A Farewell to Charms E-Book

Molly Harper

• Herausgeber: NYLA
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 367

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Queen of paranormal romantic comedy Molly Harper delivers love and laughter in this magnificent series finale! Eva Boudreaux keeps the truth about her life before arriving in Mystic Bayou a carefully guarded secret, flying under the radar as a talented boat mechanic. In the swampy little town filled with powerful supernatural beings, Eva never expected to strike up a charged flirtation with one of the Bayou's human residents. Alex Lancaster is far too polished for Eva's taste - not to mention the danger that comes with his high-ranking position in the League, which could expose her secrets. Trouble is, she can't resist his disarming sense of humor or the chemistry that crackles to life whenever he's near. Will Alex be able to handle a woman like her? Or will her difficult past keep them apart? Either way, they'll need to join forces to solve one final mystery in Mystic Bayou. The fate of the town – and their hearts – depends upon it.

Leseprobe

A FAREWELL TO CHARMS

MOLLY HARPER

This ebook is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only.

This ebook may not be sold, shared, or given away.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Farewell to Charms

Copyright © 2021 by Molly Harper

Ebook ISBN:9781641972314

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

This ebook is based on an Audible Original audiobook.

No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

NYLA Publishing

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http://www.nyliterary.com

CONTENTS

1. Alex

2. Eva

3. Alex

4. Eva

5. Alex

6. Eva

7. Alex

8. Eva

9. Alex

10. Eva

11. Alex

12. Eva

13. Eva

14. Eva

15. Alex

Acknowledgments

Sneak Peek at WITCHES GET STUFF DONE

Also by Molly Harper

About the Author

1

ALEX

Alex Lancaster was a man accustomed to being in control. He was a man accustomed to the world aligning itself around him in an orderly fashion, allowing him to do what he wanted when he wanted. He was not accustomed to sitting on the side of the road in a place called the Devil’s Armpit, sweating through his suit as he stared into a smoking engine, inhaling what smelled like a combination of deviled egg farts and feet.

“Move to Mystic Bayou, they said. An exciting career opportunity, they said. Complete control over an entire special division, they said. Well, they didn’t say anything about the Devil’s Armpit! Ow, shit!” Alex hissed in pain as his hand made contact with some burning hot engine part. He jerked back and knocked into the metal leg holding up the hood, which slammed shut. It just barely missed his fingertips.

Alex shook his hands out, grateful that while they were burnt, they were at least, intact. He did not need to add “inability to type/text” to his list of problems. He used his wrinkled sleeve to mop the sweat gathering on his brow. This had been a day of failure and frustrations, something that was becoming a trend in his life during the last few months. His meeting in New Orleans, an attempt to secure a direct transport line for goods and materials from the port to Mystic Bayou, had gone about as well as running a dart game in a hurricane. The town was growing, suddenly outpacing the regular deliveries of groceries, fuel, building materials, and every other modern convenience people couldn’t reasonably do without.

There were construction projects all over town, including the apartment buildings meant to ease the town’s housing crisis, but the only project that had been completed was an artifact storage facility at the former rift site. And that was only because Alex’s boss, Darwin Messina, considered what was essentially a super-max prison for haunted antiques to be the highest possible priority. Now that the rift – an interdimensional tear that originally drew the magique to the bayou in the first place – was closed, the town was the perfect remote, secure place to deposit dangerous historical and/or magical items the League had collected over the years. The new apartment complex was nearing that level of importance, but it wasn’t there yet.

Even with the League’s resources and Sonja Fong’s legendary organizational skills, they simply couldn’t help local businesses provide enough of what the citizens needed. There were too many timelines and contingencies to contend with, not to mention the legal and financial complexities of working with small, privately owned businesses. And frankly, Alex was starting to suspect that asking truckers to cross the Devil’s Armpit was a factor working against him. Who would want to do this on a regular basis? Despite offering the League’s usual highly attractive compensation packages to five regional trucking contractors, Alex couldn’t find a single company willing to work with them.

Alex liked to see himself as prepared for anything, but not being able to persuade one company to agree to work with him was simply mind-boggling. The League always had some link, some secret useful connection to create the desired outcome. The International League for Interspecies Cooperation was, at its best, a connection – between the world of the humans and the world of the supernatural, between different species and groups of magique creatures and between the various secret business interests of beings who had turned their magical gifts into successful money-making ventures. At its worst, it was a shadowy secret organization that sometimes enforced its will with an iron fist and the ruthless efficiency of a Monty Python sketch.

