Bad Boys of the Night: Eight Sizzling Paranormal Romances: Paranormal Romance Boxed Set

by Jennifer Ashley

  She glanced at him again. She couldn’t help it. Even after all this time, having him in the same room was like sitting next to a power line. She felt him beneath the skin, a low frequency hum that made her hyperaware and jittery.

  He wore a T-shirt that couldn’t hide the thick, corded muscles of his arms and chest. His faded Levi’s hung low on lean hips, drawing her eye down and stirring memories she didn’t want to wake.

  A black and white tattoo covered his right forearm, and a series of colorful ones wrapped his left bicep. His hair was just shy of shaved and a five-o’clock shadow darkened his jaw. At eighteen he’d been walking, talking sex appeal. At thirty-five, he was potent enough to make her swoon. He looked older, harder. A lot less boy, a lot more man. But it was working for him.

  With a start, she realized he’d been watching her, watching him. A hot blush heated her face and she jerked her attention back to her daughter. Fortunately, Analise wasn’t paying attention to anyone else.

  “Did you see your grandmother tonight?” Eddie asked.

  Technically, Grandma Beck was Analise’s great-grandmother, but they’d never bothered with the formal title. Besides, Analise had never even met her.

  “We didn’t see anyone. It was just starting to get dark when we pulled into town and Brendan wanted to see the springs, so we went straight there. It got dark really fast, though, and I didn’t like it out there, by the springs. It was creepy and I had a bad feeling, but Brendan kept talking about how it used to be. He said he’d read some Web page.” She paused, sucked in a shaky breath. “Some stupid Web page he kept going on about. I said I wanted to go and he got mad. He’d been acting really weird for a few a days because of ...”

  She stopped and shook her head.

  “I mean, I think he was stressed about work and that had him uptight.”

  “Laying sod stressed him out?”

  “Mom,” Analise said reproachfully. “Quit being so judgy.”

  Inside, Gracie cringed. They’d had this conversation before, but now, in front of Reilly, Gracie realized for the first time how much she sounded like Grandma Beck. She could feel Reilly’s eyes burning into her, but she didn’t look up.

  “Go on, Analise,” she said softly.

  “We heard something,” Analise said.

  “What?” both Eddie and Gracie asked at the same time.

  “I don’t know. It sounded like ... like ... it was in the hole,” she blurted on a shaky breath.

  “The springs?” Eddie said sharply.

  Analise swallowed and tears began to slide down her face again. Gracie could feel her daughter trembling and wrapped her arms around her.

  “It’s okay. You’re safe, sweetheart.”

  “Why is it so hot in here?” Analise asked.

  Reilly pushed away from the wall and moved to a thermostat by the old-fashioned swinging doors that led to the kitchen. Gracie hadn’t noticed it before. Now she stared in surprise.

  “Grandma Beck put in air-conditioning?” she exclaimed.

  Reilly gave her a sardonic look over his shoulder. “Would it make you feel any better if you knew she set it at ninety-five?”

  Gracie almost laughed.

  “I turned it down earlier.” Reilly paused and frowned at the control. “Who pushed it back up?”

  “Sure as hell wasn’t me,” Eddie said, wiping the sweat off his face with a handkerchief.

  Reilly adjusted the temperature and they all waited, faces tilted up, for the whoosh of air in the vents and the cool to come. At last it did, tepid but promising some relief. Reilly gave the thermostat a suspicious glance and moved back to where he’d stood against the wall.

  “You heard something in the springs,” Eddie prompted. “What did it sound like?”

  “Like there was something down there,” Analise said vehemently. “Something that wanted out. Brendan went to look. I told him not to. I was so scared. It was so ... I told him to come back and then all of a sudden he shouted to run. We got in the truck and started to drive and we saw the lights. We thought it was the town, and we turned, but we couldn’t find the way and ... and ...”

  She glanced from one face to another, as if expecting someone to be able to fill in the blanks for her. Gracie knew they were all thinking the same thing. Dead Lights.

