Text copyright ©2017 by the Author.
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Bewitching Birgit
by Tianna Xander
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my husband, Kevin, who has always believed in me. I couldn’t have asked for a better mate. Special thanks to Susan and the group of ladies who edited and critiqued the manuscript for me. You are the best!
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
About the Author
Chapter One
“Where the hell am I?” Birgit leaned forward and peered through her windshield at nothing. The sparse landscape seemed to go on forever. Maybe she should have turned left instead of right at the last turnoff. “This is definitely not Roswell, that’s for sure.”
She wasn’t about to complain, though. She needed to find someone to fix her car. The engine had started missing an hour or so ago and then it died. Twice! Birgit sighed with relief when she saw a small town in the distance. She was glad she had finally found some semblance of civilization.
Birgit headed toward the town. The car chugged, coughing and sputtering the whole way. Something was definitely was wrong with the old clunker.
Birgit glanced left and right, searching for somewhere to pull off. A service station would have been ideal. Do towns this small even have service stations?
“Who are you kidding? In a town like this, you’ll be lucky to find a self-serve gas station.” She glanced down at her fuel gauge.
A quarter of a tank. Her stomach clenched. If they didn’t have a gas station here, she’d be stuck. A block down the road, she glanced right and saw a sign for Brewer’s Garage and Gas Up.
“Thank goodness!” She turned down the street and headed for the garage, praying her car would make it the last few hundred feet.
With a sputtering choke, the vehicle backfired. The sound reverberated through the town like a shot from a cannon. The loud bang echoed off the surrounding mountains as smoke—or was that steam—rolled out from under her hood while she turned into the station.
Two figures strode out through the smoke, waving their hands in front of them as they spoke a language that seemed foreign to her.
“Oh, God.” Birgit rested her head against the steering wheel. No wonder there wasn’t anything in this town. She’d somehow driven into Mexico. Though, how she got through border control without stopping, was anyone’s guess. “Why didn’t you invest in that GPS system like Angie suggested?” If she had, she would be in Roswell with her problems, not stuck here—wherever here was.
The voices drew closer, speaking the strange language that didn’t sound like any Spanish she’d ever heard before. It was obvious by the timbre they were male and by the glimpse she got as they strode through the smoke still drifting around the car, they were both well over six-feet tall. The strange language stopped as the men reached her driver’s door.
“Can we help you, ma’am?” the taller one asked in heavily accented English.
He leaned down and rested his forearms on the edge of her window. He didn’t look Hispanic with his blond hair and ice blue eyes. His intense stare discomfited her when he glanced down at the ungodly mess in her car.
“Um… Yes. Yes, you can.” She pulled the keys from the ignition and handed them to the man. “First, I need you to tell me where the hell I am. Then, I need you to haul this piece of crap to the junkyard, if you have one around here.” She pushed the trunk release, opened her door and got out of the car.
The two men stood staring at her as she strode around to get her things out of the trunk. “Why not have us fix it, instead?” the shorter one asked as he leaned in and pulled the hood release. “We do have a full service station. We fix cars all the time.”
“Don’t bother.” She yanked her small suitcase from the trunk, set it on the ground and reached in for the larger one. “My last mechanic told me that the next time it died on me, he wouldn’t be able to fix it. Stick a fork in it. It’s done.”
Why couldn’t the damned thing have died on her before she drove this distance? Why couldn’t it have died in San Diego? Better yet, why couldn’t it have died before she bought it and got stuck with the damned thing?
“Every car can be repaired, ma’am. It’s only a matter of how much work it will take to fix it.”
“Yeah, and how much money it will cost,” she muttered.
Reaching inside, the taller one stuck the keys into the ignition, dropped the gearshift to neutral and the two men started pushing the car into their shop.
“Give us an hour or so and we’ll tell you if we can repair it.”
“You know what Reno will say.” The other man glanced back at her. “He will say there is no vehicle he cannot mend.”
Birgit snorted, then covered it with a cough. “Okay,” she replied with a shake of her head. “But you’re just wasting your time.”
She turned to pick up her cases, to find another man who resembled the other two, had already picked them up as though they weighed nothing. He headed toward the office of the shop. It must have been the man, Reno, the other two had mentioned.
“We’ll just keep these here, ma’am.” He set them in a corner behind the dirty counter. “Why don’t you head on over to the diner and get yourself something to eat?” He looked her up and down with a grin. “It looks as though you could do with a few good meals.”
What a jerk! Birgit bristled. How dare he say such a thing? The man had no idea how hard she worked just to stay a size eighteen. Everyone in her family was at least her size or bigger.
Her anger must have showed, because the creep smiled at her and winked. “I like the ladies with a bit of extra padding.”