Still, Alex liked to think that as the executive director of the Mystic Bayou branch of the operation, he was directing the League’s resources for the greater good. People were safe in Mystic Bayou from threats past and present, and they were, for the most part, happy and healthy. All he had to do was somehow provide what they needed in the middle of the town’s historic population boom.

For decades, the League had prepared for the human world to discover that the creatures they told campfire tales about since the dawn of time were real and had been living amongst them in secret. Once the word got out thanks to a viral video of a shifter’s meltdown over a parking spot, the administration hoped that they could persuade said humans that the creatures just wanted to live their lives as normal people and had no interest in eating them. (For the most part.)

What the League hadn’t anticipated after the “Eustace Cornwell incident” was for the public to track down and descend upon what had always been a secret supernatural utopia.

Years before, the League sent pre-eminent anthropologist Jillian Ramsay, PhD, to interview citizens of Mystic Bayou about their unique community, where humans knowingly lived alongside the magique, as all otherworldly creatures were called in the Bayou, blending their lives and cultures together to create a beautiful and welcoming place to live.

Within days of the parking lot incident making headlines, Jillian’s book – The Bayou: A Wholehearted Approach to a Blended Community – was the next thing to go viral. Though the town was never officially mentioned by its full name, the omission didn’t stop dedicated sleuths from tracking it down. Since then, droves of curious humans had arrived in Mystic Bayou parish limits and many of them planned to stay. The enamored humans wanted to live in a place where they could see the creatures they’d read about since childhood, and the magique wanted a hometown tailored for them from the ground up.

This created a hydra of crises within the town. There weren’t enough places to rent or buy, meaning newcomers were living in improvised campgrounds off Main Street. There weren’t enough jobs to go around. There weren’t enough places to buy groceries or gas. The town only had one restaurant, run by a cranky brownie who didn’t appreciate gluten-free requests. The postmaster, Bonita De Los Santos, requested funding to expand the post office to accommodate the increased demand on routes and post boxes. And as more social media posts went up, more busloads of tourists poured into town, creating traffic jams and generalized chaos.

Carefully and deliberately, Alex and Sonja worked through these problems like the logistical maze they were. It amazed him that in this day of immediate gratification and lightning-fast internet (outside the Bayou, anyway), he was troubled by something as simple as finding transportation for inanimate objects. Given the uncomfortable expressions and the repetitive, almost-scripted responses he got from the contractors he’d met that afternoon, Alex suspected that the trucking companies were cooperating against him somehow, conspiring to drive up the terms of the contract. But he also thought this could be paranoia and possibly a delusion brought on by heat combined with the sulfurous stink coming off the Devil’s Armpit.

Alex’s League-issued SUV started acting up the moment he’d left the city proper. The temperature gauge on the engine started to climb steadily. He probably should have stopped at a station, but he’d hoped he’d be able to make it back to town before it reached the “critical” stage. And now, he wasn’t sure exactly what he was supposed to do about the engine temp or the eerie cha-plunk-cha-plunk-cha-plunk noise it had been making. Alex had a rudimentary knowledge of cars when he’d traveled with his family on the carnival circuit, back when he called himself Alex Carver. You had to know how to patch a tire, replace a dead spark plug or even re-attach a muffler with nothing but baling wire and happy thoughts, if you wanted to keep up with the caravan. But cars were half computer now and Alex had no idea what he was looking at when he lifted the hood.

He’d thought he was safe when he’d reached the Devil’s Armpit, the last geographical barrier before one crossed into the Mystic Bayou parish. But half-way through that particularly odorous landmark, the little red digital temperature needle on his dashboard suddenly shot up the last few millimeters to “HOT.” And then his engine made a sound like the shriek of a wounded dolphin. He’d had just enough time to pull over to the shoulder before the car shuddered to a stop.

He was stuck. Alex Lancaster, the most trusted and capable lieutenant of Darwin Messina himself, was stranded on the side of the road like a horror movie ingenue. His cell, which he’d yet to forsake for one of Sonja’s fancy satellite models, didn’t pick up a signal out here. And he’d told his assistant, Jessica, that he might stay at a hotel in town if his meeting ran late. So, no one would think anything was amiss if he just didn’t show up that night. His options were trying to walk the remaining twenty miles into town or sleep in his car, which would essentially turn into an oven full of stink overnight.

Alex scrubbed a hand over his face, not registering the sound of wheels crunching over gravel behind him. His father, one of the best-known menders in the business, known for his resourcefulness and adaptability in any given situation, from securing vets for sick petting zoo ponies to getting a Tilt-A-Whirl car replaced in Fairbanks, Alaska, on a Sunday, would be ashamed.

