Fireworks at Midnight (1Night Stand)

By Tara Quan

Recent college graduate and part-time cat familiar Dulcina “Sweets” Gato is having the worst New Year’s Eve in living memory. End of year expenses trigger serious cash flow problems, and her microwave just went up in smoke. To make matters worse, her best friend’s overprotective big brother is back in town, and his return threatens to put a huge crimper on her nocturnal activities. The only thing she can look forward to is Madame Eve’s 1-Night Stand service. After all, she’s sick and tired of being a 21-year-old virgin.

Enforcement Agent Mikal Knight is a warlock on a mission. Having finally scored a transfer to Washington, D.C., he’s now at liberty to pursue the object of his desires—his baby sister’s best friend. But first, he has a vigilante to track down and a mysterious matchmaking service to investigate. Sent on an undercover operation, he resigns himself to a pointless 1-Night Stand on New Year’s Eve. As luck would have it, his mystery date’s identity might let him kill several birds with one stone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Decadent Publishing
• Release date: Dec 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781613337714

Tara Quan

Globetrotter, lover of languages, and romance author, Tara Quan has an addiction for crafting tales with a pinch of spice and a smidgen of kink. Inspired by her travels, Tara enjoys tossing her kick-ass heroines and alpha males into exotic contemporary locales, fantasy worlds, and post-apocalyptic futures. Armed with magical powers or conventional weapons, her characters are guaranteed a suspenseful and sensual ride, as well as their own happily ever after

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Fireworks at Midnight

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 by Tara Quan

ISBN: 978-1-61333-771-4

Cover art by Mina Carter

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work, in whole or in part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

Published by Decadent Publishing Company, LLC

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Also by Tara Quan

Delicious Delay

Operation Owl

Flirting With Fire

Frosty Relations

Fireworks at Midnight

A 1Night Stand Story

By

Tara Quan

~Dedication~

To anyone who has tried to find parking in downtown D.C.

Chapter One

Dulcina Gato hated few things more than going through the day without coffee.

After she got her high school diploma and landed a minimum-wage job, she rode the independence high and turned down her parents’ allowance. When she made the mistake of spending her precious paychecks on a bachelor’s degree, she downgraded from Starbucks flavored lattes to less-than-adequate espresso shots. After spending years in online and night classes to earn a piece of paper that hadn’t increased her income by a single cent, she went on a descending spiral past donut-store drip to land at the bottom of the caffeine rabbit hole, fast-food chain budget brews. Even this luxury went the way of the dodo when she had the bright idea of quitting her dead-end day job to turn her jewelry-making hobby into a small business.

The ten-dollar coffee maker she’d bought at a flea market had long since died a slow and torturous death, and all she had left to keep her going at 7:00 a.m. on New Year’s Eve was an instant cup of Joe. She stared at her orange mug through the grease-stained translucent door of the circa-1980s microwave, wondering why it took so long to heat up water. As soon as she got her hands on the money Flowers Forever had raked in over the Christmas shopping season, she’d invest in one of those electric kettles.

Her vision hazed. Through fluttering lashes, an overlay of smoke and flames flashed over the worn laminate counter. Starting from behind the appliance, a black smear snaked up the peeling wallpaper to reach the dirt-encrusted popcorn ceiling.

Shaking her head to dispel the burst of foresight, she yawned. Shit. How fucking inconvenient. She glanced down at her torso, too sleepy to remember what she’d pulled on last night when she got out of the shower. Bright-blue nighttime shorts and a matching tank top might not be ideal for greeting a cavalry of firemen. Washington, D.C.’s prolonged arctic winter had turned her once-tanned skin a sallow yellow, which acquired a sickly sheen when paired with her clothes’ clashing aqua. Considering she’d scheduled her next beach vacation in ten years, she needed to avoid cold hues for the foreseeable future.

If push came to shove, she should have enough time to pull on something more flattering and run a brush through her hair. Upsides of the shoulder-length schoolgirl bob included the ten-dollar price tag and extreme low maintenance. Since highlights grew out faster than she could save up money, she eschewed artificial color in favor of her natural drab brown. She hadn’t been born with her sister’s brains, and lack of scholarships meant she came out of the undergraduate rip-off with a mountain of student loans.

Growing up had turned out to be a huge bummer. The year’s end came with an insane amount of incidental expenses for the fledgling company she’d started with Shelley Dupree, her best friend since pre-kindergarten. While she and her business partner could legally buy alcohol at long last, affording any seemed out of their reach. Paying next year’s fee for their website, which she’d put off until the previous evening, had almost netted them bank overdraft fees. No way could they get a new microwave in the foreseeable future.

Shells, she bellowed. The kitchen is about to catch on fire.

Her short-legged pal bounded in less than a minute later. Wearing a pink sweatshirt and matching pajama bottoms, the petite twenty-one-year-old earth mage could pass for a high schooler. Leaves and flower petals dusted her chestnut hair; dirt smudged her flushed café au lait cheeks. Sweets, I swear to God—if this is your idea of a joke, I’ll bury you.

Dulcina preferred the nickname Sweets to the name her parents had bestowed upon her in an unfortunate moment of nostalgia—the single reason she could come up with to explain why both she and her sister had such distinctly Spanish names. And while her sibling’s Catalina got shortened to a neutral Cat, Sweets’ legal name always ended up as some permutation of Douche, Dull-Chai, or China. "Why are you so