April 1, two years earlier
THE EAR-SPLITTING NOISE of the alarm clock was sadistic and cruel, and most hellishly of all—four freaking hours too early. Devon Franklin rolled over again and threw the covers over her head.
Three o’clock in the morning.
For a moment, there was blessed ignorance. The idea that she had accidentally missed the alarm, or that she had suffered a temporary brain spasm. Unfortunately, none of those things were even remotely close to being true.
The digital watch was within easy reach on her bedside table, but she knew the date. The other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year she woke up with a sigh of relief, because it wasn’t…
April 1.
Bone-tired and furious, she succumbed to a fit of juvenile rage, and slammed her hand over the off button, silencing the beep and hopefully killing the clock in the process.
April Fools’. Ha. If she were an average twenty-eight-year-old female, with a life expectancy of 78.1 years, nonsmoker, healthy diet, within ten pounds of her ideal weight, she could blame the crack-of-dawn buzzer on a no-good-sibling prank, or a moronic friend getting carried away with a holiday that was nobody’s idea of fun.
However, she was a Franklin.
Cursed. People thought curses were cute and funny, and only happened to pretty people. Oh, yeah. If only that were the case.
Being the most rational Franklin, she knew the safest path to a relatively pain-free day. Hibernate in bed until midnight and wait the disasters out. It was what the rest of her family called Devon’s Ostrich Solution.
She hated when they said that. Maybe it wasn’t the most daring (Cam), optimistic (Darcy) or academic (Reg) strategy. However, it remained an undisputed fact that of the four siblings, Devon had a lower incidence of medical traumas. From an early age, as soon as she understood the eventful complications of the Franklin curse, Devon had hunkered down and opted for maximum protection against whatever bad things came on April First. Sure, it meant that her life wasn’t nearly as lively…
Oh, boo hoo hoo.
Now she’d done it. Completely debated herself into wakefulness when she wanted nothing more than to sleep. Devon sunk down farther into the blankets, waiting for the sounds of silence to wash over her and hopefully deliver her back into the sleepy arms of Morpheus, who was the only man who dared come near her on April Fools’. Yes, that was what she was doomed to for her sex life. Imaginary Greek gods.
Instead of sleepy silence, hard rain rapped like coins on the old roof of her tiny cottage, quaintly set in the middle of Middle America.
Maxbass, North Dakota. Nothing ever happened here. Devon had picked the town three years ago for that reason.
She craved nothingness. She ached for nothingness. A booming blast of thunder scoffed at her nothingness, rattling the double-paned, tornado-proofed, hurricane-secure windows.
Outside, another sound mixed with the rain. An unsettling dragging sound and some sort of howling. Not quite an animal. But it could be an animal. A bear. A lion. A zombie. In Devon’s mind, all were highly probable.
From outside the house, the moaning noises continued, but there was absolutely no way she would investigate. Nope, she would bury her head under the duvet and live out the next twenty-four hours in blissful ostrich-buried-head-in-the-sand-I-know-nothing mode.
But what if it was something bad? asked that incessant voice inside her head.
The doorbell rang, and Devon lifted the comforter away from her face, opening one cautious eye. On the wall opposite her bed, the bank of security monitors showed an empty doorstep, with a dark shadow hovering just beyond the porch. An intruder?
Statistically, in a town with a population of four hundred and thirty-seven, intruders or burglars were unlikely. As her wretched inquisitiveness began to take hold, though, she lowered the covers another inch. Over the years she had learned that no matter how she tried, problems didn’t go away when you ignored them, they merely smashed through windows (April 1, 2000), or roofs (April 1, 1982), or drove through the living room (April 1, 1993).
But Devon was more determined than most of her family. She’d finally wised up and had pimped out her tidy two-room cottage into a modified nuclear bunker, outfitted with a state-of-the-art monitor and surveillance system, all nooks and crannies visible from every room, and best of all, fashionably accentuated in a cheery yellow.
Each room contained a row of screens that displayed a live feed of all the other rooms in the house, including the exterior perimeter. If disaster was going to strike, Devon wanted to know in advance.
The ordinary citizen would consider the elaborate setup overkill. However, the ordinary citizen would have suffered a psychotic breakdown from the streak of April firsts that she’d had.
Devon, never a dummy, had learned.
The doorbell rang, and this time the shadow was fully visible on the monitor. Not Morpheus, no, this was a man. Human, living, breathing, and looking almost…sane.
His dark T-shirt clung to a brawny chest, and flexing arm muscles were artfully displayed as he leaned on her doorframe.
Thanks to the rain, his dark hair was plastered like a skullcap to a nicely formed head, and in spite of the weather, he seem calm and fairly controlled. The overhang of her porch wasn’t doing much to keep him out of the storm. A wave of drops washed over his face, and he dragged a hand through his slicked hair, pushing it away from his face.
A magnificent face. Chiseled and thin, with a dimpled chin and a mouth that looked as tasty as ice cream, maybe tastier. His eyes were the best feature. Pale underneath black brows and spiked black lashes, they gleamed as if he were actually enjoying himself.
Although it was 3:00 a.m. on April Fools’ Day, Devon’s lady parts were especially wide awake.
For a few dazzling seconds she stared as the rain sluiced over his face, along the broad shelf of his shoulders. It was like watching a guy in one of those soap commercials, those devious marketing ploys where the product was for a male, but the target audience were women who would be goggle-eyed over a bare-chested young man relishing his sensual time alone in the shower.
