William's Witch: A Cardinal Witches paranormal romance (The Cardinal Witches Book 2) Read online

  William’s Witch

  A Cardinal Witches paranormal romance

  Alyssa Day

  Holliday Publishing

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Excerpt: Damon’s Enchantress

  Thank you

  About the Author

  Books by Alyssa

  1

  William Pemberley woke up with a blazing hangover and realized that, yet again, he didn’t know where or when he was.

  The where was a fairly common occurrence and had been for at least the past few decades, so it didn’t bother him all that much, but the when was a relatively new development, and he didn’t like it at all.

  Even worse—his skin was itching. Badly. So either he was caught in the first-ever underground pollen storm, or somebody was throwing around a lot of fairly powerful magic in the vicinity. He contemplated rolling over and going back to sleep until the headache wore off or the magic went away, but the persistent itch and the general discomfort of lying on top of a three-hundred-year-old coffin combined to make him change his mind.

  He shot up through six feet of soil into the moonlit quiet of a church graveyard, landing in the middle of a standoff between a couple of knife-wielding thugs and a woman wearing a lopsided pair of plastic wings. The woman was the one casting the spells—the thugs weren’t casting anything but a major case of body odor.

  Whatever they’d been doing or shouting or threatening stopped the moment William appeared, and all three of them looked at him with varying degrees of shock (the thugs) and suspicion (the…fairy? Butterfly? Victim of a low-rent Halloween costume shop?).

  “Who the hell are you?” the taller of the men shouted, clutching his knife closer to him as if it could protect him from the Big, Bad.

  “A tuxedo? Really?” the woman drawled in a rich, sultry voice that made him think of aged whiskey and dark chocolate. She looked William up and down and curled her lip. “Isn’t that a little old school?”

  William glanced down at himself, mildly surprised to find that he was, indeed, wearing a tuxedo. He grinned at the butterfly. “Apparently, I had a very good time. What year is this?”

  She snorted in a very unfeminine way that, oddly enough, turned him on a little. “2016. Vampires are out, shifters are in, hashtag it’s a new world, baby.”

  William had no clue what she was talking about, but the shorter thug took that moment to try to sneak up behind him, the pathetic excuse for a dagger raised in one hand. Before the human could slash out and ruin a perfectly good jacket, William whirled around, picked him up, and threw him twenty feet across the graveyard into a pile of leaves.

  “You killed Henry!” the taller one shouted. Then he attacked, proving once again that some humans had the IQs of turnips.

  William sighed, but before he could raise his hands to counter, the idiot froze in mid-leap and then fell to the ground and lay there, unmoving, his wildly beating heart the only sign that he was still alive.

  The butterfly started laughing and lowered her own hands, which were glowing faintly with the sparkling residue of magic. “Wouldn’t want you to wrinkle your fancy suit, Drac.”

  “My name is William,” he said mildly, torn between the urge to get the hell out of…wherever he was…and the budding curiosity about this witch who was so unafraid of him.

  “Of course it is,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Because I break my rule about tequila on first dates one time, and I get groped on a balcony, mugged in a graveyard, and bothered by a vampire named William.”

  She took a step closer, out of the shadows and into the moonlight, and William’s brain forgot how to make words. She wasn’t very tall, but she was wearing impossibly high heels to make up for it. Her softly rounded body was clad only in a tiny red dress and those ridiculous wings. Her eyes were enormous and dark—he couldn’t tell their exact color—and her softly waving hair—also dark--hung down in a thick fall all the way to her waist.

  Curiosity turned to something hotter. More primal. Predatory, even.

  He wanted her.

  It was nothing new, wanting. He was a vampire, and he hadn’t survived for hundreds of years without wanting. When he wanted, he took. Power, territory, women. And then he moved on, because ultimately he discovered, every time, that he never wanted anything or anyone for very long at all.

  Those who live forever are easily bored.

  “Hey! Are you listening to me?” She snapped her fingers in front of his face. “I asked you if you killed that guy, and if you’re going to be a problem for me. Because, frankly, I’ve had enough crap tonight, and I really don’t need any more. I’m glad to go our separate ways, no harm, no foul, whatever. But I can kick your ass for you if you feel the need to fight.”

  In spite of his attraction to her, the predator in him registered the threat. His fangs descended, and he offered her his coldest, cruelest smile. The smile that had once made a murderous warlord piss his pants and beg for mercy.

  The butterfly didn’t beg for anything. Instead, she yawned.

  Suddenly he wanted her with an intensity he hadn’t felt in more than a hundred years. She was beautiful, and she was bold, and she wasn’t afraid of him at all.

  He took a step toward her and almost laughed when she backed up and then glared at him, as if she were furious that she’d shown a drop of weakness.

  “To answer your questions: First, he’s not dead. I threw him in the pile of leaves on purpose, and I’m not hungry enough to drain the blood of an imbecile. Second, yes, I am absolutely going to be a problem for you. You may as well tell me your name and where we are, since we’re going to become so intimately acquainted.”

