The Accidental Genie (4 page)

Sloan gave her a cocky grin. “You wanna see the proof?”

Jeannie shook her head hard. The glint of the store’s display light through the windshield caught the chocolate and red highlights in her wavy hair and highlighted her cute nose. “Where the hell are my clothes and what is
this
?” she asked, plucking at the filmy pants covering her shapely thighs, then lifting her feet to reveal jewel-encrusted slippers, pointy toed and tipped with tassels. “I look like MC Hammer!” she virtually shouted, spitting the veiled material of her fez from her mouth.

“Whoomp, there it is.”

“No. That’s ‘Can’t Touch This,’ wolf man.”

He reared his head back and laughed for the third time that night. “That’s
were
wolf.”

“Not laughing here.” She threw her arms over her chest with a shiver.

“Maybe it was a parting gift from your friend?” Sloan guessed, pulling off his jacket and draping it along the back of her seat for her to use. “I don’t know. Like I said—this”—he waved his hand along her length—her very sexy, rounded length—“isn’t our specialty. Anyway, you’re out of the bottle, and that’s all that matters. Are you okay? I mean, physically?”

Jeannie’s return expression was bland when she burrowed into his coat, pulling it tight to her chest. “Is anyone ever really the same after being pushed through an opening the size of a donut hole only to end up wearing a fez?” She flicked the hat on her head with two fingers.

Sloan chuckled. “You make a valid point. So, I guess that’s it, right? You’re out of the bottle. Mission accomplished. Go team.” He held his fist forward for her to knock. This ought to shut Marty up.

Jeannie’s eyes were still glassy, but she managed to knock fists with him with a weak stab and a slight shudder of her shoulders.

“You want a ride back to your car?” He reached for the gearshift to put it into reverse.

She nodded her head affirmatively. “Yes, master,” was her throaty, sinfully enticing reply.

Sloan kept his foot on the brake and cocked his head in surprised confusion. “I said, do you want a ride back to your car?”

“Yes,
maaaaster
,” came out of her mouth once more, only this time in a warbled almost cry while her lips twisted in distaste.

Sloan paused with a frown. “Did you just call me master?
Master?
” Very. Kinky.

It was clear she was struggling to keep her lips from moving, but it was as though some invisible entity were forcing the phrase from her lips. “Yes, master,” she all but spat.

Now her eyes weren’t just glazed. They were glazed and wide with shock and maybe even some horror, if he was reading the drop of her jaw right. Jeannie clapped a hand over her mouth with such force, it echoed in the car.

Okay, this had gone from a little weird—because let’s face it, he knew weird—to full-on whacked. Wherever this was going, he wasn’t going with. She was alive. She didn’t have any discernible injuries, and excluding the strange way she’d come by her cute outfit, no paranormal abilities. It was time to call this rodeo. No way was he revealing what he’d thought earlier.

Jeannie blinked, then frowned, clearly choosing her words with caution. “I’d like to go home now,” she whimpered around her fist.
“Please.”

“Home. I’m on it.” Lifting his foot off the brake, Sloan backed out of the parking lot and made a beeline back toward the house where he’d found her. They rode in relative silence, Jeannie tucking her purse and his jacket to her once barely covered breasts and Sloan trying to keep his eyes off them.

Woman in crisis, ass. No breast watching for you.

They slid to a halt right back where they started. Simultaneously, they reached for their respective door handles, Jeannie’s hand shaky, Sloan’s impatient to get out and get her safely to her car before anything else happened.

He made his way around to her side of the car, placing his hand at her elbow and catching a whiff of the fruity scent she wore. Sloan plucked a lingering cigarette butt from her hair with gentle fingers. “Where’s your car, Jeannie? Give me the keys. I’ll go get it for you.”

She tipped her purse up to the streetlamp and pulled out her keys, handing them to him, hesitance in her eyes. “It’s just outside of the back gate.” She breathed a sigh of evident relief that her statement didn’t include the word
master
.

“Why don’t you wait in the car where it’s warm?” he suggested from over his shoulder. If he hurried, he could still catch the last half of the game.

Footsteps sounded behind him. He paused and turned to find Jeannie to the rear of him, her heels visibly digging into the pavement, her body at an awkward slant. “Did you hear me? You can wait in the car.”

She wobbled, putting her hands out to steady herself. “Oh, I heard you just fine. Apparently, my feet don’t have their listening ears on.”

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, rocking back on his heels. “Your feet?” Now what? Had they sprouted wings? At least that would have some paranormal qualities to it.

“You heard me. My feet aren’t cooperating. Each time you take a step, my feet literally mirror your footsteps, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

“That’s crazy,” he replied, sarcasm seeping into his words before he could prevent it.

She crossed her arms over her chest, the arms of his jacket hanging over her hands. “You’d know crazy, now wouldn’t you,
expert
?”