Her legs twitched and she realized the inherent dangers of this situation.
Aroused or not, she wasn’t stupid enough to actually answer the door.
As if sensing her momentary weakness, the doorbell rang again, the monitor showing a determined bent to the man’s jaw, as if he knew someone was home, and through evil, sexy-man, mind-control powers could lure her to respond to his call.
Not in this lifetime, buddy. Pick another sap.
Devon pulled the duvet over her head because she could be more stubborn than anybody, anytime.
The doorbell rang again.
And again.
And again.
This time, he left his finger on the bell, one long, very annoying ring that echoed behind her eyes like a hang-over, or tinnitus, or an annoying stranger who thought foolish people should open their doors at 3:00 a.m.
Whatever.
The doorbell rang again, and that was it. Devon threw back the covers, and flipped on the light switch next to her bed. Without missing a beat, she grabbed the flashlight that was strapped to her bedpost, stuffed her feet into her slippers (after first checking for spiders) and then trudged to the front door. Not that she was going to open the door. Yet.
From the bank of monitors in the living room, she could see more. The Air Force squadron insignia on the T-shirt, complete with wings. The base wasn’t that far. The man was a pilot?
Damn it. Did he have to be in the Air Force? Devon could ignore pushy Girl Scouts and their cookies, she could ignore Facebook friend requests for weeks and she shooed away stray animals that might possibly mistake her home for something other than the small pit of hell that it became on April first every year. There’d been one small cat, but that was a tragic story best left alone. After suffering through an endless saga of disasters and hoaxes, Devon was immune to everything.
The man peered into her camera. Correction: Devon was immune to almost everything.
In spite of the familiar feelings of foreboding, ignoring a 3:00 a.m. doorbell-wakeup call by a member of the U.S. Armed Services, well, it seemed…un-American.
Or at least that was what her lady parts were telling her.
Cautiously she unlocked the three dead bolts, although the security chain stayed firmly in place. After the door creaked open a scant three inches, Devon warned, “You should know that my boyfriend is a black-belt instructor, and also a cop, and he’s got a loaded shotgun aimed right at your privates. So make it good and make it fast, because he’s not happy and someday you might want to reproduce, in which case you’ll need your jewels intact.”
“Howdy, ma’am. Sorry to bother you and your boyfriend. I know it’s late, but I need to borrow a phone. You see, there was this bachelor party. I’m ashamed to admit it’s sort of blurry, but I need to call and get a ride back to the base, and I can’t find my cell.”
His drawling voice was rumbly and slurred, an odd combination that spoke of both sexiness and irresponsible drunken stupor, neither of which Devon approved of, but both of which stirred irresponsible sexy shivers inside her.
Knowing the road to high insurance premiums was paved with shivers exactly like this, she managed a mocking laugh.
“Oh, come on. Do you think I’m stupid enough to open my door to a drunken stranger at 3:00 a.m.?”
“Well, of course, if you were alone, I wouldn’t expect you to let me inside. I can hear that clipped no-nonsense tone in your voice. Very sensible and smart, ’cause God knows there’s a lot of kooks in the world. I had a grandmother that sounded a lot like you, and she hailed from West Texas, and could shoot down a coyote and then serve it up in a stew. I have yet to meet anybody more practical than that. Until now. But it seems to me that as long as your boyfriend isn’t itchy on the trigger, I’ll make a quick call, and be home before I drown. Seems to me we’d all come out alive, and you and your man could content yourself with the knowledge that you helped a forlorn human being in his dark time of trouble.”
Realizing she’d been outfoxed by a tipsy man, Devon rested her forehead against the door. She didn’t want to do this. It just reeked of…Devon ending up with the short end of some pointed and painful stick. Knowing she was doing the smart thing, her hand pushed the door shut.
Right before the door was securely latched once again, the miserable man sighed, a melodramatic exaggeration of both starving orphans and homeless kittens that might have melted a softer heart.
Devon’s fingers hesitated, keeping the door open only a hairbreadth.
“Look, I’m sorry about this,” he explained in that raw voice that stroked down her increasingly wobbly spine. “If it wasn’t raining, I’d wait it out, but I’m soaked and my leg hurts—”
“What did you do to your leg?” Devon asked, flipping on the porch light and then opening the door before stepping back in shock.
No way did the tiny three-inch image on the monitor compare to the sucker punch of the full in-person effect. His hair wasn’t merely black, it was the startling blue-black of stealth bombers, gun barrels and every other doomsday device known to man. Long thick lashes framed silvery gray eyes, which were currently wearing that ah-shit look that she knew well from having two older brothers, who, not being nearly as accepting of their fate as Devon, experienced ah-shit moments on what was a nearly daily basis.
Her mouth went dry from looking at him, and in her mind, she was already calculating the estimated maximum loss if she just did something small, like touch him, like kiss him, like seduce him.
Oh, for Pete’s sake, what was she thinking? Instantly she made a note to get a bigger vibrator.
Devon locked her arms across her chest, determined to remain unmoved, uninvolved, unaroused and alive.
“The leg’s not injured. It’s uh…encumbered,” he answered, those silver eyes widening innocently, which should have been impossible, considering the slightly tipsy tilt to his mouth…and the ball and chain around his leg.
Ball and chain?
Devon slammed the door shut.