Why hadn’t he stopped in New Orleans, stayed in a nice four-star hotel and enjoyed some room service? Why? Alex had wanted to get home, he’d told himself, as he’d put the Crescent City in his rearview. But it wasn’t like he had anyone or anything waiting for him in his League-issued trailer. Hell, he didn’t even have a cat. He’d been thinking about getting one, but then he’d be a single guy living with a cat, and that didn’t seem fair to the cat.

How sad was it that if he disappeared overnight, absolutely no one would be affected? Sonja maybe, but between her and Jillian, they could run the office so smoothly that no one in the League headquarters would realize he was gone.

“Can I be of any help?”

He turned toward the sound of the husky voice behind him.

Fire.

Alex was blinded by the searing sunlight reflecting off the woman’s hair. It made her look like some strange angel with a flaming halo. He squinted, raising his hand to shield his eyes against the glare. He shifted his gaze to the truck parked behind her, a new dark blue F-150 with Carmody and Boudreaux’s logo painted on the side.

He knew the lady in question, a full two inches taller than him and broad-shouldered. She had that dewy, flushed beauty often seen on women who spent hours applying layers of powder and paint to achieve a “natural look.” Her long hair was a strange mix of colors – copper, gold, chestnut, even a few strands of silver – leaving the overall impression of a molten river of bronze. It fell in messy waves around her face, framing a pair of wide, light brown eyes. Unfortunately, those eyes were shielded by a pair of aviator sunglasses, reflecting back at him Alex’s damp, disheveled mess.

What was her name? Abby? Ella?

“Eva!” he blurted out. “Eva Boudreaux.”

She smiled, a confused quirk tilting her full lips. “Yes, I’m Eva. And you’re Alex. I don’t think we’ve been officially introduced, but the girls have mentioned you a couple of times. Always in a nice way, mind you.” She extended her hand, pumping his up and down with confidence. She was southern, like so many people around here, but somehow her accent was more alluring – all honey and smoked bourbon that seemed to slide along his skin as she spoke.

“Yeah, that’s me. I work with your friends over at the League,” Alex said.

“Are you all right?” she asked, her brows furrowing together in concern. Her voice was musical in its lilting smoothness, making the hair on his neck stand up. It was a beautiful break from the relentless, shirt-soaking heat. “It looks like the heat’s gotten to ya. I have some water in my truck.”

“I’m OK,” he said, shaking his head. He’d been staring at her. And he was pretty sure his mouth had been hanging open. Not exactly the picture of administrative confidence. “I haven’t been out here that long.”

“Well, at least let me look at that engine. You wouldn’t have stopped out here unless you’d had to. No one spends time in the Devil’s Armpit except mosquitoes and tourists who don’t know any better,” Eva said.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” he said. “I think I can have it up and running as soon as it cools down.”

Behind him, his car made a belching noise and spit out a cloud of steam that made him bolt towards her in alarm. She didn’t flinch, simply grinned at him, and tied that strange molten hair up in a messy bun as she walked towards the SUV.

“Well, I’m not quite as good with cars as I am with boats, but even I can see that this,” she paused to point her elegant, long-fingered hands at the steam billowing from under his hood, “is not fine.”

He nodded silently, his eyes trailing to where her overalls were tied around a waist that took on an hourglass shape between those shapely hips and the sweetly rounded tops of her…

Alex cleared his throat and looked away. He knew he shouldn’t be checking out her cleavage when she was helping him out. But when she was leaning over like that, her tank top clinging to all that smooth skin, his better judgment self-ejected into the water and was eaten by whatever monsters lived there. As she’d passed, he wondered what she smelled like, close-up. Was it wrong that he wanted to take a step nearer to find out? Probably.

Oh, good grief, was he drooling?

He quickly wiped at his chin before she noticed that he was making a complete jerk of himself. Eva deftly flipped up the hood with one hand and peered into his engine.

“Whoo,” she huffed, waving the wisps of smoke out of her face. “Well, this isn’t ideal running condition, is it?”

He shook his head without making any sounds. He wasn’t sure he had the air to produce any.

She bent over into the engine. No, wait, his body had chosen this unfortunate moment to connect his brain and his mouth.

“Hot,” he wheezed.

