hummed a second before she felt Daemon’s hands on her, his long fingers closing around her upper arms. He steadied her, his body hard and hot at her back. Her pulse slammed into red line.

  How had he made it down the stairs so quickly? How had she not heard his approach?

  He stepped around to face her, his hands skimming the skin of her upper arms, as though he was loath to let her go. Her head fell back and she stared into his eyes, saw something there that made her shiver. Something primal.

  “There are all sorts of monsters in this world, Jen,” he murmured, “and you do need to watch for them.”

  Her breath came in a jagged gasp. She wet her lips, and his gaze dropped to her mouth, hot, intent. She thought he would kiss her. A part of her wanted him to, wanted to know the feel and taste of him.

  He smiled, a dark, feral baring of white teeth. “You need to watch out for things inside your home, too.”

  For a second, she thought he meant himself, that he was telling her he was some sort of monster. Then he gestured to the ground and she looked over her shoulder at a dark lump: the rolled-up rug that usually ran the length of the hall. In the gloom, she hadn’t noticed it there.

  “I moved the rug so I could get my supplies in and out easier,” he said. “You almost caught your crutches on it.”

  And he’d saved her. So she’d been wrong. His actions were chivalrous and necessary, otherwise she’d be on the floor in a pained heap right now.

  “Thanks.” She pressed her lips together, willed her pulse to settle. “My saviour.” She laughed.

  He didn’t. “I’m no one’s saviour, Jen.” A heartbeat, two, then he brushed a strand of hair from her cheek. “Drive safe.” His tone was nonchalant, as though he hadn’t just moved faster than he ought to, ha
dn’t held her close enough that she could smell the scent of his skin, hadn’t made her ache for his kiss.

  A half-hour later, Jen used her hip to bump her cart as she hobbled along the aisle of the Shop Rite on Route 52. Mrs Hambly - an old friend of her grandmother’s - and the high school maths teacher, Gail Merchant, blocked the way.

  “Terrible tragedy. Terrible. Things like that don’t happen here,” Mrs Hambly insisted. She plucked a grape from a bunch, popped it in her mouth, grimaced, then helped herself to another from a different bunch.

  Jen wondered what tragedy had Mrs Hambly all worked up today. Last week it had been the kids lurking outside the variety store, and the week before that it was the lack of personal service at the ATM.

  Planting her crutches, Jen added a head of lettuce and a couple of tomatoes to her cart. Ahead of her, Gail absently filled a bag with peaches, her attention on Mrs Hambly as she asked in hushed tones, “Does Sheriff Hale think she was killed there, or the body brought from somewhere else?”

  “Didn’t say,” Mrs Hambly snorted. “Maybe he doesn’t want to give anything away. Maybe that’s part of the investigation.”

  Jen stared at the two women in shock. “Killed?” she echoed. “Who? Where?”

  “ Sheriff fished a woman - well, actually, parts of her - out of the stream that runs through the woods between your place and the Peteri’s this morning,” Mrs Hambly said bluntly. “Naked. Dead. You didn’t know?”

  “No.” Jen shook her head, horrified. The forest between her place and the Peteri’s stretched for miles, and somewhere in those miles a woman had died. Parts of her. Which meant that parts were still missing. She shuddered in horror, not willing to ask.

  “He thinks she was in the water for about two weeks,” Gail added.

  Two weeks. Memories drifted like smoke, coalescing into solid recollection of the afternoon that Daemon had first turned up on her doorstep. After he’d left her that day, she’d sensed something in the woods, watching her. Something dark and frightening.