The Accidental Genie (6 page)

“Boom, baby!” Nina shouted, slamming her palms together to make a loud crack and following up with devilish laughter. “She nailed that restored piece of fucking metal like you nail chicks, hard and fast, werewolf. Made me slam my fang right into the dashboard of your precious can on wheels.”

Marty pursed her lips. “Shut up, Nina! Let me finish explaining.”

Sloan’s hand immediately went upward, his lips becoming a thin line. “Wait. You hit my car? My rebuilt-from-the-ground-up ’66 Mustang? The one I spent two years working on? You
hit it
?” His voice raised a couple of notches.

Jeannie noted his struggle to keep his anger in check. It was just a car . . . but it was one Sloan clearly loved. Her feet shifted to move away due to the fact that he looked like he was going to blow, but the invisible force that kept her tethered to him rooted her to the spot.

“Oh, she did more than hit it,” Nina said with antagonistic properties. “She rammed that fucker so hard it folded like a junkie in a meth lab.”

“Damn it, Marty!” he roared in a whoosh of air; his sharp cheekbones wisped red with anger. “I told Keegan you shouldn’t be allowed to drive something so big. You were dangerous enough in that stupid convertible you had. Giving you a car the size of
The Partridge Family
tour bus was just more indulgence on the part of my brother, who doesn’t understand the word
no
.” He shot Nina an angry glare. “I thought you said she hit a fire hydrant, Nina?”

Nina shrugged with indifference, clearly unconcerned about Sloan’s precious piece of metal. She slapped him on the back with an amicable grin. “Oh, she did, dude. That was
after
she slammed into your tuna can on wheels, knocked it out of the way, and drove up over the fucking curb. It’s how I broke my fang. Because I was driving your hunk of junk, dude. So, I guess, somebody’s gonna need to make nice with the Geico gecko in the very near future.”

Sloan’s eyes bulged for a mere moment before they narrowed in Marty’s direction. Menace lurked in them. He took an imposing step forward, parting Wanda from Marty without touching either of them. “I should have known better,” he seethed. “What the hell was I thinking leaving something as simple as picking up my car to the three of you? It’s like leaving Larry, Curly, and Moe to organize world peace!”

Wanda finally spoke, her voice tight but composed. “Now, Sloan, there’s no need to be so rude. It can be fixed. Stop overreacting.”

“Fixed?” he yelled, his fists in a tight clench. “Fixed, Wanda? It took two years for me to rebuild that car. You know what this is like, Wanda? It’s akin to me running over your stupid, and according to you, priceless Hummel collection. You know, the one you spent half of your life scouring eBay to complete?”

Wanda’s eyes went wide when she gasped. Her finger shot up under Sloan’s flaring nostrils. “Don’t you call them stupid, mister! Don’t you dare make fun of my Hummels!”

“Dude!” Nina yelped, taking a protective stance in front of Wanda. “It’s just a fucking car. Knock it the fuck off and let’s get to the biz at hand. I’m sick of these yapping women. I need quiet, and I need it soon. Now you’ve gone and added another broad to this shit wreck of babble.” She thumbed over her shoulder at Jeannie. “So shut the hell up and lay off.”

Jeannie blanched at the tension between the three women and Sloan, her stomach knotting. She hated yelling and she especially hated discord.

Sloan whipped around and began to pace, the crinkle of his jacket ringing in Jeannie’s ears. “Just a
fucking car
, Nina? Excuse my foul language, Jeannie, but is your garden gnome collection in that creepy Harry Potter maze of trees in your backyard just a
fucking garden gnome
collection, Nina? Or is it important to you? Because I remember tripping over one of those ugly things at Greg’s five millionth birthday party last year and you nearly losing your wee mind because I chipped its freaky garden gnome hat.”

Okay. Things were getting ugly. Cars and Hummels and garden gnomes aside, she needed help. Real help. Screw uptight Sloan and his classic, rebuilt car. Sloan could catch a cab.

Jeannie tapped him on the shoulder and cleared her throat. “Look, I don’t want to interrupt the battle of the Most Important Possessions, but I’ve had a really long night, and the sooner you can—”

“You leave my goddamn garden gnomes out of it, ass sniffer!” Nina spat, cornering Sloan until Jeannie was almost pressed up against the wall. Her movements were freakishly swift, making Jeannie’s heart pump with fear.

But Sloan obviously didn’t fear Nina in quite the way he’d preached she should. “Back off, vampire.”

“The hell,” Nina taunted, snapping her teeth together. It was clear she thoroughly enjoyed razzing Sloan. Whatever the friction between them was about, there was an underlying amusement in it for both of them Jeannie didn’t quite understand.