“Sure is. Why don’t you go get some of that water?” she called, her voice amplified by the metal hood. He followed the order, because, again, he was approaching complete-jerk territory. When he’d gulped down the better part of a chilled liter bottle, he returned to find her elbow deep in his car, moving in a brisk, surgical manner, muttering to the car like she was soothing a recalcitrant patient. She didn’t even complain of her hands burning as she tapped and plucked at the engine like it was a mechanical harp.

Alex should have known the woman would be some sort of engine genius. He’d seen her around town on occasion, but he’d never gotten this close because she was usually accompanied by Jon Carmody, getting along “like a house afire,” as Mayor Zed Berend put it. It was well known in the Bayou that Jon could fix any boat with any problem, and Jon had cut Eva in on his family business – a great shock to the older crowd who spent most of their day jawing over it at the local pie shop. For Jon to go so far as to rename his grandfather’s repair business to include Eva, she had to have some serious talent. The pair of them were so close, if Alex hadn’t known that Jon was ridiculously in love with Lia Doe, he might have suspected that Jon and Eva were a couple. But Jon and Lia were pretty public about their happiness, like a pair in one of those shrewdly sweet cable holiday romance movies. Not that Alex was bitter about it or anything, having had some pretty serious interest in Lia himself for a bit.

OK, maybe he was a little bitter about it. Lia wasn’t the first woman to have left Alex flat for some local guy she’d just met in Mystic Bayou. First, his childhood sweetheart, Cordelia Canton, had blown off any consideration of a reconciliation to take up with a sort-of dead Irish guy. Then Lia… well, to be fair, he’d only had a brief but intense interest in Lia, but who wouldn’t? She was a lovely, lithesome mystery and she’d ditched him the minute Jon had so much as smiled at her.

What was it about these local guys? Was it that they were magique, all manner of enigmatic and powerful shifters? How was he supposed to compete with men who could turn into dragons or lions or, in Zed’s case, a massive and frankly, fucking terrifying, bear? Or maybe it was the accent. Women seemed to love a good Southern accent, especially when the guy dropped random French words into conversation like Zed did. And Alex’s lifelong efforts to polish up his diction had resulted in his sounding like a newscaster from Anywhere, Indiana.

So no, he hadn’t been close enough to Eva to enjoy this sort of… what would you even call drooling on the side of the road while a beautiful woman saved your ass? Contact? Conversation? Creepery?

Eva seemed happy to simply orbit in the warmth of Jon and Lia’s life, spending time with their friend circle, living next door to them and working with Jon in his boat shop. But now, Alex had a million questions he wanted to ask her and couldn’t seem to find the wherewithal to ask them. Was Eva happy in the Bayou? Did she want something more or would she build her life here, like everyone else seemed determined to do? Did she realize he was staring at her beautifully curved backside as she puttered around in his engine?

He was not a good man.

“A-ha!” she said suddenly, straightening and brandishing a limp bit of gray plastic that was dripping onto the pavement. He wasn’t sure if she’d finally burned herself or if she’d realized he was ruthlessly objectifying her as she did him a favor. He was prepared to run, either way.

“Radiator hose!” she crowed. “For all the extras they’ve stuffed inside cars here lately, you still need your engine cooled to keep it running. I have a couple in my truck, one of them will probably get you back to town. But you’ll have to ask somebody with more experience than me to fix it long-term.”

Before he could object, Eva was rummaging around in her truck for the spare part and transplanting it into his SUV. He wasn’t surprised in the least when she eventually climbed into the driver’s seat and the engine roared back to life as if nothing had ever been wrong. Her smile was triumphant and transfixing as she hopped out of the SUV, wiping her hands on the lilac-colored bandana she kept in her back pocket. It appeared to be printed with sweetly grinning sloths.

Curiouser and curiouser.

“I’ll follow you back to town, make sure you get there safe,” Eva said.

“Er, thank you.” He cleared his throat, absolutely sure that his cheeks were flushed and red. It was a little emasculating, having a woman worrying whether he would make it home safely, but Eva was simply better at this mechanical stuff than he was. And her vehicle was in good working order while his was not. Gender had nothing to do with it.

“I’d like to pay you something, for your help. This is time you could have spent on other customers.”

“Oh, I couldn’t!” she exclaimed, the wattage of her smile dampening.

“But it wouldn’t even come out of my pocket. The League would be paying you. We want to foster good relationships with local vendors. And we can’t do that, taking advantage of unpaid labor.”

Her expression was almost sad as she peered over her mirrored sunglasses at him. All at once, he had a strange feeling of being found wanting, and he wished he could explain, assure her that he wasn’t a corporate douche with a calculator for a heart. He just couldn’t seem to find the same easiness with the locals that everybody else seemed to have.