  Technically, it was a nautical term that she’d looked up once in an attempt to understand the reference to the lights everyone in Diablo Springs had seen at one time or another. The closest she could come to an explanation was the floating quality the light behind a port window—shuttered or not—would have when viewed from the shore. Diablo Springs had never been large enough for a boat and there were no shores here—not anymore. The term, however, managed to perfectly represent the fear inspired by the lights that could be seen hovering over the deep dry spring where nothing should ever float again.

  “You saw Dead Lights,” Reilly said calmly.

  Gracie shot him a disapproving look. Now Analise had a name for her overcharged imagination to build upon.

  “Dead Lights are a phenomenon of the dried springs, honey,” Gracie explained. “Probably something to do with the gases trapped under it and the heat.”

  Gracie saw relief in her daughter’s eyes at an explanation that she could believe. “I don’t remember anything after that.”

  “You never saw your grandma?” Eddie asked.

  “No, we never made it here.”

  Gracie knew what Eddie would ask next and she stood quickly, hoping to stop him. He’d already told her over the phone where Grandma Beck’s body had been found. Analise didn’t need to hear that. Not now. Not yet.

  “I’m going to take Analise upstairs and show her where she’s sleeping. I think she’s had enough for one night.”

  Eddie looked at Analise’s drawn features and nodded. “After you’re done, come down. I still need to talk to you.”

  Analise set Romeo down with Tinkerbelle and Juliet, and all three dogs followed diligently behind her. Gracie could feel Reilly’s gaze tracking her as she led her daughter to the stairs but she didn’t look back. Looking back never did anyone any good.

  At the door to her old bedroom, Gracie hesitated, suddenly afraid of crossing the next threshold. Being back in this town, in the home where she’d grown up ... seeing it so transformed while trying to cope with the reality that she’d never see her grandma again…it all felt like too much. She’d been gone for half of her life and she felt it down to the bone.

  “I have no idea what’s behind this door,” she told Analise with a tight laugh. “She might have burned my bed.”

  Analise stared into her face, trying to see all that Gracie wanted to hide. “I don’t get how she could do that to you. Throw you out when you were pregnant. How could she let me grow up and never try to know me?”

  The pain in her daughter’s voice tore through Gracie. She’d cried herself to sleep many nights with that question spinning in her head. “It was another time, honey. People were different back then.”

  Analise snorted. “It was 1998, Mom. Not that long ago.”

  “It’s like dog years in Diablo Springs.”

  Analise gave a halfhearted smile. Tinkerbelle and Juliet waited patiently, following the conversation like a tennis match while Romeo pranced around them.

  Gracie braced herself as she reached for the doorknob. She doubted her grandma would have turned it into a rented room as she’d done the others. Grandma Beck had strict, if often cryptic, rules about such things. No guests in family quarters was one of them. Most likely she’d stripped the room bare and left it as a stark reminder of all of Gracie’s failings.

  With a fake smile for Analise, she opened the door.

  Surprise didn’t describe what she felt when she saw inside. Shock was closer, but still not big enough. The room looked exactly as it had when she’d left. Not even dust had moved in to change it. Gracie gripped the door frame, staring at this metaphor for her relationship with Grandma Beck. She’d shut her out
while keeping her memory in pristine suspension.

  Analise brushed past her with a look of wonder, her fear forgotten for the moment as she stared back in time to her mother’s life as a teenager. Posters of The Backstreet Boys, Hanson, and Titanic decorated the walls and a bed with a bright purple comforter butted up to a nightstand in the corner. A picture window overlooked a huge mesquite in the front yard and polka-dot curtains that Grandma Beck had sewn herself framed the glass. Once the sun came up, they would be able to see the ruins from here. Now it was just a dark void in the distance.

  A hot pink beanbag chair sat next to a CD player with bright lights and fat knobs for volume and the radio. Gracie had saved her babysitting money for months to buy it. A cracked plastic CD case had been tossed on top. Spice Girls.