Sloan threw his hands up in defeat and turned to stomp off to find her car. The faster he got her into it, the faster he could go home.

But the echo of her slippers stalked his ears. Sloan pivoted on his heel to find her but a couple hundred feet from him.

Jeannie’s eyes narrowed, glittering in the glow of the lamplight with an I-told-you-so glint to them.

Rolling his tongue along his cheek, he took a step backward to test her theory.

As though someone were pushing her from behind, she teetered forward, fighting the unwanted movement of her feet. When she began to stumble, Sloan rushed forward, catching her so she wouldn’t crash to the hard pavement.

Jeannie slumped in his arms with a growl of frustration, bracing her hands on his forearms. Their bodies pressed closer, making Sloan inhale sharply. He set her from him with a hard glance. “I think we have a problem.”

“Ya think,
master
?” The fatal word flew from her mouth like a bullet, crashing through her clenched teeth. She screamed then, her face turning a shade of red Sloan couldn’t remember seeing before.

That was just before she disappeared in a cloud of perfumed, lavender-colored smoke.

Sloan waved away the smoke, and when it cleared, he was still alone.

This paranormal incident was brought to you by the words
yes
and
master
.

CHAPTER

2

“Is this outfit some kind of pathetic ploy for attention, Jeannie Carlyle?” Betzi, her menu planner and chef for Cee-Gee Catering, drawled the question from her position on Jeannie’s moss green couch.

The surface was covered in boxes of sales receipts and client orders Jeannie could never find the time to organize. Betzi swung her legs over the arm of the sofa with a yawn, casually flipping through the current issue of
Cosmo
.

When Jeannie, who was still marveling at the technique with which she’d arrived on her doorstep, Sloan strangely in tow, didn’t answer, Betzi peered over the top of her magazine, a smirk on her face, her light brown eyes dancing with amusement. “Well? Don’t give me the eyeball. Answer the question. Do you need some love or something? Because I have to tell you, boss, I’m kind of tired tonight—it was that damned yoga instructor that did it to me. Well, that and all his downward-facing dog. He has so much energy. Sexy as hell, but phew—much work. Oh, and the twins are in your bedroom—snarling and, I’m sure, taking great pleasure in eating those fluffy stripper thongs you got at the flea market.”

Jeannie shot Betzi the most infuriated glare her eyeballs would allow without falling out of her head. Tonight was not the night to hear about another of Betzi’s sexual escapades—most especially if it involved downward-facing dog and a sweaty yoga instructor.

When she’d managed to poof herself back to her brownstone’s front door amidst this new smoke-and-mirrors technique she’d acquired, she’d burst through the door to her friend’s astonished gazes, introduced Sloan, acquiring more astonished gazes, and proceeded to explain her arrival and the preceding nightmare of her bottle captivity.

So it was an explanation that was just this shy of outlandish? Surely they knew her well enough to know she’d never make something like this up . . .

Jeannie spread her arms wide, indicating her flimsy ensemble and being extra careful to keep her back to Sloan. “Of course this is a ploy for attention, Betzi Cable. First, there’s my festive fez—what about that doesn’t scream I want attention? Then there’s my harem pants. Because I’m all about absolutely anything that will show off all the cellulite on my ass and how so not firm my abs are.”

She pushed Sloan’s jacket out of the way and pinched at the small roll of flesh exposed just under her ribs, making a face. “And who doesn’t want to flaunt their miniscule, thirty-four B fun bags in this armor they call a push-up bra? Fun bags that closely resemble a can of freshly popped dinner rolls all oozing out the sides?”

“Ohhh, but it’s such pretty material—all that gauze . . . So delicate, and look at the intricacy of the waistband of your MC Hammer pants. I mean, you just don’t run into that kind of embroidery anymore these days,” Charlene, Jeannie’s assistant muttered in her best divert-the-crazy-in-this-situation tone.

Usually her lyrical Australian accent soothed Jeannie. Tonight, it just made her want to throw her mate on the barbie. Clearly, they weren’t getting the picture here. She had a 911 on her hands.

Charlene tweaked the leg of Jeannie’s harem pants and forced a bright grin. “And those shoes, mate?” She nodded her thumbs-up. “To. Die. For. So authentic.”

Jeannie let out a puff of pent-up air and planted her hands on her hips in a frustrated gesture. “Right, because in my desperate ploy for attention, I definitely want my attention-grabbing outfit to have only the most intricate embroidery.”

Charlene gnawed on her lip—one of her many nervous reactions when she didn’t know what to say. “You know, I could’ve stayed home. I had plenty of work to do for that beast of a bride, Willow Sanders. I didn’t have to come over to make sure Betzi didn’t suffocate the twins with a pillow or give them too much canned dog food. You do remember what happens then, don’t you? It leads to oose-lay oopy-pay.” She whispered the words, her eyes flitting to the floor in shame. “It took us three cleanings with that carpet cleaner and four gallons of solution to get the mess all up the last time she fed them her leftovers from The Dawg House. I was just trying to help,” she huffed, clearly offended by Jeannie’s harsh tone.