  She stared at him with no change of expression except for the slightest widening of her eyes, but William could hear her heart beat, so he wasn’t fooled. She wasn’t scared, but she was something. Perhaps intrigued.

  Perhaps annoyed.

  It was always hard for him to tell the difference.

  “Sure. I’ll play. Why not?” She laughed again, but this time it was as bitter as the almost-forgotten taste of nettles and despair. “My name is Amy. This is Garden City. Tequila is a curse on womankind.”

  He opened his mouth to respond—with what he didn’t know—but instead he sneezed, hard, and the gorgeous Amy took advantage of his distraction to flick an immobility spell at him.

  Nicely played.

  He watched her walk away, her world-class ass swaying in that shimmery little dress, and he could almost taste the anticipation of how much fun he was planning to have pursuing her.

  She stopped at the corner of the church, glanced back at him, and blew him a kiss. “It’s been fun, Drac. I hope I don’t see you around.”

  He waited almost a full minute after she disappeared around the corner before he shrugged off her spell. Just in case she came back. It wouldn’t be any fun if he gave away his secrets too early in the game.

  A tiny, rational corner of his mind tried to raise the question of why a vampire who was allergic to magic would want to get involved with a witch, but he’d had a lot of practice ignoring anything that sounded remotely like the voice of reason.

  “It’s William,” he repeated, happier than he’d been since the end of Prohibition.

  And then he launched himself into the cold night air so he could follow his butterfly—at a di
screet distance--all the way home.

  2

  True fact of life: It was hard to be a bad ass when you lived on Wildflower Lane.

  Amy contemplated the coffee situation in her miniscule kitchen and wondered, once again, why Starbucks didn’t deliver. Since coffee didn’t magically (ha! Witch humor!) appear in her favorite mug, she resigned herself to making it. Three cups later, she still hadn’t quite wrapped her head around the horror of her blind date and everything that had happened after, so she contemplated going back to bed. It was Saturday, after all, and even apprentice private investigators deserved a day off. Naturally, that’s when her cousin Rose knocked once at the back door and walked in.

  The good part of living on a street where almost every house belonged to a relative: you were never alone.

  The bad part of living on a street where almost every house belonged to a relative: you were never alone.

  “Don’t even ask; you can’t have any coffee. Your mom would kill me,” Amy told her pregnant cousin, who was looking a little wild-eyed, but still unfairly gorgeous. Rose was tall and blond, and had blue eyes that had been known to captivate men from three counties away. Next to her, Amy felt like the frizzy-haired troll of the family.

  “Then let me at least smell yours, because if I have to drink one more cup of that nasty herbal tea made from ‘special family recipes,’ I’m going to kill her,” Rose moaned. “Why did all the Cardinal witches have to be garden witches? Why couldn’t they be, I don’t know, coffee witches?”

  Amy blinked. “Coffee witches?”

  Rose picked up a dish towel and waved it around ominously, or as ominously as a dish towel could get. “Don’t mess with me, I’m armed.”

  They compromised on half a cup, with lots of cream, and multiple promises to never, ever tell Sue. Rose sat down on one of the two chairs at Amy’s tiny table, took a sip and then sighed, deeply and blissfully.

  “Do you two want to be alone?”

  “Shut up. Okay, how was the date?”

  Amy groaned. “The worst. First, I had to put up with the story of every P.I. movie he’d ever seen and lots of ‘jokes’ about whether I was ‘packing’ or not. This was at dinner, which I had to pay for, because he’d ‘forgotten’ his credit card next to his computer at home.”

  Rose whistled. “That’s three sets of air quotes. Maybe a new record.”

  “Oh, it gets worse,” Amy said grimly. “Then he took me to a costume party, which was really just a gathering of Furries.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “People who like to dress up in animal costumes to have sex.” Amy started making another pot of coffee, since going back to bed was apparently not in her future. When she turned back around, Rose was still gaping at her.

  “That’s—But--When does that get fun? Naked. Naked is definitely the way to go for sex,” said the pregnant woman, whose growing abdomen was scientific proof that she’d had sex at least once in the recent past. And since Amy knew Alejandro, Rose’s husband, she figured “at least once” was more likely to apply to every night. Or every hour.

  Amy had to force her lip not to curl. “Sure. Rub it in. I haven’t done the wild thing in so long I forget why it’s called wild.”

  Rose at least looked apologetic. “I’m sorry. Really. I thought this guy sounded like he had promise.”

  “No. No promise. Not even a little. But then it got worse. He started groping me on the balcony.”

  “Does he still have hands?”

  “Ha. Yes, sadly. I just took my wings and left.” Amy pointed to the sad, discarded plastic wings sitting on the floor in the corner.

  “Your wings?”

  “Some guy was handing them out for anybody who wasn’t in full ‘I’m a squirrel and I’m horny’ costume.”

  When Rose stopped laughing, she shook her head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just--"

  “And then I cut through the cemetery and two morons tried to mug me.”

