Enthralled

This is for everyone who knows the pain of losing a parent. Dad, you left us far too soon. I hope somebody up there told you that I’ve made my writing dreams come true.

Also, thank you to awesome reader

Jen Cash-Cook for Brynn’s name.

THE CURSE OF THE BLACK SWAN

A thousand years ago, on the edge of the Fae lands, a beautiful young peasant woman was bathing in a stream, singing a song of gratitude for the golden sunshine and the magnificent day. However, unlike many who play in the daylight, the girl also sang her thanks to the moon, who rested in diurnal slumber and yet heard the lilting melody of the girl’s voice and was pleased.

But others with darker purpose heard the girl’s wondrous song, too. The king of the land, a cold, hard man who beat his hounds, his children, and his wife with equal fervor, followed the melody to the stream and found the girl, innocent and glorious in her nudity, and he determined to attack her with his rapacious lust.

The girl pleaded with the barbarian king, which availed her nothing. So then she ran, and she fought, as her father the woodsman had taught her, and she managed to keep the king at bay until the sun dipped below twilight’s horizon, when her strength finally gave out. The king, enraged by her defiance, stabbed her through the heart and left her to die. As the girl bled to death on the bank of the silvery stream, the night wind whispered in her ear that the moon, who had appreciated the gift of the girl’s song, had taken pity on her.

“I will save you from this king, but you must agree never to leave me, and to become a black swan and sing to me every third night for the rest of your life, and swear also that your daughters and their daughters will continue to fulfill this promise.”

The girl, who had lost all hope as her blood pooled near her body and then slipped into the moonlit stream, parted her lips, barely able to speak. “And if I agree, will this gift—this curse—never end?”

The moon reigned alone over the dark night, and thus had her own measure of cruelty, but she knew well that mortals needed the promise of hope to survive, and so she offered this version of the truth in return:

“You and each generation’s eldest daughter will be released from your vow when you meet your one true love and bear him a daughter.”

The girl’s tears flowed as her blood had done mere moments before, when she agreed, and the moon caused a magnificent fountain to appear on that very spot. In the center of the fountain, a perfect black marble statue of the beautiful young woman, one hand held out to a swan, now stood as eternal monument to the vow.

From that day until this one, a black swan swims in the fountain and sings her songs of loss and longing every third night, while the moon smiles her icy smile. This woman who is also a swan plots and plans for how to avoid falling in love and how to never, ever bear a daughter who would be forced to carry the curse. But the moon’s pull is strong, and she is determined not to lose the lovely swan song, so these plans have never succeeded.

Not yet.

ONE

Bordertown, a place where the Fae, demon, and human worlds intersect, hidden in the heart of New York

Sean O’Malley ran into the burning building, dodging and weaving around the rest of his colleagues who were running and limping out of the inferno before it exploded or completely collapsed, either of which was due to happen any minute.

“O’Malley, get your ass back here,” his boss, the new Bordertown fire chief, shouted.

Sean ignored him, just as he’d ignored the previous fire chief. He’d heard something in that building. Maybe it was only a cat, and no matter how much it tore him up inside when he found evidence that a helpless animal had lost its life in a fire, he knew the rules: Firefighters didn’t risk their lives for pets. Not that he usually gave a rat’s ass for rules, and he’d certainly bent a few to save pets in the past. They all had.

But it hadn’t sounded like a cat. It had sounded like a baby.

Zach, the closest thing to a friend Sean had on the crew, planted himself in front of Sean, blocking his path to the door.

“Not this time,” Zach shouted.

They had to be loud to be heard over the roar of the flames that were greedily consuming the old building. Too much rotten wood, too little upkeep—it would be easy to blame that, if this hadn’t been the fourth building in as many nights hit in exactly the same way. They had a serial arsonist on their hands.

“I heard a baby. Get out of my way, or I’ll go through you,” Sean said, deadly calm and deadly serious.

He didn’t have time to delay. There was no way he was taking a chance on giving up on a baby who needed him. Not now and not ever—not ever, but especially not today, after his mom’s bombshell.

Zach was a couple of inches over six feet tall, but Sean was bigger by a few inches and probably by forty pounds of muscle, not to mention his extra abilities. Zach didn’t hesitate; he moved out of Sean’s way, fast, as soon as he heard the word baby. None of them understood how Sean could hear things that nobody else could, but they knew it was true. Enhanced hearing was one of his super powers, they liked to joke.

They also all knew that he could withstand temperatures that would have fried most of them alive. They didn’t joke about that one. He’d caught more than one of his colleagues watching him warily after they’d fought fires, their expressions similar to how he imagined he’d watch a feral wolf. They weren’t all that far off.

They knew he was different, but they didn’t know how different. Sean didn’t tell anybody he was half fire demon. Life was easier that way. Even in Bordertown, where demons were as common as low-caste Fae or shady humans, fire demons were considered to be the worst of the worst: crazed berserkers and the most terrifying of predators. His abilities already isolated him enough from the rest of the tightly knit crew. He didn’t need to add to it.

All of this ran through his mind in the few seconds it took for him to hit the building doorway running. He burst into the conflagration, head down and racing for the spot where the sound had originated. Second floor, to the left. He barely paused at the staircase, but the view was enough to make a sane man flinch. A roaring wall of orange-red flame screamed toward him, and the heat knocked him back a couple of steps. His skin felt the heat, even under his suit, and when the fabric started to melt off his body, he discovered that his protective gear wasn’t rated anywhere near high enough.

Whatever accelerant the arsonist had used wasn’t purely chemical; no way would a normal fire be burning that hot. Magic was involved here. In fact, it would take black magic to push a fire to these levels. Sean could feel his eyes flaring as his pupils contracted, and he knew that anybody watching him would see the irises turn deep blood orange in color and start to glow.

Sean analyzed the situation for options, but the stairs were the only way up; no matter that the stairwell was a tunnel of flame and probably going to explode any minute. He took them four at a time, barely clearing the last one before the explosion hit and the stairs collapsed into a burning mass of tinder. He glanced back at the fiery pit at the bottom of the stairwell and grimaced, and a falling chunk of ceiling smashed down on his helmet, nearly knocking him on his ass.

He stood there, head ringing and skull vibrating, and realized that one of these days he was going to kill himself trying to act like a big damn hero.

But not today.

The sound came again, and he still wasn’t sure. Wounded animals sometimes sounded a lot like babies. It could go either way. But he’d come this far, and he’d be damned if he’d leave anybody behind. He took the first door across the hall to the left, unerringly finding the source of the sound. The front room of the apartment, cheaply furnished but neat and tidy, was only beginning to burn, and he had a moment to hope that the bedrooms were in good shape before he hit the closed inner door running. Two seconds later, about a hundred pounds of shaggy black fur smashed into his chest.

Sean barely stayed on his feet. There had been a lot of power behind that furry projectile. The beast hit the floor and immediately clamped its powerful jaws around Sean’s ankle and pulled, hard. The pink collar on her neck proclaimed that the creature was named Petunia.

“Okay, Petunia, hang on,” Sean said, using his most soothing voice, but the dog’s whining increased in both pitch and volume, and she pulled even harder, trying to move Sean over to the corner of the room.

There was a crib, or bassinette, or whatever the hell people called the small, lace-draped wooden cradle tucked against the corner of the room. He heard the crying again, and it was definitely coming from the crib.

“I got him, girl,” Sean told Petunia.

She seemed to understand, since she let go of Sean’s ankle immediately and stood there, panting and making deep coughing noises. Smoke inhalation could damage dogs’ lungs, too, and Sean made a mental note to have the dog looked at when they got out of there. A crash sounded in the apartment’s front room, and he amended the thought.

If they got out of there.

The baby turned her startled, reddened eyes up to Sean in the instant before he swept her into his arms, and then she waved one pink-pajama’d arm at him and gurgled.

“We’re out of here, princess,” he told her, and then he picked up the room’s only chair, a wooden rocking chair, and hurled it at the window while shielding the infant.

The glass shattered outward, as planned, and Sean crossed the room and looked out. A jump from the second story was an easy one for him to make with fire-demon strength, especially only carrying a tiny baby instead of a large, screaming adult—which he’d had to do before—so he had this one in the bag.

No sweat.

And then the dog barked, reminding Sean that Petunia was not going to make it out alive on her own. He shook his head, impatient with his stupidity. His mother’s news had been blanking out everything else on his mind, and he knew better than most that distraction could be fatal at a time like this.

Sean looked down at the dog’s hopeful face, hesitantly wagging tail, and big, brown eyes. Petunia had stayed in that room to protect her precious charge, and she’d even pulled a Lassie on Sean’s leg to get him to find the baby.

Screw the rules. There was no way in hell he was going to leave that dog to burn to death.

“You’re going to have to trust me, girl,” he said, crouching down in front of the dog, but keeping an ear out for the shift in sound that would tell him that the entire apartment was about to collapse. He could somehow feel in his bones that the fire was about to take the whole thing down.

The dog’s big eyes looked worried, but she lifted one paw as if to shake, and Sean took that for a yes. He lifted her into the arm that wasn’t full of baby, took a running leap for the window, and leapt out into the comparatively cool darkness of the autumn night.

Within the next five minutes, he’d reunited the baby with her mother, who’d been missing because she’d run down to the building’s laundry room while her child was napping. The exploding water heater had shaken debris loose from the basement’s walls and ceiling, and a big chunk of something had hit the woman and knocked her out. Zach had knocked the debris off her and scooped her up, and by the time they roused her to consciousness, the EMTs were administering oxygen to her baby right next to her, so she’d never had to suffer even a moment’s fear that her child was dead. Petunia, also wearing an oxygen mask and getting checked out, was frantically trying to wrap her furry body around her entire small family all at once.

“Good job, girl,” Sean murmured, tipping a salute to the canine heroine before he moved on.

As always, he wanted to be sure to disappear before the thank-yous started and the media showed up. Bordertown’s lead crime reporter, Jax Archer, was a disgraced Fae lordling who just happened to be a living, breathing lie detector, so Sean preferred to stay out of his way. Sean’s old fire chief had gone along with his disappearing acts, mostly because Sean worked more hours than anybody else in the department.

The new chief wasn’t clued in yet.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” the chief shouted at him, crossing behind the hoses toward Sean while everyone else, exhausted but on the alert, watched the powerful streams of water battle the raging, magically created fire.

Sean noted that the department’s witch had arrived at some point, and he was now adding his efforts to the mix. Good thing, too, because water alone wasn’t going to stop that beast.

“Avoiding reporters,” Sean said bluntly, too tired and worried to care about playing nice with the new boss, who was turning out to be quite an asshole.

One of the reporters Sean could actually tolerate picked that moment to round the corner behind the truck and, spotting Sean, she headed straight for him, her cameraman racing to keep up with her.

“Pierce Holland, Bordertown Gazette,” she said unnecessarily, thrusting her microphone in Sean’s face.

“I know who you are, Pierce,” Sean said, but the reporter kept her game face on.

“You know the drill, O’Malley. Intro for the viewers, all hail the courageous firefighter, et cetera, et cetera,” she said, lowering her microphone and grinning while the cameraman checked something on his lens.

“I’m good,” the man said.

Instantly, the reporter’s smile vanished and she assumed the somber air of Reporter with Serious News, as Sean thought of it. The still-burning flames cast dancing shadows across their little tableau that patterned Holland’s face in a harlequin’s motley of black and orange, and for a moment Sean’s grandmother’s voice rang in his head, talking about a goose walking over his grave.

“Do we know what caused tonight’s fire? Also, I heard you brought out a baby and a dog after everybody else evacuated, O’Malley. Care to comment?”

The chief, winded and red-faced, rushed up then. A less charitable man might have thought he timed his arrival with the moment the camera turned on. Sean decided he wasn’t all that charitable.

“I don’t think you’ve met the new chief, have you, Pierce? He was the one who convinced me to go back in for that baby,” Sean said, lying through his teeth. He pounded his boss on the back, only a little too hard. “Excellent instincts, this guy. Going to make a great chief.”

The chief’s eyes widened, but before either he or Pierce could say another word, Sean smiled at them and ducked behind the truck. By the time his overactive hearing picked up the beginning of the chief’s response to the reporter, Sean was a block away and moving fast, stripping off his gear as he walked.

Another couple of blocks, and he made it to Black Swan Fountain Square, his favorite place for relaxation and quiet contemplation in the middle of the night. There wasn’t much room in the rest of his life for peace or quiet. The family business, O’Malley’s Pub, was always full of loud talk, laughter, music, and merriment.

It was enough to piss a man off.

Especially when he was sick with worry about his mother’s unexplained “little tests,” which had left her drained, weak, and nauseous for more than three weeks now. They knew about her cancer, but when he’d dropped by that afternoon, she’d refused to give him any specifics about the latest issue. So Sean had been having a bad damn day even before his fire station had gotten the call that the arsonist had struck again.

He stared blindly at the black marble sculpture of the beautiful young woman and the swan in the center of the fountain, so tired that he didn’t pay much attention to the actual live swan floating serenely in the water until the second time it came around. When he did notice it, he blinked, and then a flurry of movement in the water boiled up into a cloud of sparkling mist that he hadn’t been expecting, Bordertown or no. So he figured he could be excused for rubbing his smoke-wearied eyes when the iridescent shimmer dissipated, and the bird flapping its wings in the swan fountain turned into a beautiful woman.

A beautiful naked woman.

Maybe that hit he’d taken to the head had been harder than he’d thought, and now he was hallucinating. Except he didn’t have the luxury of that belief for more than a few seconds, because the hallucination started talking to him.

“Really? Are you just going to sit there and stare at me?”

“Well, I was here first, before you turned naked, ah, turned human. I mean, you didn’t—”

“Right. Chivalry. Dead. Insert appropriate cliché.” She pushed her long masses of dark curls out of her face and stalked over to him, not the least bit embarrassed that she was incredibly and gloriously naked. When she crouched down next to him, his breath got stuck in his lungs in a way that had nothing to do with fire but everything to do with heat.

She glanced up at him while reaching under the bench with one hand, and some of what he was feeling must have shown on his face, because she grinned.

“Relax, hot stuff. I’m just getting my clothes.”

TWO

Brynn raised her backpack to show him she had a purpose under that bench and wasn’t trying to pounce on him, and then she walked a few feet away, ducked behind a large flowering bush, and yanked on her clothes. After that, she stopped to hyperventilate a little bit, because he’d seen her transform. Catching her naked wasn’t nearly as worrying as catching her turning human, because this was Bordertown, and sometimes people who were different enough found themselves sold on the black market to collectors.

This guy, though, he’d seen her, and now she had to wonder why it was that she hadn’t noticed him sitting there, when she was usually so very careful, why the moon magic hadn’t shielded her from his view, and what the consequences might be. The only clue offering her even a little rational thought was the BTFD fire helmet sitting on top of a pile of what looked like firefighter gear next to him. Even she, self-proclaimed hermit that she was, knew the insignia of the Bordertown Fire Department. Maybe he was one of the good guys.

Or he’d killed and eaten a firefighter and stolen the guy’s uniform. Again, this was Bordertown.

The man was seriously beautiful. Even in the dim light from the decorative lanterns lining the square, she could see that he was an amazing specimen of sheer male virility. He had long, muscular legs and broad shoulders that tapered down to a narrow waist. He was no poster-perfect model, though. His dark hair was too long, his face was too stern ever to be called pretty, and she could have sworn his eyes had gleamed briefly with a spark of hot orange-gold, but in spite of all of that—or maybe because of all of that—she’d felt a bolt of interest that had registered as pure sensation the minute she’d completed her transformation and seen him sitting there.

