Authors: Cindy Spencer Pape
Motor City Witch
Motor City Witch
By Cindy Spencer Pape
She’d left magic behind
Once upon a time, Elise Sutton had been a powerful witch and paranormal enforcer. Once she’d been madly in love with Fae lord Aidan Greene. But when Aidan had considered his duties more important than their relationship, the love affair ended badly. Shortly after, while on the hunt for a rogue demon, Elise was brutalized and almost killed. Months later she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. To protect her child—and her heart—Elise decided to live a nonmagical life.
Until she meets Aidan again, and he assumes Dina is his daughter. When Dina is kidnapped by a racial purity movement, Elise turns to Aidan for help. The icy facade she has built around herself shatters at Aidan’s touch. Together they have to hunt through the human and faery worlds to find Dina…and to discover whether or not they have any kind of chance at a happily ever after.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks so much to the team at Carina Press and Harlequin who have worked so hard to make this new enterprise a success. It has been a true delight to be part of it from the beginning. In particular, I owe a big thanks to my editor, Melissa Johnson, for being willing to spend way too much time on the phone sorting out world-building issues. Thank you as well to my critique partners Anny Cook and Regina Carlysle, and the Untitled Writers’ Group for keeping me in line and kicking me in the butt as needed, and to my husband Glenn for never failing to believe in me.
Finally, to the people of Detroit—thanks for being my home town, and my apologies for any liberties I’ve been taking. Zug Island is a real place, but that particular abandoned steel mill is fictional.
Dedication
For my sons, Chandler and Tristan. May your lives always contain magic.
“So were you ever planning to tell me I have a daughter?”
When Aidan Greene got upset, his not-quite-British accent became extremely clipped and right now it was sharp enough to sever limbs.
Elise sighed. She’d known this moment would come someday. As soon as her friend and client, Meagan Kelly, had turned out to be the missing cousin Aidan had been looking for all these years, Elise had known the showdown was going to come sooner rather than later. She’d been hoping, though, that it wouldn’t happen right in the middle of Meagan’s wedding reception. For some reason, the short, jade silk suit she wore didn’t seem like nearly enough armor for facing down a pissed-off Fae in his elaborately decorated Grosse Pointe garden.
She gulped the last of her champagne for courage and set the glass on the tray of a passing waiter before she looked up at Aidan. The six-foot-four Fae lord was resplendent—and way hotter than she liked to admit—in his custom-made tux, even with his human glamour securely in place. His dark brown hair was styled perfectly and she knew the reddish highlights were natural, while the touches of gray at his temples were just for show. Elves didn’t age like humans, but if they wanted to hang out in the human world, they had to at least pretend to.
It was a beautiful early October afternoon in southern Michigan. The band played on the terrace behind them, wedding guests laughed and danced, waiters mingled and smiled their way through the crowd, but all that receded into the distance for Elise as she tried to steady her nerves. Personal confrontations were not one of her strong suits. She could sell art to anyone—but having to discuss her own life and emotions was so awkward it was painful.
“Elise?” Aidan crossed his arms over his lean but well-muscled chest and glared down at her with sparks of fury shooting from his emerald green eyes. “You were about to explain why I have a five-year-old daughter I didn’t know about.”
“Four.” She rubbed the bridge of her nose to forestall the migraine she knew was coming. Looking around at the party in full swing, she sighed again. There was no getting out of this, so she might as well get it over with. “She’s only four. Her birthday isn’t until the end of this month.”
Aidan’s spine stiffened, and barely suppressed outrage made his long frame vibrate, though it was so slight most humans wouldn’t be able to see it.
Elise wasn’t most humans. As a
Wyndewin
witch, with a trace of elven blood of her own, she was far more sensitive to energies and vibrations, as well as magic and auras. And she’d always been tuned in to Aidan Greene—gods help her.
Stalling wasn’t going to work. Aidan was the most arrogant male she’d ever met and once he made a decision, he never backed down—he simply expected everyone else in the universe to jump to his bidding. She didn’t want to interrupt the wedding party or disturb Meagan and she particularly didn’t want to do this in front of her daughter, Adina, who was whirling on the dance floor with a handful of other children, all under the watchful eyes of Meagan’s human grandmother and a couple of her aunts. “Let’s take this inside. There’s no point in upsetting the other guests.”
“Fine.” Taking her elbow in a grip that was nearly painful, he half dragged her across the terrace, around the corner of the building, through the rose garden and into the library of his sprawling mansion.
