Nothing but some leftover drops of liquid. “You still in there?”
“Don’t you mean am I concussed and battered?” she yelled at him, her anger echoing in his ear.
Damn. “Look. I’m doing my best here, okay? I’m still new to this. Just give me a minute to think.”
And then it hit him. I Dream of Jeannie. He put the bottle back to his lips and talked into it. “Did you ever watch I Dream of Jeannie? You know the show with Larry Hagman and the hot blonde in those fluffy pants?”
There was that rasp of a sigh again. “I know this is an admission I’ll regret, but, yeah. I arranged my pillows on my bed to look like the inside of Jeannie’s bottle, and if you only knew at this very moment how familiar I am with fluffy pants. So, what of it, expert?”
He didn’t remember a whole lot about the show other than the cute blonde with the ponytail, but he remembered a little something . . . It was a feeble suggestion at this point, but it was all he had until he could locate those women. “Do you remember how Major Nelson got Jeannie out of the bottle?”
“I can’t remember. I only know that if you don’t get me out of here soon, I’m going to asphyxiate from the stench, and it won’t matter if I get out of here.”
Sloan slid down in the front seat of his car when he noticed customers of the convenience store were staring at him while he talked into a bottle like some nut out on a day pass from the crazy house. “He rubbed the bottle.”
He heard her scoff. “Weak, Sloan Flaherty. Weak.”
Rolling his tongue along the inside of his cheek, he pressed the bottle to his lips. “Got a better plan?”
She sighed a sigh that whispered in his ear, sending a chill along his spine. “No. So go ahead. Rub away.”
Heh.
“Hang on to something, then. Things might get bumpy.” Without waiting for an answer, Sloan put the bottle between his two hands and gave it a brisk rub, then set it on the passenger seat.
And waited.
His nostrils flared. Was that the scent of beer and stale cigarettes filling the interior of his car? His head swung around just as his car began to rock like they’d hit an eight point five on the Richter.
Sloan grabbed for the steering wheel, leaning forward and clinging to it with one hand while protecting the bottle on the seat with the other. The violent shaking lifted the front end of the car right off its wheels. It humped the paved parking lot like a lover, lifting up and slamming back down, over and over.
And then she was there. In the passenger seat beside him.
A disheveled, raven-haired pixie with cigarette butts stuck to her chin-length hair and a crushed beer can in the purse she clung to.
Wearing sapphire blue harem pants and a matching wisp of satin bra.
Multicolored smoke surrounded her, then drifted away and disappeared, leaving glittery rainbow trails.
Her mouth, red and plump, fell open as her light blue eyes met his, glazed and shiny.
Sloan’s mouth fell open for a moment, too. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected her to look like, but it wasn’t the cute little package she’d turned out to be. Though, definitely not his type, he liked ’em leggy and blonde. Yes. That was what he liked. Or had liked.
Sloan was the first to react. He put a hand on her shoulder, giving it a light squeeze, noticing her skin warm and supple beneath his fingertips. “Jeannie? Are you okay?”
Her wide eyes fixed on him, and she visibly cringed at the touch of his hand, but recovered quickly. “You’re the werewolf?”
Sloan gave her a cocky grin. “You wanna see the proof?”
Jeannie shook her head hard. The glint of the store’s display light through the windshield caught the chocolate and red highlights in her wavy hair and highlighted her cute nose. “Where the hell are my clothes and what is this?” she asked, plucking at the filmy pants covering her shapely thighs, then lifting her feet to reveal jewel-encrusted slippers, pointy toed and tipped with tassels. “I look like MC Hammer!” she virtually shouted, spitting the veiled material of her fez from her mouth.
“Whoomp, there it is.”
“No. That’s ‘Can’t Touch This,’ wolf man.”
He reared his head back and laughed for the third time that night. “That’s werewolf.”
“Not laughing here.” She threw her arms over her chest with a shiver.
“Maybe it was a parting gift from your friend?” Sloan guessed, pulling off his jacket and draping it along the back of her seat for her to use. “I don’t know. Like I said—this”—he waved his hand along her length—her very sexy, rounded length—“isn’t our specialty. Anyway, you’re out of the bottle, and that’s all that matters. Are you okay? I mean, physically?”
