StrangeDays

Rebecca
Royce

Book one of the Shadow Promised
series.

Dodie Chase has a
terrible crush on her neighbour, Christian Casillo. But a man like him—karate
blackbelt, exotic dancer and romance novel cover stud—could never be interested
in a mouse like her.

And thoughts of
romance fly out of her head when her best friend’s boyfriend is brutally
murdered, leaving Mindy white-haired and in shock. An evil clown, a creature
from Dodie’s worst nightmares, is pursuing everyone she loves—and she starts to
realize that Christian is among them.

A Romantica®
horror erotic romance
from Ellora’s
Cave

Dodie Chase held her car keys between her teeth while she
tried to balance her morning coffee, her apartment keys and her briefcase
without spilling, breaking or destroying anything. She shook her head. There
had to be an easier way to begin her daily routine than this.

“Here. Let me help you.”

She cringed at the voice behind her and subsequently dumped
her coffee all over her white blouse. Closing her eyes, she wondered if it
would look really bad if she started banging her head against her apartment
door. The heat from the coffee seeped through her shirt, scalding her skin. She
hissed, backing up a step while she pulled on the material, this time colliding
with her neighbor.

Making a sound somewhere between “oomph” and “whoops”, she
stumbled before he caught her and hauled her back to her feet.

“Wow. Did you burn yourself? I hope this isn’t my fault. Did
I startle you? I really only wanted to help.”

Dodie raised her eyes to meet the concerned gaze of the one
man in the world who seemed to startle her simply by existing. Christian
Casillo, her next-door neighbor and god to women everywhere, smiled at her
while he held her body against his.

She swallowed, her throat gone dry from his touch. “I’m
fine. Thank you. Just clumsy.”

Dodie pushed herself backward out of his arms and decided
not to analyze why the sudden downward slope of his blond eyebrows made her
stomach flutter. She’d spent more than enough time thinking about the man next
door. Adding even one more second of time to the activity would change her from
being fascinated with him to being obsessed.

Dodie Chase did not obsess. Not about men she would never
have one sliver of a chance with.

He asked her the same question again. “Dorothy, are you
okay? Did you burn yourself?”

“Dodie.” She cleared her throat. “Everyone calls me Dodie.”
Since this was the most they had ever communicated in the hallway, he would
have no way of knowing that. Turning on her heel, she held her head high as she
walked past him. “I’m perfectly fine. Thanks.”

She had no time to go back in her apartment and change, and
who knew whether he’d still be out here when she got finished. Dodie had to get
out of the building. Immediately if not sooner. Without another word, she fled
the hallway for the elevator, hoping she never, ever had to be that close to
him again.

Really, it was unfair to other men that people like
Christian existed. Tall and broad-shouldered, with blond hair that fell to his
shoulders. As far as she could tell from the quasi-stalking she had done of
him, which had basically meant asking anyone she could think of in the building
discreet questions about him, he spent his days in the gym or working out at
various fitness places around town. Austin had its pick of athletic offerings. He
needed only to step outside to find three or four places offering to teach
karate, pilates or something called the Barre Method.

More than once, on her way home, she’d spotted him in a
black belt at the karate studio, looking very ninja-esque. She pushed away the
memory, since it also featured her face pressed against the glass to stare at
him. Really, she was bordering on pathetic.

A man like him would never consider dating someone like her.
Particularly because, in addition to the exercise and occasional posing he did for
romance novel cover shoots, his evenings were spent dancing at Austin’s most
hard-to-get-into male strip club, Brass. By contrast, she sat with coffee on
her shirt and her hair uncombed at a desk with no idea what clothes were
fashionable or even where she could buy yoga pants should she want to go to the
gym. She knew firsthand how beautiful he looked on stage. At Brass, Christian
and fifteen other men showed patrons just what sheer male perfection looked
like while it wriggled across the floor in a seductive dance.

Dodie had watched it herself when she’d gone to see him work,
hidden at the back of the room.

Men like Christian Casillo didn’t look twice at women like
Dodie Chase. Not when she preferred to spend her nights online in roleplaying
rooms or going out with friends to listen to obscure bands play funky jazz
music. He would find her dull, so she didn’t even know why she bothered
thinking about him at all.

