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  “Rogan said that yours was an arranged marriage.” I probably shouldn’t have said that.

  Arrosa’s eyes sparkled. “He did, did he? Connor is very angry at my father. Yes, it started out that way. My family isn’t a House. The bloodline frequently produces magic users of Significant and Average caliber, but my grandfather was a Prime. The family always hoped that another would be born and when I tested as a Prime, my relatives threw the biggest party. Hundreds of people were invited. My father, Rogan’s grandfather, had great hopes for me. I was not to be married off; I would remain with the family; my spouse would join the family and take my name; and the two of us would be expected to have as many children as possible in hopes that we produced more Primes.”

  Made sense. I had looked up the Ramírez family. To be considered a House, they had to produce two Prime magic users in three generations. Arrosa’s grandfather died before she was born, but if Arrosa had a child who tested as Prime, the Ramírez family could petition to become a House.

  Arrosa pulled her shawl tight around her shoulders. “All those plans . . . And then Will Rogan showed up. My genetic profile matched his requirements and he traveled to Spain to meet me. I remember the first time I saw him. I was standing in the library, trying to sort the books, so I had several books floating over my head, and he was walking by and stopped in the doorway. We just stood and looked at each other. I had never seen anyone like him.”

  She smiled at the memories. I had a moment like that too. The first time I saw Connor, he was walking toward me through the park and I just sat there and watched him and wished that one day I could find someone like him.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “My father told him no. Not many people told Will Rogan no. He was a third generation Prime. His magic was off the charts. He had military contracts, civilian contracts, foreign contracts, and half of the world owed him a favor. It is fair to say that in some respects Connor is a lot like his father.”

  In my experience, Connor acted as if the word no meant nothing unless he was the one saying it.

  “Will made sure to run into me when I was in town. We talked. Then I met him again. And again. It was so easy talking to him. We were different, but it was effortless. So, he came to see my father again, and my father, who by that point realized that offending House Rogan wouldn’t end well, told Will that he would have to compensate the family for the loss of a Prime. He named an outrageous amount of money. Will wrote the check on the spot. Nearly bankrupted himself.” Arrosa’s eyes narrowed and I saw a glimpse of power, sharp and frightening. Alarm shot through me.

  “My father called me into his study and told me that Will bought me, and I had to go with him. And you know what my Will told him?”

  “No.”

  “He said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask her if she wants to come with me? It’s her decision.’ And my father told him I would do what was best for the family. He didn’t get it. He never did.”

  I was 100 percent with Rogan. I didn’t like his grandfather either. “Did you ever regret it?”

  “Never. Will was everything to me. We came home. His family wasn’t thrilled that he signed away nearly three-quarters of his assets. His father once called me their Louisiana Purchase. It didn’t matter. We worked together to rebuild what he had lost. We were a great team. He loved me, Nevada. I got to experience the kind of love very few people do. I miss him every day. Sometimes I wake, and I reach over, expecting him to be in bed with me. But he is never there. I do still talk to him. He is buried in the gardens, next to his parents.”

  This could be me. If I married Rogan, in a few years I could be sitting in her spot, mourning my husband. Primes swam in dangerous waters. It was almost enough to make you reconsider, but I wanted Connor too much. A week or fifty years, I would take whatever time we could have together.

  “Do you love Connor?” Arrosa asked.

  “Yes.” It wasn’t even a question.

  “And what about children? You are probably not genetically compatible. Does that bother you?”

  “I want to have his children. I will love them whether they have magic or not.”

  Arrosa’s eyes narrowed again. “Connor, you, and your children will be in danger much more frequently than most people. You are Primes. We live by different rules and my son has made powerful enemies. Some women would take an easier path.”

  Okay, I didn’t like what she was implying. I raised my head. “I may not be a telekinetic, but I promise you, anybody who thinks they can harm Connor or our children will have to go through me and they will change their mind fast. If they have a mind left by the time I’m done.”

  She scrutinized my face. “What if I decide that I don’t like this marriage?”