But he’d seen her as a swan, and that was a problem. She stepped out from behind the bush and stared him down, evaluating which step to take next. None of her options were good. He sat with the perfect stillness of a hawk or a falcon, and like those creatures, he gave off the impression of leashed power that could explode into action in a fraction of a second.

It amused her that she sometimes thought in terms of other avian species, after the early years when she’d rejected everything about the curse. Defiance and stubbornness had sometimes been the only supports underpinning her hold on sanity. Curses did not travel lightly on their victims.

“Maybe we could talk,” he ventured.

She realized he’d been careful not to stand, and he wasn’t making any gesture or movement that might startle her, and the knowledge calmed her a little more. On the other hand, psychopaths were usually good at luring women in with a false sense of security.

A breeze coming from behind him teased her senses, and she sniffed the air. “Why do you stink like fire?”

He smiled, probably laughing at Brynn and her abrupt question, especially since the firefighter outfit was right there next to him on the bench. Normal people tended to mock her for her lack of social skills, anyway. She was better with animals. They didn’t mind her shyness, her long silences, or her general inability to tell the little white lies that oiled the wheels of polite society.

Right. She didn’t need another source of pain in her life, even if it happened to come from the hottest guy she’d seen in years. She wheeled around to head out.

“Stay,” he said, and the word came out like a command, which freed her from indecision.

Commands were easy to ignore.

She took a step toward home, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw him lift a hand as if reaching out to her.

“Please.” His voice was hoarse when he said the word, as if it were one he rarely used, and something about it made her stop when nothing else would have.

She’d been alone for so long, and part of her yearned so desperately to make a connection that it loosened her determination and left her wavering—indecisive and unsure—simply because he’d used the word please.

He sighed, and the mere exhalation of air carried more meaning than it should have. It told her that he, too, might be lonely, or at least sad. For some reason, she wanted to know what had caused it. She took a breath of her own and turned, clutching her backpack tightly in her hand as if it contained a weapon with which to defend herself from crazed killers or from an incredibly hot man who carried his sorrow in his deep, dark-chocolate eyes and slumped shoulders.

“I just want to talk,” he said, and she could almost taste the richness of his voice.

As a woman who spent every third night singing, she was exquisitely, almost painfully attuned to nuances of tone and pitch. His voice was beautifully low and deep, a calming baritone that stood out from the symphony of cracked altos and drunken sopranos she was forced to endure every third night.

“Look at the swan!”

“Do you think it’s lost?”

“Maybe it thinks the statue is its mate!”

If they knew her real story, maybe they’d quit laughing at her. But if people quit laughing, they might begin to pity her, and Brynn knew that would be worse.

“I understand if you want to go. A beautiful woman, alone in the middle of the night with a strange man,” he continued, but now he’d sunk his head into his hands, and she could tell he didn’t hold out much hope that she’d stay.

She should go. She should. Two things stopped her, though: his voice when he’d said please, and the BTFD insignia on the pile of smoke-drenched fabric next to him on the bench. She decided to conclude that he was a firefighter. If he’d killed the original owner of the uniform, there would have been less smoke and more blood.

She thought about that. Gruesome, but her logic seemed pretty sound, so she dropped down to sit on the end of his bench. “What was on fire?”

He glanced up, clearly surprised that she’d decided to stay. A glimmer of a smile crossed his face, and it transformed his face from ruggedly handsome to startlingly dark beauty. She realized that if he ever flashed a real smile at her, her legs might collapse out from under her. Before she could even suspect him of flirtation, sadness dropped back over his features like a dark cloak, and she realized that seduction was the last thing on his mind.

“An apartment building over by Ancient City Antiques,” he said.

Brynn’s heart jumped into her throat. Too much of Bordertown was built out of wood, and too much of it had been around since the 1800s. Fire in an apartment building would be devastating.

“Did—did everyone get out?”

“This time. But what about next time? We can’t seem to catch him.” He clenched his jaw so hard, she was surprised his teeth didn’t shatter, and she was sure that she saw a gleam of orange fire briefly light up his eyes.

What he’d said, though, shocked her into stunned disbelief. “Somebody did that on purpose? To an apartment building?”

He aimed a long, measured stare at her before he finally answered. “This is Bordertown. What haven’t you seen done on purpose around here?”

She flushed, feeling naïve and a lot like a fool, but she didn’t jump up and run away, no matter that it was her first, second, and third instinctive reaction. Something about his attitude—his anger at the arsonist who’d shown so little consideration for human life—caught at her and made her want to know more about him.

Anything about him.

Like his name, for instance.

“I’m Brynn Carroll, and I can’t believe you haven’t asked me about being a swan. That’s usually a big topic of conversation with me and new people,” she said, lifting her chin and squaring her shoulders. Ready for the barrage of questions.

She could do this. She could meet a new person. She firmed her lips and then found the courage to hold out her hand. Normal people shook hands.

“Sean O’Malley, and I figured you’d tell me when and what you wanted to tell,” he said, and then she caught what had only been teasing the edges of her senses before—the slightest lilt of Ireland infusing the music of his voice.

When his big, strong hand carefully enfolded hers, a gentle wave of warmth spread over her. She was glad to be sitting down, because she suddenly knew her knees would have gone weak and wobbly if she’d been standing. He was big, and he looked rough and scary and dangerous, especially here in the dark, illuminated only by the glow of the lanterns, but he’d taken her hand so carefully, as if it were something to be cherished.

As if she were someone to be cherished.

She pulled her hand away, banishing the fancies as she did. Loneliness was her only companion most nights; that didn’t mean she had the time or inclination to transform a chance encounter into a romantic interlude. Not even in the privacy of her deepest yearnings.

She already knew that love never, ever would be an option for her.

“I have to go,” she blurted out, jumping up and ready to run.

“Breakfast?”

As with please, the single word stopped her when a dozen might not have.

“In a brightly lit, public place, I promise,” he said, holding his hand over his heart and smiling that almost smile again.

She started to shake her head. He was too tempting, too intriguing, too . . . too everything.

“Unless you only eat birdseed.” He finally stood, stepping back so as not to loom over her, which was good, since the top of her head came to about his nose.

Her lips quirked into a smile, almost in spite of herself. “No, I don’t eat birdseed. I’m more of a pumpkin pancakes girl, actually. With bacon. Lots of bacon.”

He groaned, a deep noise that sounded like it came from the depths of his being, and it made her wonder what noises he’d make in the middle of lovemaking. As soon as the idea danced into her mind, she blushed so hot that she was glad for the darkness.

“Bacon. And eggs. And hashbrowns. Coffee. Lots of coffee,” he said. “I think I’m going to like you, Brynn Carroll.”

“I am very likable,” she dared to say, as if she’d suddenly become a woman who knew how to flirt with an unbelievably gorgeous man. Now he’d make fun of her, surely.

Instead, he grinned, and his smile felt like a gift he’d given her to unwrap.

“Breakfast?”

“Breakfast,” she agreed. “Where should we go?”

“Anywhere but O’Malley’s,” he said cheerfully, and she suddenly made the connection.

“You’re one of those O’Malleys? The O’Malley’s Pub O’Malleys?”

Everybody knew at least one of the O’Malleys; well, everybody except Brynn. Until now. They were big and brash; quick to anger and quicker to forgive, everybody said. They’d owned the pub for a long time, and everybody in Bordertown drank there or at the Roadhouse. O’Malley’s had Irish music on the weekends, and Brynn had lingered outside the pub on occasion, listening to the lovely sound and wishing with all of her heart that she’d had the courage to step inside and join the fun.

Sean reached out to take her hand, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to hold hands with a woman he’d only met mere moments after she’d transformed from waterfowl to human.

“Yes, I’m one of those O’Malleys, but don’t hold it against me. I like to pretend I’m adopted,” he confided.

For the first time in a very long while, Brynn laughed out loud.

THREE

She was even more beautiful when she laughed.

Sean didn’t know what to say or do with himself while they walked, so he held on to her hand in silence and hoped she didn’t pull away. He was too big, too tall, too rough—he didn’t want to intimidate or scare her, but hunching over to try to hide his size would make him look like a constipated gargoyle. Ever since his squad had rescued one of those from the roof of the Bordertown Bank & Trust, the guys had teased him about the resemblance.

“Hey, O’Malley, you sure your family is from Ireland? I saw some pictures of Notre Dame in Paris, and you look a lot like those stone dudes lining the roof!”

He’d laughed and taken it all in stride, but now, for the first time in his life, he found himself wishing he weren’t so big and rough and thuglike. She probably would have run screaming if she hadn’t caught sight of his gear. People usually trusted firefighters, even people who were shady enough to run from cops. In Bordertown, there was a lot of that going on. Things would get better if that wizard, Oliver, would ever take the vacant sheriff job, but O’Malley couldn’t find it in his heart to blame the guy.

Who in their right mind would want to try to enforce the law—let alone the peace—in a Wild West town like Bordertown? Built on the frontier between three realms—the Fae kingdoms of Summerlands and Winter’s Edge, the demon realm known as Demon Rift, and the human world—Bordertown was the place where the riffraff came to play, scheme, and eke out a sketchy kind of existence. People who lived here didn’t want to settle down, follow the law, or live within the confines of civilized society in any of the three realms, but they usually knew enough about petty crime or magic to believe they could pull off minor-league rackets or that one big score.

O’Malley’s Pub served drinks, hosted poker games, and offered entertainment on the weekends for all of them. One mountain troll with a sense of humor and a love of old movies had compared the place to Wyatt Earp’s joint in Tombstone. Sean’s brother Liam had punched the troll in the head, bought him a whiskey, and then agreed with him.

Brynn offered a tentative smile, and Sean’s thoughts scattered like tumbleweeds in the desert. Damn, she was beautiful. She pulled her hand away from his, though, and he clenched his fingers against the tactile sense of loss.

“The diner? I know the cook, and he makes really great pancakes,” she said, clutching her beat-up old backpack to her chest, as if still undecided whether or not to run away.

“The diner’s great. Olaf still beating his pots together before he uses them?”

Olaf, who’d been kicked out of Demon Rift for Actions Unbecoming a Demon, or so said the proclamation framed and posted by the diner’s cash register, was the best short-order cook in Bordertown. He’d never given his place a name—it was always just “the diner”—even though it was unique, since he’d built it out of a refurbished airship. Olaf’s menu was a thing of beauty and sky-high cholesterol, and his Heart Attack Special was a particular favorite of the guys at the station when they got a chance to eat breakfast out as a group. Fighting fires burned up a lot of calories, and the treadmills and other workout equipment they trained on every day did the same.

Sean pretended he didn’t notice that Brynn was ready to bolt, and he kept walking and chatting about nothing. Canadian bacon versus American, ham versus sausage, the best way to cook eggs. Sean was in the middle of mentioning that he liked his eggs scrambled with cheese, when it occurred to him that he was talking to a woman who turned into a swan about eating eggs.

Crap. He was a complete moron. He stopped walking, even though they were still about a half-block away from the diner.

“I’m an idiot. Eggs. I can’t believe I was talking about—”

She looked bewildered, but then her eyes widened as she reached the conclusion before he had to admit to it out loud. She laughed, surprising him.

“No. It’s okay. I mean, I’m not actually a swan. I don’t lay eggs or fly or do anything that real swans do. I just take on swan form every third night and sing until nearly dawn, and then I’m back to being me.” She laughed a little and pushed her hair away from her delicate cheekbones and out of her eyes.

He blew out a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness. That conversation was about to get seriously creepy.”

“Well, I know this keeps coming up, but it is Bordertown. You can’t live in a place where the most powerful ley lines in the world intersect without a little weird.” She shrugged and smiled up at him—this time a full-on, dazzling smile—and he almost forgot how to talk.

Damn, but she was beautiful.

“Bacon?” She tilted her head toward the gleaming silver, red, and white exterior of the renovated but grounded airship that housed the diner.

“Bacon would be great.”

He followed her into the diner, trying really, really hard not to watch her lovely round ass as it moved in those snug jeans, and failing completely. When they walked in to the brightly lit diner, he discovered that her dark mass of curls was actually a deep auburn color, and he almost groaned. Great ass and she was a redhead. He’d always been drawn to redheads; his family teased him that it was the Irish in him. He must have made a funny noise, because Brynn gave him a questioning look.

“Just enjoying the delicious aromas of coffee and fried everything,” he said, relieved when she smiled and nodded instead of accusing him of staring at her butt.

Olaf greeted Brynn like an old friend and then scowled at Sean like he’d never met him before and yet suspected him of vast and nefarious wrongdoing. The cook was maybe five feet tall, almost as round as he was tall, and would be practically blind without his enormous glasses. His gleaming bald head, its skin darker than the French roast he served, was always visible as he stood on a box behind his counter and surveyed his domain.

“You be careful of those crazy O’Malleys, you hear me, Brynn? You’re a good girl. You don’t need that kind of bad boy,” the cook scolded loudly, banging two of his skillets together for emphasis.

All the other patrons at the counter, and the few at booths this early in the morning, looked up with interest. Brynn’s face flushed such a hot pink that Sean almost wondered if she might be part fire demon herself. In the light, he could finally see that her eyes were blue, a pale gray-blue like wintry clouds reflected in a frozen pond. He suddenly wanted to pull her into his arms and warm her up, match his fire with her ice.

Maybe Olaf was right to warn her about him. He was clearly losing it.

The cook pointed a spatula at him. “You hurt my girl, I hurt your face.”

Sean stifled a smile. He knew the little demon wouldn’t take well to being mocked.

“I just want to buy her a good breakfast, Olaf. Feed her up a little,” he protested, trying to project wounded innocence.

Brynn was standing, mortified, only about two feet away, but nobody needed to know that the clean rain-and-grass scent of her hair was giving Sean all sorts of thoughts, few of which were entirely innocent.

“Okay, that’s enough from both of you,” she said, making a break for the booth the farthest from Olaf’s window.

She dropped her backpack on the red leather seat and started to slide in next to it, but Sean touched her arm to stop her.

“I’m sorry, but I need to sit on that side,” he said, indicating the seat and the wall behind it. “Unless you want to sit next to me?”

“But why—oh. Can’t have your back to the door?” She bit her lip, but then she nodded and took the other seat.

He’d expected it, but still found himself a little disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to feel the warmth of her body next to him, her legs stretched out next to his.

“Is that a firefighter thing?”

He was watching her seductive lips move as she spoke, and it took him a beat to catch up with what she’d actually said.

“No, it’s an O’Malley thing. My dad drummed it into us from the time we could walk. ‘Me boyos, you always scan the room for danger and protect the women and children.’ I asked him once, wasn’t I the child in the room?” He shook his head at the memory.

She leaned forward a little, resting her folded arms on the spotless Formica tabletop. “What did he say?”

Sean laughed. “He knocked me down and told me to stop asking him stupid questions. Then my four brothers jumped on me and pounded on me for a while.”

Brynn tilted her head, watching him as if he were a strange, rare specimen of animal at a zoo. Which was almost funny, considering she’d been the one swimming around in a fountain wearing nothing but feathers, but he could see her point. A lot of people reacted like that when he told them anything about his rather boisterous childhood. That’s why he’d quit doing it years and years ago.

So why was he suddenly telling tales about his family to a woman he’d only known for an hour?

Loneliness.

The word popped up, unbidden, from deep inside him, the place where he shoved words like that. Words like regret and isolation and sorrow. He’d been surrounded by beautiful, tempting women from the day he’d turned sixteen and started working in the bar, but even in a crowd, he’d always felt alone. There’d been plenty, male and female, human and not, who’d wanted to play with one of the O’Malley boys, but there’d never been anyone who wanted him for himself. His mom had always said that the perfect woman for him would come along, but now his mom was dying slowly from an enemy Sean couldn’t battle, leaving him with no faith in miracles. He swallowed hard and pushed the anger and bitterness away, yet again.

