Semi-Obsessed Read online

  Semi-Obsessed

  Harper Hall Investigations #5.5

  By

  Isabel Jordan

  © 2018 Isabel Jordan. All rights reserved.

  Cover Design by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are the product of the author’s twisted imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or people (living or dead) is coincidental (and would be super-weird).

  Table of Contents

  Praise for the Harper Hall Investigations Series

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Epilogue

  A personal note from Isabel:

  Praise for the Harper Hall Investigations Series

  “Harper is a heroine you can get behind! She's witty, crazy, kick-ass, and amazing! Noah is my new book boyfriend! He's the bad boy we all want and your mom hates but then she falls in love with him, too!”

  —Indy Book Fairy

  “Fresh and fun. Relaxed with a good dose of humor.”

  —Lanie's Book Thoughts

  “Semi-Charmed is well-paced, fun and easy to read.”

  —TJ Loves to Read

  “The hero and heroine were intriguing and engaging.”

  —Smexy Books

  “Holy crap! That was awesome! More please!! Brilliantly funny, sexy, charming, and awesome.”

  —Me, Myself & Books

  “If you are a fan of the Sookie Stackhouse books, Buffy the Vampire slayer, and the likes, you will enjoy this book a great deal.”

  —The Book Disciple

  “Harper Hall is the best kind of heroine for me. She’s funny, snarky, can handle herself in a fight and never shies away from telling anyone what she’s thinking. Long-story-short, this series is worth a read. Just don’t read it in public because there are parts that are snort-laugh inducing (and no one looks hot while snort-laughing).”

  –Knockin’ Books

  “I went into this book hoping to get the same feelings I got from the last book. I was not disappointed. This book was great from beginning to end. The characters I loved in the last book were there for me again.”

  –Pixies Can Read Blogspot

  “If you love Charley Davison, True Blood or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, then you will definitely want to read this quirky vampire/paranormal series.”

  –Literati Literature Lovers

  “I waited FOREVER for this book…at least it seemed that way. I couldn’t wait to read Mischa and Hunter’s story! True to the author’s form, I giggled my way through this story, when I wasn’t sighing over the leading man.”

  –Author L.E. Wilson

  “It reads like a perfect blend of all my favorite romantic comedies, action movies and supernatural TV shows.”

  –Romance Rehab

  “This book and series has quickly become a comfort series to me. When I need a good read with some quirky but lovable characters this is definitely on the list! There is plenty of snark, sarcasm, wit and friendly banter that happens between these characters that I just connect to them all. I just can't get enough!”

  –The Genre Minx

  Dedication

  To Don.

  You know why you’re here. You know what you’ve done.

  Acknowledgments

  It takes a crap-ton of people to get a book published. And if I didn’t have these people propping me up, I’d still be working at my soul-sucking 8-5 job in B2B marketing and advertising (*shudders*) instead of doing what I love everyday (while wearing sweatpants).

  So, thanks to Connor for always being nice to people in public so I don’t have to be. That allows me to save my mental energy for writing, which is SUPER helpful.

  A BIG thank you to my parents and husband for their continued and TIRELESS support and encouragement.

  Lots of love to LE Wilson for being the best beta reader and cover critique partner in the world. (There’s no way I ever would’ve released this book into the wild without your help!)

  And speaking of covers, HUGE thanks to Dar Albert with Wicked Smart Designs for the fantabulous cover art. You’re a rock star!

  Thanks to Renee Wright for her invaluable proofreading and editing services. (I swear, one day I will sit down and try to learn when to hyphenate words and when not to. Not today, but one day…)

  And most importantly, THANK YOU to all the fabulous readers and bloggers out there who have stuck with Harper and her crazy crew since 2014. These have been the best years of my life thanks to y’all. Stay fabulous!!

  Can’t wait for more books? Connect with the author to make sure you don’t miss anything!

  Email: [email protected]

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  Private readers’ group (Bitch, write faster): https://www.facebook.com/groups/846416382191567/

  Twitter:@izzyjord

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  Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ijordan0345/

  Website: http://www.izzyjo.com/

  Sign up for updates on all things Isabel Jordan at: http://www.izzyjo.com/sign-up.html

  Happy reading!

  Chapter One

  “I need your husband for a night.”

  Marina Petrocelli wasn’t exactly sure how her sister would reply to the request. No one was ever really sure how Harper Hall would reply to anything. So, she steeled her nerves for whatever jokes or crudes remarks may come.

  She didn’t have to wait long.

  “I love you, but not enough to become your sister wife,” Harper shot back in a Sahara-sand-dry tone.

  Marina’s nose wrinkled involuntarily. “Gross. Not like that. The station’s charity event is next week and I don’t have a date.”

  The television station where Marina did hair and makeup for the on-air personalities was run like a sweatshop and the owners treated employees like gum stuck to the bottoms of their shoes, but the one thing they consistently did right was their annual charity event. No expense was spared, and a different charity benefitted every year. This year, Marina had talked the planning committee into raising funds for the Whispering Hope Humane Society.