Elise hugged her arms around her chest and glanced around the familiar, luxuriously appointed, book-lined room, even as he pulled her further inside, into a smaller private den that he clearly kept as his home office. Aidan was the CEO of Underhill Industries, a multi-faceted company that encompassed the Fae’s vast holdings in the mortal realm. Since she’d broken up with Aidan, he had also become the keeper of the Detroit area safe house for the Fae. According to information she’d received from her brother, Aidan had relocated here less than a year after their breakup, convinced that his missing cousin was somewhere in the area, and he’d moved the headquarters of Underhill with him. So while she’d visited the mansion as Aidan’s guest, she’d never seen his inner sanctum before. It was like stepping into an upscale British gentleman’s club, without any other members.
“Nice.” Suppressing a shiver, she sat in one of the leather club chairs in front of the empty fireplace while Aidan dropped into the other, gripping its arms with knuckles gone white.
“My daughter,” he grated in a voice she imagined made his employees tremble with fear. Good thing she didn’t work for him. “Were you ever going to tell me about her?”
“No.” She fought to keep her voice from cracking and stared into the cold, empty hearth rather than chance looking at him. She gathered her breath before she blurted out the salient fact. “Because you aren’t Adina’s father.” Elise’s daughter was the love of her life, the best thing that had ever happened to her—but her conception…that had been probably the worst moment of Elise’s entire life. Even five years later, it was still excruciatingly painful to think about it.
“Bullshit.”
Her gaze flew to his face before she could check it and she found him staring back at her. Damn, why did he still have to be the one man who could make her melt with nothing but a look?
Aidan’s slender, perfectly chiseled features were stark with emotion—something the eleven-hundred-year-old Fae rarely displayed. His reserve, which matched her own, was one of the things that had drawn her to him.
“Yes, we always used condoms, but gods know those can fail. I have eyes, Elise. And oddly enough, they’re almost exactly the same shade of green as your daughter’s. Granted, if she’s not quite five, she must have gone a bit post-term, but that’s not unusual for halflings.”
It didn’t surprise her that he leapt immediately to the arithmetic. Aidan’s facility with numbers was unusual for one of the Fae and a significant part of the reason he’d been chosen to head their corporate interest in the mortal realm. However, in this case, she knew the math by heart, having gone over it repeatedly during her long, difficult pregnancy. His memory was off—there’d been a time or two they were careless, but that didn’t matter. Adina had been born almost exactly ten months after the last time Elise had slept with Aidan.
Aidan wouldn’t back down until he’d heard every sordid detail, damn him. Elise was reticent at the best of times, and this subject was incredibly awkward and personal. The truth of it was, she was so shy, it was hard for her to open up, even with her family and close friends. The only person she’d ever been able to be openly affectionate with was Adina.
“Okay, if I’m going to tell this story now, I need a shot of that cognac I know you have stashed in here somewhere. It isn’t exactly a time of my life I like to think about, much less discuss.”
Aidan nodded coldly. With a flick of his fingers, a bottle of VSOP, probably older than Elise, appeared in one hand while a pair of snifters popped into the other. He poured a couple
fingers of liquid into each glass and handed her one without a word. Looking at her, he raised one dark slash of an eyebrow in expectation.
She sipped slowly, composing her words with care—now that was something she was good at—putting up a good front. “So after our huge fight on Christmas Eve—the one where I wanted some kind of commitment and you were too busy with your work for Underhill Industries. and your search for your cousin…” It hadn’t been much of an argument—yelling and screaming weren’t in her nature. Elise had simply told him that since she obviously meant less to him than his business contacts, she didn’t see a future for them together. Then she’d hidden her tears and walked away, head held high.
“That’s not exactly how I remember the discussion, but go on.” His voice could have frozen Lake St. Clair, the huge body of water only a few hundred yards beyond his gardens.
“Regardless. On New Year’s Eve, there was a skirmish with some demons down by the Detroit riverfront. Since my date with you was cancelled, I went along with Des and another
Wyndewin
to deal with the problem.” Both Elise and her brother, Desmond, had been born to a family of human wizards and witches known as
Wyndewin
, or white magic wielders, and had worked for the
Wyndewin
League. Keeping other magical beings from making a mess of the human world was part of their job description.
“Which, the way I recall events, was part of what we were fighting about. Your gifts are in healing, Elise. You never were much use in a fight.” His voice was perfectly level, as if reducing the insult to mere fact, but she could see him swirling the amber liquid in his glass, a sure sign of tension for Aidan. If he was calm, he didn’t fidget. “I wanted you to stop taking on enforcement missions and focus on your art career.”