“You were the only one, weren’t you?” Her blue eyes held understanding and something else. Something he hoped wasn’t pity. He damn sure didn’t want pity from her.

“The only one who questioned the orders? The others wouldn’t have pounded on you, otherwise,” she continued, and he realized what that glimmer of emotion was in her eyes.

Not pity. Compassion.

A dizzying wave of heat swirled through him, and he looked down in case the demon glow made an appearance in his eyes. The sensation put him on guard at the same time as it threw him off balance. Rage was the emotion that catalyzed him into heat mode. Fear—terror—could do it, too. But a gentler emotion never had before, and yet he could feel his skin temperature rising way too high.

Brynn might be dangerous to him, he realized, and the thought only made him want to get closer. A lot closer.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I was the only one who ever questioned, at least until after Dad died. We were O’Malleys, so we would grow up in the pub, work in the pub, and take over the pub. Liam, Blake, Oscar, and Yeats—they all mostly followed the party line. Me? Not so much.”

“Order up, O’Malley,” Olaf shouted, banging a metal spoon against a pot.

“We didn’t even order yet,” Sean said, startled.

Brynn laughed. “Sometimes he’s like that. You get what he feels like cooking for you. Trust me, it’s always good.”

Sean walked back to the counter to pick up the tray, which included a mountain of food, two mugs of steaming hot coffee, a carafe of more of the same, and, luckily for his rising temp, two glasses of ice water. Olaf refrained from threatening him again, but he did wag his finger in the vicinity of Sean’s chest.

“I understand why you want to protect her, Olaf. She’s definitely someone to be cherished,” Sean said, not even knowing where the words were coming from, but knowing that he meant them.

The little demon’s face relaxed out of its scowl, which was an improvement, at least, and Sean headed back to their table with enough food to feed an army of shapeshifters.

“Ooh, pancakes,” Brynn said, all but moaning.

She proceeded to take both plates of pancakes, consolidate them into one enormous pile, and slather them with butter and enough syrup to put out a small fire, while Sean watched in awed disbelief.

“You’re going to eat all that?”

“And bacon,” she said, snatching a crispy piece from the platter. “Hey, I worked up an appetite swimming around in the cold and singing. We can ask for more if you want some. So, you’re all named after Irish poets?”

“What else? Yeats had it the worst. People always want to call him Yeets when they see it written, instead of pronouncing it Yates. Drives him nuts.”

Brynn raised an eyebrow. “And Oscar didn’t get hot-dog jokes?”

“How’d you guess? He pretty much pounded everybody who tried, but O-S-C-A-R followed him around a lot when he was a kid,” Sean said, grinning at the memory. “We’d all jump in and help, of course. Not too many wanted to take on the O’Malley boys.”

“No sisters?”

Sean’s smile faded as he remembered the time he’d come across his mother kneeling in the attic next to a large trunk, tears running down her face. She’d been folding a tiny pink lace nightgown. He’d been a kid then, afraid to intrude on his mom’s privacy. Since he’d grown, he’d wondered sometimes if she’d miscarried the daughter she’d always wanted, but he hadn’t known how to ask. Hadn’t wanted to resurrect her sorrow.

“No sister,” he said abruptly. “You? Brothers or sisters?”

“No. My mother didn’t even want to have me,” she said, frowning. “She was trying to break the curse. No daughters means no daughters have to turn feathery.”

Sean took a long sip of his coffee, wondering how to ask the obvious question. Finally, he settled on the simplest way.

“Why? How?”

Brynn’s face lost its happy glow, and he bitterly regretted mentioning it. “Forget it. None of my business. Let’s eat, and we can talk about anything but fires or swans.”

Her smile was the best reward he could have gotten. “Yes. I agree.”

She took a big bite of pancake and closed her eyes in bliss. “Mmmmm.”

She was absolutely glorious. Desire sparked in Sean like tinder to a blaze, and he suddenly wanted to lick maple syrup off her body, or at least spend the next month doing nothing but eating breakfast with her and watching her smile.

He lived his life surrounded by people, and yet he was always so alone. For the first time in forever, he felt a connection, and he had no intention of letting her get away before they could explore it.

“After we finish the pancakes and bacon, we can have waffles,” she said, grinning like a child at Christmas, and he smiled right back at her, basking in the warmth of her obvious enjoyment.

They talked and laughed and worked their way through most of the food and several cups of coffee, and a good hour and a half had gone by before it even occurred to Sean to wonder why it was so easy for him to talk to her. They had an ease between them that felt more like the connection between good friends than the awkward getting-to-know-you stage between strangers.

Brynn picked up the last piece of toast, sighed, and put it back down. “I’d better not. I already feel like I won’t want to eat again for a week.”

He suddenly remembered something and looked around. “Isn’t there usually a waitress here?”

Brynn pushed her plate back, apparently full at last, and nodded. “Ethel. She does synchronized swimming three mornings a week, so it’s serve yourself on those days.”

Sean thought about the old movies his grandmother had liked to watch, and decided Brynn must be putting him on. “Her name is Ethel, and she’s a synchronized swimmer?”

“Yes, why?”

He shook his head. “Never mind.”

The diner’s door banged open, and Zach strode in, followed by a couple of the guys from the crew. The last thing Sean wanted to do was share Brynn with them, and he knew the moment they caught sight of him they’d come barging over.

“Hey, we might want to head out,” he told her. “It’s about to get pretty noisy in here.”

She glanced back over her shoulder at the group just inside the door, and he could have sworn she flinched a little. “Yes, time for me to go. Breakfast was . . . nice.”

She put a hand in her pocket, but he shook his head. “My treat.”

“But—okay. Thank you.” With that, she was up and out of the booth almost before he could react, but he couldn’t let her go like that. “Wait. Brynn, how do I reach you? I’d like to do this again, or dinner, maybe, as soon as we can figure out a time.”

Brynn started shaking her head before he’d even finished the sentence. By the time she replied, his heart was already sinking into his gut.

“Oh, no, you don’t understand. We can never see each other again.”

Before he could protest, she slipped through a door that said Employees Only, and she was gone.

Zach’s booming voice penetrated Sean’s stunned disbelief. “O’Malley, there you are. The chief wants to see you. Something about reporters and obeying orders.”

Sean stood up and met Zach in the aisle. “Forget it. I’m off duty. Tell him to go talk to a mirror, like he usually does.”

Zach didn’t smile at the admittedly lame joke. “You’re going, and I’m going with you. We’ve finally got a lead on the freak who’s setting these fires.”

Sean glanced back at the door through which Brynn had disappeared, but then made himself shake it off. No time to worry about mysterious women right now.

“Let’s go get the bastard,” Sean said grimly. He pulled out his wallet and left money on the cash register counter for Olaf.

“Go get him for all of us,” the little cook said, and the murmurs of agreement from everyone in the diner followed them out the door.

FOUR

Sean sat in the uncomfortable metal chair in the conference room and amused himself by imagining all the ways he could crush Bordertown Fire Chief Arvin Ledbetter like the pompous little cockroach he was. He didn’t know how many asses the new chief had kissed to get the job, but the windbag was clearly good at his work.

The ass-kissing part of his work. Not the fire chief part.

Zach and the guys had brought takeout breakfast for everyone, because they were all just too damn tired to cook. Nobody had said much until they’d devoured Olaf’s cooking down to the crumbs. Now they were ready to listen, even though most of them looked ready to drop any minute. The shift change had come and gone, and the fresh day crew sat and leaned against the clutter of safety notices and posters lining the walls of the room, including one that Zach had artistically altered.

Sean doubted that Smokey Bear had ever performed such a lewd act on a goat.

Shift change hadn’t meant a thing today. Not a single one of Sean’s crew had made a move to go home. They all wanted to catch the arsonist before he could strike a fifth time.

“As I was saying, we suspect that this is the fourth fire the same perpetrator set in Bordertown,” Ledbetter said, positioning himself in front of the whiteboard.

Sean groaned. “We know that. Same accelerant, same signature, same guy. Do we have any new evidence or not?”

The chief glared at him, and Sean could almost see the word insubordinate form in the jerk’s brain. “Yes, if you’d have a little patience, O’Malley. We believe the fires are the work of a disgruntled ex-Bordertown city official who was fired from the parks and—”

“No,” Sean interrupted, earning himself a death glare. “We already checked him out. Wagner, Waggoner, something like that?”

Zach nodded. “Yeah. Wagner. He had an alibi for the second fire.”

“Alibis can be faked,” Ledbetter pointed out.

“You’re right,” Sean admitted. “But that’s not why it isn’t him. Wagner is pure vanilla human. The arsonist used magic for the accelerant.”

Sharply inhaled breaths and low, vicious cursing filled the room from every firefighter in it. They all knew how much harder it was to combat a magically enhanced blaze.

“He could have had a partner,” Sue Newman pointed out, but she didn’t sound convinced. Her short, blond hair stood up in spikes, and dark smudges under her eyes testified to her exhaustion. She’d been on the same shifts as Sean for the past several days.

They were all working too hard, but they didn’t have a choice because, so far, the arsonist was working harder. Or smarter. Either way, the madman was at least one step ahead of them, and this time he’d almost claimed his first human victims.

Sean was pretty sure the man wasn’t working with a partner, though. Arsonists were almost always loners—at least the true crazies and the ones who considered themselves experts were—and no amateur was behind this string of fires.

Ledbetter made a croaking harrumph sound. “What evidence do you have that magic was used? We found no proof of that.”

Sean had been hoping the question wouldn’t come up, because he couldn’t explain it without revealing his fire demon heritage. As far as he knew, only fire demons and black magic practitioners could see the complete spectrum of colors in a fire and instantly know which were caused by magic, and there was no way in hell he was giving anybody cause to think he was either. He’d sworn an oath to his father—all the O’Malley boys had.

So he deflected. “You called us here because you had new evidence, Zach said, and since our witch was helping put out the fire, I just figured—”

The chief scowled, which unfortunately made his piggy little eyes squint and his puffy little jowls puff out even further. Sean made the mistake of glancing at Zach, who was clearly thinking the same thing, and he had to fight back the grin. It was neither the time nor the place for it, and there was damn sure nothing funny about the situation, but the man looked ridiculous when he tried to act important.

“Yes, well, you’re right,” Ledbetter said, pointing to the department witch, José Castilho, who was slumped at one end of the table looking no more than half-alive.

Castilho looked up when the guy next to him elbowed him, and he nodded wearily.

“Yeah. Magical accelerant. Worse than anything I’ve ever encountered before, too. It fought me like a living thing.”

The exhausted night-shift men and women around the room nodded and made sounds of agreement.

“The fire just didn’t act right. The air currents didn’t affect it in a normal way,” Sean improvised, when it became clear that Castilho had nothing else to say. “The smell was wrong, too. Whatever or whoever set this fire didn’t even try to hide the fact that he used magic.”

“The burn patterns were wrong, too,” Ledbetter interjected grudgingly, as if he hated to agree with anything Sean said. “The electronic accelerant detector came up with nothing. Even the dogs—nothing. Nada. Zip.”

That didn’t make sense.

“You used the hellfire hounds?”

The chief shook his head. “No, O’Malley, we couldn’t use them. They were on loan from Demon Rift, and they went back yesterday. I’m trying to borrow them again, but considering they’re the only mated pair of hellfire hounds known to exist, the demons are understandably reluctant to let them out of their sight until the hounds throw their first litter.”

Sean nodded. He understood but hated to hear it. Hellfire hounds were the best in the world at detecting fire starters and tracking them down, but even they had been thrown off at the first three sites. There’d been something fascinating about watching the powerful dogs race around and around the sites, but fascination had turned to empathy as the hounds grew more and more frustrated until they finally surrendered and sat down next to the truck, whimpering.

“The arson investigators are out there now, interviewing everybody and doing their best to discover motive, means, or opportunity,” Ledbetter continued. “But we all know that motive is usually just sheer crazy in cases like this.”

“We need to find him,” Sean said, seeing that baby in his mind. “What if we don’t get to the next fire in time?”

The chief’s face hardened and, for a moment, Sean saw the shadow of the firefighter the man had been before his internal politician took over. “All available resources are focused on this case, as of right now. Anything else is cancelled. All nonemergency leave is revoked.”

There were a couple of halfhearted groans, but nobody made any real protest. They were all focused on the same goal; it’s why they’d become firefighters in the first place.

“Pyromania plus pretty strong magical ability,” Sean said. “A match made in hell.”

After that, the meeting broke up, and everybody who’d worked the night shift headed out to get some sleep. Castilho stopped Sean with a look, and the witch nodded toward an empty corner of the room.

Sean ambled over to meet him, but before he could say a word, Castilho turned around and pretended to study a poster on protective eyewear.

“Look, I don’t have any evidence of this, so I didn’t want to put it out there,” Castilho said quietly. “But since you mentioned the magic, I’m going to tell you what I suspect. I know it’s going to sound crazy, because we haven’t seen one around Bordertown in years, but I’m worried that there might be a fire demon behind this. They’re all insane, and they have the ability to set fires magically.”

Sean’s gut clenched, and he schooled his face to impassivity. “I don’t—”

Castilho glanced around, as if to make sure nobody was near enough to overhear. “Hey, I know it sounds nuts. I know it’s all just rumors, but that’s my hunch, and I wanted to tell somebody.”

Before Sean could say a word, Castilho laughed a little too loudly and then clapped Sean on the shoulder.

“You’re a riot, man. Smokey Bear walked into a bar. Too much,” the witch said, grinning at the two guys standing across the room at the coffeepot as if he and Sean had just shared a great joke.

“Yeah, I’m a riot,” Sean muttered, watching Castilho.

The witch suspected a fire demon. Of course he did. After all, everybody knew that fire demons were evil—devils incarnate, right? It was why the O’Malleys had kept their secret all these years. Sean was half fire demon, and his secret identity might even make him the prime suspect, if anybody found out about it.

Now he just had to make sure that nobody did.

When Sean arrived at his mom’s house, Liam was walking down the steps from the front porch, frowning so hard that Sean could almost hear his brother’s teeth grinding. The thunderous expression on Liam’s face was the same one that often reduced even the most belligerent drunks at O’Malley’s into submission.

“Didn’t you buy a new car yet?” Liam said, all but growling as he studied Sean’s latest piece-of-crap ride.

“No point, since they all wind up smelling like smoke, but I’ve told you that before, so why don’t you let me in on what’s really pissing you off?” Sean shoved his hands in his pockets to avoid the temptation to smack his brother in the head. Funny how the childhood roles always came back so easily at this house.

He rocked back on his heels and stared up at the pleasant front of the old Colonial. They’d grown up here, the house always full of the sounds and smells of boys. Shouts and laughter, grass-stained and mud-spattered sports uniforms. The O’Malley boys had been a formidable force on the neighborhood baseball and football teams, always ready for a pickup game, not so great about doing homework on time, except for Yeats, who’d been the studious one.

Through their childhoods and the turbulent teen years, his mother had been the center of the home, dispensing hugs, chocolate-chip cookies, and wisdom as needed. Even after their dad died, when Sean, the baby, had been only eight and Liam, the oldest, had been fourteen, she’d never faltered—or at least never where the boys could see it. She’d been strong enough for all of them, even managing to tame Blake’s wild rebellion because she’d been able to see the pain where nobody else could see anything but the anger.

She was the strongest woman Sean had ever known, and now her boys needed to be strong enough for her.

“She wants us to meet with her lawyer,” Liam said, biting off the words. “Get her affairs in order. What the hell is that about? She’s still fine.”

“We don’t need to do that now,” Sean said, instantly going into full-on denial right alongside his brother. “She’s got plenty of time.”