Birgit gaped at him. “A little extra padding?” She had a bit more than that.
“Yep.” He nodded. “You’re a bit small for my tastes, but you’d be perfect for my brother, Reno.”
Hmm… So this isn’t Reno after all? She couldn’t wait to meet the paragon of the mechanical world. Not! The last thing she needed was some caveman from a backward town laying claim on her so far from home. Birgit watched the man work for a few minutes, noticed the resemblance between the three men she’d seen since driving into town, and wondered if they were all brothers.
“Look…” She rested her hands on her hips. “I didn’t come here to hook up with someone.” She crossed her arms with a scowl and tapped her toes with irritation. “In fact, I didn’t mean to come here at all.”
“Accidental meetings can be the best kin
d, sometimes.” He grinned down at her. “If you didn’t want to come here, then why did you?” He stared at her, brow raised.
“I got lost.” She felt a blush creeping up to her cheeks. “I don’t know what happened, but I planned to be in Roswell, right now.”
“Roswell?” His brow furrowed and a faraway expression crossed his face.
“You know,” one of the other men said as he twirled his finger next to his head. “The woo woo place.”
“Hey! That wasn’t nice. Wanting to visit the place, doesn’t make me crazy.” She glared at the other man. “I’m interested in UFO’s. So sue me.”
“Oh!” The man closest to her nodded and then turned to her with a knowing grin. “You turned left when you should have turned right, a while back.”
“I knew it!” She stomped her foot. “I just knew it.” She paced back and forth, for a moment, slapping her forehead with the palm of her hand.
“Relax, ma’am.” He held his hands out in front of him. “We’ll fix your car.”
They all stared at her as though she’d lost her mind. She couldn’t blame them, she supposed. She had just been smacking herself in the head.
“I can’t afford much. I’m telling you, just junk the damned thing.”
“We will fix it and if you can’t afford it, we’ll work something out.”
Birgit had an idea what kind of ideas men could get when a lone woman agreed to work something out.
“As long as it doesn’t include bargaining with my body, I’m all for that.” She rested her hand on her hip. “But don’t get any fresh ideas.”
“It won’t include your body—at least not in the way you might think.”
“Um…”
“Go.” He waved her off as he absently picked the dirt from under his nails with an odd-looking pocket knife. “Eat. Come back in an hour and talk to Reno. He’ll tell you what’s what, then.”
It seemed as though she didn’t have much choice. These men were determined to get her car back on the roads. Her stomach grumbled as she turned toward the door. Maybe she’d go get something to eat, after all.
“Maybe I will go look around town a bit.” She paused at the door. “Can you tell me where a restaurant is?”
Chapter Two
“I’m telling you, you’re going to like this woman.” Ceno leaned under the hood of the car as he fiddled with the computer. “She’s got gleaming red-brown hair, eyes as green as new leaves and a figure you’d appreciate.” A few clanking noises came from his general vicinity before he said, “Ow! Damn it. That hurt.” He shook his hand and cursed in Zolonian. It appeared as though the fool had racked his knuckles on something.
Reno loved the sound of their native tongue, even when it stumbled from the lips of his ignorant brothers. “I don’t think so, brother.” In the few years they’d been stuck on this backward planet, he hadn’t found one woman he’d been attracted to in the least. The idea of finding the one who would bring out the animal in him was ludicrous.
He crawled into the vehicle and stuck his head under the dash. He planned to install another computer as a redundancy to keep the rattletrap of a vehicle running once it left town. If he was smart, he would take it to the woman down the road and ask her to enchant the damned thing to be certain it didn’t break down in the middle of nowhere with a lone woman inside.
Just because he didn’t expect the owner of the vehicle to attract him, didn’t mean he wanted her in danger. The computer slid into place between the air ducts and the heater core. He fastened it with a zip tie and three screws to hold it while he connected the system’s wires into the core.
“You know as well as I do, the odds of finding a compatible woman here, are astronomical.”
He put the thought of women and mates out of his head as he frowned up at the workmanship of the computer. If memory served, this was the last one. They would need gold to make more. They could use copper or silver in a pinch, but those metals corroded, which could cause the part to fail. Gold never corroded. That meant a trip out of Magic. He hated leaving town. The rest of the world was just plain weird.
Would he ever understand the trust humans put into their vehicles? They weren’t put together well at all. Their ship had been in better shape than the best built car on this world and they’d crashed the fargin’ thing six miles from town not quite three years ago because their youngest brother, Deno was an idiot and had no idea what it took to be a pilot. At least they’d crashed near this town.