  My heart made a flip in my chest. I was afraid of that. “Then I’m very sorry. I have the deepest respect for you and I will still strive to be the best daughter-in-law I can be. But I love him, and I will marry him.”

  Connor chose that moment to walk out on the balcony, carrying a platter with three steaming coffee mugs filled with tea. “Are you done torturing Nevada?”

  “I like her,” Arrosa said.

  What?

  “How in the world did you manage to get her?”

  “He kidnapped me and chained me to the floor in his basement.”

  “What?!”

  “It was a misunderstanding,” Rogan said and shot me a look. Yeah, payback is a bitch. Deal with it.

  “I am going to need the whole story,” Arrosa said.

  “Does this mean you will attend the wedding?” he asked.

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  And my future husband just successfully derailed his mother’s train of thought and sent her into a new direction. Nice.

  Arrosa floated her cup to her and sipped. “Have you set a date?”

  “In a couple of weeks,” Connor said.

  “Out of the question. It will take that long just to inform all of the family.”

  Family? What family? I glanced at Connor. “I thought you didn’t have any family?”

  “Oh, he does. He has a grandfather, four uncles, two aunts, fourteen cousins, some of them with their own children, and that’s not counting the extended family. Most of them are from my side and they live in Spain. He just doesn’t like some of them very much.”

  I pivoted to Connor.

  “Some of them are vultures,” he said and drank his tea. “I want a simple wedding, Mother.”

  “Connor Anders Rogan.”

  Oh-oh. Middle name. Never a good sign.

  “I was planning to invite Uncle Inigo,” he said. “And Uncle Mattin. What if we only invite the ones I like? If we’re inviting everyone, perhaps we should invite Kelly.”

  Oh, that was a low blow. Kelly Waller was Connor’s cousin and she and her son were the only surviving blood relatives from his father’s side. In a family of magic users, she was born with a weak talent, while Connor’s power was off the charts. She’d married for love instead of genetics, and her parents cut her off. From her point of view, she had lost everything. She and her husband struggled, and she had expected Connor, her baby cousin, to set things right when he became an adult. Instead Connor enlisted in the Army and went to fight his own war. She felt twice betrayed.

  By the time he came back and tried to reach out, her jealousy and resentment had gone toxic. She hated him and the family so much she’d tried to kill Connor on multiple occasions. For this purpose, she gave her only son, Gavin, to a psychopathic Prime, who used him to murder an off-duty cop. Now Gavin sat in prison, and only Connor’s influence and a great deal of investigative work on my end had kept him from being shot on sight.

  We would probably invite Gavin and his father. I was reasonably sure that the Rogan family name would buy Gavin a day pass. Kelly was a fugitive, from both the law and the House Assembly. If I saw Kelly, I would put a bullet between her eyes without hesitation. I wouldn’t try to apprehend her or talk to her. I wo
uld shoot her until I ran out of bullets.

  Arrosa looked at him. “Is this a practice marriage for you? Are you planning on divorcing Nevada and doing this again?”

  Rogan’s face took on that look of intense concentration that usually meant he expected someone to shoot at us. “No.”

  Magic snapped out of my mother-in-law and I nearly fell out of my chair.

  “You are my only son,” Arrosa Rogan declared.

  The loving mother had vanished. Her expression hardened, her eyes narrowed, and the tone of command in her voice made me want to snap to obey. She would give Grandma Victoria a run for her money.

  “If fortune smiles on us, this will be your only wedding. This will be a formal affair. Your bride will be wearing a breathtaking gown, you will be wearing a tuxedo, and I will watch you two exchange vows and kiss in front of our entire family and all of our friends, and I will glow with pride at this moment. You will not rob me of that joy. Later I will talk to your father about it and tell him how beautiful it was. Am I making myself clear?”

  The Scourge of Mexico and the most terrifying Prime in Houston unhinged his manly jaws and said the only thing he could, “Yes, Mother.”