Jeannie’s return expression was bland when she burrowed into his coat, pulling it tight to her chest. “Is anyone ever really the same after being pushed through an opening the size of a donut hole only to end up wearing a fez?” She flicked the hat on her head with two fingers.
Sloan chuckled. “You make a valid point. So, I guess that’s it, right? You’re out of the bottle. Mission accomplished. Go team.” He held his fist forward for her to knock. This ought to shut Marty up.
Jeannie’s eyes were still glassy, but she managed to knock fists with him with a weak stab and a slight shudder of her shoulders.
“You want a ride back to your car?” He reached for the gearshift to put it into reverse.
She nodded her head affirmatively. “Yes, master,” was her throaty, sinfully enticing reply.
Sloan kept his foot on the brake and cocked his head in surprised confusion. “I said, do you want a ride back to your car?”
“Yes, maaaaster,” came out of her mouth once more, only this time in a warbled almost cry while her lips twisted in distaste.
Sloan paused with a frown. “Did you just call me master? Master?” Very. Kinky.
It was clear she was struggling to keep her lips from moving, but it was as though some invisible entity were forcing the phrase from her lips. “Yes, master,” she all but spat.
Now her eyes weren’t just glazed. They were glazed and wide with shock and maybe even some horror, if he was reading the drop of her jaw right. Jeannie clapped a hand over her mouth with such force, it echoed in the car.
Okay, this had gone from a little weird—because let’s face it, he knew weird—to full-on whacked. Wherever this was going, he wasn’t going with. She was alive. She didn’t have any discernible injuries, and excluding the strange way she’d come by her cute outfit, no paranormal abilities. It was time to call this rodeo. No way was he revealing what he’d thought earlier.
Jeannie blinked, then frowned, clearly choosing her words with caution. “I’d like to go home now,” she whimpered around her fist. “Please.”
“Home. I’m on it.” Lifting his foot off the brake, Sloan backed out of the parking lot and made a beeline back toward the house where he’d found her. They rode in relative silence, Jeannie tucking her purse and his jacket to her once barely covered breasts and Sloan trying to keep his eyes off them.
Woman in crisis, ass. No breast watching for you.
They slid to a halt right back where they started. Simultaneously, they reached for their respective door handles, Jeannie’s hand shaky, Sloan’s impatient to get out and get her safely to her car before anything else happened.
He made his way around to her side of the car, placing his hand at her elbow and catching a whiff of the fruity scent she wore. Sloan plucked a lingering cigarette butt from her hair with gentle fingers. “Where’s your car, Jeannie? Give me the keys. I’ll go get it for you.”
She tipped her purse up to the streetlamp and pulled out her keys, handing them to him, hesitance in her eyes. “It’s just outside of the back gate.” She breathed a sigh of evident relief that her statement
didn’t include the word master.
“Why don’t you wait in the car where it’s warm?” he suggested from over his shoulder. If he hurried, he could still catch the last half of the game.
Footsteps sounded behind him. He paused and turned to find Jeannie to the rear of him, her heels visibly digging into the pavement, her body at an awkward slant. “Did you hear me? You can wait in the car.”
She wobbled, putting her hands out to steady herself. “Oh, I heard you just fine. Apparently, my feet don’t have their listening ears on.”
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, rocking back on his heels. “Your feet?” Now what? Had they sprouted wings? At least that would have some paranormal qualities to it.
“You heard me. My feet aren’t cooperating. Each time you take a step, my feet literally mirror your footsteps, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
“That’s crazy,” he replied, sarcasm seeping into his words before he could prevent it.
She crossed her arms over her chest, the arms of his jacket hanging over her hands. “You’d know crazy, now wouldn’t you, expert?”
Sloan threw his hands up in defeat and turned to stomp off to find her car. The faster he got her into it, the faster he could go home.
But the echo of her slippers stalked his ears. Sloan pivoted on his heel to find her but a couple hundred feet from him.
Jeannie’s eyes narrowed, glittering in the glow of the lamplight with an I-told-you-so glint to them.
Rolling his tongue along his cheek, he took a step backward to test her theory.