Liam’s bleak expression was enough to call out the lie. Their mom didn’t have plenty of time, and they both knew it. They’d tried doctors, Fae healers, and even wizards, but cancer didn’t play by any rules but its own, and this time the O’Malley boys were on the losing team to the most merciless opponent they’d ever faced.

Liam studied the lawn. “Hedges need trimming. House could do with a coat of paint. Barbecue time?”

Sean nodded. “Day after tomorrow good? I’ll have the afternoon and evening off.”

“Yep. I’ll spread the word.”

They got together at least once a month for a barbecue, bringing all the food and manning the grill, and used the occasion to plan any and all upkeep the house needed. Their mom always baked her famous apple and pumpkin pies for them, but for the first time ever, Sean wasn’t sure she’d be up for baking. Pain scorched through him at the thought, and he clenched his hands into fists at his sides but then forced them to relax.

He needed to chill. Try on a smile. Be brave for his mother, even when the eight-year-old boy inside him wanted to sit down right there on the sidewalk and howl.

“I’m going to go in and see her for a while before I head home for some sleep,” Sean said.

“She’s sleeping now. I got her settled into her recliner in the sunroom out back, and she threw me out so she could nap.” A ghost of a smile crossed Liam’s face. “She’s still pretty tough for such a tiny little thing.”

Sean grinned. At five feet, two inches, their mom had been rapidly outgrown by all of her boys, but there had never been a moment’s doubt about who was in charge.

“I’ll never forget the time she backed you up against the refrigerator and told you that you were, too, going to have the condom talk with your mother, or you were never going to go on a date as long as you lived under her roof,” he told his brother.

Liam threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, man, I thought I was going to die. My face was still purple by the time she finished and I escaped to my room. ‘You are responsible for your actions, Liam, and if I ever find out you’re having unprotected sex, I’ll beat your arse all the way down the street.’”

“She had the exact same conversation with me,” Sean confided, shuddering. “That talk scared me out of the backseat of more than one car, let me tell you.”

“Exactly as she planned. She had the same talk with Blake, Oscar, and Yeats, too, believe me,” Liam said, his gaze trained on a pair of small boys riding their bikes at the end of the street. “Seems like not long ago, that was us.”

Sean turned to watch the boys. It was less painful than staring at his childhood home and wondering how long his mother would still be able to live there. “And now we’re all grown up.”

“No wives or kids, though,” Liam said darkly, kicking a stone off the sidewalk toward the street. It thudded softly when it hit a tire on Sean’s car and bounced back. “Trust me, she brought that up, too.”

Sean’s mouth fell open. “She what?”

“She wants us to get married. All of us. Soon. Doesn’t want us to be alone.”

For some reason, the image of Brynn’s face as she’d enjoyed her pancakes flashed into Sean’s mind, but he pushed it away. She was obviously a complicated woman. The last thing he needed in his life was more complication.

“If she wanted grandchildren, she shouldn’t have married a fire demon,” Sean growled. “I never want to pass this heritage on, and I can’t imagine any of us feel any differently.”

Liam shrugged. “We managed to have a pretty damn happy childhood.”

Sean, who’d started to head for his car, whirled to stare at his brother. “Yeah, until Dad flamed on when that drugged-up wannabe burglar broke into the house.”

The druggie hadn’t been alone, and his accomplice—who’d also been on drugs and who’d been scared to death by the sight of a fiery demon blazing brighter than the noontime sun over the Summerlands—had been carrying a gun.

Sean and his brothers had called 911 and used the fire extinguisher to put out the blaze while their mother kept pressure on Dad’s wound, but it had been too little, too late. Their father had died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, leaving Mom to run a pub and raise five boys on her own.

“I’m never going to subject a woman to anything like that.”

When Liam didn’t reply, Sean shrugged and headed for his car. “I’ve got to get some sleep. I’ll check on Mom this afternoon.”

“It would have to be the right woman,” Liam said, so quietly that anybody without fire demon hearing would never have heard it.

Sean paused, but this time he didn’t look back. They’d been down that road before, and he was surprised that Liam, of all of them, had even a glimmer of hope left.

“There is no such woman.”

FIVE

After six hours of sleep and a quick lunch at a neighboring deli, Brynn opened her tiny shop and looked around, smiling. Scruffy’s Pet Spa wasn’t much of a business, but it was all hers. She tailored her hours to fit her late nights, and she wouldn’t take a pet twice if the owner was a pain in the butt. The animals were never a problem for her, even though she’d once worried that dominant or aggressive dogs and cats would try to push her around, somehow sensing her inner swan.

Swans weren’t exactly predators, after all.

Instead, it was as if they recognized a kindred animal spirit or were able to understand that she only wanted to help them. In five years of running the grooming salon, she’d only been attacked once, and afterward the vet had discovered a tumor the size of a lemon in the dog’s brain. Poor guy hadn’t been able to help his fear and aggression. She’d always have the scar on her left arm, but at least the experience hadn’t left her traumatized.

Brynn, of all people, understood the dog’s plight. There’d been a time when she, too, had been afraid and angry due to events beyond her control. She was never able to think back to her first several nights as a swan without shuddering.

Pushing the memory aside, she focused on preparing for her workday. She moved about in her usual routine, checking her tools, restocking her inventory of dog treats inside the glass case from the fresh shipment, and getting the cash box out of the small safe. Her cleaning service had done a terrific job as always. A brother-and-sister Fae team ran the cleaning business, and she had engaged their services on the barter system. The two Fae owned four excitable Dalmatians, and the dogs wouldn’t let anyone but Brynn, whom they adored, give them baths. In turn, Brynn always got a kick out of seeing the haughty Fae brought low by a quartet of canines.

As she prepped for the hundred-pound golden retriever mix scheduled to arrive soon, she caught herself humming. She froze, automatically glancing at the giant red clock on the wall, and was shocked to realize that she’d spent at least five minutes rearranging the same three brushes on the table.

Sean.

He’d invaded her fountain, her solitude, and her dreams. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had so much fun doing something as ordinary as eating breakfast, and the tingle of sexual attraction had added a zing to every minute. If only she could be normal for once, then maybe . . .

Maybe nothing. Maybes and if onlys were for fools. She could never have a man like Sean O’Malley, and she shouldn’t even want him. She’d promised herself that she’d never fall in love, never take the chance of getting pregnant and subjecting another generation—her own daughter—to the curse of the black swan.

The bell over the door rang, and Brynn flashed her biggest smile to welcome tiny old Mrs. Mastroianni and her dog. Peaches, as far as Brynn could figure out, was golden retriever crossed with moose. The friendly dog easily outweighed his owner, and could have pulled Mrs. Mastroianni across town—or carried her on his back, if he’d wanted to do it. But he was extraordinarily gentle with his tiny owner and saved all his boisterousness for the Bordertown dog park.

“Let’s trim his fur this time, dear,” Mrs. M. said, patting her dog’s shoulder without needing to lean down even a little. “And please use that apple-scented conditioner that leaves his coat so shiny. He’s looking a little scruffy.”

Brynn smiled, knowing her line. “Then he’s in the right place, isn’t he? We’re here for all the dogs who don’t want to be scruffy anymore.”

Mrs. M. chuckled, as she always did, and toddled off to meet “the girls” for tea and gossip. As Brynn watched her go, a trace of worry shadowed her mood. Her favorite client was walking just a little bit slower than usual. A little bit stiffer.

“But she’ll outlive us all, won’t she, Peaches?” Brynn ruffled the silky fur behind the dog’s ears, and Peaches, who never seemed to mind his silly name in the slightest, grinned his happy openmouthed doggy smile up at her as if agreeing.

Four hours later, Brynn, tired but content, swept up dog hair and disinfected the grooming table. In addition to Peaches, she’d bathed and groomed a pair of huskies, a chunky little pug who hated to have his nails trimmed, and a young wolverine who’d fallen into a vat of pickles. It had taken three shampoo-rinse-repeats with her special herbal shampoo for Brynn to remove the pungent aroma, and the faint scent of dill still infused the air.

Mrs. Mastroianni graciously had insisted that Brynn take a two-dollar tip, as always, and Brynn had given in, as always, never once letting on that she only charged a fraction of her usual fee for Peaches. Mrs. M. was pretty clearly on a fixed income, and it probably took a good portion of that just to keep Peaches in dog food. With her arthritis, there was no way the elderly woman would have been able to bathe and groom the enormous dog on her own, and it boosted both her pride and her dignity to add in the small tip. Brynn made sure that Mrs. M. never discovered that the shop’s other clients generally tipped ten times that amount.

“Hey, it’s two dollars I didn’t have this morning,” Brynn told the framed photograph of the original Scruffy, a two-hundred-pound Irish wolfhound who’d wandered over to the fountain one night, wounded and limping. He’d curled up at the edge of the water and watched Brynn swim around for the next several hours.

Almost as if he’d been standing guard.

As soon as she’d turned back into human form, Brynn had taken him to Dr. Black, the best vet in town. She’d said Scruffy had probably been hit by a car. After he’d recovered from his injuries enough to leave the animal hospital, Scruffy had lived with Brynn for another three years before he’d died peacefully in his sleep. He’d been the best friend she’d ever had, and although it had been several years since he’d gone, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to get another dog.

The bell over the door rang just after she knelt down behind the grooming table to retrieve a nail file that Theo the pug had kicked off during his valiant struggles to escape.

“I’m sorry, but we’re closed,” she called out without bothering to look up.

“I’ve got an emergency.” The man’s voice was deep, rich, and a little desperate. It was also the voice that had murmured to her in her dreams a few short hours before. She slowly stood up, sure that her mind must be playing tricks on her.

It wasn’t. Sean O’Malley stood, large as life—and that was pretty darn big, considering those incredibly broad shoulders—in the middle of her shop, holding a hissing Persian cat.

“You!” Sean and Brynn said at the same time, and then they both laughed.

The cat didn’t appreciate the humor, apparently, because it lashed out with one paw and scratched the back of Sean’s hand. Sean didn’t even flinch, and he didn’t say a word of reprimand to the cat. Brynn liked him even more for that. Most creatures were jumpy when they came into a place that, no matter how clean, would always hold the scent of other animals.

“Do you work here?” Sean glanced around. “Nice place.”

“It’s mine.”

Brynn felt a moment of fierce pride over her neat little shop. The rows of colorful dog and cat accessories behind the counter gave the place a festive air, and framed photos of happy customers and their pets lined the walls. She’d made a success of her business in spite of the challenges that came with the swan curse.

“I was just closing, but you said you had an emergency?” She let the question ring in her voice. “Must be my day for it. I had a baby wolverine with a pickle problem earlier.”

He grinned. “Sounds like an interesting story.”

The cat in his arms yowled and lashed out again, leaving a second red stripe next to the first on Sean’s hand, and Brynn decided she’d had enough of that. She marched over to Sean and took the cat out of his arms before he could protest.

When the cat hissed at her and started fighting in earnest, Brynn pulled it more tightly against her chest, wrapping the squirming bundle in her arms.

“Stop it right now,” she said firmly, and the cat’s eyes widened at her tone, and then the tension seeped out of its body as it relaxed against her.

Sean’s mouth dropped open. “What did you do? I’ve never seen Barty calm down like that for a stranger. He hates most people. Well, pretty much all people except for my mother.”

Brynn smoothed a hand down the cat’s fur and crooned at him. “Barty isn’t a bad boy, are you, my beautiful one? Just a little misunderstood.”

The beautiful white Persian closed his brilliant blue eyes and began to purr, and Brynn almost laughed at Sean’s stunned expression.

“It’s a gift,” she confided. “If animals didn’t like me, I’d go out of business.”

“Makes sense,” he said.

His gaze swept her from head to toe and she suddenly flushed, realizing how she must look. Sweaty hair, no makeup, her Scruffy’s apron covering her T-shirt and jeans; she was no fashion plate, that was for sure. Of course, she’d been wearing feathers the first time he’d seen her, so it was all relative. Sean was wearing a dark green shirt and a pair of well-worn jeans and, even though the dark shadows under his eyes told her that he hadn’t slept much, he was still absolutely gorgeous.

It was entirely unfair.

“Your emergency?” she prompted.

“Oh, right. He has a big wad of gum stuck in his tail. Neighborhood kids probably dropped it on his favorite spot on the stone wall in front of the house. My mom wouldn’t let me chop it out with scissors.”

Sean dragged a hand through his own silky dark hair, which needed to see a pair of scissors, too, but Brynn kept that observation to herself.

“You live with your mother?” It was none of her business, but she was curious.

He laughed. “No, but we all go visit her a lot. She’s rattling around in that big house by herself now, and we worry. I caught some shut-eye and then arrived just in time for the cat emergency this afternoon.”

“Let’s have a look,” she said, carrying Barty over to the table.

The little cat started to protest again when he saw the grooming table, but Brynn took a clean, soft towel from a shelf and placed it down first, then set him on top of it.

“Nobody likes a cold metal table,” she told Sean.

He was watching her again—studying her as if she were a puzzle he needed to solve—and she didn’t like it.

“Don’t stare at me.”

“I can’t help it. You’re beautiful,” he said, and she was caught off guard by the sincerity in his voice.

She covered up her flustered reaction by reaching for the tools she needed. A fine-toothed comb and a little oil should do it.

“I’m not beautiful. You must not get out much,” she snapped, before pointing to the shelf behind him. “Please hand me that bottle of sesame oil from the shelf.”

When he silently gave her the oil, she winced at the sight of the scratches on his hand.

“There’s a first-aid kit under the counter. You should clean up those scratches.”

“I’m fine. I’m sorry if I embarrassed you. I’m not really good at small talk,” he said, his face grim as if he’d had to force out the words.

She rolled her eyes and started combing the edges of the gum out of Barty’s tail. “You practically grew up in the most popular bar in Bordertown, and you have four brothers. How can you not be good at talking to people? If you’d had my childhood, I could understand it. I spent most of my time alone.”

He shrugged, but she was almost sure he’d flinched a little. Interesting. Deep cat scratches didn’t bother him at all, but questions about his social skills made him uncomfortable. Yet another thing they had in common.

“Please go tend to those scratches. I’ll be stressed out about it until you do.”

His gaze caught hers as if demanding her attention, startling her into perfect stillness. A spark of deep red-orange color pulsed in his pupils for an instant, and then was gone so fast she wasn’t sure she’d really seen it. When he turned toward the counter, she exhaled a shaky breath.

Barty let out a particularly loud meow, startling Brynn into almost knocking over the uncapped bottle of oil.

“Yes, baby, I’m sorry. Let’s try a little oil to work that gum out, okay?” As she started to carefully work the oil into the fur around the gum, she glanced up at Sean, who was disinfecting and bandaging his hand. “He has quite a loud meow, doesn’t he?”

“That’s how he got his name.”

“Barty?”

Sean grinned. “Nope. Bartholomeow, if you can believe it.”

“That’s a good one,” she had to admit. “I’ve heard a lot of funny pet names, as you can imagine. Today I had one of my favorite dogs in here; an enormous golden cross named Peaches. He’s quite an elegant, dignified dog, so I always wonder if he’s a little embarrassed by his name.”

“I think I know that dog,” Sean said, after he put the first-aid kit away. “Tiny little Mrs. Mastroianni?”

“That’s the one. Bordertown is a small place, isn’t it?”

“Mrs. M. is a friend of my mother’s. They used to go for tea, before . . . before.”

Brynn recognized the pain that stamped his face. She’d worn the same expression after her mom had died.

“She’s gone?”

“No. She’s—no. Cancer. She doesn’t have much time left. Maybe three or four months, they tell us.” His eyes were dry, but his voice was rough with the unshed tears that she knew must be clogging his throat.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, wanting to do something—anything. Reach out to him, give him a hug, offer some comfort. But she knew better. Getting involved was dangerous.