“Only so it wouldn’t inconvenience you.” She swallowed another mouthful of cognac. Aidan had gotten cranky when she’d missed one of his business dinners because of a battle with a rogue witch. Whatever Aidan Greene wanted, Aidan Greene was supposed to get, but Elise was nobody’s puppet. Unfortunately he’d been right about her fighting skills. “Anyway, I learned my lesson that night.” Her stomach turned at the thought of it. “One of the demons hauled me off into an alley while Des and his friend were fighting another five or six of them. By the time Des was able to get to me…”
“You were raped.” The low rasp in his tone promised death and destruction for somebody and for a change, it wasn’t Elise. After a moment, though, some of the anger turned on her, making her fight not to flinch in her chair. “And you didn’t think you could tell me about it.”
“We’d already broken up.” Tears tried to clog her throat. “There didn’t seem to be much point. You’d said not to bother calling you again.”
“After you told me you never wanted to see my face in this lifetime,” he snapped.
Aidan never snapped, so she knew he was bothered, which touched her. And he had a point, damn him.
She
had been the one to break things off between them and not too politely, either. But he’d been so wrapped up in his work and other obsessions that he hadn’t had time to be the boyfriend she’d wanted—or the husband she’d been hoping he’d one day be.
“Regardless—after your daughter was born, surely it became abundantly clear that she’s mine. I don’t know of any species of demon with dark brown hair, fair skin and emerald eyes. Those green eyes certainly don’t come from your family.”
Elise tipped her head. Adina had inherited her dark hair, though with russet highlights, which Elise assumed came from somewhere in her own lineage. Her mother was dainty and Chinese, her father a tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed British Canadian. She herself was average
height at five feet six inches and slim, with black hair and dark eyes. Her skin was pale ivory and her features were mostly European, with a slight epicanthic fold giving her a mildly exotic appearance. She played up the exotic aspect, using it to her advantage in the art world. Adina had almond-shaped eyes, but no fold, and her skin was an even lighter shade than Elise’s. The eyes though…
Elise drew in a deep breath and exhaled it slowly through her nose. “That’s how I know she isn’t your daughter, Aidan. Dina wasn’t born with green eyes. They didn’t turn that color until a year ago.”
He slammed his empty snifter down on the end table beside him so hard the crystal cracked and brandy spilled everywhere. “What?”
Elise looked around for a napkin, but Aidan waved a hand and made the spill disappear. Damn, since she’d stopped using magic in her everyday life, she’d forgotten how effortless it could make things seem.
“Elise, tell me.”
“As soon as Dina was born, I could tell she was part demon. The midwife laid her in my arms, she looked up at me and I swear she smiled. Not gas, but a genuine smile. She had these big eyes that were the most beautiful purple I’ve ever seen. Then they changed to gold—not golden brown, but honest-to-gods metallic gold—in a heartbeat.”
“What the hell race of demons has that characteristic?” Aidan’s face paled. “I’ve never heard of it before.”
Elise shrugged. “The
Wyndewin
have no idea either. Des swore the demon he killed was from Gravaki, though, and there’s a lot we don’t know about that plane.”
“Besides them being powerful and generally inclined toward mayhem, neither do the Fae.” He scrubbed one hand through his hair. Demons were from a variety of planes other than earth and there were pretty much an infinite number of them. He inhaled deeply and leaned his head back against the leather of his chair. “I’m sorry, Elise. I like to think I’d have been there for you, if I’d known—about the attack or the pregnancy.”
She shrugged. There was no way she could admit she’d dreamed of having him beside her, holding her hand when the baby was born. “You were busy. And I was—pretty out of it for a while. There was a huge magical backlash when Des destroyed the thing. My powers were wiped clean for almost a year and only recovered slowly after that. I was barely even conscious that first week. Des got me on a private plane and took me to my parents’ house in Vancouver. I stayed there until Dina was three months old, when I resigned from the
Wyndewin
League, came back here and opened my own gallery.” Before her attack, she’d been the assistant curator of contemporary art at a major Detroit museum.
“Why come back to Detroit? I’d have thought if you wanted to avoid me, you’d have stayed in Vancouver with your family.” His lips—those lips she remembered so perfectly, even after all this time—pressed into a thin white line.
“My art contacts were all here.” It was a lame excuse at best. How could she tell him that for a month when she’d been deciding what to do, every time she’d held her infant daughter, an image of Detroit’s skyline popped into her head?
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Aidan picked up his cracked glass, mending it with a wave and pouring another splash of brandy into it. “Why does she have green eyes now, then?”
“I’d really rather not discuss that.” Elise had never been able to lie worth a damn when it came to real life. As a business woman she could bullshit with the best of them, but not when people she cared about were involved.