  “So what?” Harper asked. “Go stag.”

  “I can’t go by myself.”

  “Why not?”

  Marina repressed a sigh. Harper wouldn’t let this go. Shit, Harper never let anything go. She’d have to just come clean. “Dex will be there,” she admitted.

  Harper let loose a string of profanities that would’ve earned her a smack upside the head from their mother before saying, “I’ll have Riddick break both his legs. That’ll keep the lying, secretary-fucking jerkwad away from the charity thingy so you can go enjoy yourself in peace. There. Done and done.”

  The sad—and kind of awesome—part of that statement? Harper wasn’t kidding. Harper’s husband, Riddick, would t
otally break her ex’s legs if Harper asked him. But a few weeks in traction wouldn’t change the fact that her boyfriend cheated on her with his nineteen-year-old secretary. He’d even had the nerve to dump Marina before she could dump him. Fucker.

  Marina’s friend Violet, who happened to be a shrink, had labeled Dex’s dalliance as a pathetic mid-life crisis. Marina didn’t really care to label it. All she knew was that she wasn’t going to let the greasy little weasel ruin the station’s charity event for her. She was going to wear the ridiculously expensive dress she’d been starving herself for three weeks to fit into and face the cheating bastard while looking more fuckable than she’d ever looked in her life.

  Harper probably wouldn’t understand such a simple, petty revenge plan. She was the type who’d kick the door down, march into the event like she owned the place, and knee Dex in the balls before grabbing some champagne and dancing like no one was watching. That was just who Harper was.

  Harper was the fun one. The wild one. If anyone in her family was ever going to need bail money, it was Harper, and there’d undoubtedly be a great story attached to why she needed it.

  Marina was the first person Harper would call for the bail money. The responsible one. The mature one.

  The boring one.

  Everyone who found out she was related to Harper Hall was shocked. Harper is so talented, so gifted, they’d say. A psychic who owns her own paranormal PI firm? How exciting! Harper with her wild curls and fire-engine-red classic Mustang. Such a free spirit.

  Marina’s thick brown hair was so heavy it couldn’t hold a curl on a dare and she drove a Camry, for God’s sake. A beige one.

  (It got good gas mileage and she was able to get it for a song at Gary’s Discount Auto Land, okay? Don’t judge.)

  When Harper was around, Marina was the other sister. The one with no paranormal gifts whatsoever. Everyone’s second choice.

  And normally, that wasn’t a problem for Marina. She adored her sister, and someone had to be the responsible one. The sensible one. The one who wasn’t a drama magnet.

  But today…today was different. Today, Marina would give a kidney to be Harper. Not because Harper was so fun and talented and vivacious, but because she had Riddick—a guy who looked like the love child of a Sons of Anarchy biker and a Calvin Klein underwear model, and gazed at Harper like she’d placed every star in the night sky with her very own hands. Someone who’d go with her to the stupid charity event so all her coworkers would stop giving her the sympathetic, oh-poor-Marina-got-dumped-for-someone-younger-and-more-fun head tilt.

  That head tilt was really starting to annoy her.

  So, while there was a certain appeal to the idea of Riddick, a huge, scary, motorcycle-riding dhampyre and former Sentry slayer, beating the hell out of Dex, the most generic human white guy to ever drive a white Volvo, Marina just couldn’t bring herself to do this thing Harper’s way.

  “Going alone isn’t an option,” she said. “All my coworkers know Dex cheated on me, and I’m getting super sick of their pity.”

  And since every on-air personality was in her makeup chair for over an hour a day, she rarely got a break from everyone’s pity. The good news, she supposed, was that Dex was in sales. If he was ever on-air and she had to apply his makeup, she couldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t end up with an eyebrow pencil shoved up his nose. Sideways.

  “Who cares what they think?” Harper asked. “They’re all just a bunch of old farts, anyway.”

  Easy for someone who didn’t care about what anyone thought to say. With a frustrated sigh, Marina said, “I work with those old farts every day. It’s my job. Can you just stop arguing with me and try to help me, for God’s sake?”

  She could practically hear her sister’s eye roll. “Fine,” Harper said on an exhale. “I’ll help. But everyone at the station probably knows Riddick is married to me. They wanted to run that story on him last month, remember?”

  Ugh. She’d forgotten about that. Riddick had brought down some renegade vampire who’d tried to rob the local blood bank, and her station had begged him for a good solid week for an interview. Dex had even tried to get her to talk Riddick into it, since he’d been sure it would be good for advertising sales.

  In typical Riddick fashion, his answer had been a horrified fuck no. The man was one of the most anti-social creatures Marina had ever encountered. He’d probably rather be water boarded than participate in an on-air interview.

  “Damn it,” Marina muttered, more to herself than to Harper. What was she going to do now?

