Storm Crazy: A paranormal cozy romance (Destiny Paramortals Book 1) Read online

  Storm Crazy

  Destiny Paramortals #1

  Livia Quinn

  Contents

  Books by Livia Quinn

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  About the Author

  For Veterans

  Storm Crazy © copyright 2014 by Livia Quinn

  ISBN: 978-0-9904032-0-3

  Cover Art by Cora Graphics

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission except in brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. All characters are from my imagination or fictionalized. To obtain permission to use portions of text, please email: [email protected]

  Praise for Destiny Paramortals

  “My new favorite series!” “Okay, I’m hooked, give me, give me some more!!!” “A bit of magic, a lot of fun and a budding romance!” “Tempest Pomeroy is the best new paranormal heroine of the year!” “OMG, I loved this book. Run don’t walk to the buy button.” “Destiny…is like a mini-vacation from the real world.”

  If you love Darynda Jones, Eve Langlais or Kristen Painter, you’ll like Livia Quinn.

  Books by Livia Quinn

  The Destiny Paramortals

  Storm Crazy, #1

  Cry Me a River, #2

  Eve of Chaos, #3

  Blame It on the Moon, #4

  Take These Broken Wings. #5

  Blood Moon #6

  Blood Opal

  Undone

  Men of Honor (Contemporary Romance/Military)

  Ridge

  Luc

  Nick

  All I Want for Christmas

  Men of Honor Box set

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  Author’s Note

  A writer never knows where she’ll get her inspiration. When I moved to the south from D.C., I experienced some of the worst weather of my life with tornados walking the interstate in the middle of the night. I remember waking up wondering, “Is that a train?” Then came Katrina. Is it any wonder I gave my heroine, a tempestaerie, control over weather forces? And because I love reading about them, you will always find themes of family, love and community. I hope you enjoy the series. Jack and Tempe have a lot to learn.

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  As they say in my favorite escape, Britain…

  Caide Mile Failte’, A hundred thousand welcomes.

  Livia

  liviaquinn.com

  Welcome to Destiny, home to the Paramortals since…well, forever…where human neighbors and their new sheriff live alongside shifters, dragons, vampires and a family of djinn… Just don’t tell the humans.

  To former Navy pilot-turned-sheriff Jack Lang, the town of Destiny appeared the perfect place to settle down - safe, sane and secure. But his investigation into a perplexing death shatters the alleged calm and threatens the tranquil home life he hoped to provide for his daughter. Especially, when he catches his mail lady in the act of stealing an antique vase after stepping over said body. Soon enough, Jack discovers Tempest Pomeroy is an outright trouble magnet who never fails to test the limits of his patience or the law.

  Tempe’s regular job is delivering the mail, but the chaotic storm brewing in this idyllic small town amplifies her quickening powers. Her genie brother’s bottle is missing, her mother’s nowhere to be found, and the sexy sheriff and her ex-lover are facing off like gladiators in an arena. Except, well, Destiny doesn’t even have a civic center. For most of her life, she’s denied her heritage, but as the sheriff’s investigation veers off into the bizarre and intrudes into the existence of the Paramortals, danger heads toward them like an F5 tornado… Look out, Tempest’s about to go Storm Crazy.

  A human sheriff, a storm witch, and the quirky, supernatural town of Destiny. What could go wrong?

  Chapter 1

  There’s wisdom on the wind,

  and power.

  Think about it.

  The same breeze that ruffled your hair

  this morning

  whipped the soccer player’s shorts

  in Spain yesterday

  and guided the lightning bolt

  from Zeus’ fist

  millennia ago.

  Aurora Boreal

  Tempe

  Zeus’ holey boxers! I’d known this would happen, but why now? Why today of all days? I leaned against the heavy oak mantle, shoulders sagging suddenly, and studied the clearly delineated blank space in the dust, the exact shape of my brother’s amphora—that’s “genie bottle” to you mere-mortals.

  My baby brother hadn’t come home last night—for the first time since our little chat.

  A month ago I’d have been calling his cell, taking a detour from my mail route to locate him, or if worse came to the very worst, calling our mother, Phoebe, to find out if she’d seen him. But that was before River and I had a discussion about what he called my “embarrassing over-protectiveness”. As a result, I promised not to leap to dire conclusions when I didn’t hear from him for a day or, he insisted, two. Since then I’d been hands-off, and spectacularly “un-protective”.

  Okay, so he’s not my baby brother. He’s only six years younger than me, and he runs his own contracting business, but I’ve practically raised him since he was four.

  Was he testing me, I wondered, as I took the stairs to the slave quarters of our antebellum home, each one hundred and fifty year old step creaking under my weight. River and I are in the process of remodeling the old house, but each project has to take a back seat to my delivery job for Universal Mail and River’s construction jobs, not to mention our shortage of funds.