Enough. Done. Dumb. Her shirt was soaked. The guys at work
would give her hell about it all day.

Sighing, she stepped out of the elevator. Some days were
just like this. They started out strange and they only got worse. Maybe she
could cut this one off at the pass. The oddness could be attributed to her run-in
with Christian and she could leave it at that.

* * * * *

Later that morning, as she stared at code wondering whether
she was going to have to have to call one of the tech guys over to help her,
she looked up to find her best friend Mindy looking down at her.

Mindy leaned against Dodie’s cubicle wall, a smile on her
lips. “Nice of you to notice I’m here.”

“You know how I get when something isn’t working? Today,
nothing is working.” She leaned back in her chair, strain in her neck making
her grit her teeth. “What’s going on?”

It was past lunchtime and Mindy, one of the salespeople for
their small company, didn’t usually take breaks in the middle of the day.

“Have you been following the weirdness on the news today?”

“No. I’ve been totally preoccupied figuring out why I can’t
get the hero of this game to turn his head left in this scene instead of right.
It just won’t do it.” She broke the pencil she was holding in her left hand. It
snapped right in two. Blinking at the mess she’d made, she set the two pieces
down in front of her. “What’s going on?”

“Just a lot of weirdness around town. People are reporting
seeing things and some spree of murders happened in an office building on
Lamar.”

“Really?” She clicked over on her desktop to check the Twitter
feed she left running all day. Sure enough, local Austinites were speculating
about objects in the skies, calling it some kind of secret government project run
amok. As for the murder spree, she winced when she read the details.

Those poor people. All gutted. Silently, she sent good
energy to their families to help them to get through such a tragic time.

“Thanks for letting me know. I’ve been a little out of it.”

Mindy shrugged. “That’s okay. I just can’t concentrate
today. I have a billion phone calls I could return but I can’t seem to do
anything constructive. Austin doesn’t have this kind of crime. We just don’t.”

Dodie smiled at her friend. She could really use a break and
it certainly looked as if Mindy could too. “Let’s go get some coffee.”

One of the benefits of having an office so close to South
Congress was the ability to pop into the South Congress Street Café whenever
she wanted.

Mindy fell into step beside her. “You’re sure you haven’t
had enough of the stuff today? You’re still wearing your early morning taste of
it.”

“Ha ha. I only spilled that because Christian spoke to me. If
he’d left me be, like any self-respecting sex god should, I would have gone on
my way and not looked like this all day.”

As they exited the building, the ninety-degree Austin summer
air blasted Dodie’s face, making her instantly break out in a sweat. A glance
at Mindy showed that the blonde, blue-eyed and perfectly thin five-foot four-inch
woman appeared as fresh as she had moments before in the air-conditioned building.
She never seemed to sweat. It was so damn unfair.

“You know, you were rude to him this morning.”

Dodie blinked, trying to follow the thread of conversation. “Do
you mean Christian?” She’d told Mindy all about it when she’d first arrived at
work.

“Yes. He was trying to help you and it sounds as if not only
did you blow him off, but you were rude about it.”

“I wasn’t rude.” She’d said thank you. If she hadn’t said
much else, it didn’t really matter. A man like Christian wouldn’t have given
her two thoughts after she’d left. Why did she have to be Molly Manners about
the whole thing?

“You were. Did you even try to speak to him? This is not the
first encounter you’ve had with him when you’ve all but sprinted to get away
from him.”

Dodie winced. It was wonderful to have a best friend and
terrible that she remembered all the secrets about Dodie that she’d like to
have Mindy forget.

“I don’t know why I get shrewish and strange every time I
see him. I spend enough time thinking about him. I’m just so weird.”

They approached the coffee shop and went inside. The air-conditioning,
up to high, blasted at them, sending Dodie’s body temperature into shock. The
summers in Austin were spent going from too hot to too cold every time she went
inside or out.

Mindy ordered their coffee, then turned to look at Dodie.
“You have a crush on him, so a little weird is to be expected, particularly
because for someone as cute as you are, you have so little experience with men
outside the friendship arena.”

Dodie couldn’t deny that. “I was a fat teenager. Guys
weren’t exactly lining up to take me out.”

