Smitten With Death

by Sharon Saracino

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Praise for Sharon Saracino

  Smitten With Death

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  A word about the author...

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Just when I thought

  I was going to make it to the bottom of my stairs agilely and uninjured, I was foiled by a conglomeration of woven gossamer strands dappled with dewdrops glinting in the sun that some eight-legged bastard had constructed between the wall of the garage and the stair railing during the night.

  Have you ever noticed how walking into an unexpected spider web turns you into an instant ninja?

  I slapped myself in the face, did a passable imitation of a windmill in a hurricane, and provided a short demonstration of the Argentine tango. Then I stomped the spider into a mashed splat. I left the corpse where it lay to warn off any of his friends who might have ideas of picking up where he left off and jumped the final two stairs to the sidewalk, twisting my ankle in the process. Clearing my throat, I tossed my ratty ponytail over one shoulder with a deliberate air of insouciance intended to plainly communicate to my audience that I totally meant to do that. Anyone can be good. Awesome takes practice.

  Once Gail established I’d landed on my feet, as opposed to my ass—my stepmother is well acquainted with my challenged coordination—she saluted me with a grin and a white waxed-paper bag, then headed for the house to prepare the kitchen for the pending arrival of my sister and her brood. Walking slowly and rolling my hips in what I fancied was a seductive manner, in an effort to detract attention from my limp, I absently wondered if there would ever come a day when Morgan Kane would see me at my best. All things considered, it wasn’t looking promising.

  Praise for Sharon Saracino

  “Max Logan is definitely my type of heroine—a strong woman filled with snark who knows how to use it! Witty, insightful, and frequently hilarious, Saracino’s writing keeps me up late into the night, chuckling and cheering into my blankets. This series has quickly become one of my favorite reads!”

  ~AJ Nuest, author of She’s Got Dibs

  ~*~

  “Max Logan is back and as snarky as ever with a wild combination of humor, occupational hazards, eccentric characters, and moments of sheer lunacy. Smitten with Death will keep you entertained from start to finish.”

  ~Sharon Buchbinder, author of Obsession

  Smitten With Death

  by

  Sharon Saracino

  Max Logan Series, Book 3

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Smitten With Death

  COPYRIGHT © 2015 by Sharon Saracino

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: info@thewildrosepress.com

  Cover Art by Debbie Taylor

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Fantasy Rose Edition, 2015

  Print ISBN 978-1-62830-822-8

  Digital ISBN 978-1-62830-823-5

  Max Logan Series, Book 3

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  Thank you to everyone

  who jumped on this crazy train from the beginning

  and stayed on board for the ride!

  I’m so grateful for your love and support.

  Chapter 1

  Normally, people who die stay that way, but to tell you the truth, I can’t recall anyone ever using the word normal and the name Max Logan in the same sentence. I died and lived to tell about it. Some might argue I didn’t actually die but simply enjoyed a particularly vivid Near Death Experience. Believers cite NDEs as proof of an afterlife. Scientists argue they are hallucinations of warmth, security, and light perceived as reality induced by a massive release of chemicals in the dying brain. Me? I was hardly in a position to question anyone’s concept of reality. Of course, my afterlife experience was sorely lacking in warmth and security, consisting primarily of my naked butt in an unsanitary bus terminal overseen by a harried little clerk with absolutely no appreciation for my sparkling sense of humor. Thanks to my awesome ninja skills and my Kubler-Ross stages of death and dying influenced powers of persuasion, I made it back. My boyfriend and ex-husband, Roger-the-Proctologist, wasn’t quite so lucky. Yeah, he’s still dead. All indications are he’ll be staying that way. It sucks. All. The. Time.

  I’d like to believe my supernatural sojourn is behind me, but I haven’t been accused of optimism in quite a while. So I hold my breath and wait for the other shoe to drop.

  While waiting, I’ve discovered some things may be worse than death. Like being trapped in a cramped ballroom at a wedding with two hundred and fifty or so well-meaning relatives. Most of whom still pulled a funeral face every time they glanced in my direction.

  Oh, pul-eeze! Like you don’t know the look I mean? Yeah, I knew you did.

  “How are you really, dear?” Great Aunt Tess shouted the question to me over her fruit cup.

  “Just living the dream, Aunt Tess.”

  I tapped my finger to the side of my lips hoping subtly to alert her to the thick fruit syrup dribbling from the corner of her mouth and threatening to saturate the nest of gray, stubbly whiskers sprouting from her chin. She failed to take the hint, and her face puckered into a clearly skeptical expression at my response.

  Aunt Tess had embraced her widowhood with the maniacal fervor of a vegan avoiding a platter of prime rib since 1967. Every item of clothing the woman owned was unrelieved black. No doubt, my scarlet O’Hell-no bridesmaid gown was even more offensive to my perpetually bereaved aunt than it was to me. Albeit for entirely different reasons. The red leather jacket I’d worn to the rehearsal dinner last night probably would have induced seizures. I guess I’m just not one of those women who feels the need to advertise my loss via my wardrobe—for forty years.