Or it was possible he was a corporate douche. He wasn’t sure anymore. He was so sweaty right now.

“What about fostering good relationships between neighbors?” she asked. “That’s part of what living in Mystic Bayou is all about, helping people because they need it – not because you could get something out of it. It’s not why I came here, but it’s a big piece of why I’ve stayed.”

He cleared his throat and took another sip of the water. “You make an excellent point.”

“I usually do,” she told him primly, her lips quirking. “Now, get in that car and don’t get too confident on the gas. She’s still a little shaky.”

He nodded sharply. “I’ll do what I’m told.”

She snorted as she pressed a hand to her broad chest. “Magical words that I’ve been waiting to hear all my life.”

It took forever to roll into Mystic Bayou, primarily because Alex refused to drive over twenty-five miles per hour on a borrowed radiator hose. It was weirdly intimidating, having her following him, knowing she was probably judging his driving and whether he was someone who listened to her sound professional advice. He didn’t want to disappoint her.

Main Street was busier than usual this late in the afternoon, with people bustling around on the sidewalks, carrying groceries and carryout bags for their evening meals. Others sat around the town square, talking, eating pie from Bathtilda’s and taking selfies in front of the town’s now-famous fountain – paid for by the Boones – depicting all manner of supernatural creatures sheltered under a dragon’s outstretched wings.

Alex didn’t recognize about half of the crowd and that was… unsettling. Very quickly, he’d become accustomed to knowing his neighbors here, and he supposed Eva was right. That was part of the charm of living in such a small town, knowing the people around you. He hadn’t exactly made close friends here, but… yeah, there was no way to follow up on that statement that didn’t sound pathetic. The point was he’d developed a sense of whom he could trust in Mystic Bayou and whom he couldn’t, and now that sense was obliterated.

With a sigh of relief, Alex parked his SUV in his usual spot near the front of the League’s research village. Eva honked her horn, waving as she drove away. He found that he was strangely sad that she hadn’t stopped. He could have invited her into his trailer, offered her something to drink. He wondered what she’d think of the place. The League had done their best to provide plush, livable spaces for their employees, but it still looked like a prefabricated trailer. It was far more spacious than the trailer he’d grown up in, and he’d tried to dress it up with the sort of personal touches that his mother had somehow used to make their little space a home – photos from the various places he’d lived, art he’d bought in New Orleans. But it was still a prefabricated trailer done in mostly gray and laminate.

Did he even have a beer to offer her if she’d accepted the invitation? As far as he remembered, the contents of his fridge were limited to a half-empty bottle of cabernet sauvignon and an old take-out container he wasn’t brave enough to open. The cat he didn’t own was very lucky not to live in those conditions.

As he watched Eva drive away, Alex noticed a black pick-up truck with heavily tinted windows pull out of a parking space near the parish hall. It very slowly turned toward the outlying areas of town, where Jon and Lia lived on Sea Cove Road. But plenty of people lived out in that direction, including Eva. And there were plenty of unfamiliar cars now that so many newcomers had arrived. It was probably just a coincidence that the black truck was following Eva out of town.

Still, Alex couldn’t help a heavy feeling of dread slip through his belly as the truck’s taillights disappeared into the deepening dusk.

2

EVA

Eva Boudreaux had traveled all over the world in her misspent youth, but there was no place for a sunset like Mystic Bayou. Even when there was a possibility that she was being spied on by a perverted alligator shifter.

Eva sipped her stout and tilted her face toward the last dying rays of the sun. She’d found she liked the sun, very much, so much so that she’d developed a considerable tan over the years. The only time she’d been so ruddy-cheeked in her “before life” was when she worked the forges, learning how to shape gold in its roughest form, in the oldest manner possible.

Looking back at her little house on the water, Eva was grateful all over again that Bael Boone rented his uncle’s old place to her. Over the years, she’d lived in hovels, cabins, miner’s shacks, the occasional low-rent apartment, and finally, her beloved trailer. But this adorable little waterfront house with its tidy, open rooms and worn furnishings? This was a home. It had been a very long time since she’d had a home. To be honest, she wasn’t sure she’d ever had one before. She’d had a place to live and a family, but she’d never quite belonged there.

She belonged here.

Eva flexed her free hand. It had felt good to poke around in Alex Lancaster’s engine. She rarely got to work with cars beyond her own beloved but ancient truck, but she liked a challenge. She was proud, not only that she’d managed to get Alex back to town unscathed, but that she’d managed to get through an interaction with him without blushing or making awkward hose-related jokes.