  I rapped firmly on his door as I have nearly every morning of his life.

  “River! You up?”

  Before I turned the knob to his apartment I sensed the lack of his Djinni force. The tidy bed confirmed he hadn’t slept here last night. I was tempted to break our agreement right then and call his cell, but I’d heard him loud and clear, “What am I supposed to do, carry you with me when I decide to have sex with a woman?”

  I sooo didn’t want to go there. Of course, that had been his intention.

  I couldn’t afford to be late for work on EVAL Monday, so I scratched out a benign note, Call me when you get in, had second thoughts, grabbed another piece of paper and wrote, Pizza tonight? I sped down the stair
s, plucked my keys from the counter and stepped through the front door onto the veranda.

  Thunder gave a long low grumble in the South. As soon as I heard it I stopped, turned my face up to the sky. My heart rate slowed. My feet itched to sink into the wet grass, to plug into the fresh energy of the approaching storm. I stood for a moment feeling the wind’s intimate caress, inhaling the sweet fragrance of the rain as it drizzled down my cheek. The cool wind lifted my hair with loving fingers. If my nature were feline, I’d have been purring.

  But duty called, so I plucked the soggy newspaper from the driveway, got in my truck, and headed to the postal center. The temperature was starting to drop as the cold front advanced. There were sure to be weather consequences.

  Hot, cold; moist, dry; calm, blustery. These seasonal disputes create a smorgasbord of ionic imbalances. For a Tempestaerie like me, wind is menori, the Breath of Life, and that smorgasbord—the fuel. It can manifest as a mild zephyr, or a full on weather disaster, like Katrina.

  I’m also a Paramortal, a consequence of the ancient bond forged between the supernatural species to ensure peace and defend the weak.

  At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. If I didn’t have a few little talents, I’d think I was adopted. You’ve heard that old song, “Cry Me a River”? Well, my emotions need to be running pretty high to produce even a trickle from a spigot.

  If you look in the Paramortal dictionary, Tempestaeries are often described with words like “quirky, erratic… dysfunctional”. No kidding, there might even be a picture of my family—if you could capture a Djinni on camera.

  “Functional” would have described my family before Daddy died, before Mother became too preoccupied with her lifestyle to care for her children. Before I was left to raise my baby brother.

  My name is Tempest Pomeroy. Yeah, Tempest and River. Bless mother’s cliché lovin’ heart. I’m just grateful we didn’t wind up as Thunderclap and Snowflake, Black Cloud and Little Sprinkle, or Flash and Flood. With my hair—a bright copper streaked with rainbow hues—I’d have been Flash.

  Back in the day, Paramortals intentionally mingled with human society, so it would be less traumatic for humans to accept our existence on those rare occasions when one of us is exposed inadvertently. Imagine how an unsuspecting mere-mortal would react if he knew the local bartender was a vamp, or the popular ambulance tech, a Dinnchensha. That’s how a budding storm “witch” like me became a mail carrier.

  A few humans suspect we live in their midst, but we try to keep the magical weirdness to a minimum—let them think of it as “quirkiness”. We don’t just slap them upside the head with the truth, unless the human in question needs an attitude adjustment, or we’re having a particularly bad day.

  Like today—EVAL Monday, the first of seven days when the mail service re-certifies each carrier through an intense pressure cooker of counts, inspections and evaluations. We call it EVIL week because of the harsh, sometimes unfair scrutiny involved. If you fail to re-cert, one of the hovering substitutes could take your job quicker than you can say, “You’ve got mail”.

  The day was already looking like a seven on the EVIL crapola meter. My supervisor, Calvin Beck stood in the middle of the parking lot, scanning each carrier’s progress and timing us with a stopwatch. “Do not spend company time organizing your packages,” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “Get loaded and get out of here.” Of course, if we didn’t organize our loads, we’d find ourselves written up for not returning to the dock on time. And Beck knew it. The upcoming Mardi Gras holiday meant the mail was especially heavy.

  “You just want to skew the results in management’s favor, Beck,” I said, already thinking ahead to my first deliveries, and hoping I wouldn’t be chosen for a driver observation.

  He ignored me and directed his next command at the new carrier who was applying the magnetic warning signs to the sides of her truck. “Barbara, move it. Good God, look at the time. You should have already had those signs on your truck. Nine minutes…”

  “Ignore him, Barbara,” I called. Beck aimed another glare in my direction. Enough of this. When he looked off I held my tattooed fingertip aloft, tapped into the moisture-laden atmosphere, and used menori to aim those molecules in his direction. Ten seconds later he was banging his stopwatch against his palm. That should do it.

  But as usual, he got the last word.

  “Time,” he called—before I’d finished throwing the last few packages into the truck from my buggy. “Nine minutes, twenty-seven seconds.” He scowled at me. “Next time make it eight, flat.”