As though someone were pushing her from behind, she teetered forward, fighting the unwanted movement of her feet. When she began to stumble, Sloan rushed forward, catching her so she wouldn’t crash to the hard pavement.
Jeannie slumped in his arms with a growl of frustration, bracing her hands on his forearms. Their bodies pressed closer, making Sloan inhale sharply. He set her from him with a hard glance. “I think we have a problem.”
“Ya think, master?” The fatal word flew from her mouth like a bullet, crashing through her clenched teeth. She screamed then, her face turning a shade of red Sloan couldn’t remember seeing before.
That was just before she disappeared in a cloud of perfumed, lavender-colored smoke.
Sloan waved away the smoke, and when it cleared, he was still alone.
This paranormal incident was brought to you by the words yes and master.
CHAPTER
2
“Is this outfit some kind of pathetic ploy for attention, Jeannie Carlyle?” Betzi, her menu planner and chef for Cee-Gee Catering, drawled the question from her position on Jeannie’s moss green couch.
The surface was covered in boxes of sales receipts and client orders Jeannie could never find the time to organize. Betzi swung her legs over the arm of the sofa with a yawn, casually flipping through the current issue of Cosmo.
When Jeannie, who was still marveling at the technique with which she’d arrived on her doorstep, Sloan strangely in tow, didn’t answer, Betzi peered over the top of her magazine, a smirk on her face, her light brown eyes dancing with amusement. “Well? Don’t give me the eyeball. Answer the question. Do you need some love or something? Because I have to tell you, boss, I’m kind of tired tonight—it was that damned yoga instructor that did it to me. Well, that and all his downward-facing dog. He has so much energy. Sexy as hell, but phew—much work. Oh, and the twins are in your bedroom—snarling and, I’m sure, taking great pleasure in eating those fluffy stripper thongs you got at the flea market.”
Jeannie shot Betzi the most infuriated glare her eyeballs would allow without falling out of her head. Tonight was not the night to hear about another of Betzi’s sexual escapades—most especially if it involved downward-facing dog and a sweaty yoga instructor.
When she’d managed to poof herself back to her brownstone’s front door amidst this new smoke-and-mirrors technique she’d acquired, she’d burst through the door to her friend’s astonished gazes, introduced Sloan, acquiring more astonished gazes, and proceeded to explain her arrival and the preceding nightmare of her bottle captivity.
So it was an explanation that was just this shy of outlandish? Surely they knew her well enough to know she’d never make something like this up . . .
Jeannie spread her arms wide, indicating her flimsy ensemble and being extra careful to keep her back to Sloan. “Of course this is a ploy for attention, Betzi Cable. First, there’s my festive fez—what about that doesn’t scream I want attention? Then there’s my harem pants. Because I’m all about absolutely anything that will show off all the cellulite on my ass and how so not firm my abs are.”
She pushed Sloan’s jacket out of the way and pinched at the small roll of flesh exposed just under her ribs, making a face. “And who doesn’t want to flaunt their miniscule, thirty-four B fun bags in this armor they call a push-up bra? Fun bags that closely resemble a can of freshly popped dinner rolls all oozing out the sides?”
“Ohhh, but it’s such pretty material—all that gauze . . . So delicate, and look at the intricacy of the waistband of your MC Hammer pants. I mean, you just don’t run into that kind of embroidery anymore these days,” Charlene, Jeannie’s assistant muttered in her best divert-the-crazy-in-this-situation tone.
Usually her lyrical Australian accent soothed Jeannie. Tonight, it just made her want to throw her mate on the barbie. Clearly, they weren’t getting the picture here. She had a 911 on her hands.
Charlene tweaked the leg of Jeannie’s harem pants and forced a bright grin. “And those shoes, mate?” She nodded her thumbs-up. “To. Die. For. So authentic.”
Jeannie let out a puff of pent-up air and planted her hands on her hips in a frustrated gesture. “Right, because in my desperate ploy for attention, I definitely want my attention-grabbing outfit to have only the most intricate embroidery.”