And they’d been right there, on the tip of her tongue.

Though she was aware of him – you couldn’t live in Mystic Bayou without being aware of the man who oversaw the whole community for the League – she’d never spoken to Alex directly. He attended most of the community’s big events and could regularly be found in the parish hall or at the pie shop, but he seemed to hold himself at a distance. He was friendly with his coworkers at the League, but not friends. She’d noticed that while Jillian and Sonja seemed cordial with him, Alex didn’t get invited to the gatherings her little friend group hosted. But Eva didn’t know whether that was his doing or theirs. He seemed like a nice person, but she couldn’t see much under the surface, at that distance.

And when she finally got close enough to speak to him, all she could do was bluff her way through by smiling and focusing on his ailing SUV.

Thank goodness she was wearing sunglasses so he wouldn’t realize how hard she was staring. Alex was, simply put, a ridiculously beautiful man. He looked like he stepped out of the pages of Unnaturally Sharp Jawlines Quarterly, all polish and poise and purpose. That afternoon was the first time she’d seen him remotely mussed, in her embarrassingly frequent observations of the man from afar. And even with sweat on his brow and a rumpled shirt, his eyes glowed bright and his hair shone dark gold under the sun.

Alex Lancaster was a shiny thing. And her kind just loved shiny things.

And in a stunning development proving just how unfair the universe was, he was so much more than a pretty surface. She’d expected “generally pleasant with good manners.” She hadn’t expected Alex to be funny, appreciative, and self-deprecating. He didn’t even try to prove that he knew as much about engines as she did. He just stepped out of her way and let her fix it.

Sitting with her feet dangling in the water, Eva flexed her hand again. It was as wide as her mother’s with the same long and capable fingers. Somehow, it didn’t keep her from working on the tiny metal pieces involved in any of her interests. She was reminded of exactly how delicate Alex’s features were, of the narrow width of his wrists.

There was nothing small about her, or delicate. Her hands were big. Her shoulders were broad. Her feet were longer than Jon’s, for goodness’s sake. She knew because they’d once mixed up their work boots. And honestly, she’d never seen anything wrong with her body. It was useful. It got things done. She was built just like everybody in her family. She was perfectly herself, comfortable in her skin and with who she was. She was not a “decorative” person. Her clothes were utilitarian, the kind of things you didn’t mind staining with grease or misplaced ketchup. She never got to go to the “fun” section of the lingerie store and get some delicate whisp of lace and silk, designed to be ripped off in a passionate frenzy. Her bras were built like those metal armor cups featured on inaccurate video game armor. When Eva shopped for clothes, she reached to the back of the rack every time because that’s where the large sizes were kept. The human world was simply not built for people her size.

Well, fuck the human world. She was fabulous.

But still, that nagging thought that she was definitely not the sort of woman Alex Lancaster would be interested in kept picking at the back of her brain like a steel splinter working under her skin. Why was it bothering her? When a man (or woman, frankly, Eva didn’t like to limit herself) was interested in her, Eva mentally calculated to determine her own interest. If it matched, she pursued. If not, she gently let them down. And if a person was disinterested in her, she got over it and moved on. So why was she so worried about Alex?

Alex was a complication she could not afford in a life she’d already allowed to get far messier than she’d ever intended. She’d seen how Alex had looked at Lia when she’d moved to town, all wistful longing and want. Frankly, Eva couldn’t blame him. She’d been similarly stunned by Lia. Eva half-considered making a play for the deer shifter herself – backing off the moment she saw how completely smitten Jon was with Lia.

But that’s just not what was in Alex’s eyes when he looked at Eva, and that should have been fine with her. She was prone to selecting bigger, burlier types anyway. If Zed had a brother, Eva would have climbed that fictional man like a bearded tree – but never Zed himself, who had become a close friend to Eva… and was mated to an absolute darling of a woman who could create balls of lightning with her hands. Eva wasn’t about to interfere with that on any level.

Casual sex with large, exuberant men. That was her wheelhouse. It worked for her. Maybe it was time for her to take a weekend closer to the Gulf Coastline, find a way to relieve some of her… tension. And if she happened to locate a non-Zed bearded tree-man, all the better.

“You have a weird look on your face that I would prefer you not explain,” Jon said.

Eva startled, cursing her lack of focus, thinking about Alex. She had strength on her side, and a fair amount of indestructibility, but super senses only worked when you weren’t having inappropriate thoughts about unattainable men. Super senses were funny that way.