  He stepped onto the bumper of Barbara’s truck and yelled, “Listen up, people. There will be a back door inspection today when you return at 4:30. Make sure you’re compliant with regulations and have no, I repeat, no undeliverables. Your scans will be monitored.”

  “Great.” We also might be followed on our route, which meant no speeding, no talking on the cell phone, no rule-breaking. Too bad my brother wasn’t handy. He was the only one who could grant my wish for things to go perfectly.

  I secured the remaining packages and arranged the mail so I could climb in on the right side; stretch my left foot over the console and onto the pedal. I cranked the truck, flipped on my flashing light, and beeped the horn. With my left hand on the steering wheel, I looked over my shoulder and backed out of my space. And felt immediate relief.

  The first two hours of the job, the part with all the B-S—that part—I hate. Being on my own, driving the route, connecting with my customers—most days, it’s like being self-employed.

  A squeal of brakes interrupted my reverie and the “Toad” stopped his mail truck just short of my right bumper. With a blast of his horn, he leered out the window. “Ze—Shootfire, Fritz. You saw me pulling out.”

  He just leered and blew his horn. “Get those buns out of my way, sweet cakes. I’ve got mail to deliver.” Scanning the area for onlookers, he grabbed his crotch and gave it a tug, “I can always find time for you, though. How ‘bout it, Tempest?”

  “The way I hear it, that package is too small to even be certified.” I heard chuckles behind me as I peeled out of the parking lot, chastising myself for letting him get to me.

  Smoothing the furrow between my eyebrows with my middle finger, I considered the unique pressure. It was odd, not really a headache, more a rumbling threat. I told myself it was the barometer, the Toad’s four-thousandth sexual innuendo, and the worst mail day of the year. It was not because I have a bad temper.

  Chapter 2

  Tempe

  I was back in a good frame of mind by the time I drove up to the little green and white rambler with its meticulously manicured pansy beds, plush green grass, and brilliant white picket fence. One of my little talents is reading auras, and the glow around this house said, “I’m contented. My world is perfect.” Newlyweds with a penchant for gardening?

  I was half right—I was contented when Mr. Newlywed answered the door. His tall broad shouldered physique could have stopped a train. That is, if the engineer was a woman and she’d been transfixed like me.

  He was all lean sculpted muscles and tanned skin above and below the white cutoff sweats. His ripped calves and abs spoke of hours of conditioning. The tendon in his thigh twitched and my eyes jumped to his face—to a broad smile, framed by a thick layer of fragrant white shaving cream.

  “Mornin’.” His deep voice reverberated, and I expected the vibrations to send the cream on his face sloughing off like an avalanche.

  I regrouped, reading the name off the package, “…um, Jordan Lang?”

  His light silver eyes crinkled and the moist heated scent of his skin stormed through my blood like whitewater rushing through a narrow canyon. A glistening droplet escaped the snowy cream on his cheeks and glided gracefully down the tanned column of his throat. Zigging and zagging like an X-games snowboarder on the bronze diamond slope, it plunged off his chest gleefully, moguled over finely chiseled abs, and disappeared into the snowy white mater
ial at his waist.

  Those little water elementals…they have all the fun.

  “… sign something?”

  Another dollop of white fluff landed on the package I was holding and brought me screeching back to the present.

  “The package…” His lips quirked and the crinkled lines around his eyes deepened. He rubbed a white towel over his wet hair, and my eyes went to his biceps which bunched and enticed with each rub. My favorite part of a man’s body. “Do I need to sign for it?” he asked once again.

  Zeus’ bolts! I’d felt a mysterious pull when I looked into his eyes, like nothing I’d felt before, and I’d probably been staring at him like some star struck fan-girl. My face heated, but since I couldn’t do like my brother—make a wish and disappear—I relied on routine, handing him the E-pad. “Print your name on the top line, please, and sign underneath.”

  “Who is it?” a female voice called from the interior of the house. The Missus? A flush of embarrassment hit. I grit my teeth to keep from rolling my eyes. I’d been about to flirt with a man who was taken. Get me out of here.

  “Just the mail, Sweetheart. I’ve got it.”

  He angled in by me, accepted the stylus, and signed in bold, totally unreadable strokesMust be a doctor—a surgeon with those hands. I could see them performing surgery, stroking a woman’s cheek, moving across my skin, easing upward… I reached for the stylus and zap, chain lightning crackled along my heated nerve endings.

  He’d felt it, too; his eyes elongated and flashed silver, focusing on me like lasers. Reality receded and the present went from brilliant and alive to gray, muted. Spinning dizzily, I felt as if my body left the porch and spun off into the clouds…straight up, the dome of the sky sitting around me like a bubble.