She peeked around his back to see Sloan glowering down at Nina, his eyes dark and dangerous. “You know, Nina, I’m sick and damned tired of your thug tactics.” He jammed a hand into his thick, dark hair in clear frustration. “Swear to Christ, there are times when I wish I was a woman, because if I were, oh, lady—I could finally get away with—”

Sloan didn’t get to finish his sentence.

But, Jeannie reflected, he might be in the market to borrow her painfully tight push-up bra and some liquid eyeliner.

Oh, dear.

CHAPTER

3

No one moved.

Not even Nina, who’d been coiled like a tightly wound spring just seconds ago.

Ohhh. Jeannie’s mouth fell open in horror when she stepped from behind Sloan after more of that crazy lavender smoke had cleared. She shoved her fist into it to keep from squealing while a rush of tingly heat spread from her toes to the top of her head.

Wanda’s elegant face had gone slack—her tastefully made-up eyes wide.

Marty pressed her hands to her cheeks and frowned.

Not surprisingly, Nina was the first to recover. She took a swaggered step away from them and scanned Sloan from head to toe.

Then she smiled. Wide. Devilish even. “Niiiice hooters.” Her whistle was clear and sharp, cutting through the still silent room. “Would ya look at those, Marty? Perky, right? And look at his ass. It’s like the one you have when you wear that fucking Booty Pop.”

Marty’s nod was as slow as her words. “Yeah . . . perky . . . No Booty Pop required . . .” she mumbled with a tone in the key of awe.

Sloan stared at them all, his eyes, now complete with a beautiful fringe of lashes, were wide, too. He looked down at his newly acquired lady lumps, plucking his T-shirt outward at an awkward angle with a gasp. “Oh, my God!” he squealed, much, Jeannie supposed, like any woman who had breasts as fine as his would.

But then he snapped his ruby red lips shut when he obviously heard the words that shot out of his mouth had a very feminine, almost Valley Girl hitch to their tone. With a stomp of his foot, he planted a hand on his curvy hip and glared at Jeannie.

Jeannie winced as she took a few steps backward to assess the full damage. Sloan’s dark hair hung in beautiful long tresses around his face, the almost blue highlights glossy under her living room lamp.

His very made-up-with-more-makeup-than-a-MAC-display-rack face was cakey with foundation, and the blush on his cheekbones made him look like a clown. He was, quite frankly, a parody of a woman. It looked like he’d been playing with his mother’s makeup and had failed dismally.

She bit her lip when she took in the sag of his once tight-fitting jeans. They bunched at his waist and thighs, yet were much too tight in the area of his derriere. Once a luscious thing to behold, it was now a backend to rival the likes of even J.Lo. Though still totally luscious.

Had she done this? Had she turned Sloan into this nightmare version of a woman?

Jesus. He was coyote ugly. So ugly, he was a candidate for the Chew Your Arm Off in Order to Get Away from Your Drunk Hookup on the Morning After club.

It had to have been her. There’d been that strange lavender smoke—smoke that, even now, still dissipated in flirtatious tendrils all around Sloan.

But how?

Nina crossed her arms over her chest. “God, you’re an ass face of a woman. So I guess sometimes you get what you wish for, eh, flea bait?”

“The wish!” Wanda gasped, her purse rocking on the crook of her arm when she whipped around to face Jeannie. “Sloan wished to be a woman . . . Oh, sweet mother. Jeannie can grant wishes.”

Oh
. Jeannie blanched.

How wishtastic.

*   *   *

“I
swear, Marty,” Sloan complained with a hint of whine, brushing his luxurious locks from his face with a swipe of his hand. “I don’t know how you women do it. This is—well,” he drawled, “it’s just awful. Yes. Awful.” He shook his head, fighting a rush of tears. “I mean, I feel so overwhelmed right now. One minute I want to lie down on the floor and cry like a two-year-old, and the next, I want to challenge Nina to a hair-pulling contest because she has more fabulous hair than me. It’s in-san-ity!” He pouted, then frowned because his lower lip had jutted forward of its own free will.

Fuck. Had he just said that all girlified while his hand flew around in the air? In delicate fashion, to boot? The rush of uncontrollable emotions raging through him assaulted each nerve in his body in unmerciful womanly waves.

He couldn’t stop his disturbingly over-the-top responses. The moment he thought better of them was the moment they flew from his lips.

He felt raw and out of control, on the verge of tears, and—of all unmanly things—touchy and ultrasensitive. Thank God the girls had talked Jeannie into coming back to the OOPS offices where they had their paranormal index cardholder with all their connections.

