Accidentally Aphrodite - Dakota Cassidy Page 0,23

stood her in the corner of the room, but Quinn wasn’t letting go. She clung to Nina’s hand, her legs visibly shaking as the other women rushed to her side.

Khristos looked heavenward, hands on hips, ready for third-degree verbal lacerations from his mother’s sharp tongue. But he wouldn’t allow her to frighten Quinn. This wasn’t her fault.

“Mom, knock off the big, scary disembodied voice thing, would you?” he ordered. “Delicate flower here. If you want to rumble, show yourself. But you’ll do all the rumbling with me.”

Silence. Deafeningly so.

He was getting the silent treatment—which was just as well, considering the vocal treatment involved things breaking and sometimes a slight shift in Mt. Rushmore. But it also meant she was pretty damn pissed. And to be fair, she should be.

She’d just lost the power to do what she loved to do best. Meddle. Mythology told the story of Aphrodite, the master at evoking love and lust in men, and while that much was once true, the game had grown cold for his mother—whose real name was Esther-Lou.

She’d mellowed over the centuries, and what she really loved was helping people find love and happily ever afters—likely because she couldn’t find one of her own. But she loved love in all shapes and sizes. Especially if you took into account the amount of Hallmark movies she watched as a barometer for her sentimental streak.

Yet, she’d been talking about retiring for years now. She was tired. She’d complained just last family dinner about it. She wanted to travel, maybe find a nice condo in Boca to settle down in. Relax, sit by the pool, read a book without the constant interruption of matchmaking.

But what she wanted most was for Khristos to settle down and give her grandchildren. Making him guard the apple was her way of sticking it to him for remaining a bachelor for so many centuries.

She’d often said he’d bucked responsibility his entire life, using his charm and good looks to go about his merry way without being caught up in the net of a relationship. Guarding the apple was, according to her, a last-ditch effort to teach him a lesson in accountability.

And he’d done a damn good job of it for hundreds of years.

Until Quinn.

And a distraction on his part that, despite what Nina had joked, wasn’t a leggy blonde. Add to that what he’d chalked up to a small seismic occurrence he couldn’t explain, and his perfectly good union of man and apple had ended.

However, his mother didn’t like having things taken from her before she was ready to give them up. She hadn’t planned on losing her powers by having them ripped right out from under her. They were supposed to be handed down to Iris, the Goddess of Rainbows, who was chomping at the bit to take over.

Which meant now two women would want his head on a platter. Two volatile, chaotic, very angry women.

“Was that really your mother?” Quinn finally squeaked.

Shit, shit, shit. She was frightened, her pretty eyes wide, her hand shaking as she stuck to Nina like glue, and it saddened him. She’d had a tough go with this prick Igor. He wasn’t so much of an asshole he couldn’t see that. He’d heard the story while she’d confessed her love woes to the apple.

So what choice did he have but to tell the truth?

He moved toward Quinn slowly, his eyes on her face. “Yes. That was my mother, and I promise, she’d never hurt you. I wouldn’t allow it.”

Quinn’s head poked out from behind Nina’s back, her wide eyes just peeking an inch over the vampire’s shoulder. “But she does hurt people? Is it a practice she makes a habit of?”

He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. This was his fault and his fault alone. He had to remember that and remind himself patience was a virtue—one Quinn and her fears would likely sap the life right out of.

But he had no one to blame but himself for this quandary, and he’d do whatever he had to in order to help her be the best Aphrodite she could be.

If she’d just get out of her own way.

“No. She doesn’t make a habit of it. I promise you, everything will be fine.”

Quinn licked her lips, her face pale, her grip on Nina of the Kung-Fu variety. “What did she mean, you’d suffer the wrath of the gods?”

He jammed his hands in his pockets and wondered if she had any whiskey stashed somewhere in that tiny