  Yearbooks and photo albums lined her bookshelves, along with her favorite stories from kindergarten up. She’d always kept her books and she remembered how much she’d missed them after she’d gone. She’d only been able to take what she could fit in her second-hand Volkswagen when Grandma Beck had shown her the door. Everything else she’d left behind. Until she walked through the door at that moment, she hadn’t realized how much of herself that included.

  “I can’t believe she kept all this stuff,” Gracie murmured, entering her past with its bittersweet memories.

  Analise gave her a troubled look so filled with questions that Gracie couldn’t quite meet it. Before she could voice any of them, Gracie raised her hand and shook her head.

  “I’m too tired to talk about any of this tonight, sweetie. Why don’t you get ready bed and try to sleep. If I know Eddie, he’ll be back with more questions tomorrow. We can talk then, too.”

  “We can go see Brendan in the morning, right?”

  Gracie nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” Analise gave her a good night hug. “I’m sorry I lied.”

  “We’ll deal with that when we’re back home.”

  “I know.”

  Tinkerbelle and Romeo stayed with Analise in the bedroom. Both dogs would take up their usual posts at the end of her bed. Tinkerbelle would wait until Analise went to sleep, though, before she made the jump from the floor to the mattress. She thought she was sneaky.

  Ever faithful, Juliet followed Gracie back downstairs where Eddie and Reilly waited. The house still felt unbelievably hot down here—much warmer than upstairs, though it should have been the opposite. Or maybe it was her anxiety that made it feel so warm. Her grandma was dead. She didn’t even know how she’d died yet.

  And Reilly Alexander was back in Diablo Springs.

  “Can we try to open some windows?” Gracie asked as she entered the front room.

  Reilly had moved to the bar. He stood at the end, arms resting on the battered surface, head bent as he contemplated the wood grain. Gracie wished she could hear his thoughts. She wasn’t looking forward to the confrontation that was certain to come.

  “Reilly already tried to get them open,” Eddie told her. “They’re either painted or nailed shut.

  “I think all the air is going to the rooms upstairs. It’s cooler there.”

  A large, aged photograph hanging on the wall above the fireplace caught her attention. In a bright flash of lightning, it seemed that the eyes of the subjects had shifted. Gracie moved closer and stared at the women gathered at a table that looked just like the ones here now. She hadn’t heard him move, but suddenly Reilly was behind her.

  “That one looks like you,” he said in her ear.

  Startled, she stumbled back and into the solid wall of his chest. His hands came up to steady her, and the feel of him, the scent of him tumbled Gracie down a long tunnel of memory. He’d always felt so solid to her, someone certain and strong in her teenaged world of chaos. Grandma Beck had never seemed mentally sound. Even as a child, Gracie had understood that a few of her hinges had rusted over. By contrast, Reilly had been constant and reliable.

  What a farce.

  She turned quickly, stepping away when a traitorous part of her wanted to lean. Eddie was flipping through his notes.

  “From what I got earlier,” he said, “your daughter and this Brendan kid arrived just after seven. Mac Conner came out when he saw the sirens and told me he’d seen them drive through town.”

  Gracie and Reilly looked up in unison, both with the same bemused expression on their faces.

  “I’d forgotten what it’s like to live in a town so small a strange vehicle is noticed,” Reilly said.

  Eddie frowned. “We know our neighbors here.”

  “No offense intended.”

  “Mac said they were speeding,” Eddie said. “That’s why he noticed.”

  “I’ve talked to Brendan about driving fast,” Gracie said. “He doesn’t listen. He’s eighteen and still missing the connection between his ears and his brain.”

  “You sound just like your grandmother,” Reilly said.

  Stung, she raised her chin. “I sound just like Analise’s mother. That’s how I’m supposed to sound.”

  His jaw hardened and he looked away.

  “The sun set about six-thirty, seven,” Eddie continued. “I was at the Buckboard having dinner when my radio went off. Monica over at the municipal office said Carolina Beck had called in, all upset and shouting. Said there was trouble out at the springs. Said to get my ass out there right now.”