He just wouldn’t have been able to stand Jeannie’s friends silently laughing at him, too. It was enough that Marty, Nina, and Wanda had cackled like hens the entire ride over. They’d texted him more than one LOL along with helpful makeup tips and the URL for the Spanx website while Jeannie, still glued to his side, sputtered snorts of laughter.

Thankfully, Betzi and Charlene had agreed to let Jeannie call them when she was done handling her
escapade
, as Betzi had titled it.

“Know what all that whine is about, Sloan?” Nina asked.

“Wha . . . aa . . . t?” He was sniveling. Christ and a prostitute, he was sniveling, much in the way he’d heard Marty do when she watched those Lifetime movies—or when she wanted her way with his brother Keegan.

“That’s called PMS, girlie,” Nina taunted, holding up a hand mirror she’d dug out of the OOPS bathroom so Sloan could see what he looked like. “Know what makes that boo-boo all better? Oreo cookies and some Midol. You want I should hit the twenty-four-hour drugstore on Seventh?”

Sloan swiped the air again in Nina’s direction with a furious hand and pink-glazed nails. “You leave me alone, you mean beast! I’d rather eat hot coals than have you do anything for me!” he cried out.

Cried
.

Oh, fuck all. Sloan lifted his foot, his now silver high-heeled foot, to begin to stomp around some more, only to fight back the urge with the clench of his teeth.

He pressed his fingers to his eyes to keep from sobbing and took a sniffling gulp of air. “Oh. My. God. Make this stop! I just can’t bear it a second longer! Not a second!” Sloan whipped a warning finger up in front of Marty, who’d crossed the room with sympathy written all over her face. He didn’t want pity. He wanted balls.

That thought made him blanch. Did he still have balls? He couldn’t look.

This was all Marty’s fault. If she hadn’t made him feel so guilty for not supporting her venture with OOPS, he’d have never answered the phones so she could have some alone time with the girls, and he wouldn’t now be shedding tears, talking with his hands, cramping, and craving a bag of chips double dipped in chocolate ice cream and hot fudge sauce.

Jeannie placed her palm on his arm, giving it a squeeze. Despite his womanly appearance, her hand made him think straight, manly things—technically, at this stage of the game, making him a lesbian. “I’m sorry, Sloan. I don’t even know how it happened. It just did. You know, in that puff-of-smoke thing. But if it makes you feel any better, you know, if we can’t fix this, what you’re experiencing, er, displaying is a really exaggerated version of how it feels to be a woman. Well, maybe not the Midol and Oreos, but the rest . . . Like you’re hormonal times a billion.” She patted his arm again, her eyes reflecting her share of bewilderment.

Her tender, nurturing tone wrought more tears from eyes he would have sworn were all cried out. But taking into account he was utterly sick with jealousy that Jeannie had such perfectly symmetrical, almond-shaped eyes—it made sense.

After looking in that hand mirror the beast kept waving in front of him, Sloan found he sorely lacked in the feminine department. Sorely.

“Don’t,” he heard himself squeak, putting a hand between them. Jesus. What was it with the hand thing? “I can’t bear your pity. I’m a mess.” Again, even as the words escaped his lips, he couldn’t believe they were coming from his mouth.

Marty patted his shoulder and pulled a tissue from the sleeve of her fabulous, long-sleeved maxi dress. Sloan bit the inside of his lip when he summed up Marty with three words that were as foreign to him as how to use a mascara wand.
Maxi dress
and
fabulous
. All in one sentence. Oh, God.

She tilted his chin up and swiped at his tears. “Stop. You’ll ruin your makeup.”

“Loook at me,” he moaned. “I’m hideous. Simply hideous!”

“And fucking whiny,” Nina added, just so there’d be extra tears.

His finger was immediately up in the air again and then, he was waving it in accusatory fashion at Nina. “If I wasn’t sure before, Nina, I am now. You’re not a woman. You couldn’t be, you unfeeling, angry little viper. You’re insensitive and crude and you dress like you just left some Goth party where people cut themselves while they play Halo.”

Nina winked, adjusting her hoodie around her face. “Well, I’ve been telling you for years I’m more man than you’ll ever be. Guess I was fucking right. Now quit adding to the already overweight load of broads on my back and shut up. We have a problem—one we know diddly about. Jeannie can obviously grant wishes. Yours at least, for sure. So the first thing would be to nix the word
wish
totally from your vocabulary. Everybody clear on that shit? No wishing for fucking anything. Though Marty might want to wish her Booty Pop was real so she doesn’t have to wear those two slabs of poufy material over her bag of bulldogs anymore.”