Not for the first time, she wondered how this dark-haired merman became the best friend she’d ever had. Jon was unlike any person she’d met in all her centuries living with the humans. Reclusive and taciturn until he found common ground with her, and then he’d practically drowned her in goodwill and friendship. With Jon, she didn’t have to work twice as hard to prove her skill as a mechanic. He didn’t resent that she was more talented than he was in some areas. He didn’t take advantage of it. He simply recognized it and offered her a portion of his family’s long-held boat repair business, in return for her hard work.

“Anybody ever tell you it’s rude to sneak up on people? Plus, stupid when that person has access to a variety of blunt metal objects?” she asked, eying his beer with suspicion. She loved the man like a brother, but if he brought any more IPA into her home, there would be consequences.

“Your tools are all the way back there in your truck,” Jon scoffed. He gracefully dropped into a sitting position and slipped his long legs into the water next to hers.

It was strange, how easily she’d fallen into step with him. She’d always been slightly apart at home, different from her family. And here? Jon had just pulled her along into his big circle of friends, a circle he had only recently joined, after so many years isolating himself. It felt like she’d just slipped into a stream that was made for her. And when she didn’t know what to say in the group, there was always someone there to ask a question or move the conversation along. They all just fit together like pieces of a puzzle, but there was room for her, too. She didn’t feel like she’d just been slapped on the edge. She felt a part of things.

She gestured with her bottle to the wide-open waterfront. “You assume I don’t have weapons hidden nearby. You don’t know my life.”

He snickered. “I like to think that’s not true, but you are a woman of mystery.”

Her mouth twitched, even as discomfort flared inside her. Time to change the subject. “We’ve talked about the beer, Jon.”

“It’s not my fault I can’t handle that intense dark shit you and Zed like so much,” he said, chin-pointing to her bottle and shuddering. “Besides, this is not just a beer. This is an invitation.”

“Is it six bottles of ‘take your piss-water back to your own house, because I’ve had a long day fixing an airboat for a jackass who kept asking if I was qualified to be handling a timing belt’?” Eva asked.

Jon groaned, spanning his hand over his face. “I knew I shouldn’t have sent you down to Percy’s place on your own. He’s such a jackass.”

“Well, you did try to warn me. And you can’t babysit me just because a client is a jackass. Besides, Hector’s a bigger client. We needed you to finish his job first,” she said, taking one of his beers and wincing as she took a sip. She shook her head and handed it back to him. “At least Percy didn’t ask me if my boobs got in the way during oil changes like Balfour Boone did.”

“We were right to stop working for that particular jackass,” Jon said, taking her discarded beer bottle.

“We really should start a jackass registry,” she muttered. “Or at least apply a jackass surcharge.”

“It’s not your worst idea,” Jon said. “Let’s bring it up at our weekly business meeting, but like I said, this beer is an invitation. Everybody’s getting together tonight…”

“Oh, gods, are they coming here?” she gasped, glancing around for the inevitable procession of vehicles that accompanied the group. “My place is not child-proofed, Jon, and last time Dalinda set fire to Sonja’s curtains with a sneeze. And they were really nice curtains.”

He chuckled, raising his hands. “Don’t worry. They’re not coming here. They know you’re not quite up for that, yet. Jillian and Sonja, they know the group as a whole can be a little… they can be a lot. All the same, they’re getting together at our place. Something about board games and snacks, I don’t know. Lia and Dani were pretty excited about it. And anything that makes Dani feel better in her condition…”

Jon paused to shudder and Eva made a sympathetic noise. Ever since Dani had become impregnated with Zed’s bear-spawn, her life had become a non-stop search for the nearest receptacle to throw up in. Eva thought human morning sickness was supposed to end sometime early on in the pregnancy, but Dani continued throwing up well into her second trimester.

“So Zed is basically guilting everybody into this, huh?” Eva guessed.

“He didn’t really have to but, yeah, he made the baby Dalinda eyes at us. It was deeply disturbing,” Jon said.

She wanted to say that Zed couldn’t possibly know how to make dragon-phoenix hybrid baby eyes in an accurate fashion, but this was Mystic Bayou. Anything was possible.

“All right, then.” She stood and dusted her hands off on her jeans. “Dump your not-quite-real beer in the water. Maybe it will keep the Beasleys away.”

“If anything, it would draw them in,” Jon muttered, before dropping the empty bottles in her recycling bins.

“You realize that if this is a trivia-based game, Jillian will destroy us, right?” Eva asked.

Jon waggled his head while swallowing his beer then sighed. “Yeah. But there will be snacks, so there’s a tradeoff.”