“Fair enough, but you’re not a fat adult. You’re twenty-five
years old. You could get out a little bit. Come with Brian and me tonight. We’ll
go to a bar. Someplace where people talk to one another rather than sitting
around silently listening to sounds that make my ears hurt.”

“I can’t tonight.”

“Oh, is it
Star Trek
or Warcraft?” Mindy lacked the
sneer Dodie expected from someone who didn’t play.

“This is why you’re my best friend. You remember things like
that.”

She smiled, handing Dodie the coffee she’d ordered before
stepping back outside. “Another night then.”

“Sure.” She really would try to make a point of going out
more. Truth was, Dodie did not want to be alone for the rest of her life. She had
things she wanted to achieve that required socialization. Marriage, family,
kids. Hot sex. An image of Christian skipped through her mind again. Damn him
and his perfectly sculpted body.

“Maybe you could try to talk to him the next time he speaks to
you.”

Dodie shook her head. “Really good-looking men make me
really, really nervous.”

“I know.” Mindy sighed dramatically. “Maybe just try not to
run quite so fast?”

* * * * *

Christian counted his sit-ups as he stared out the window of
the gym. Another fifty or so and he could call it a day. It was his night off from
Brass and he didn’t have anywhere to go that required him to hurry up and
finish. Still, as much as he loved the gym, he didn’t want to waste his one day
off a week entirely inside the gym walls.

He practically lived there and that had to stop. Four more
months and he should have enough saved to open his own karate studio. Then he’d
really get to be doing what he wanted to do—teaching martial arts.

It wasn’t that he didn’t love dancing, but he had no
intention of making a lifetime out of his career at Brass or from the few
photographs he’d sold of himself that had landed on the covers of a dozen
romance novels.

All of that had been fun—he still couldn’t help but smile
when he saw himself on a bookshelf dressed as a pirate or a cowboy—but he’d
managed to keep his eye on the goal the whole time he’d worked other jobs. He
would open a seemingly normal karate school, but in the back it would be
something quite different. There he would teach as Master Foy had taught him—only
to the chosen few bound to fight the darkness.

This was as the master had foreseen it, and what Christian
had waited for several years to see come to fruition. In the meantime he’d
really been having a good time.

Except for the whole problem with his neighbor. His
redheaded, blue-eyed, freckled, curvaceous neighbor haunted his dreams and kept
him hard all the time. She reminded him of Joan from the television show
Mad
Men
. He’d always found the actress attractive, but she had nothing on Dodie
Chase.

The neighbor to his left, an eighty-year-old woman who owned
a dog that yapped at all hours of the night, had told him that Dodie worked as
some kind of software genius. He would love to hear her talk sometime, watch
her work, smell her hair as he had that morning when he’d discovered it was scented
just like strawberries.

But every time he got near her, she scampered away. That
almost never happened to him. The women he danced for could hardly keep their
hands off him. He’d always loved women and had never had one avoid him so
completely.

Maybe she thought he was dumb. He stood, grabbing the towel
he’d laid out. Unlike many of the other gym patrons, he always cleaned up after
himself.

Dodie would like him. He didn’t doubt it for a minute. When
she didn’t dress for work, she wore comic book, anime and science fiction T-shirts
over her jeans. He loved that stuff. They’d have a lot in common during the day,
and at night he’d get to explore her body.

Except she wouldn’t let him near her.

After showering and changing in the locker room, he exited
the building with a smile for the receptionist who took everyone’s card.

“Christian. I was hoping I’d see you.” She batted her eyes. “Maybe
you’d like to go out tonight?”

“Shana. Hi.” He waved at her. She was nice but boring as all
hell. “I’m afraid I’m busy tonight. But thanks. Hope you have fun.”

If Dodie would just treat him like that, all would be well. What
was he supposed to do with a woman who wanted nothing to do with him but whom
he felt in his soul he was supposed to be with?

It wasn’t as if he could demand her obedience as he would a
creature of the darkness.

He’d have to keep doing what he’d been doing—gentle and
determined pursuit until she came around. The curvy redhead belonged in his
bed. He would get her there if he employed a power of patience.