  “She said that?” Gracie asked. “She said ass?”

  “According to Monica she did.”

  “I never heard her use so much as a darn.”

  “Maybe Monica threw the ass in for effect. However it happened, I jumped in my car and went straight there. That was just about the time the storm blew in. It was lightning like there was a short in the sky. I haven’t seen a storm like this in years. Hell, the rain alone is enough to dance about. We’re going on a ten-year drought.”

  “Eddie ... my daughter?” Gracie prompted before he could go on too long about the drought. She’d heard it enough times to know the subject of drought in a conversation could last almost as long as the drought itself.

  He nodded. “When I got there I didn’t see anything. Not a damn thing. Then as I was turning, I saw a pickup truck perched at the edge of the springs. Lights were out, and it was so dark, I almost missed it. So I backed up and aimed my headlights and that’s when I saw your grandma.”

  Stomach churning over the thought of the balanced truck, her daughter possibly still inside, Gracie braced herself.

  “Before I could get out of the car, I saw the truck start to rock. Still couldn’t see anyone in it, but it looked like it was shaking.” He lifted a hand and made a back-and-forth motion. “Then, Carolina, she shouts at it. I couldn’t hear her over the wind and the thunder, but she was screaming like a banshee. She started running toward the truck. So did I, but she got there first. She was still screaming, though I couldn’t make heads or tails out of what she said. Next thing I knew, she was falling and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop it.”

  “She slipped?” Reilly asked the question Gracie was afraid to.

  Eddie released a deep breath through his nose and shook his head. “I guess. No one pushed her and I hope to God she didn’t jump. I’ve told the city council a hundred times we need to fill those springs in. Never enough money. No one will work out there.” He shook head some more. “By the time I reached the edge, I couldn’t see her anymore, but I saw the kids in the front seat of the truck. They were scared shitless, practically catatonic. I tried to get to them, but it was like the wind was against me and lightning was striking all around. I thought I was going to be laid out next to your grandma in a minute. And then the truck went over.” He whistled and made another gesture. “It all happened so fast.”

  “Oh my God,” Gracie breathed. It was almost too horrible to believe. Her grandmother wasn’t the first Beck woman to lose her life at the old springs. Gracie’s mother had died there when Gracie was just an infant. And now it had nearly taken Analise.

 
“I jumped on the horn and called for help,” Eddie was saying, “and then I got my winch and fed it out into the hole.”

  “You went down?” Reilly asked.

  Gracie understood his shock. They’d all grown up with stories about what lurked in Diablo Springs. Demons, ghosts, three-headed monsters. Fear of the springs was part of the fabric of their childhood. Call it superstition, call it wise—even adults stayed away from the treacherous springs. The thought of going down inside it in the dark, during a storm, made Gracie’s blood run cold. The idea of her daughter being trapped down there made her sway.

  Reilly reached out to steady her again, his hand warm against her arm.

  “What did you see down there?” Gracie asked, when she didn’t really want to know.

  “Not a lot. It was damn quiet, like being inside a vacuum. I couldn’t hear the storm. Couldn’t hear the kids. Couldn’t hear nothing. Not ashamed to tell you I was spooked, because I sure as shit was.”

  “How did you get them out?” Reilly asked.

  “The truck caught not far from the edge. Don’t know how or on what yet, but it was just dangling. I was scared to death I was going to tap it and it would just go. I got to your daughter’s side first, Gracie. The boy was unconscious, but Analise had enough wits left to help me get her out. About that time, backup came and we pulled Brendan up, too. After we got them off to Doc Graebel’s, we found your grandma.”

  “Did the fall kill her?” Reilly asked in a strained voice.

  “Won’t know until Digger files his report.”

  The name startled Gracie out of the dread that had overcome her. Digger Young, the town’s coroner and undertaker. His family had been handling the dead of Diablo Springs for over a hundred years. She didn’t know if it made her feel better or worse to know her grandma was in his hands now.