Caring about someone was worse. Look what had happened to her mom.

She worked diligently to remove the rest of the gum, and then she washed the oil out of the beautiful Persian’s fluffy tail. He was purring now, lying on his side and enjoying the attention.

“I can’t get over how calm and happy he is for you,” Sean said, gesturing to Barty. “He hates everybody.”

Brynn gently rubbed the cat’s belly, and a thought occurred to her. “Has he always been like this? Persians are one of the best-tempered of all the cat breeds. It’s unusual to hear of one hating people.”

“Come to think of it, he hasn’t. He was a perfectly good cat for the first couple of years she had him. Cute as a button when he was a kitten, too. It’s just for the past year or so—”

Brynn knew what was coming when his voice trailed off. “When did your mom get sick?”

“Right about the same time, I think, although she didn’t get her diagnosis until several months ago,” he said, his eyes widening. “Do you think Barty knew?”

“It’s very common for animals to react when their people get sick,” Brynn said. “There are even doctors who use dogs to detect cancer in humans. They can smell the tumors or the difference in the bloodstream, or something like that, I think. I’m sure cats can do the same, only I haven’t heard of anyone trying to train a cat to do the job.”

“I’ll be damned,” Sean said, lifting the now-clean and gum-free cat up off the table and staring into his eyes. “Are you just worried about Mom, Barty?”

The cat meowed plaintively and quite loudly, and Sean smiled at him. Brynn’s heart stuttered in her chest at the sight of the big, masculine firefighter sharing a moment of compassionate understanding with the beautiful little creature, and the feeling rang every warning bell she had.

“Oh, boy, you should be on a poster,” she muttered, going to wash her hands and drop the comb in the disinfectant.

“What was that?”

She turned around, and he was standing way too close to her, even though she hadn’t heard him move.

“You,” she said, almost accusingly, backing away. “You’re like a movie poster. Hot guy rescues people from burning buildings and saves kittens from trees in his spare time. You don’t own a spandex suit, do you?”

A slow, deliciously wicked smile spread across his face. “Hey, if you’re into that kind of thing, I’ll see what I can find.”

SIX

Sean watched the intriguing rosy glow rise in Brynn’s face, and the blood in his body rushed straight to his cock. He’d never been so glad to be holding Barty, whose fluffy sweep of a tail hung down and concealed Sean’s enormous erection. Damn, but he was suddenly acting like a teenager at his first sight of cleavage, although Brynn couldn’t be more covered up.

His memory, though, was happy to rush in and supply her image, in full-color detail, from the night before. Her incredibly beautiful body, naked and gleaming in the moonlight, wasn’t a picture he was likely to forget anytime soon. His throat went dry, and suddenly he wanted nothing more than to pull Brynn into his arms and kiss the breath out of her. He could put poor Barty in one of the roomy crates lining the back wall—just for a few minutes, or an hour or two—and see if kissing her would quench the need that had been simmering at a slow burn ever since he’d first seen her.

His cock strained against its denim confinement, and Sean knew the answer was a resounding no. Kissing wouldn’t do anything but make him want more and more of her. Long, slow, powerful kisses. Naked kisses. Long, slow, hard thrusts into her hot, wet, welcoming body, maybe right there up against the glass counter.

He groaned, and Barty hissed at him, snapping him out of the fantasy and into the reality in which Brynn was staring at him like he was a lunatic, and they were standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling glass front wall of her shop.

With people walking by outside.

So, maybe not.

Instead, he took a deep breath and told her a different truth. “It’s pretty impressive that you own and run your own business, when you have to deal with the curse.”

She blinked, clearly not having expected him to say that.

“I—it’s—thank you. I’m very proud of my little shop, actually,” she admitted, and her cheeks turned pink again.

He caught himself staring at her like an idiot, and tried to come up with something to say.

“Dinner,” he finally said desperately.

“Excuse me?” Brynn looked around, probably wondering if she had a bigger pair of scissors nearby so she could use them to protect herself from the crazy man. He tried again, but this time he attempted to channel his brother Oscar, who was charming and funny and great with women.

It didn’t work.

“Dinner? With me? You?”

Her lips quivered, and he realized with relief that she was trying to fight back laughter instead of yelling at him to get out of her shop.

He hoped.

“Is this a thing with you? One-word invitations to meals?” Her smile faded quickly, though. “Sean, I told you, I can’t get involved. The curse—”

“It’s only dinner. You have to eat, right? Eat with me.”

She glanced down at Barty, who seemed to be bored with the entire conversation, and then back up at Sean’s face. “Well. I do have to eat. How can I refuse an eloquent invitation like that?”

“Tomorrow? No, I have the night shift. The day after tomorrow?”

A shadow passed through her winter-blue eyes, and he remembered that she’d have to do swan duty then.

“We can eat early, if you like,” he added, willing her to agree.

She bit her luscious lip, which made him go right back to wanting to kiss her, but then she nodded. “All right. But just dinner.”

“Just dinner. How much do I owe you for Barty?”

Brynn smiled and shook her head. “No charge. Bring him back to me for a bath and grooming soon, though, okay? He’s looking a little scruffy.”

“Scruffy,” he said. “Is that why the shop’s name is Scruffy’s?”

She nodded at a framed picture of a shaggy gray dog. “Yes and no. That’s Scruffy, and I named the shop in his honor, too. A play on words. I’ll tell you about it at dinner.”

“I look forward to it,” he said, and then he headed for the door before he could say something stupid and cause her to change her mind.

“Sean,” she called after him, and he stopped with one hand on the door.

“Any progress on finding that arsonist? The business owners around here were talking about nothing else at lunchtime,” she said. “We’re all worried.”

“We’ll find him,” he promised grimly. “We’ll stop him.”

“Be careful,” she said, and he carried the words—and the concern that had been clear in her voice—with him for the rest of the day.

It was almost midnight before he remembered that, for once, he had a conflict in his schedule. He’d asked Brynn out for the same night as the one for which he and Liam had planned the family barbecue.

No problem. Surely Brynn wouldn’t consider meeting his entire family to be “getting involved,” right?

Zach shook his head when he caught Sean pounding his head against his locker. “Yeah, buddy, I’ve had days like that, too.”

Two long, quiet nights later, Sean left work almost as tired as if he’d been fighting fires nonstop. Sometimes, the slow nights were worse than the busy ones—especially when they were all on edge, waiting for an arsonist to strike again. He was hungry, exhausted, and on edge, but he wasn’t interested in food or sleep. He wanted to see Brynn. Needed to see her.

He started out walking, with no particular direction in mind, since he didn’t know where she lived and he was pretty sure her grooming business wasn’t open at six in the morning. Nobody was around at dawn except cops, firefighters, and people who’d been up misbehaving all night, like the thugs hanging out on the street corner about a dozen feet in front of him. He should sleep. He was going to see her that evening, if she hadn’t changed her mind. He abruptly stopped walking and scowled so fiercely at the thought, that a couple of juvenile delinquent goblins who’d started trash-talking about him wheeled around and headed the other way. The few remaining made a point of studiously looking down at the ground when he passed by, but he barely noticed them, because his mind was still on Brynn.

Please let her not have changed her mind.

She’d attracted him with her looks, but she’d captivated him with her spirit. He’d always had a different idea of beauty from most; he liked rounded figures, not model-thin ones. Interesting, intelligent faces rather than vapid, model-perfect ones. He was drawn to a sense of humor and a great laugh as much as he was to a pair of flashing eyes and a great ass.

Hey, he was a guy. He wasn’t going to deny, even to himself, that a great ass wasn’t a big draw.

But Brynn. Brynn. She was gorgeous, no doubt, with all that curly red hair and those winter-pale eyes. Her body, that he kept seeing over and over in his memory, was incredible. She was so much more than that, though. Somehow, in spite of the tough childhood she’d mentioned, and in spite of a curse that had hijacked fully a third of her life, she’d been tough enough to start and run her own business. She was compassionate enough to calm an angry cat and diagnose Barty’s fury as worry for Sean’s mom.

How could a woman like that still be alone, the curse be damned? If he ever got lucky enough to have the chance to be with her, he’d never—never what?

What did he think he could do? Tell her he was a fire demon and live with her happily ever after? Who was he kidding? Was it even possible for a worse combination to exist than fire and feathers? Just because something about Brynn touched the soul-deep loneliness he’d been living with for so long didn’t mean he had any chance with her, or even any right to try. He should call her and apologize, and then make a point to never see her again. That would be the right thing to do. The gentlemanly thing to do—an expression that his father had so often used.

“Screw that,” he snarled, and a banshee hunched on top of a nearby roof screeched and took flight.

“It’s only dinner,” he shouted after the creature, as it winged its way off into the sunrise.

She had to eat, right?

SEVEN

After Brynn closed the shop and took a quick shower in her private restroom in the back, she dried her hair, got dressed, and wondered what she thought she was doing. She stared at her reflection in the mirror, and an unfamiliar person stared back: a woman who wore eyeliner and mascara and even a little lipstick. A woman who’d dressed to impress a man whom she had no intention of keeping.

Did she?

Unnerved by her conflicting thoughts, she put the makeup bag down, figuring she’d done the best she could, and smoothed down the skirt of her one and only little black dress. She’d spent the past two days talking herself into and out of having dinner with Sean. It wasn’t the idea of the dinner date itself; she’d been out on dates before. She was a normal, healthy woman, after all. She liked men. She liked dinner. But this time was different.

Sean scared her to death.

It wasn’t just that he was unbelievably hot, although he was. Tall, dark, and delicious. The muscles, the hair, the amazing cheekbones, and those melting, chocolate-brown eyes were all bad enough, but when he smiled, she wanted to rip his clothes off with her teeth. It was a little late in the day to discover the latent sex fiend lurking inside her, so she figured that her extreme reaction was all about Sean.

She’d met plenty of great-looking men, though. This was Bordertown, after all. The Fae were almost always beautiful, even the men, and water demons were a little like self-servicing plastic surgeons—they could use their powers to enhance their looks whenever they wanted. So, sure, she’d seen hot guys before, but a lot of them were so arrogant and vain that she’d been turned off by the first words out of their mouths.

Sean, on the other hand—he was anything but charming or smooth. She smiled, remembering how he’d asked her to dinner in the first place, standing there with that “deer in the path of the Wild Hunt” expression, as if he’d been sure she’d turn him down. He’d raced out of the shop, clutching poor Barty, so fast that she hadn’t had a chance to get his phone number or give him hers, so she was guessing he’d show up here at the shop.

If he didn’t show, she’d probably be better off, anyway. She didn’t need complications.

She walked out into the shop, almost not sure which she was hoping for—that Sean would show up or that he wouldn’t—but ultimately she couldn’t lie to herself. She would be disappointed if he stood her up. Even a little bit devastated, maybe.

The realization scared her all over again. How had he become so important to her, so fast? What was she going to do about it?

The knock on the door jolted her out of her low-level panic, and she turned to find Sean standing there, darkly elegant in a white shirt and black pants, and all of her mental reservations fell away like dog fur beneath the shears. She wanted this. She wanted him.

She unlocked the door.

Sean never thought it would take so much effort to keep from swallowing his tongue. She was so damn beautiful in her simple black dress, with her curls, brushed loose and shining, hanging in a thick, luxurious mass down her back. He wanted to bury his hands in her hair and smooth the shining strands against his face. He wanted to see it spread across his pillow. His body tightened at the pillow idea, and he had to clench his teeth against the rush of desire that swept through him.

“I didn’t know what to wear,” she said hesitantly, and he realized he’d been standing there silently staring at her like an idiot, probably with his mouth hanging open like the fish on the wall at O’Malley’s. The one that came to life, sang songs, and heckled the customers.

“You look amazing,” he told her honestly, and then he realized he hadn’t told her they were going to a barbecue. Women had dress codes or something for what they wore. She probably wouldn’t have wanted to get so dressed up for a barbecue, but he’d be damned if he’d regret it. She looked like his own personal dream of the perfect woman, come to life just for him.

And he was ambushing her with dinner with his family.

He was an idiot. The fish was smarter than him.

“Are you okay?” She was starting to look concerned, and little wonder.

“I’m going to throw myself on your mercy,” he confessed. “I ran out of here so fast the other day that I didn’t get your number, because I was afraid you’d find a reason to say no if I hung around. So I didn’t have a way to call you and tell you we’re actually going to a barbecue.”

She raised one eyebrow as she stepped out and locked the door behind her.

“Yes, I can see the problem. So hard to look up Scruffy’s in the Bordertown phone book or online,” she said dryly.

The dress came down to a few inches above her knees, but there was a little discreet slit up the front that flashed her leg at him as she walked, and it distracted him completely as he opened his car door for her.

“Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat and shoving away all thoughts of pinning her against the car and biting her neck until she moaned. “Yeah, that would have been a great idea, if I’d thought of it. Although honestly I would have been worried that if I called, you’d have had a chance to change your mind.”

She stopped, inches in front of him, and the scent of violets and spring rain teased his senses.

“You’re being very candid, Sean,” she murmured. “Is it sincere or is it meant to disarm me into telling you my secrets, I wonder?”

He blinked. “You have more secrets?”

Brynn started laughing and then slid into the car, flashing an appealing length of bare leg. “Smooth, Sean. Very smooth.”

By the time they finished discussing her day (three dogs, one cat, and a rabbit who’d encountered a skunk) and his day (no progress or news on the arson case), they were pulling up in front of Sean’s family home. Brynn looked around in obvious disbelief at the residential neighborhood and then narrowed her eyes.

“When you said a barbecue, I assumed you meant Bordertown Barbecue, which was already sketchy considering the rumors of the kind of meats they put in their pulled ‘pork,’” she said darkly. “It did not even occur to me that you’d be introducing me to your friends on our first date.”

“I’m not,” he protested.

“Not what?”

“Not introducing you to my friends. Also, I like the sound of ‘first’ date, because it implies there will be a second date,” he said, smiling hopefully. “We don’t have to stay long, but I promised I’d stop by.”

She frowned at him and crossed her arms under her breasts, which did breathtaking things to her cleavage and promptly made him lose his train of thought again. So he quit talking and jumped out of the car, walked around to open her door, and held out his hand.

She met his gaze for a beat before she took his hand, so he didn’t let go of her all the way to the house, just in case.

“You live here?”

“Nope.”

“But you’re not introducing me to your friends?” She slanted a suspicious look at him.

“Nope.” He started to knock on the cheerful red door that he’d given a fresh coat of paint only the month before, but it flew open before his fist could connect.

“Sean! You brought a friend,” his mother said, beaming.

“They’re not friends. They’re my family,” he told Brynn, tightening his grip on her hand.

She smiled up at him and whispered five words through clenched teeth. “I’m going to kill you.”

But she followed his mom into the house, so Sean called it a win. Whether or not he was going to end up dead later, she was all his for now.

EIGHT

Brynn’s stomach clenched into a tangle worse than the one the gum had made in Barty’s fur. She’d swallowed her misgivings and agreed to have dinner with the first man she’d ever met who pushed every single one of her buttons, and now she’d ended up at dinner at his mother’s house. If she hadn’t known about Mrs. O’Malley’s illness, she would have wondered what kind of grown man took a woman home to Mom for their first date. Since she did know, the fact that Sean had brought her here was actually kind of touching. Mrs. O’Malley led her into a spacious family room, comfortably decorated with big, sturdy-looking furniture, lots of plants, and dozens of framed photos of Sean and his brothers at varying ages from babyhood to adulthood.

“Mom, this is Brynn. Brynn, this is my mom,” Sean said, grinning at both of them.

“It’s Kathleen, and you are very welcome to my home.”

“Brynn Carroll. You have a lovely home, Kathleen.”

