Beguiled by Maureen Child Page B

therefore ensuring that he would spend even more time with them. Now he was living in a magically built tree house in the oak out back and quite literally whipping up dinner nearly every night.
    He wasn’t much of a cook—traditionally speaking, with a stove and, say, pans—but the little pain in her ass could really magic up some great meals.
    “I’m just saying,” he continued, as if Maggie hadn’t spoken at all, “I don’t mind helping out around here—mostly because if you keep cooking, I’ll die . And watching over the kid once in a while is okay, ’cause she doesn’t bug too bad. But no babies.”
    “How’d you find out about Nora’s baby?” Maggie demanded.
    “I told him,” Eileen said. “Mom explained this morning before I went to school.”
    “She told you about the baby already?” Had Maggie been the last one to know? Even Bezel knew before she did? How was that fair? Well, just went to prove, being Queen didn’t bring many perks.
    “Well, duh .” Eileen grabbed another cookie from the open bag on the table. “Thirty-five percent of parents try to hide the coming of a sibling,” she pronounced. “It never ends well.”
    Bezel lifted both silver eyebrows, then shook his head and went back to muttering some incantation over the white china platter on the counter in front of him.
    Leaving him out of this for the moment, which she tried to do as often as possible, Maggie studied her niece. Twelve years old, Eileen had the Donovan blue eyes, dark red hair that hung just past her shoulders and pale skin softly dotted with freckles. Maggie couldn’t have loved her more. “So are you okay about the baby?”
    Eileen thought about it for a second or two, then shrugged and smiled. “Sure. It’s good for Mom to have a baby, since I’m practically grown.”
    “You’re twelve,” Maggie reminded her, making another grab for the cookie bag herself.
    “I’ll be thirteen in nine months. That’s practically tomorrow.”
    God, it really was. As fast as time was moving lately, Eileen could be a grandmother by next week. Maggie’s head hurt and the cookies weren’t helping.
    “After dinner, can somebody come over?”
    “On a school night?” Maggie countered, already shaking her head. “Your mom would kill me.”
    “She’s in Otherworld, remember?”
    Maggie narrowed her gaze on Eileen. God, was the sneaky maneuvering—trademarks of teenager-hood—starting already? “Somebody who ?” she asked, remembering the boy who’d been so intent on hiding from her.
    Eileen smiled and got a dreamy look to her eyes that she usually reserved for her favorite actor on Supernatural , Jensen Ackles. Oh boy.
    “Is this about Devon?”
    Eileen didn’t answer, instead concentrating on licking the thick white icing between the two chocolate cookies.
    That more than anything spiked Maggie’s internal radar. Donovan women were rarely quiet. Which meant that either Devon was getting her to be quiet or Eileen had already reached the hormonal stage where she wanted to shut her family out of her life. Oh, please not that.
    “If I told you it was Amber who wanted to come over, that would be okay?” she asked, clearly unable to keep quiet for long.
    “Still a school night, and besides, it’s not Amber, is it?”
    She smiled. “Not so much.”
    “Then who?”
    “Devon, okay? It’s Devon,” Eileen grumbled to herself as she finished off her cookie and grabbed another one. “But it’s not like I was trying to sneak out to see him. I wanted him to come over here where you could interrogate him and humiliate me. See the trust I have in you?”
    “Touching. Truly.” And it went without saying that she would be interrogating good ol’ Devon at the first opportunity.
    Eileen sighed and pouted. At the same time. “You’re my aunt. You’re supposed to be the fun one who spoils me.”
    “Uh-huh,” Maggie said, folding up the cookie bag before she could eat another one herself. Yes, since she’d gotten