* * *

While Eva’s place was the definition of clean Scandinavian minimalism, Lia had made Jon’s former bachelor pad into something out of Better Shifter Homes and Gardens. The Carmody residence had been a comfy, sun-bleached retreat before Lia had moved in, all well-loved denim-colored furniture and softened bits of beach glass. Lia had built on that theme with driftwood sculptures and strategically placed petrified coral. She took one of Gran Carmody’s lovely blue-and-white patchwork quilts and displayed it prominently on the wall. Somehow, it was both sophisticated and cozy, and Eva was deeply afraid of the creative gleam Lia got in her eyes every time she came over to Eva’s place.

The crowd greeted her with their normal enveloping warmth the moment she walked in the door. It was the sort of overwhelming noise and bustle that would have scared her into hiding in the early days. But now, she simply accepted the hugs and kisses and being handed a squealing, fire-breathing baby as if it was the most natural thing in the world. And it was. These people loved her, and for a moment she allowed herself to bask in the peaceful glow of it.

Eva loved this town. She loved how open and accepting everybody was with each other, even if it did make it a little difficult to maintain her assumed identity. She didn’t talk about her past or her kind with the group, which she knew drove poor Jillian crazy. But anthropologist or not, Jillian was professional enough not to push (too much) when a clear boundary had been drawn. But there were so few like her, out here in the human world, that if word spread that someone like her was here in the Mystic Bayou, her family would find her in no time at all.

Jon was soon dragged into the kitchen to taste-test some sort of shrimp-based experiment Lia had come up with. Having been raised in a household with staff (pause for Eva’s absolute amazement), Lia had never learned to cook and was now trying to master every Cajun recipe Zed’s mother, Clarissa, could throw at her. Dani tended to stick to her more cheese-based Midwestern roots when it came to kitchen-craft. Together, they usually came up with a menu that pleased everybody’s palates. But tonight, it seemed that a pale green Dani was reclined on the well-loved sofa, keeping one hand over her rounded belly.

“There’s a theme to tonight’s menu. ‘Stuff Dani’s been craving.’ We’re hoping it will help her keep it down,” Sonja told Eva quietly, placing a platter of empanadas on the table next to dim sum, gyros and other “hand-held” foods.

“The little cub has waged war on my ability to keep anything down,” Dani groaned. “But somehow, food-within-food appetizers just taste safe.”

“Pregnancy cravings are weird like that. I threw up blue lava if I went near anything mango-flavored, but towards the end I was craving all the other tropical fruits so much Bael basically lived in the grocery store parking lot,” said Jillian. She waggled a copy of A Comprehensive History of Sewing Machines and placed it on the end table, above Eva’s work boots. Jillian was always doing that, bringing Eva books she thought she might enjoy. And since Eva was fascinated by machinery, a historical guide to sewing machines would keep her up all night like a nail-biter murder mystery.

It was nice to be understood.

“And on the lava note, we don’t want to see if Dani can throw up lightning, so we’re encouraging her to eat foods wrapped in other foods,” Sonja whispered as she threw an arm around Eva’s shoulders.

“I heard that!” Dani said, sitting up.

Eva snickered and offered Sonja a gentle squeeze in return. Sonja always smelled of expensive boutiques and office supplies, a strange combination that worked for her. Eva had been surprised that Sonja, of all people, had offered her friendship on such easy and open terms. Sonja was so fancy. But Eva had a wealth of skills and Sonja appreciated that in a person. Every woman here was a competent and powerful person in their own right – paired with an equally capable person. Frankly, if they ever decided to take over the League and re-order the supernatural world, Eva wasn’t sure Darwin Messina could stop them.

As Dani changed position on the couch, her face went a paler shade of green, somewhere in the chartreuse family. Zed appeared in a flash, placing a frosty ginger ale in her hand and easing her back onto the cushions.

“I’ve got you, Abeille,” he murmured to his fiancé, his face aglow with absolute adoration before turning his attention to the swell of her belly. “OK, kiddo, we’ve talked about this. Yes, it’s funny to make maman turn different colors.”

“Thanks, hon,” Dani deadpanned.

Zed shrugged, all innocence, “But you’ve got to give her just a couple of vomit-free hours a day, all right? She will have the power to ground you when you come out of there. You keep this up, you’re not going to be able to leave the house until you’re in graduate school.”

Rolling her eyes, Dani raised her arm and gave Eva a wave. “Yeah, I’m just going to stay here. It’s my least barf-y position. Hope that’s cool.”