Kathleen O’Malley was clearly ill. Her skin had thinned to near translucence, and she was far too thin. Wisps of close-cropped white hair feathered across her head as if she’d lost most or all of it recently and it was only just starting to grow back. Her warm smile, however, gave no hint of anything but delight.

“I heard all about you,” she confided, taking Brynn’s hand in her slender fingers. “You saved my dear Bartholomeow from the shame of an unsightly tail.”

Kathleen’s smile let Brynn know she was gently poking fun at her own “emergency.”

“Sean said you were pretty,” she continued, and Brynn felt her face warm up.

“Sean’s kind of pretty himself,” Brynn said, flashing a conspiratorial smile.

A shout of masculine laughter sounded from the entry to the kitchen, and Brynn looked over to see a slightly older, slightly less-rough-edged version of Sean leaning against the archway.

“Oh, he’s pretty all right, but I’m much prettier.”

Sean scowled and put a territorial arm around Brynn’s waist, surprising her. “Back off, Oscar. Brynn’s not interested in self-proclaimed ladies’ men.”

Oscar’s eyes widened. “Well, well. So that’s how it is,” he said quietly. “Interesting.”

Brynn pulled away from Sean and crossed the room to shake Oscar’s hand.

“I’m happy to discuss who and what I’m interested in all by my little old self,” she said lightly, slanting a glance back at Sean.

Oscar held on to her hand for a little bit too long. “It’s very nice to meet you, Brynn Carroll, although you have very bad taste in men,” he said, grinning. “I hope you like steaks.”

“You leave Sean’s girl alone and go outside with your brothers to watch the grill,” Kathleen chided her son. “She’s going to help me with the pies, aren’t you?”

Brynn nodded and then watched, bemused, as Sean and his brother jostled and joked their way out the kitchen door and, presumably, into the backyard. She looked at Kathleen, who was maybe about five foot nothing, and then at the door through which the two big men had departed.

“You had five of them?”

Kathleen blinked and then started laughing, and Brynn flushed as she realized what she’d said.

“I’m so sorry. I don’t really have much in the way of social skills. I spend most days mainly in the company of cats, dogs, and dill-scented wolverines,” she explained, feeling painfully foolish.

“And you spend a third of your nights as a swan,” Kathleen said quietly, looking up at Brynn with eyes filled with compassion and understanding.

Brynn’s shoulders slumped. “He told you?”

Kathleen patted her arm. “Honey, this is Bordertown. I’d almost be worried if you were plain vanilla human. The most surprising thing about you isn’t that you turn feathery a couple of times a week, anyway.”

“It’s not?” Brynn picked up the stack of plates Kathleen indicated, but then stopped. “What is the most surprising thing about me? I’d think with a name like O’Malley you’d be used to seeing red hair.”

Kathleen smiled gently at Brynn’s lame attempt at a joke. “What surprises me the most is that my Sean finally brought someone home. He’s never introduced me to a woman in his life before.”

Sean watched Brynn as she gradually relaxed around his family, and he wavered between wanting to drag her off so they could spend time alone, and feeling an unreasonable burst of pride that she liked his family maybe as much as they clearly liked her.

Some of them maybe liked her too much.

He glared at Blake, who’d leaned a little too close to Brynn, laughing at something she’d said, but Blake just grinned at him and shook his head. Liam and Yeats were at the pub, so he’d only had to contend with two of his brothers, thankfully. They’d managed to work out plans for chores and house repair over steaks and salad, and now that they’d polished off the pies, Sean was ready to escape and get Brynn away from their evil clutches. Oscar was too damn charming for his own good, and Blake had been making Brynn laugh too damn much. It all left Sean feeling like he was ready to thump their heads together like he hadn’t done since they were kids.

His mom turned toward Sean and smiled, and his heart cracked open a little. She was too frail—too thin—too sick. He’d deliberately taken a job where he could save people; why the hell couldn’t he save her?

She touched his arm. “She’s truly delightful, Sean. I’m so glad you brought her to meet me.”

“I know. She’s amazing, Mom. Tough, like you.” His gaze returned to Brynn. Barty lay sleeping curled up in her lap and, for the first time in his life, he was jealous of a cat. “I think we’re going to head out. Spend some time alone before she has to report to the fountain.”

His mother nodded. “I understand. Bring her back soon, okay?”

Sean smiled and kissed his mom on the cheek. “I’ll try.”

He stood up and held out a hand to Brynn, and felt a surge of fierce, possessive triumph when she took it.

“We’re out of here, boys,” he told his brothers. “Cleanup is on you tonight.”

They didn’t offer more than token protests, which made Sean suspicious, until he realized that they were on their best behavior for Brynn. Funny the effect she had on the O’Malley men.

Brynn leaned down and gave his mom a quick hug before they left, and Sean had to swallow over the lump in his throat. He didn’t speak again until they were in the car, buckling up.

“Thank you for that. We needed to sort out the house chores, and my mom was thrilled to meet you,” he said, looking down at the steering wheel, out the windshield—anywhere but at Brynn.

“She’s amazing,” Brynn said softly. “You were lucky to grow up with her and such a big family. My mom died when I was young, and I never knew my dad.”

“No siblings?”

“No. Just me.” Her face was tense in the pale glow of the streetlights. “My family tends to stop procreating after the one daughter.”

“I’d offer you a couple of brothers, but I think they’d like it a little bit too much,” he said, hoping to make her smile. “Believe me, I tried to sell them, give them away, and even pay people to take them when I was a kid.”

Her peal of laughter was his reward. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah. Once, I put up a sign in the yard that said, For sale: 4 used brothers. Cheap. Except I spelled it wrong, C-H-E-E-P, and my stupid brothers followed me around making bird noises and pounding on me for a week.” He grinned at the memory, and Brynn stared at him in disbelief.

“Boys have an interesting idea of fun, don’t they?”

He thought back to how he’d gotten revenge for the bird noises, and how long it had taken him to find four rotten eggs, and he started laughing and put the car in gear. “Oh, yeah. Definitely interesting.”

NINE

They talked about everything and nothing, sitting on Brynn’s front porch, and when the time came for her to go to the fountain, Sean insisted on walking there with her. Brynn changed into jeans and a sweatshirt; easy on-and-off clothes.

“I don’t like this,” Sean grumbled, shoving his hands in his pockets as they walked. “It’s not safe. Anybody could bother you, or hurt you, or even eat you. What if some creature passing by happens to be hungry? You can’t protect yourself as a swan.”

She slanted a glance at him. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate your concern, but I’ve been doing this awhile, and my ancestors before me for a thousand years, or so the legend goes. Do you think we would have lasted ten days, let alone ten centuries, if the moon didn’t extend her protection?”

He blew out a breath and nodded. “Of course. Moon magic. I should have figured that out.”

“She doesn’t want anything to happen to her pet singers, after all,” Brynn said bitterly.

“How does that work?”

“I’m not sure. It’s not like laser beams shoot out of my wings or something. From the best we can figure out, the moon’s magic shields us and gives off a ‘you can look, but don’t touch’ vibe. It almost always works when I’m getting dressed and undressed, too, actually, which is why I was so surprised that you saw me. So far, nobody has ever tried to hurt me.”

They turned the corner to Fountain Square, and Brynn’s shoulders slumped. The last thing she wanted to do was spend the next several hours floating mindlessly in the fountain, singing, but the curse was already taking hold. She could feel the tingles in her arms and legs that preceded the change.

“Sean, I—”

Her thoughts scattered when she looked up at him. His eyes were glowing hot red-orange, and her first reaction was to be wary, but her second reaction was far more primal and erotic. She turned toward him like a flower seeking the sun, wanting nothing more than to be warmed by his heat; captured by his fire, when she’d been so cold for so long.

“Beautiful,” she whispered, staring into his extraordinary eyes.

“Yes. You are,” he said roughly, and then he wrapped his strong arms around her and captured her mouth with his own.

His kiss was a revelation. He claimed her with a powerful masculine dominance that weakened her knees and stole her breath from her body. His tongue pushed at the seam of her lips and she opened for him, moaning when he delved inside and plundered, taking what he wanted like a pirate come to claim his spoils. She clutched at his shoulders, dizzily wondering if she would collapse if he let her go, but he held her even more tightly.

He was relentless—demanding. He tasted like the apple pie from dinner; cinnamon had suddenly become her favorite spice. She kissed him back, taking as well as giving, riding the day’s emotional roller coaster up and up and then over the crest of heat and sensation. If they hadn’t been in the middle of Fountain Square, she would have started taking clothes off—his or hers, it didn’t matter—and then—

Fountain Square.

The curse.

She pulled away, though everything in her rebelled against it. Her breathing was too shaky to form words for several seconds, so she rested her forehead on Sean’s chest and drew in a long, deep breath.

“Never before. I’ve never forgotten myself and the curse like that, not even for a second. Sean, you’re—”

“I’m the man who wants you in his life,” he rasped, and she felt a moment of sharp pleasure that the kisses had affected him as much as they had her, but the curse’s demand increased, overwhelming everything else, as it always had.

Brynn’s eyes burned, and she was shocked to realize she was fighting back tears of loss and longing. Longing for the normal life she could never have.

“I never cry,” she said, but it was too late. The warm wash of sadness overflowed, and she tried to turn away from Sean, but pushing against his hard, muscular chest was like pushing against the marble statue.

“Don’t cry,” he said, and his voice was almost frantic. “Damn me for a fool. Brynn, I’m sorry. I should have asked your permission or—”

“Let. Me. Go,” she said urgently, and he released her, clenching his hands into fists at his sides.

She ran for “her” bench, tearing her clothes and shoes off, but she barely had time to reach her backpack before the transformation took her. The moon was jealous of her songbird, and evidently Brynn had delayed the moment for too long.

She stood, naked and shivering, while the brief agony of the shift took her, and the last sight she saw through her human eyes was Sean, pain stark in the grim lines of his face as he watched her.

Once she was a swan, she didn’t care about anything except reaching the water and beginning her song, but the wisp of human consciousness that floated in the back of her brain thought that both song and water were especially icy that night; cold as the deep reaches of a solitary heart.

Sean shoved Brynn’s clothes in her backpack and then tossed it on the marble bench and sat next to it, all the while cursing himself for being an overbearing buffoon. He’d rather face a raging fire without any of his safety gear than ever be forced to see Brynn crying again. His chest ached, and he didn’t like it one bit. How could her tears have so much power over him that they reduced him to helplessness?

He should have asked, or warned her, or something. Anything. Except—she’d been kissing him back. Her sweet mouth had dueled with his, and she’d held tightly to him with the same ferocity he’d felt as he kissed her.

Claimed her.

Claimed? He jumped up off the bench, suddenly unable to sit still. Where had that thought come from? He’d only just met her and hardly knew anything about her. It was definitely not time to think about claiming.

His gaze arrowed to the elegant black swan floating serenely in the waters of the fountain, raising her head toward the moon, and a fierce wave of protectiveness swept through him. Claiming might be a good word, after all. There were other words that he’d thought of, too, when he’d looked into her silvery blue eyes.

Holding. Touching. Keeping.

Mine.

The otherworldly sound of her song wove through the strands of his consciousness, tantalizing and seducing, and it took him a few beats to realize that he’d never heard a swan actually sing before. It must be a side effect of the magic. There were no words, of course, but Brynn—as a swan—was singing; her song was an ethereal, plaintive melody that tugged at his heart and wound its way into his soul.

He wanted to keep her. The shock of the discovery rocked him back on his heels so hard that Sean didn’t pay much attention to the tall man in the long black coat until he’d walked to the edge of the fountain and stretched out a hand toward Brynn.

“Get the hell away from that swan,” he told the intruder, his voice cold and deadly.

The man turned to face Sean, who recognized him instantly and prepared for a difficult and possibly fatal disagreement.

“Luke Oliver,” Sean said. “I heard you were running for sheriff. Shouldn’t you be off somewhere kissing hands and shaking babies?”

Oliver bared his teeth in something that might have been called a smile. “I never shake babies in Bordertown. Who knows what they might transform into?”

Sean didn’t think the man whom everyone called the Dark Wizard of Bordertown had said transform by coincidence. The fire demon inside him wanted to blast the wizard, but he fought back against the rage that was jacking up his body temperature to a dangerous level.

“You’ll be leaving the swan alone,” Sean said evenly, as he advanced on Oliver.

Oliver raised his eyebrows and then laughed. “You’re as fiery as your grandmother was, aren’t you?”

Sean abruptly stopped. “You knew my grandmother? Which one?”

None of the boys had ever met his dad’s parents. They lived deep in Demon Rift and had disowned their son for marrying a human. His mom’s mother had lived in Bordertown but had died several years before.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say I knew her. I met your grandparents once, when I was traveling through the Firelands,” Oliver said, his face shadowed with memory. “She wanted to singe my ass for me when I accidentally walked through the edge of her garden.”

The corners of the wizard’s mouth turned up in a wry grin. “And I mean singe literally, as I’m sure you know, fire demon.”

Sean folded his arms across his chest, wariness replacing anger, but he didn’t bother trying to lie. “So. You know. What do you want?”

Oliver studied him. “I don’t want anything. I damn sure don’t want to be sheriff. I have no interest in telling Bordertown about your heritage, if that’s what you mean.”

Something in Sean relaxed. “You mean you don’t think a fire demon is behind the arson?”

“No, I do not,” Oliver said grimly. “But when I find out who is, he won’t be long for this world—or for any of the three realms.”

The remaining traces of Sean’s wariness vanished, replaced by a feeling of kinship. “If I don’t find him first.”

Oliver nodded and then headed off to wherever it was that wizards went at midnight. When he reached the edge of the square, he stopped and looked back at Sean.

“I was wrong. I do want something from you, O’Malley.”

Sean tensed. “Of course you do. That’s the way of life, isn’t it? What is it?”

“Be good to Brynn,” Oliver said. “I’ve known her since she was a baby, and I wouldn’t be . . . kind . . . to someone who hurt her.”

“Neither would I,” Sean said, and the words were both a promise and a threat.

TEN

Brynn hopped up and out of the fountain, transforming back to human as she moved, and headed straight for Sean. He sat, unmoving, on the same bench where she’d dropped her clothes, and even in swan form she’d known that he’d stayed and watched over her the entire time. She was naked, but she didn’t care. She needed to touch him, hold him, reassure him that it hadn’t been his presumption that had caused her tears, but his passion.

“You stayed,” she said, her voice breaking. “You stayed.”

He leapt up and strode toward her, holding out his arms, and she flew into them.

“Nobody has ever stayed,” she whispered. “Nobody but Scruffy, and I kept him, and now I think I have to keep you, too, because—because—”

But she didn’t have time to find or articulate any reasons. Sean lifted her off her feet and fiercely captured her mouth again, branding her with his savage possession.

“Put your clothes on so I can take you somewhere and take them off again,” he said, and his deep voice was a steely command coated in velvety seduction.

She laughed at his words and trembled at his touch, but within minutes she was dressed and they were sprinting toward her tiny house. She unlocked her door with shaking fingers, and then he was kicking the door shut, locking it, and stalking toward her with an almost feral determination.

“I’ll be having you now,” he said, his Irish lilt singing out in the words, sensuous and rich.

Her breath caught in her throat, and she raised a hand to her chest, backing away almost instinctively. He was too big, too male, too dominant. She’d never be able to control this man, and she prided herself on a life lived entirely under her control.

“You can’t just tell someone you’ll be having her,” she said breathlessly.

He threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, my beautiful one. I will, and I did, and if you want me to leave, you’d better tell me right now, or my next move will be to rip those clothes from your body and taste every gleaming inch of your lovely skin.”

He stopped moving and stood, completely still, like a predator deciding whether to pounce. “Will you be telling me to leave, then, Brynn my lovely?”