  “You’re so brave, Maxine,” she mumbled around her diced peaches. “No one knows better than me how difficult it is.”

  “Actually, Aunt Tess, I’m not brave at all. But I do believe one has to be practical.”

  Besides, I’d already tried wallowing on for size and discovered it’s as useless as pants on a hooker. It simply leads to weight gain and in the end, doesn’t change a thing. With a sigh, I pushed my fruit filled parfait glass over to my father, the Hardware King of Hamilton, who scraped his spoon in the bottom of his with the desperation of a starving man.

  “Roger is gone. Questionable fashion choices won’t bring him back.”

  Nothing would bring him back. I knew that better than anyone. Be
cause I was the one who’d hunted his dead butt down in the afterlife and tried. Everyone tells me when one door closes another door opens. What no one told me is the long, lonely hallway leading to the next door is a complete and total bitch. But I was doing okay. Mostly. Though sometimes I do feel like a duck floating on a lake—smooth and calm on the surface, and paddling like hell underneath to keep from sinking.

  Okay, so maybe I didn’t get to choose the music, but I could damn well choose how to dance, right? Also, it wouldn’t hurt if someone really had let me choose the music—at least for tonight. I was pretty sure even I could have put together a better playlist than Dancing Frankie, the five foot six, three hundred and seventy-five pound karaoke packing DJ.

  Did I mention his name was Dancing Frankie? Don’t even attempt a visual. I promise you couldn’t do him justice. Seriously.

  To add insult to injury, pink is not my color. I’m simply not a pastel kind of girl. Unlike my willowy, blonde half-sister Denise, nothing about me screams delicate and dainty. In fact, I’d hazard a guess nothing even whispers it. I’m more of a jewel tone type. I’m all about the drama.

  Tell me this surprises you.

  Still, my cousin Mary Ann had been planning this day since 1979, the golden age of pastel puffery, and apparently felt compelled to pay homage. I was pretty sure the number in the wedding party exceeded the guest list and included every cousin, sorority sister, and co-worker with whom she’d ever shared a margarita. Each of us sported a different shade of insipid. The receiving line resembled a drunken Easter Bunny’s nightmare. At least good foundation garments had managed to tease a hint of actual cleavage out of my less than spectacular bosom. I take what I can get.

  Stepmother Gail reached under the table to pat my knee in silent appreciation of my gallant effort at polite conversation. The seventy-two yards of taffeta and chiffon crammed in my lap thwarted her attempt. People say if you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all. Gail knows if I strictly adhered to that theory, I might never speak again. She understands me, my stepmother, though I’d never given her credit for it until recently. I guess maybe death is good for a few things, after all. I was not ordinarily known for my restraint. Or tact. In fact, some people actually think I’m a smartass. I prefer to think of it as explaining why people are idiots. It’s a public service, really.

  Hey, I’m working on it, okay?

  A gang of white-shirted wait staff descended upon the unsuspecting wedding guests like a horde of well-organized locusts. They whisked away the fruit cups, replacing them with silver-trimmed china plates piled with mixed greens topped by ruby red grape tomatoes. They conducted the maneuver with such efficiency that my father was diving in with his spoon for another goopy mouthful of fruit cocktail before he even noticed the switch. He swapped utensils with the ease of a street magician performing sleight-of-hand and stabbed a forkful of lettuce without missing a beat. When it comes to his food, Dad is flexible like that.

  Actually, I’d discovered my father is flexible in a lot of ways. Sure, he’d been slightly upset when the unholy hotness that is Morgan Kane, Hellhound Grim Reaper, brought me home the day Roger died. Okay, maybe apoplectic is a more accurate description. He was even more upset when he learned the binding, designed to protect me from my supernatural superpowers, had been snapped like a dry-rotted rubber band left too long in the corner of the junk drawer with the dust bunnies and tangled paper clips. But once he accepted it was a done deal, he ultimately concluded it was my decision whether or not to embrace my supernatural sideline. If I ever reach a decision, that is. His confidence gives me the warm fuzzies, though it has made me start monitoring him carefully for other signs of early dementia.

  “You gonna eat that?” Dad arched a bushy salt and pepper brow and darted a hopeful look in the direction of my untouched salad. My stepmother rolled her eyes, pulled her own plate closer, and hunched over it like a bear guarding her cub.

  “Knock yourself out, Dad. I’m saving myself for the chicken.”

  For the record, the chicken dinner, when it arrived, wasn’t nearly as impressive as the sight of Mary Ann’s new in-laws staggering onto the dance floor to perform the Chicken Dance. An unsteady ring of half-sloshed revelers flapping their arms and wiggling their butts like poultry on crack would have been entertaining enough on its own, but when they began passing around the family heirloom, a large papier-mâché bonnet fashioned in the shape of a chicken head, I knew we had reached the epitome of wedding reception chic. What next, the Electric Slide?

  Almost as though my supernatural superpowers had magically expanded to encompass precognition, which as far as I knew they hadn’t, the techno-strains of that oh-so-danceable classic blared through Dancing Frankie the DJ’s speakers. This resulted in a coordinated squeeeee from every female in attendance. Excluding me. Rumor has it I’m a bit of a nonconformist.