  “Wonderful. We will set the date three months from now. That will give everyone time to rearrange their schedules.” Arrosa turned back to me and smiled, all warmth and sunshine again. “I’m so excited! My dear, the dress, the hair, the flowers. You have so many wonderful decisions to make.”

  Chapter 1

  Two months and two weeks later

  Catalina

  I fought my way through the hallway of Mountain Rose house trying to dodge the children. Everything I ever read about my future brother-in-law on Herald suggested that Connor Rogan was a loner with no immediate family besides his mother and his cousin, Kelly Waller, who didn’t count.

  Herald lied.

  The gaggle of children was coming right for me.

  I clutched my tablet to my chest and braced myself.

  They ran around me in circles, giggling, and dashed down the hallway, leaving a little girl holding a stuffed unicorn in their wake. I let out a breath.

  Rogan had oodles of relatives, scattered all over the Mediterranean, and all of them descended on his mother’s house to attend the wedding. I liked kids, but there were somewhere between twenty and thirty children under the age of twelve on the premises and they traveled in packs. The last time I ran across this gang of preteens, they knocked the tablet out of my hands. Nothing could happen to the tablet. All of the wedding files were on there.

  The little girl and I looked at each other. She was probably five and supercute, with brown hair and big dark eyes. She wore a pretty lavender dress decorated with tiny silk flowers. If Mom had put me into that dress when I was her age, it would be covered with mud and engine grease in about five minutes. When I was five, I either played outside or in Grandma Frida’s garage, while she repaired tanks and field artillery.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Catalina.”

  “Mia Rosa García Ramírez Arroyo del Monte.”

  I had seen her before, I realized. She always seemed to follow Mrs. Rogan around. She trailed her to the porch, to the study, to the media room. She even wanted to sit next to her in the dining room.

  Mia Rosa thrust her unicorn up. It was almost as big as she was and decorated with blue and silver plastic jewels the size of grapes and way too many sparkles.

  “This is Sapphire.”

  “She is very pretty.”

  “She lives in the midnight clouds and her horn glows with moonlight.”

  Of course. Jewel Legends. It was a popular kid cartoon with mythical animals. I was too old for it, but Arabella, my younger sister, caught the very beginning of it. Everything had to be Jewel Legends for a while: notebooks, backpacks, phone cases . . . And then she went to high school and that was the end of that.

  “I want a sparkly gun,” Mia Rosa announced in a slightly accented voice.

  “Um, what?”

  “There is a gun that lets you put more sparklies.”

  “You want a bedazzler?”

  Mia Rosa nodded several times. “Yes. My mommy said you were the go girl and I should ask you.”

  Go girl. I hid a sigh. “I’ll see what I can do. What is your mommy’s name, so I know where to deliver the bedazzler?”

  “Teresa Rosa Arroyo Roberto del Monte. Thank you. But don’t give it to mommy. Give it to me.”

  Awww . She said thank you. “You’re welcome.”

  She curtsied and ran after the kids, dragging her unicorn.

  My phone chimed. I glanced at the text message. Arabella has written, “Where are you??? Get here!!!” and added a gif of a crying baby with photoshopped rivers of tears. I took off at a near run.

  It all started with Nevada firing the wedding planner. The first wedding planner.

  Usually my older sister was a perfectly reasonable person. Well, as reasonable as someone can be when she is a human lie detector. However, two weeks ago Simon Nightingale disappeared, and House Nightingale hired us to find him. Just three months ago our family registered as a House, and our small PI firm went from Baylor Investigative Agency to House Baylor Investigative Agency. The Nightingale case was our first investigation. The entire Houston elite was watching us, and it drove Nevada a little nuts. A lot nuts. She was pretty much a nutcase.

  The first wedding planner was fired because she argued with Nevada. My sister would explain the way she wanted things done and the planner would tell why they couldn’t do it that way. Most of the time “couldn’t” meant “we won’t do it because it’s a Prime wedding and it’s not the way things are done.” Finally, the planner explained to Nevada that it wasn’t really her wedding, but a wedding of House Rogan and she needed to stop impeding it with “ridiculous demands,” such as serving queso as an appetizer at the rehearsal dinner. The planner was promptly escorted from the premises.