“You know how you can help, Charlene?” Jeannie asked, her voice tight, her temper flaring.

Charlene’s face instantly brightened, her wringing hands stilled. Sweet and genuine, she answered, “Name it. I’m in. Whatever you need, and I do mean whatever.”

Jeannie narrowed her eyes in the vicinity of the alleged werewolf Sloan Flaherty, gorgeously quiet while he watched the women interact. Waving a hand in his general direction, she snorted. “Tell me what to do with
him
.”

Betzi dropped the magazine on the couch and smiled in Sloan’s direction with a coquettish slant to her lips. She smoothed her pixie-cut dark hair behind her ears and slipped to the edge of the cushion with a wink. “I’ll tell you what I’d like to
do
with him, but it’s probably not fit for polite company. Oh, and Ms. Charlene Gibbons, who blushes if you use the word
vagina
. Now, usually, that wouldn’t stop me, but seeing as you ran rampant with this fascinating, though maybe a little outdated, maneuver in order to nab a man—I’m sticking to the employer/employee code and keeping my all-out lust for hot stuff on the inside.” She made a circle with her finger around her lower torso. “But a warning for all future endeavors. The next time you go on a long overdue man spree, leaving me and my lady parts behind to babysit Benito and Boris, and you don’t bring me home any leftover doggie bags of the male persuasion, I’m breaking up with you and going to work for that pig Aleksi.”

Jeannie’s eyes rolled upward. She gritted her teeth and fought for composure. Not an easy task in harem pants. “I cannot believe you’d threaten me with that cheesy Russian rip-off of Sandra Lee. He makes those crescent rolls from scratch like Pillsbury is suddenly making Big Macs. And I did
not
go on a man spree. I told you what happened,” she insisted, peevish in tone.

That Betzi and Charlene were having trouble believing her explanation for showing up here in this getup with a man she couldn’t get more than a few hundred feet from without being forced directly back toward his vicinity by some invisible force came as no surprise.

She was having trouble believing it, too. But still . . .

Betzi rose, waving a dismissive hand at Jeannie before sauntering toward Sloan, who was still looking rather confused, and was now sitting on the ottoman that matched her burgundy chair, covered in her almost identical dogs Boris’s and Benito’s hair. “Yeah, yeah. There was a bottle of booze, and a bald Aladdin guy with a single braid down his back, and he wore parachute pants, and a phone call and some sort of paranormal something or other and then
him
. The, uh,
werewolf
,” she enunciated in slow syllables. “Look, friend, here’s the thing. If this isn’t a ploy for attention, or some whacky way of acting out slash losing your marbles because of all work and no play or a date in all the time I’ve worked for you makes for a dull, maybe even mental Jeannie Carlyle—then just say it. Never mind. I’ll say it. Your hormones finally caught up with you. No shame in that, boss.”

Jeannie began to protest, but Betzi held up her hand and snapped her fingers together while Charlene’s eyes darted between her boss and her coworker with nervousness. She backed away, stumbling over a throw rug before righting herself and biting her lip.

“Look, you don’t need a reason to admit you have needs,
mi amiga
. I always say if your hormones are calling—answer the damn phone. But you definitely didn’t have to make up this elaborate story about being trapped inside a gin bottle because you want to sleep with a guy who likes to role-play and has a fetish for Barbara Eden. There’s nothing wrong with a little kinkity-kink. I’m just going to be thankful you didn’t hook up with a man-child who likes to wear diapers. There’s also nothing wrong with a one-night stand. Don’t be ashamed of your needs, Jeannie. Own those bitches.” Betzi punched the air with a slow, unenthusiastic fist for emphasis.

“Okay, ladies. That’s enough,” Sloan said, jumping up, a disgusted scowl on his beautifully chiseled face. “I can assure you I do not wear diapers, and have never, not even once, considered them as an accoutrement to anything sexual.”

Charlene clasped her hands together at her breast and sighed with a dreamy rasp. “Ohhh, he knows what the word
accoutrement
means. He’s a smart one-night stand. Way to pick ’em, Jeannie.” She, too, punctuated her statement with a much more enthusiastic fist pump than Betzi’s and gave Jeannie an encouraging smile.

“For the last time, he is not a one-night stand!” Jeannie yelped with a stomp of her bejeweled foot, making the tassels on her shoes quiver. “What I told you about how this all happened is true, Betzi Cable! I didn’t pick him up at the party I catered, and I definitely don’t want to have a one-night stand with him!”

Sloan beat the place on his chest where his heart was with a fist. “Ow. That cuts so deep.” He gave her a somber glance, but his eyes, a light blue and hooded by dark lashes, gleamed.