  Don’t pretend this surprises you.

  But it did include, I was sad to note, my sister Denise. She jumped out of her seat next to her doting husband, Brad-the-Famous-Vascular-Surgeon, and flounced in my direction. Yes, flounced. Frankly, though my sister could give lessons in flouncing when the occasion warrants, in this case, I’m pretty sure it was unintentional. In these dresses there wasn’t much else a girl could do.

  “C’mon, Max.” She waved her arms in the general direction of the dance floor and shouted over the din of clinking cutlery. Plastering what I hoped was a look of abject disappointment on my face, I pointed first at my sequined clutch and then in the direction of the ladies restroom.

  “Sorry,” I mouthed.

  Her shoulders slumped. Then she perked up and headed back to her table to drag her husband, Brad-the-Famous-Vascular-Surgeon, out to the dance floor where lines of guests already gyrated in an uncoordinated manner with a complete lack of musicality. Honestly, I probably wasn’t a person who should be critical of the lack of coordination in others. Level surfaces have a tendency to jump up and smack me in the face. I can also fall up stairs, get hit by parked cars, and make poles magically appear in front of me at a moment’s notice. I’m just talented like that. Dancing? Yeah, not worth the risk to life and limb. Mine or anyone else’s. One would expect I would have acquired a modicum of dexterity at my age, but apparently, even supernatural superheroes have limitations.

  With a good deal of yanking and tugging on the part of my folks, and some creative cursing and wriggling on my part, I managed to un-cram myself from under the table. Fortunately, I didn’t really have to use the facilities. I suspected a real potty break might require a crane, several handmaidens, and perhaps a hunky fireman or two just to keep the dress out of the toilet. But I meandered in the direction of the little girls’ room anyway, just to give credence to my fib.

  I propped myself against the wall near the ladies’ room door trying to appear properly chastised, rather than amused, by the evil eye cast in my direction from the dance floor by Brad-the-Famous-Vascular-Surgeon. Brad hated dancing almost as much as I hated laundry. I felt sorry for him. Okay, not really, but I thought maybe I’d try empathy on for size and see how it fit. I grinned and blew him a kiss a mere heartbeat before a cold draft snaked along the floor and crept around my limbs, bringing with it the unmistakable taint of death. Sweat popped out on my forehead and trickled down the valley between my underwire enhanced ta-tas like Niagara Falls after a forty-day rain. My stomach tightened and heaved. My lungs felt too small to take in air. I glanced around desperately, trying to pinpoint the source of my sudden unease. This could not be good.

  Back at the table, Dad was still shoveling food into his pie hole, wedding cake and ice cream this time, and Gail had turned in her chair to watch the dancing. I couldn’t help noticing she’d moved her dessert plate just beyond my father’s reach. Smart woman, my stepmother. Dancing Frankie was shaking his thang, and every other obscenely bulging jiggly bit he possessed, in a manner threatening imminent trauma to anyone within a six-foot radius. In fact, just watching him trau
matized me a little. It was not pretty. But neither was it the cause of my discomfort. Well, at least not this particular discomfort. No one else in the room seemed aware anything had changed, but the pall of doom weighed me down like a lead apron.

  Uneasily aware I might be privy to something unseen, courtesy of my supernatural super-powers, a vague whiff of sulfur compounded my disquiet. The last time that precise stench had singed my nostrils, it was closely followed by the appearance of the thick-necked, dark-haired, massively muscular Guardian of the Gates of Hell. Of course, while evil swirled around Cerberus like the cold, dark cloud I felt invading the ballroom, I also knew he couldn’t arbitrarily cross over to the land of the living. I clenched my fists in the folds of my skirt and tried to ignore my inner reptile, but my lizard brain was screaming at me to get the hell out before something really bad happened.

  Oh, pul-eeze! Haven’t you ever heard of the lizard brain?

  The lizard brain is that lump of tissue at the base of your skull that floods you with dire adrenaline warnings whenever you feel threatened. While an Internet junkie like myself knows the lizard brain has been around forever, and existed in even the earliest land animals, most people are more familiar with it as the fight or flight response.

  At the moment, I was fighting flight with everything I had no matter how insistently my little green reptile whispered in my ear. This was my family in this room. Those I loved and those I would categorically deny in public and cross the street to avoid. I couldn’t just abandon them to whatever threat might be imminent.

  Okay, I could, but I would almost certainly feel bad about it afterwards.

  I swallowed my foreboding and hurried back to the table, my eyes darting frantically around the ballroom the entire time. If something wicked was this way coming, I wanted to be near my folks to do whatever it took to keep them safe. I was just reaching for my chair to begin the backbreaking process of cramming the miles of putrid pink prom gown under the table when a sweeter and infinitely more appealing aroma tickled my nose. Well, at least it was appealing to me. Let’s see, first the chill of death and now the unmistakable scent of jelly doughnuts. It could mean only one thing. The Grim Reaper was in the house. It may have been the sound of my heart, which suddenly started beating double time, but I’m pretty sure the loud thump I heard was the other freaking shoe hitting the floor.