Brynn hesitated for a single heartbeat, but deep in her heart she knew that she’d already made her decision. She’d made it when she’d found him waiting for her.

“No. I don’t want you to leave, because I’ll be having you, too.”

Triumph soared through Sean, and he didn’t give her a chance to change her mind. He grasped her luscious ass and lifted her up, groaning as she instinctively lifted her legs around his hips, pressing her body against his straining cock, exactly where he needed her to be.

“Where?” He gritted out the word from between clenched teeth.

She pointed toward a short hallway and then started kissing and nibbling his neck as he walked. His vision blurred and the door to her bedroom seemed to be limned in red-gold light. He knew his eyes must be changing, and he knew he should care, should stop, should give a fiddler’s damn about keeping her from seeing them, but all he could think of was getting his hands on her skin and his mouth on her sweet, round breasts.

“I want you,” she whispered, and his cock twitched, growing even harder, until he wondered desperately if he’d even be able to work his way out of his pants.

He kissed her, deep, hard, and long, and then he set her down on her feet and pulled her shirt over her head in one swift motion.

“Finally,” he said, covering her breasts with his hands and blowing out a deep breath. “I don’t mean to sound crude, but I’ve wanted to get my hands on these since I first saw you.”

She laughed, and the sound was high and wild and breathless. “Imagine that. A man who likes breasts. How surprising.”

“Oh, but yours are spectacular,” he said, leaning down to surround one taut nipple with his lips.

He sucked, hard, and she cried out, digging her fingers into his shoulders.

“Oh, Sean, yes,” she said, and the words were kindling to his flame.

He tossed her on the bed, stripped off his clothes, and stared down at her, indulging his need to see every inch of her body, but she was still too covered up. He didn’t like it.

“The pants. Take them off,” he said roughly.

Her eyes widened, but she complied, and then she was beautifully, gloriously naked, and his hungry need for her burned into a conflagration. She was exactly what the lonely, lost part of his soul had been craving for so long, and she was here, and she was his.

He wasn’t ever going to let her go.

Brynn blushed as he stared down at her, but she also reveled in the powerful desire that blazed from his fascinating, glowing eyes. She held up her arms, wordlessly enticing him to come to her, as she let her gaze wander down his hard, muscular body. His powerful chest narrowed down to the carved muscle of his abdomen, and an intriguing trail of silky hair seemed to point the way to his large, jutting erection. He was aggressively, proudly male, and he’d come to claim her like a conquering hero from a fairy tale.

Brynn, who spent every third night of her life as a living, breathing participant in a fairy tale, wondered if she’d finally become the princess instead of merely the swan. Sean was no Prince Charming, though. He was too rough—too alpha—to ever be considered charming. More a pirate than a prince. But now he was hers, unpolished edges and all.

He joined her on the bed, pulling her into his arms. She dared to touch her tongue to the edge of his ear, and he rewarded her with a long, heartfelt groan. He caught her mouth with his, invading and possessing, while his busy, clever hands stroked her sides, her bottom, and her breasts, until he drove her to the brink of insanity. Creamy heat rushed to the juncture between her thighs, and her nipples tightened until they ached from the sizzling electricity of his touch.

“Sean. I want you. Touch me everywhere,” she demanded, and he lifted his head and flashed a wickedly seductive smile.

“Oh, I will, lass. Before dawn paints the sky, I will touch and taste every bit of you,” he promised. Her pirate had surprised her again by turning poet.

He kissed her again and again, until she was drowning in need and want and sensation, and then he shifted slightly so his hand could reach between their bodies. He caressed her exactly where she needed and wanted him to, and she cried out from the sensation.

“You’re so wet for me,” he said, and his big body shuddered under her hands. “I need you, Brynn. I’m not sure I can wait—”

“I don’t want you to wait,” she said. “The drawer next to the bed. Hurry.”

He kissed her again, long and lingering, and then opened the drawer where she kept the unopened box of condoms she’d bought a while ago in a random burst of optimism. He quickly covered himself and then he was back, positioning himself between her legs.

She wrapped her legs around his, and her arms around his neck, urging him on, and he plunged into her with one powerful thrust and then stopped, holding himself up with straining arms.

“You feel so unbelievably good, Brynn. I can’t—I can’t be slow about this.”

“Hard. Fast. Now,” she said, bucking against him.

He took her at her word, driving into her with all the power and passion she’d suspected lay just underneath his calm exterior. She was helpless to do anything but match his pace and his urgency, driven by her own need to reach the climax that rushed toward her on wings of red-gold flames.

Her body tensed, clenching around him as he took her up and over, and her mind and body exploded into sparkling waves of sensation. She clung to Sean, calling his name over and over, and it goaded him into increasing his pace, until he was thrusting into her so powerfully that a second, stronger wave of climax broke over her just before he roared out his own completion. Shuddering with the force of it, he slowly rocked to a stop, and then he turned on his side and wrapped her in his arms while still inside her.

“You belong with me,” he said, and she nodded, agreeing completely, before she realized what the consequences of it all might be for the future.

“Sean—” she began, but he kissed her again, silencing her insecurities, if only for a while.

His eyes, still glowing with the color of flame, stared into hers, and he reached down with one hand and pulled the quilt over her. “Let me take care of the condom, and then we need sleep. All the rest of it can wait. Please.”

His penis pulsed inside her as if punctuating his request, and she gasped a little bit but then nodded. He was gone and back quickly, and he pulled her back into his embrace as if he’d missed her in even that short time.

“Okay. Let’s get some sleep,” she said, snuggling close, reluctant to spoil the moment with talk of curses or futures. She’d never, ever, felt anything like the incredible magic of Sean’s lovemaking and—just this once—she wanted to forget her problems. She wanted to simply bask in the afterglow.

Serious, independent, responsible Brynn could wait until later. Sensual, decadent, feminine Brynn owned the now. As she lay there with her body tucked against his, she realized that he hadn’t only filled her body, but her heart and soul, too, and she waited for the wave of terror to wash over her at the realization.

It didn’t.

Instead, a sense of complete peace and contentment swept through her, a feeling of belonging. A feeling of home. She wanted this man, and she was beginning to wonder how far she would go to keep him.

ELEVEN

Sean woke to the noon sun slanting through the window shades, turning Brynn’s auburn hair to a glowing coppery red. She slept in his arms, and he stayed quiet and still, not wanting to wake her, content simply to watch her sleep.

She’d turned his life upside down, this magical woman. He, the eternal loner, suddenly wanted to find a way to make room for her in his life. She’d already stolen a place in his heart. Her delicate lashes fluttered as she slowly woke, and she blushed when she glanced down and noticed that his cock was hard.

“I won’t apologize,” he told her. “I’m always going to be hard when I wake up next to you.”

“Always? Sean, we have to talk about this.”

He hated to see worry in those winter-blue eyes of hers, so he decided to do his best to replace it with passion.

“We could talk about it,” he said, rolling onto his back and pulling her on top of him. “Or we could do this.”

With that, he gently rocked his hips up and down, rubbing against her sensitive clit, and he enjoyed it far too much when her eyes glazed over and she gasped.

“Oh! That feels so good,” she said, almost moaning.

Then she flashed a grin and encircled his cock with one slender hand.

“But if we’re going to distract each other from serious conversation, I think it’s my turn,” she said, gently but firmly stroking the length of his erection up and down, until he was shaking from the effort it took not to come in her hand.

After that, they spent quite a long time distracting each other, both in bed and in her shower, where Sean discovered that a wet, soapy, and slippery Brynn was very distracting indeed.

Brynn made sandwiches in her cheerful blue-and-white kitchen, casting glances from beneath her lashes at the large, utterly male person who’d made himself at home, in both her house and her life, in the space of only a few days.

“I’ve told you about the curse, at least the short version. Let me give you more than the headlines,” she said, handing him the largest sandwich she’d ever made in her life.

He glanced at it and grinned. “You must think I really worked up an appetite.”

“I sure did,” she blurted out, and then she felt her face go scarlet. “Stop it. Eat your sandwich.”

He laughed, but he picked up his sandwich. After a few bites, he glanced across the tiny kitchen table at her. “Maybe give me the full version?”

So she did, neatly folding her napkin and placing it next to her plate, and then telling him about the peasant girl, and the king, and the moon’s bargain. When she finished, she waited for him to show his disappointment or, worse, his revulsion at the thought of becoming involved with a woman who was destined to doom her own daughter to the curse of the black swan.

His face was cast in hard lines, and he crumpled his own napkin into a ball in his fist. “What a bitch,” he said grimly.

She blinked, utterly confused. “What? Who?”

“The moon. Or the moon goddess, depending on your beliefs. Whoever or whatever made that bargain was not playing fair. One saved life in exchange for a thousand years of servitude? I don’t think so.” He slammed his fist on the table, rattling the salt and pepper shakers. “We have to find a way to break the curse.”

She sat back in her chair, nonplussed. Of all the reactions she’d expected, this wasn’t even on the very bottom of the list. Break the curse? Nobody had even considered that, as far as she knew, in the entire history of her family.

“It’s the moon,” she said, enunciating carefully. “How do you break a curse cast by the moon?”

He shrugged. “You find a witch who’s bound to the moon goddess and ask him or her. This is Bordertown. I’m sure we can figure it out.”

She was already shaking her head. “I don’t want you to have false hope. The moon is too powerful. I plan never to have children, because I don’t want to do this to my daughter. The curse will stop with me.”

“Okay,” he said blandly, and then he picked up his sandwich and took a huge bite.

“Okay? What do you mean ‘okay’?”

After he swallowed and took a drink of water, he grinned at her. “Okay. We’ll find a way to break the curse, or we won’t. Either way, I’m not planning to let you out of my life, so just deal with it.”

“Deal with it?” Her voice came out sounding unnatural, and she realized she was echoing him like a stupid parrot.

“You forget, we have something that your ancestors didn’t have all those years ago,” he said, his rich brown eyes sparkling with humor.

“What is that?”

“Birth control.”

Her mouth fell open. “I know we have birth control, you idiot. But I couldn’t ask you to be content with a woman who can never give you children.”

“I want you, Brynn Carroll,” he told her, shoving his chair back and rounding the table to pull her up and into his arms. “We’ll figure out the curse and the children later, and in the meantime we can adopt a dog or three. They’ll be the cleanest, best-groomed dogs in Bordertown.”

“But—”

Sean stopped her by the simple means of kissing her until she gave up and kissed him back, but his conscience prodded him with its sharp blade until he reluctantly pulled away from her.

“There’s something else, though,” he said, steeling himself to tell her the truth about his fire demon heritage, hoping that she could understand and accept him.

Hoping she wouldn’t run screaming or throw him out of her house.

Before he could figure out a way to begin, the antique rotary phone on her counter rang, and they both looked at it as if it were an alien artifact.

“I should answer it,” she said apologetically. “It’s the number I give out for customer emergencies.”

“Like wolverines in the pickle vat?” He grinned at her. “Skunk encounters?”

“Exactly.” She picked up the phone and had a quick conversation about, from what he could decipher, a garage mechanic’s dog who’d rolled around in automotive oil. The owner couldn’t get it out and was worried.

“Yes, I’ll be glad to come in early. I’ll meet you at my shop in twenty minutes,” she said, ending the call.

“You have to go,” Sean said, resigned and more than a little relieved. A reprieve, then, until he had to admit that half of his DNA came from the most hated and feared species of creature in Bordertown.

“I have to go,” she confirmed, already cleaning up and getting ready to leave.

He stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “I need to tell you a secret of my own, Brynn, before we go any further.”

She frowned. “If you tell me that you’re married—”

He laughed. “Are you kidding? My mother would have skinned me alive if I had a wife and brought a date to her house.”

“Okay, well, tell me this evening. After work,” she said, a slight frown shadowing her beautiful face.

“Can’t. I have to work tonight, too,” he said.

“Then come by when you get done, even if it’s the middle of the night,” she said. “Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than my curse, right?”

Her attempt at a smile faded when he didn’t return it. She squared her shoulders. “Okay,” she repeated. “We’ll figure this out.”

They finished cleaning up in silence, and then they both headed for the door and their respective days. He’d just stepped out onto the porch when she stopped.

“I forgot my keys,” she said. “You go ahead, and I’ll see you later.”

Sean hesitated, but he did want to check up on his mom before he went to work. He pulled Brynn close and kissed her again, taking his time about it, right there on her porch.

“I’ll see you tonight,” he promised. “Good luck with the oil emergency.”

She smiled. “Thanks. All in a day’s work at Scruffy’s.”

Sean sauntered down the steps and headed for his car. It wasn’t until he’d traveled halfway to his mother’s house that he realized he was whistling. They’d figure it out. She’d be okay with his secret.

He refused to let things turn out any other way.

TWELVE

Brynn rushed to her bedroom to get her keys, but before she could make it back to the front door, it started to swing open, and sheer, effervescent joy bubbled inside her. He hadn’t been able to leave without another kiss, maybe.

“Back so soon,” she teased, but the large man who entered her house wasn’t Sean.

She stumbled back a step, but she wasn’t really worried, not yet, even though he was entering her house uninvited, because he looked familiar to her for some reason.

“Can I help you?”

The man raised a closed fist to just in front of his mouth, opened his hand, and blew. A shower of fine gray dust shot forward into Brynn’s face before she could duck or dodge away.

“What—” she managed, but the rest of the sentence died away as the poison entered her system. The room spun, and her vision funneled down to black, except for sparks of light from the matches her attacker was lighting.

Matches? But why—?

Her last thought before unconsciousness claimed her: Sean.

THIRTEEN

Sean heard the alarm when he was still halfway down the block from the station, and he started sprinting. The arsonist had taken a few days off, but even though Sean and the rest of his crew hoped the scumbag had fallen off a cliff or, more fitting, set himself on fire and was now out of commission, nobody was relaxing. This could be him again, and—worse—he could be escalating. People could die.

Please let it be a normal, boring backyard grill out of control.

“House fire,” Sue told him, when he started gearing up. “We don’t know if it’s him or not.”

“Where is it?”

She rattled off the address and Sean dropped his helmet, whirled around, and grabbed her. “What did you say?”

She blinked and glanced quite deliberately at his hands on her shoulders. He immediately released her.

“I’m sorry, Sue, but I need to hear that address again right now,” he demanded. Terror sliced into him with a scalpel’s edge, and rage wasn’t far behind.

She repeated the address.

It was Brynn’s house.

He pulled out his phone and started running.

“Scruffy’s Pet Spa,” he snapped, and the computer handling information repeated the name and then connected him to a phone that rang and rang, six long rings, before the voicemail picked up and informed him that Brynn had gone home for the night.

She’d never reset her message today.

She wasn’t answering the phone.

She might be in that house.

He ran faster.

Sean arrived before the truck and crew, and he was still too late. Brynn’s tiny house was an inferno, and there was no way anyone could possibly be alive inside. He threw back his head and roared out his anguish and rage, and the heritage he’d spent so long denying rushed to answer his call.

Every inch of the surface of Sean’s body blazed into flame. The fire was so intense and the temperature so high that his clothes and the gear he’d managed to don instantly disintegrated into ash. Unexpectedly, the fire didn’t hurt him at all; not that he would even have felt the physical pain. The neighbors and other mindless looky-loos who always gathered at fires started screaming and running, probably to get away from the terrifying fire demon, but Sean didn’t give a damn about any of it.

Not that he’d outed himself, not that he was scaring the populace, not that he didn’t know if he’d survive what he was about to do. He hit the front of her house running and used his body as a battering ram to hurl himself through the front windows, not bothering with the door. He expected the lash of back draft that hit him, hard, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

No fire could compete with the blazing heat of a fire demon.