  The second planner was fired, because she kept lying. Her approach to wedding planning was to pacify the bride by pretending that everything was under control even when it wasn’t. She didn’t want to be micromanaged. But, my sister was an epic control freak and her attention to detail was legendary within the family. Nevada would ask if something was a problem, and the planner would repeatedly assure her that things were fine, despite being warned that Nevada could sense her lies. Things came to a head when Nevada asked her point-blank if she and Mrs. Rogan had come to an agreement on the caterer. After being told for the tenth time to not worry about it, Nevada snapped. I realized that the second planner was let go when I saw her running to her car in five-inch heels with a look of pure panic on her face. My sister had burst onto the porch behind her, yelling, “Is it fine now? Is it still fine?”

  We didn’t bother with a third wedding planner. Arabella and I took a weekend, armed ourselves with takeout, and after thirty odd episodes of Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? and four seasons of Bridezilla , we decided to plan the wedding ourselves. It was that or there would be no wedding.

  Unfortunately, while Rogan and his mother treated us with perfect courtesy, the rest of his family wasn’t quite sure about our status. Both Arabella and I were registered as Primes, but our records were sealed. Also, our family wasn’t wealthy, and Rogan was a billionaire. With me being eighteen and Arabella turning sixteen, they didn’t feel we had any authority. I had a feeling we ranked as “poor relatives who run errands,” somewhere just above hired help. Apparently, I was the go girl. I didn’t even want to know what Arabella was.

  Just what I needed. I already felt like a clumsy trespasser in all of this beautiful luxury. This wasn’t my home. My home was in the loft of the warehouse. If there was any way to not be here, I would’ve taken it. But I loved my sister.

  It would be a lot easier if we could do all this in Rogan’s house, but Rogan and Nevada declared Rogan’s home a wedding-free zone and hid there whenever they could.

  I turned the corner and walked into a room where Nevad
a stood on a dais, wearing high-heeled shoes and the in-progress wedding dress, which currently was muslin marked with blue pencil lines. Two people crawled around her, pinning the hem.

  Arabella stood in front of her, her arms crossed over her chest. Both Nevada and Arabella were blond, but Nevada’s hair was closer to clover honey, while Arabella’s resembled gold corn silk. I was the only brunette in the family, besides Mom. Right now the similarities between my two sisters were really apparent, and if you didn’t look at their faces, Arabella seemed like a shorter smaller copy of Nevada.

  Ooo, I should tell her that next time we fought. She would hate that.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “She wants lilacs in her wedding bouquet.”

  “Okay . . .” Nevada had said she wanted carnations, but we could stuff some pretty pink lilacs in there. I didn’t see the problem.

  “Blue,” Arabella squeezed out. “She wants blue lilacs.”

  No and also no. “Nevada . . .”

  “I had to hide in a bush of French lilacs yesterday and they were very pretty and smelled nice. The card on the tree said, ‘Wonder Blue: prolific in bloom and lush in perfume.’”

  I googled French lilac, Wonder Blue. It was blue. Like in your face blue. “Why were you hiding in a bush?”

  “She was being shot at,” Arabella said with a sour face.

  “So you stopped to smell the lilacs while people were shooting at you?” I couldn’t even.

  “Mmm. I was in a greenhouse and they made a lovely hiding spot.”

  I decided to go with logic. My sister was a logical person. “You asked for a spring wedding. You chose pink, white, and very light sage green as your colors. There is no blue anywhere in the wedding.”

  “Now there is.”

  “Your bouquet has pink carnations, pink sweet pea flowers, white roses, and baby breath.” Three varieties of pink carnations, because she couldn’t pick one. And Nevada would never know the panic in the floral designer’s eyes when we told her it had to be a carnation bouquet. Apparently, carnations weren’t upscale enough for Mad Rogan’s wedding. Poor woman kept trying to suggest orchids.