“Nina.” Wanda let out a low warning growl, sending her friend a scowl filled with discontent. “We’re absolutely not going to begin this way again. No more yelling and threatening and in general taking far too much pleasure in someone else’s pain. Now, you will sit. You will sit without uttering another word unless it’s supportive and warm, and you will smile like you just ate someone’s limb clear off while you do it. I will not have you offend another client.”

Jeannie clacked her jeweled slippers together when she glanced at Nina and Wanda. “I’m not offended. I thought it was pretty funny.”

Nina grinned. “I like her. She can stay. At least until some crazy shit’s about to go down and we have to save her life. Then she has to hit the bricks.”

Marty crossed the room and splayed her fingers over Nina’s mouth, placing her other hand on her shoulder as leverage. She cocked Nina’s head back and peered into her friend’s coal black eyes. “I’m going to remind you of your husband’s words after the last disaster you created. If you don’t learn to keep your mouth in check, he’ll hand you over to clan rule himself. Remember those words, Nina? Remember
why
he said those words. You remember Phoebe, don’t you, bulldozer? The sister you turned into a vampire in one angry shove?”

Nina’s chin lifted and her eyes narrowed to black slits in her head, but when Marty slid her fingers down to her chin, her lips pressed tightly together in compressed silence.

Marty rocked Nina’s head up and down, making the long, dark cascade of her hair fall out of her hoodie and tumble over her shoulder. “Why, yes, Marty,” she mimicked her friend. “Yes, I remember every word my adorably fed up husband Greg said, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to heed those words, because I do not want my head chopped off at dawn in front of my entire clan of vampires. No chopped heads. None. It’s messy, and neither Wanda nor myself can fit your beheading into our tight schedules. Not to mention, I find myself faltering on what to wear to a beheading.”

Nina ripped Marty’s hand from her chin with a snide smile. “Maybe you should ask Mistress Sloan?”

Marty slapped her hand back over Nina’s mouth.

Jeannie was instantly on her bejeweled feet, the chair the girls had so graciously sat her in tipping over and clattering to the floor. The look of panic on her face made Sloan want to reach out and squeeze her hand in comfort.

Oh, ick
. Comfort her? If it weren’t for her, he’d be home right now, watching the game. This girl thing—this sympathizing with a woman he hardly knew—was work, not to mention everything he hated.

Jeannie’s stiff frame straightened. “Okay. You had me at the head-chopping thing. I don’t know what that means, and while I’m sure you’d all be good enough to explain it, because you’ve been nothing but gracious to me. Well, except for on the drive over when I thought Gina, Trina, Farina was going to attempt warp speed, and she so awesomely offered to do something I can’t even repeat to my intestines if I didn’t stop backseat driving. But that was just a simple misunderstanding. I mean, I’d threaten to eat someone’s intestines like they were a spaghetti dinner if they interfered with my audition for NASCAR, too. It’s only natural. So no explanation needed. I’ll just go. You know. Home. To my house . . . I think I can figure this out on my own.”

“It’s fucking
Nina
.”

Jeannie nodded absently. “Right. Sorry. Fucking Nina. The vampire who turned her sister into a vampire, too.”

Wanda, Sloan noted, sensed Jeannie’s rising panic and went instantly to her side. She wrapped an arm around Jeannie’s shoulder and patted, steering her back to the chair. “It’s all right, Jeannie. I can see you’re panicked. But I promise you, if you go home, you’ll only be right back here again in need of our help. Don’t be frightened. We would never hurt you.” She eyed Nina with a familiar warning look Sloan often saw pass between the women.

He watched Jeannie’s shoulders go rigid through eyes that were sticky with mascara. Until she looked deep into Wanda’s compassionate eyes, and then he saw her face transform from frightened deer in the headlights to one of tentative trust.

He’d give Wanda that. She had a way of creating calm in the midst of complete chaos. She was always who soothed Nina when she went off on a tirade, and she was the peacemaker between her friends. Jeannie was in good hands with Wanda.

Sloan crossed the room, his ankles buckling at awkward angles in his heels, in order to place his hand on Jeannie’s shoulder and give it a squeeze. “It’s all good, girlfriend. Wanda will take care of you,” he reassured her, then realized he’d called her
girlfriend
.

Jesus and fuck.

Sloan eyed Jeannie as she took a deep breath. “Okay, so let me get this straight because everything’s very crooked right now. What we have so far is this: I can grant wishes, and I’m responsible for Sloan’s cramping and the ugliest high heels I’ve ever seen in my life.”