He shouted her name, over and over, but heard nothing in response except the roar of the fire. The magically created fire.

The arsonist had struck again, and this time he’d made it personal.

Sean crashed through crumbling, fire-engulfed walls until he reached the black and ruined hull of the kitchen that he’d sat in only hours before, promising Brynn that they’d find a way to be together.

Now she was gone, and the fiery monster who was all that was left of Sean could feel nothing but agony.

Could want nothing but revenge.

He finally stumbled out of the inferno. She wasn’t here. There hadn’t been any evidence of a . . . body.

Brynn hadn’t been in the house.

Castilho was on the lawn, using his magic to combat the blaze. He saw Sean burst out of the house in full fire-demon mode and flinched, but to his credit he didn’t back away.

“Sean. Is that you? What the hell? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Sean slowly approached, unsure of his new abilities—he had no idea how close he could get to a human being without setting the person on fire.

“Didn’t want you to fear me,” he told the witch, whose eyes widened when he heard Sean’s voice coming from the demon’s mouth.

“Well, hell, if you’re a fire demon, then they can’t be all bad, can they?” Castilho grinned at him, and then turned his full attention back to the complicated magic he was working to help contain and extinguish the fire.

Sean didn’t know how to react to the man’s easy acceptance and, what’s more, he didn’t really care. He had to find Brynn.

Sue came running across the lawn, waving her phone at him. “Sean, it’s Zach. He says he needs to talk to you.”

He snarled at her. “No time. Have to find Brynn.”

Sue was paler than he’d ever seen her, and he’d been shoulder to shoulder with the veteran firefighter when she’d battled the worst of the worst blazes.

“You don’t understand, Sean. Zach says he has Brynn Carroll, and if you don’t show up within ten minutes, he’s going to set her on fire.”

FOURTEEN

Brynn had never been so afraid in her life. The man—Zach, he’d called himself—who’d knocked her out with poison powder and set her house on fire was absolutely, certifiably, insane. Worse, he was messing with black magic.

He’d slapped her face until she’d regained consciousness, and then he’d bragged to her about how he’d set more than seventeen fires in Bordertown and other places. The seventeen fires had claimed six victims so far, and he’d recited every single name, almost as if he were boasting, chanting the six names rhythmically like a prayer.

Like a curse.

When Brynn had been unable to hide her revulsion, he’d slapped her again, tied her hands behind her, shoved her over to a wooden box, and told her to sit. When she’d tried to fight him, he’d pulled out a plastic bag filled with more of the gray powder and asked her if she’d rather be conscious or unconscious when her lover arrived.

So now she sat, hands tied behind her, and fought back the shuddering terror that Sean would run headfirst into Zach’s trap and get himself killed. She didn’t have time to fall apart. She needed to be able to think, plan, and fight back.

Zach was planning to kill Sean, and there was absolutely no way she was going to let that happen. She took a long, steadying breath, and forced herself to calm down, look around, and think. Unfortunately, there weren’t any convenient caches of weapons or a telephone handy, because she wasn’t living in a movie. Bruce Willis wasn’t going to yippee-ki-yay his way into the building and save the day, but Sean—the man whom she now realized she loved—was going to try.

She believed in Sean far more than any movie hero, but if she didn’t act fast, he was going to get himself killed.

The stench of mold and garbage permeated the interior of the hulking warehouse where she’d regained consciousness. The building was made of steel and concrete—harder to burn, Zach said—and it had clearly been abandoned years before. Piles of debris hunched in corners, and Brynn was sure the movement she’d seen at the edges of the cracked concrete floor was rats.

Zach took a break from his frantic pacing and followed her gaze.

“Rats! Are you afraid of rats, little girl?” He chortled like a caricature of an evil villain, and all she could do was watch him in disbelief.

“You kidnapped the wrong woman, if you wanted somebody who was afraid of rats,” she said flatly. “Why don’t you let me go, and I’ll help you catch a few of those rats so they can eat your eyes out? Then at least you won’t be able to see to set any more fires.”

He turned his reptilian gaze on her, and she shuddered. “Watch your mouth, you slut. Dropped your pants for O’Malley fast enough, didn’t you? That’s the problem with people today. No morals.”

“You’re an arsonist and a murderer,” she shouted at him. “How dare you speak to me about morals?”

He whirled and threw his hands into the air, hurling a bolt of green smoke at the rats, who squealed and scurried away. They didn’t seem to be hurt, but they weren’t sticking around, either, so Brynn didn’t know how to judge the strength of Zach’s magic.

Before she could say or do anything else, a thunderous roar sounded from just outside the door. Someone was shouting her name, and Brynn realized she was out of time.

Sean had arrived.

The warehouse door blew off its hinges and slammed down to the floor, and a creature she’d only heard about in rumors and fairy tales crashed into the room. Red-hot flames surrounded the shape of a big man, but they didn’t seem to be burning him. The blaze moved with him—part of him—covering him like a second skin. Heat shimmered around his body like a warped version of a halo, and she didn’t need to get any closer to confirm that her first impression had been right.

This was a fire demon in full, raging fury and, if the stories were true, its next move would be to set fire to Zach, Brynn, and everyone else within a half-mile radius of the warehouse. Despair washed through her, and she fought wildly against the rope tying her wrists behind her. She didn’t care if it killed Zach, but she didn’t want to die today, and she really, really didn’t want to burn to death.

She jumped up off the box, but before she could take a single step the demon started running toward her, and she caught sight of its face.

His face.

The fire demon was Sean.

He hadn’t been kidding about secrets.

Sean saw Brynn hunched over, one side of her face red and swollen, and any hope of restraint shattered. Zach had hurt her, and he was going to die badly. But Brynn was alive. She was alive.

He roared her name again and headed straight for her, not realizing until he saw her face that she might not welcome his approach. That she might be afraid.

Afraid of him.

The flames engulfing him must have malfunctioned in some way, because now they were searing his heart.

Before he could think of something to say to reassure her, he caught sight of movement in the corner and spun around, shielding Brynn with his body, and faced Zach.

“I knew it! I knew you were a fire demon all along, or at least I’ve known ever since I started to practice black magic,” Zach said, smiling crazily.

“You were my friend,” Sean said, low and deadly, rage and pain combining to intensify the flames surrounding him. “Why?”

Zach tilted his head. For an instant, he looked truly bewildered, as if he didn’t understand, either, how he could have turned into such a monster, but then something evil took over and stared at Sean through Zach’s eyes.

“Because I could,” Zach sneered. “You kept blocking me, though. You, with your super hearing and your impervious skin. I wanted that baby to die, because the power I would have gained from sacrificing an innocent would have been incredible, but you had to play the hero and save her.”

The madman who’d once been Sean’s friend raised his hands into the air. “You just wouldn’t leave it alone, would you? So now, you have to die, and then your woman will die. But since she’s not an innocent, she’s going to have to suffer quite a lot of pain first, to make her death worth my while.”

Zach started laughing, and he hurled a wave of greenish-black smoke at Sean. “Goodbye, O’Malley,” he screamed.

Sean braced for the impact of the magical attack, but it didn’t hurt him—not one bit. Instead, the flames coating Sean’s body reached out toward the smoke and greedily sucked it in, dissipating it completely.

As Zach stared at him, dumbfounded, Sean suddenly had an interesting thought about fire demons. Maybe, since nobody knew exactly what they were, nobody knew exactly how to hurt them. Or, at least, maybe Zach didn’t.

“No! No, no, no, no, no,” Zach shrieked, raising his hands for another attack.

“Now it’s my turn,” Sean said, and he instinctively called for an ability he’d only guessed he might possess, and he hurled a blast of scarlet fire.

Zach threw up a magical shield, though, and then he countered with a different kind of magic. This time, the attack smashed Sean back on his heels. Sean whirled around, absorbing the brunt of the attack and then countering with another, more powerful blast of fire that Zach couldn’t deflect.

This one connected.

Zach screamed horribly as he died.

Sean slumped, exhausted and completely drained, and the flames surrounding him subsided and then disappeared completely. He fell to his knees on the cold concrete, shaking hard and unable even to stand up for one more moment, as his body reacted to his first use of his fire-demon powers.

“Brynn,” he croaked, turning to look for her.

But she was gone.

FIFTEEN

Brynn stormed back into the warehouse with her backup in tow, but when she saw the aftermath of the battle, her heart screamed at her that she was too late. Sean, human again and completely naked, lay collapsed on the floor. Zach, or at least what was left of Zach, lay smoldering in a charred heap in the corner.

She ran to Sean, knelt down, and lifted his head onto her lap, tears running down her face.

“An ambulance is on the way, but you’d better wake up right now, Sean O’Malley. You wake up, or I’ll get the moon to put a curse on you, too, and turn you into a—into a pigeon. A fat, stupid pigeon,” she babbled, uncaring that Sean’s brothers were watching her fall apart.

The four of them picked up Sean and Brynn both, ignoring her protests, and carried them out of the stinking building into the clean night air, not stopping until they arrived at a small park across the street and gently set the pair down on the soft grass. Brynn immediately wrapped her arms around Sean again, holding her breath as his eyes slowly opened. She was relieved to see that only a hint of red-orange fire remained in his pupils.

“A pigeon, hmm? Can a swan fall in love with a pigeon, lass? If so, then I won’t be minding so very much,” he said, his Irish lilt pronounced.

“I don’t know about that, but a swan can fall in love with a fire demon, and I know one who has,” she told him, laughing and crying all at the same time.

She kissed every inch of his face, over and over, until he caught her cheeks in his hands and held her still while he kissed her long and deep, right there on the grass in front of his brothers and, as they arrived, sirens blaring, the entire Bordertown Fire Department, all of whom cheered and made hooting noises.

“I love you, Brynn,” Sean said, gazing into her eyes, and she started crying again.

“I love you, too. Never, ever scare me like that again.”

Oscar took off his shirt and tossed it down over Sean’s hips, laughing.

“Why don’t we cover up the jewels, boyo? And welcome to the family, Brynn. Maybe you can knock some sense into my brother.”

Brynn stared up at the four of them, suddenly realizing that they were hers now. And Kathleen was hers, too. She had a family.

She had a family.

Fresh tears poured down her face.

Sean’s strong arms banded around her, and he murmured into her ear. “Let’s go home, Brynn. My home is yours now.”

At his words, she remembered that her own house had burned to the ground, taking all of her personal possessions with it, but the pain of loss wasn’t nearly strong enough to match the exhilaration soaring through her heart. She’d only lost things. She still had her business, anyway, and—most important of all—Sean was safe.

Sean was safe, and he loved her.

“That’s really terrific red hair. I think you’re going to be a great O’Malley,” one of the brothers said, and the others started laughing.

Brynn’s mouth fell open. Things were suddenly moving very fast. “An O’Malley?”

“Yes,” Sean said firmly. “My O’Malley. Forever.”

SIXTEEN

Three months later

Sean’s mother leaned on his arm as they walked from his car to Black Swan Fountain. She was fading rapidly now, the cancer carrying her away from them and into a world made up of pain and weakness. Too often, he and Brynn, or one of his brothers, would find her staring off into the distance at something—or someone—that only she could see.

“I’ll see your father again soon,” she suddenly said, as he arranged a warm blanket on the cold marble bench for her.

“Mom,” he protested. “You have plenty of time left. Don’t—”

“I don’t, Sean, love, and you know it,” she said gently. “Of all my boys, you were always the most realistic, even though you were the baby.”

“Even though I fell in love with a swan?” He glanced at the fountain, reassuring himself that Brynn was there—safe—although he could already hear her lovely song.

“I fell in love with a fire demon,” his mom replied, smiling a little. “Sean, I want you to know how happy I am that you found your Brynn. She’s strong, and smart, and she loves you with her entire heart. I could never have asked for more for you, my beautiful boy.”

He felt his eyes start to burn, but he smiled for his mother’s sake and put an arm around her frail shoulders.

“A mother’s love is one of the most powerful forces in the world, Sean. I carried you in my body and nurtured you as babies, and then cheered you on to independence as boys, and now I am so proud of you all as grown men. My biggest regret in all of this is that I have to leave you before you come to the next chapters of your stories. I wish I could see your brothers all find love, as you have. I wish I could see you bring your own children into the world and help you raise them.”

He started to protest, but the gentle sadness on her face stopped him. She knew the truth and didn’t want to hear false platitudes. Not now.

“I love Brynn as if she were my own daughter,” his mother said, and he pretended not to see the tears that she tried to hide as they fell slowly down her face. Instead, he looked steadily at the fountain until she’d patted her cheeks dry with a tissue.

“She loves you, too, Mom. One day, when we break this curse, we’re going to have a daughter and name her after you,” he promised, even though it was tough to get the words out past the lump that had lodged itself in his throat.

“Oh, don’t do that,” she said. “Kathleen is so old-fashioned.”

She thought about it for a moment. “Or at least only for a middle name . . .”

They shared a laugh and then sat in silence for a little while, watching Brynn and listening to her beautiful song.

“We’ll find a way to break the curse and bring baby Kathleen into the world, don’t worry,” he said, hoping it was true.

“I have some ideas about that,” his mother said, pulling a piece of paper out of her pocket and handing it to him. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you tonight—and here.”

He scanned the paper, which turned out to be a short list of names, one of which he recognized. “Mrs. Mastroianni?”

His mother smiled. “Did you know that Mrs. Mastroianni is a pretty powerful moon witch? We have some thoughts about how to beat this curse . . .”

Her eyes lit up as she explained, and then they sat quietly, sharing the peace and moonlight for what Sean knew might be the very last time. When she grew tired, he gently helped her to his car, and then took her to her house, where the kind and wonderful nurse they’d hired to help with his mother’s personal needs settled her in bed with a cup of herbal tea.

When the nurse indicated that his mother was ready, he went in to say good night.

“I love you, Mom,” he said, kissing her cheek.

“I love you, Sean. Now go on with you and watch over that girl of yours until we can break the curse,” she said, shooing him out with a smile.

Later that night, peacefully in her sleep, Sean’s mother crossed the silver seas into the heaven in which she’d always believed. A few days later, her sons shared a bottle of fine Irish whiskey at O’Malley’s Pub during her wake—the largest ever held in Bordertown—and agreed among themselves that, if the world held any justice at all, she’d found their father, and the two of them were spending eternity together, loving, laughing, and watching over their boys.

EPILOGUE

One year later

Brynn O’Malley, her husband Sean, and little Maeve Kathleen, snug in her father’s arms, took a walk around Black Swan Fountain at midnight. Maeve was a little fussy, and nothing calmed her like a stroll in the night air.

They’d scattered Sean’s mother’s ashes in the fountain, at her request, and Brynn knew that each of the O’Malley men, at different times and never together, of course, came out here and brought flowers with them. She smiled as she caught sight of a bouquet of lilies wrapped with a gold ribbon.

Yeats had been here recently, then.

“Now, now, love,” Sean said, soothing their daughter. “Hush, my wee lass.”

He sat down on the bench she thought of as “theirs” and glanced up at Brynn. “A bit of help here?”

Brynn laughed to see her big, rough, powerful husband conquered by the tears of a tiny baby. She reached out to take her daughter and cuddled her miraculous, beautiful, wonderful child close to her heart.

“Let me tell you a story, my sweet girl. Once upon a time, more than a thousand years ago, a girl sang to the moon,” she began, looking into the gently glowing red-gold eyes of her husband, the man she would love and cherish forever. “But this is not that story.”

Sean leaned close and kissed her, sweetly lingering until Maeve fussed at them to pay attention to her again.

“Ours is the story of the woman who loved a fire demon,” Brynn continued. “And the man who loved a swan, and how, thanks to your daddy and your grandma, the curse of the black swan will never, ever have anything to do with you.”