As it turned out, the people of Magic, New Mexico had their own secrets and had been willing to take in four outsiders who had no business being in their town, let alone on the planet. They would have his eternal gratitude for their kindness.
“Try it now!” Ceno leaned out from under the hood just as Reno climbed out from under the dash.
The car started and ran smoothly. Resting his right foot on the brake pedal, he put the car in gear. As soon as the transmission shifted, it put a load on the tired engine. The piece of shit shuddered like the little yapping dog with the big teeth, down the street, his brother Xeno kept threatening to eat, and then died.
“That didn’t fix it,” Ceno announced.
“What was your first clue?” Reno climbed from the car, straightened to his full height and shook his head. “Why did father stick me in that ship with you three?” He threw his wrench into the toolbox. “Had I been on my own, I would have finished my quest and been home and married by now.” Provided he’d been lucky enough to find a female that would literally bring out the beast in him.
He hated the fact that they had failed their test of manhood by crashing the ship their father had sent them out into the galaxy in order to become experienced Zolon raiders.
Theirs had been an easy enough assignment. Go out, raid a few solar systems, don’t starve to death, or freeze in the cold of space, and then manage to get home safe and sound with a full cargo bay. Instead, they’d gotten themselves stuck here, repairing equipment like a bunch of old women. They should be raiding the resources on this planet, not fixing shit.
“We’re going to have to make some modifications.” He moved over to the tool case they’d pulled from their ship before they’d cannibalized it to make their own vehicles. “Where did the thruster and ionizer go?” He rifled through their other tools.
“They’re in there somewhere.” Ceno shrugged and headed for the office. “I’m going to go learn about the little girl who just happened upon this town, if you’re not going to bother. She’ll be just right for me, once she puts on some weight.”
“You’re not to touch her things.” Reno glanced up with a scowl. “I swear on everything decent, if you so much as look at her bags, I’ll beat the shit out of you. We might be stuck here, but we have no business involving ourselves with the natives.” He still held out slim hope that they would find a way home somehow. Though, to return without a ship and cargo would mean returning in disgrace as weaklings.
“You make it sound as though they’re still stuck in the dark ages,” Ceno complained as he stopped in the doorway leading to the office.
“Aren’t they?” Reno found the tool he’d been searching for and turned back to the woman’s vehicle. “They’ve barely discovered space travel. They still don’t have any type of interstellar ship, and they still can’t get along with each other. What makes you think they’ll get along with the rest of the galaxy?” He replicated a small ion thruster and installed it under her hood. “Hell, they can’t even design a vehicle that lasts more than a few years. If they sent garbage like this into space for any length of time, they’d go extinct real fast.”
He finished the repairs and climbed out from under the hood. Striding around the vehicle, he reached in through the driver’s door and turned the key. The car started with a hum and he put it in gear. It idled as quiet as it should have. It now had ion propulsion. The gas engine would merely idle and operate what pulleys it needed to run the other systems.
No doubt the woman w
ould notice an extreme increase in gas mileage. Though he was certain she would have no complaints.
“Take this down to the witch down the street and have her put some sort of charm on it so no one can find the modifications, should they look for them. It’s bad enough we’re installing them on this major piece of crap. We can’t afford to have someone find out what we’ve done after she leaves town with it.”
“Why can’t you do it?” It wasn’t like Ceno to whine. It was like him to screw things up, but as a rule, he didn’t complain much. “That woman scares me. What kind of creature has green hair?”
“Green? It was purple the last time I saw her.” From what he could see, for the most part, Topper was harmless.
Reno watched as his brother backed out of the garage and sighed. He knew he shouldn’t have installed their parts on the stranger’s car. However, he also knew, the sooner he got her out of town, the faster his brothers would stop trying to get them together.
He loved his brothers, but they could be real pains in the asses when it came to women and his lack of one. In their minds, he was now the patriarch of their small family unit and had a duty to start a new clan here on Earth. As far as Reno was concerned, the human version of hell could freeze over before he would attempt to stick his dick in any human female. He had no desire to break any of them. His hand still worked fine and he planned to keep it that way.
Chapter Three
“You can’t be serious.” Birgit stared at the man who had introduced himself as Ceno Brewer. Tall and blond like the other two men she’d seen working in the garage, he stood behind the counter with the bill in his hand, his expression rather grim.
“I know it’s probably a little higher than you expected, and certainly more than you would like to pay, ma’am, but we need to replace the parts. Hell, Reno didn’t even charge you labor.”
Birgit stared at the man’s unblinking blue eyes, unable to believe he thought the price was too high. If anything, it was way too low. She didn’t think she could, in good conscience, pay such a small amount for the repair.
Magic, New Mexico: Bewitching Birgit (Kindle Worlds Novella) Page 1