  Maybe she could ask Violet if her husband, Nikolai, would do it. Nikolai was a fuck-hot dhampyre, too. Showing up with Nikolai would probably kill the sympathetic head tilt forever.

  But as soon as the idea popped into her head, she dismissed it. Violet was nine months pregnant and getting ready to go into labor at any minute. You probably couldn’t pry Nikolai from her side with a crowbar at this point.

  Riddick’s sister’s husband, Lucas, was also out of the question. He was a cop, and everyone at the station knew all the local cops. They’d know he was married to Seven, who was somewhat of a local dhamypre legend, herself.

  God, sometimes it really sucked to be ordinary.

  “I could ask Benny to go with you,” Harper said. “He’d do it in a heartbeat.”

  Harper’s employee and bestie, Benny, wasn’t a dhampyre. He was a halfer—part wererat, part vampire. Benny was cute and endearing in a Jon Cryer/Seth Rogan, loveable loser kind of way. But he wasn’t a guy who’d make Dex regret the day he cheated on her. A guy who’d make Gloria, the station’s evening news anchor, stop trying to set her up with her son, Floyd, who still lived in his mom’s pool house and played Call of Duty all day.

  And Benny also had an unfortunate habit of making inappropriate jokes and innuendos at the most inopportune times. Harper found those inappropriate jokes and innuendos adorable, while pretty much everyone else on the planet, well, didn’t.

  But before she could tactfully figure out a way to tell Harper she didn’t want to go out with Benny, Harper said, “No, never mind. Last time he saw you, Benny said you have a bite-able ass. He’d just hit on you all night. It’d get tedious for you.”

  Marina was a bit nonplussed by that information. If a half vampire said her ass was bite-able, did he mean that figuratively, or literally? She always assumed vampires would prefer to drink from the neck or wrist, but maybe…

  Then she promptly gave herself a sharp mental slap across the face, because her ass and whether or not a vampire might ever want to drink blood from it was so not the point at the moment.

  With a groan of frustration, Marina asked, “Am I just being stupid, Harper? Should I just give up and go by myself?”

  Harper sighed. “Yes and yes. But I get it. Let me help you, okay? Give me a day or so, and I’ll come up with a plan.”

  Skepticism crept up on her. Experience had taught her to be very leery of Harper’s plans. Anything could—and often did—happen when her little sister planned, well, anything, really.

  Case in point, if she remembered correctly, there was still a clown in Rochester who had a restraining order against Harper and Riddick for something that went horribly awry at a birthday party Harper had planned for her daughter Haven’s third birthday party. Marina hadn’t asked for details. Plausible deniability and all.

  “Your silence is a huge shot in the arm for my self-esteem, sis,” Harper intoned dryly. “Come on. You know you can trust me. My plans always work out in the end. What’s the worst that can happen?”

  Visions of fire and brimstone and all manner of debilitating humiliation raced through her mind, but as she’d always done where her sister was involved, Marina merely gritted her teeth and said, “Thank you. Of course I trust you.”

  Then she prayed there wasn’t a special place in hell for people who lied to their sisters. All the time.

  Chapter Two

  When he saw an angel walk out of the television station across t
he street from the bar where he sat (where he’d been sitting all night, actually), Quinn Connell decided he might be a wee bit pissed.

  Drunk, he reminded himself. Americans said drunk, not pissed. Pissed meant angry over here, for some reason.

  Quinn hadn’t been back to Ireland in decades and he still sometimes struggled with American slang.

  Not that it mattered. Pissed, sloshed, blathered, bollocksed, blotto, rat-arsed, blind-stinkin’-drunk…it didn’t matter what he called it. The cheap whiskey he’d been swilling for the past two hours had obviously started to dick with his eyesight. How else could he explain the presence of an angel in this shitty part of town?

  She moved like a dancer, he thought as he watched her glide across the parking lot. Back straight, lean, toned limbs carrying her purposefully, but with a kind of elegant grace that Quinn could never pull off.

  Dudes who were six-four and two-twenty with hands the size of hams didn’t really do anything gracefully.

  But fortunately, grace had never been required of him. Speed, strength, ruthlessness…that’s all he’d needed in his years with Sentry. He’d been a blunt instrument of destruction. A slayer. A dhampyre, as he’d only recently found out from the Vampire Council, genetically engineered to be the perfect killing machine.

  Not the type of person someone like the angel across the street would ever glance at twice.

  It was just as well. What was he supposed to do? March up to her and say, “Hello there, lass who looks way too good for the likes of a poor orphan immigrant such as myself. I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful you are, as I’ve just been sitting here, drinking copiously while watching you like a proper creeper. I have no job, very few prospects—despite what the overly optimistic youngster at the employment agency says. But what I do have is a shady past with an organization everyone in the world pretty much hates these days, and a somewhat frightening paranormal heritage. And if it sweetens the pot any, I also did some prison time recently. Care to grab a drink with me sometime?”