Crossing her arms over her chest, Jeannie stood in front of him, just barely reaching the top of his broad shoulder. “My heartfelt apologies.”

Sloan put a hand on her shoulder, using a light grip, one that while she was sure wasn’t meant to, nonetheless made her shiver. “No, no. No need to apologize. You’re on edge. I’d be on edge if I were wearing gauze, too. No amount of intricate embroidery can make up for that.”

Jeannie’s chin lifted as she shrugged his hand away. His big, unfamiliar, warm, sexy hand. Stranger danger. “This isn’t funny, Sloan.”

“I’ll say.”

Jeannie backed up with slow steps, careful not to hit the corner of her messy desk. Since they’d both arrived at her brownstone in a puff of lavender smoke smack-dab on her doorstep, she’d had no choice but to invite him in because she couldn’t get very far without him. He’d had the very same look she knew mirrored hers. Utter confusion.

And what had that
master
thing been about? The word had slipped off her tongue like she’d always addressed strange men in that manner—though, she’d discovered, if she bit her tongue hard enough, she could now choke back the word. The use of that particular title troubled her far more than some whacky genie costume. Jeannie Carlyle was nobody’s bitch. So, yeah. “Why can’t I get away from you?” she asked with a frown of discontent.

“Because I’m irresistible?”

Jeannie wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “No, I’m pretty sure that’s not it.”

His lean jaw clenched. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on. It’s like I said, I have no information on genies or whatever it is you are. I’m a werewolf. Genies and werewolves don’t play in the same sandbox. But Marty, Nina, and Wanda will be here soon to help figure this out. Nina just texted me to say they’re on their way.”

Yeah. She vaguely recalled him explaining the three magical women that were going to tip her paranormal world right side up again by helping her get through her paranormal crisis. “And then what happens? Shorty, Tina, and LaShonda wave their magic wands and make everything okay?”

“It’s
Marty
,
Nina
, and
Wanda
,” he emphasized, his eyes somber. “I’d get that right, if I were you, specifically Nina’s name. She’s probably the meanest woman alive. No, I take that back. There’s no probably about it. She
is
the meanest woman alive. I can’t make any promises for your safety if you get her name wrong. Just a heads-up. As to what happens next?” Sloan shrugged his wide shoulders. “Can’t say for sure. I’ve never been involved in their little support group or any of the adventures they seem to manage to get tangled up in. I was just answering the phones for them because Marty made me. She’s my sister-in-law, another werewolf, and when she wants something, you give it to her or she badgers you until you do.”

It might be crazy to even consider such myths existed, but after tonight, who was the crazy one if she didn’t at least give this paranormal explanation some serious credibility. There was no denying she’d been trapped in a gin bottle. There was no denying a man had popped out of the gin bottle just before she’d been sucked into it.

OMG. Mulder had been right. The truth really was out there.

Located in a gin bottle full of stale cigarette butts and piles of beer cans.

The slight throb of her temple increased. She rubbed it with an errant finger and gathered more of her thoughts. “So this kind of thing has happened before? They’ve helped other people who’ve had accidents like me?”

Sloan’s forehead wrinkled in thought. He jammed his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “Twice, I think. So far anyway. I dunno. I don’t keep track. Like I said, I was just at OOPS helping out while they shopped—or something. They don’t get many serious calls. Most of them are pranks.”

“So how did you get here again? To my house?” When her lavender smoke had cleared, and she’d realized where she was, Sloan had been right behind her like they had some invisible leash binding them together.

Sloan planted his hands on his hips, making his leather jacket crinkle. “It was the craziest damn thing. One minute you were there, right in the middle of the road at that guy’s mansion—the next you were gone and I was right behind you. Poof. You know the rest. Puffs of girlie-smelling smoke—me outside your house, et cetera.”

Betzi circled the two of them, her heart-shaped face full of mischief. “Okay. I think it’s time for Charlene and me to hit the bricks. You guys go back to your one thousand and one Arabian nights fantasy, and I’ll call you in the morning for the juicy details after I plan that menu for the Morgans, yes?”

“No!” Jeannie shouted, clutching Betzi’s hand, panic racing through her veins. “No way are you leaving me here alone when I have more creatures coming!”

Sloan clucked his tongue in clear admonishment again. “Another tip from me to you. Ixnay on the word
eatures-cray
. If I wasn’t sure Nina’d be mad as hell that you called her Tina, I’m positive she’d eat your lungs for lunch for calling her a creature. I don’t want to scare you, but I think it’s only fair to tell you Nina can be very touchy and confrontational. Not to mention, she has absolutely no filter from brain to mouth. We’re called paranormals. I’m a werewolf just like Marty. Nina’s a vampire, and Wanda’s half werewolf, half vampire. Period.”