Charlene gnawed on her lip—one of her many nervous reactions when she didn’t know what to say. “You know, I could’ve stayed home. I had plenty of work to do for that beast of a bride, Willow Sanders. I didn’t have to come over to make sure Betzi didn’t suffocate the twins with a pillow or give them too much canned dog food. You do remember what happens then, don’t you? It leads to oose-lay oopy-pay.” She whispered the words, her eyes flitting to the floor in shame. “It took us three cleanings with that carpet cleaner and four gallons of solution to get the mess all up the last time she fed them her leftovers from The Dawg House. I was just trying to help,” she huffed, clearly offended by Jeannie’s harsh tone.
“You know how you can help, Charlene?” Jeannie asked, her voice tight, her temper flaring.
Charlene’s face instantly brightened, her wringing hands stilled. Sweet and genuine, she answered, “Name it. I’m in. Whatever you need, and I do mean whatever.”
Jeannie narrowed her eyes in the vicinity of the alleged werewolf Sloan Flaherty, gorgeously quiet while he watched the women interact. Waving a hand in his general direction, she snorted. “Tell me what to do with him.”
Betzi dropped the magazine on the couch and smiled in Sloan’s direction with a coquettish slant to her lips. She smoothed her pixie-cut dark hair behind her ears and slipped to the edge of the cushion with a wink. “I’ll tell you what I’d like to do with him, but it’s probably not fit for polite company. Oh, and Ms. Charlene Gibbons, who blushes if you use the word vagina. Now, usually, that wouldn’t stop me, but seeing as you ran rampant with this fascinating, though maybe a little outdated, maneuver in order to nab a man—I’m sticking to the employer/employee code and keeping my all-out lust for hot stuff on the inside.” She made a circle with her finger around her lower torso. “But a warning for all future endeavors. The next time you go on a long overdue man spree, leaving me and my lady parts behind to babysit Benito and Boris, and you don’t bring me home any l
eftover doggie bags of the male persuasion, I’m breaking up with you and going to work for that pig Aleksi.”
Jeannie’s eyes rolled upward. She gritted her teeth and fought for composure. Not an easy task in harem pants. “I cannot believe you’d threaten me with that cheesy Russian rip-off of Sandra Lee. He makes those crescent rolls from scratch like Pillsbury is suddenly making Big Macs. And I did not go on a man spree. I told you what happened,” she insisted, peevish in tone.
That Betzi and Charlene were having trouble believing her explanation for showing up here in this getup with a man she couldn’t get more than a few hundred feet from without being forced directly back toward his vicinity by some invisible force came as no surprise.
She was having trouble believing it, too. But still . . .
Betzi rose, waving a dismissive hand at Jeannie before sauntering toward Sloan, who was still looking rather confused, and was now sitting on the ottoman that matched her burgundy chair, covered in her almost identical dogs Boris’s and Benito’s hair. “Yeah, yeah. There was a bottle of booze, and a bald Aladdin guy with a single braid down his back, and he wore parachute pants, and a phone call and some sort of paranormal something or other and then him. The, uh, werewolf,” she enunciated in slow syllables. “Look, friend, here’s the thing. If this isn’t a ploy for attention, or some whacky way of acting out slash losing your marbles because of all work and no play or a date in all the time I’ve worked for you makes for a dull, maybe even mental Jeannie Carlyle—then just say it. Never mind. I’ll say it. Your hormones finally caught up with you. No shame in that, boss.”
Jeannie began to protest, but Betzi held up her hand and snapped her fingers together while Charlene’s eyes darted between her boss and her coworker with nervousness. She backed away, stumbling over a throw rug before righting herself and biting her lip.
“Look, you don’t need a reason to admit you have needs, mi amiga. I always say if your hormones are calling—answer the damn phone. But you definitely didn’t have to make up this elaborate story about being trapped inside a gin bottle because you want to sleep with a guy who likes to role-play and has a fetish for Barbara Eden. There’s nothing wrong with a little kinkity-kink. I’m just going to be thankful you didn’t hook up with a man-child who likes to wear diapers. There’s also nothing wrong with a one-night stand. Don’t be ashamed of your needs, Jeannie. Own those bitches.” Betzi punched the air with a slow, unenthusiastic fist for emphasis.
The Accidental Genie Page 3