  Rose’s face paled beneath the remnants of her summer tan. “What? Are you okay? I mean, I can see that you’re okay, but did they--"

  “And then the vampire showed up, wearing a tuxedo,” Amy finished triumphantly, finally having been able to outdo Rose with one of her experiences, which was hard to do to a woman who was married to an FBI Paranormal Ops agent with personal ties to Atlantean royalty.

  Silence.

  Eyes narrowing, Rose frowned, but said nothing.

  “Nothing to say? Really? I thought the vampire in a tuxedo part would at least get you,” Amy said, frowning.

  “You went too far. I was with you for the bad date and even the Furries and the mugging, well, maybe not so much with the mugging, but then you had to go that one step too far with the vampire. You can’t make up stuff like that and expect anybody to believe you, even me, and I realize I’m gullible.”

  Amy put her mug down on the chipped counter so hard that coffee sloshed out. “Hey! I’m not making any of it up. There was a vampire in the cemetery, and he was wearing a tuxedo. He helped me stop the muggers, and then I froze him and left.”

  “Right,” Rose said, rolling her eyes. “Let me guess. He was also totally hot and a billionaire, and he’s going to whisk you away from all this on his private plane.”

  A cool breeze feathered across Amy’s cheek before she heard the deep, sexy voice from the night before.

  “Only a multi-millionaire, unfortunately, but I do have a plane. Totally hot goes without saying.”

  Rose’s mouth fell open and she pointed a shaking finger. “Amy, there’s a vampire in your living room.”

  Amy sighed again and tried to ignore the flutter of interest in her belly. It really was a very sexy voice. Her bed-head hair and Ohio State sweat shirt would really impress him.

  Not that she wanted to impress a vampire. Where did that thought come from? She must be desperate. He was probably ugly, anyway. She hadn’t gotten a good look at him the night before, because he’d been standing in the deep shadows beneath the thick autumn leaves of an old white ash tree. There was no way he lived up to the promise of that delicious voice.

  “Amy, there’s a vampire in your living room,” Rose repeated, loudly.

  “A totally hot one,” the vampire in the living room added helpfully.

  “A totally arrogant one, apparently,” Amy said. She forced her hands to unclench before she turned around.

  “I froze you once, and I can do it...Oh. Boy.”

  The vampire in her living room was gorgeous. Totally hot didn’t even come close. Smoking hot. So impossibly beautiful that he couldn’t be real. She leaned back against the counter, because her knees had suddenly gone weak.

  He was probably just under six feet tall, and every single inch of him was perfectly proportioned. She knew this because he’d ditched the tuxedo for jeans and a tightly fitting black t-shirt. There were muscles in all the right places, and she swallowed, hard. But if his body was perfect, his face was a work of art, all strong bones, classical nose, and amber eyes. Top that all off with tousled waves of bronze hair the color of an antique coin, and her girl parts were jumping up and down with glee.

  She told her girl parts to chill out. The beautiful guy was a vampire.

  “This is not good,” Rose said carefully. “You freeze him. I’m going to call Alejandro. He has some experience dealing with unwanted vampires.”

  Amy laughed a little, in spite of the situation, because why not? Her life had become a bad movie-of-the-week, and the action hero had fangs.

  The vampire, who’d been looking around with interest, snapped his head around and pinned her in place with a searing look from those hot amber eyes. She wondered what she’d missed.

  “Your laugh,” he said softly, and his eyes were actually glowing.

  Common sense told her that glowing vampire eyes had to be a bad thing, and the thought snapped her out of her stupidity. Her pregnant cousin was in the room with a vampire who could apparently break all the ru
les.

  “I didn’t invite you in, and it’s daylight,” she snapped, moving to block Rose from his view. “How are you here?”

  He tilted his head and smiled, as if she’d said something amusing. “Why do you live in servants’ quarters? Are you a servant?”

  “What? No, I’m not a servant, I’m a private investigator.”

  A slow, dangerous smile spread across his perfect face, and Amy actually felt dizzy for a few seconds. If he could do that to her just with a smile, who knew what kind of danger they were in?

  “I’d like to investigate you in private,” he said, in a silken tone that matched his seductive smile.

  She laughed in his face. “Wow. That’s really lame. And you can forget it. Rose, please leave. Now. I’ll take care of William, but you need to protect the baby.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone,” her cousin said, grabbing for her dish towel, again. “Wait. The vampire’s name is William?”

  William’s lips quirked a little, but he didn’t laugh. Instead he bowed. Actually freaking bowed, right there in her living room.

  “Please accept my congratulations on your upcoming blessed event. And my reassurances that I mean neither you nor the delightful Amy any harm.”

  Amy had never before been described as delightful, even by her own mother. She took a moment to savor the word before she shook it off and pointed at him. “So what do you want?”

  He shrugged, which made so many muscles move in such wonderful ways that Amy’s mouth actually dried out a little. “I want to hire you to break a curse.”

  “Forget it. Get out of my house,” she ordered, on firmer footing now. What did she know about curse breaking? Nothing. Rose’s crazy grandma might know something, but Amy wasn’t about to put anybody else in the family in danger.