“You have to help me, Marcus,” she said again, bringing his attention back to the matter at hand. Pretty much. He did still kind of wonder what she had on under that sweatshirt.
“I’ll be glad to,” he told her. “What do you want me to do? Water your plants while you’re gone?”
She started bouncing up and down again. “No, I want you to come with me,” she said, her brown eyes wide with excitement.
The drink he’d been lifting to his mouth stopped just short of completing the action. “Come with you?” he echoed. “Why?”
“Because I’m going to need another driver.”
“What are you talking about?” Marcus asked. “You’re planning to drive to Georgia? By Monday?”
“If we take turns at the wheel, we can drive straight through. We won’t have to stop except for food and restrooms.”
He eyed her curiously for a moment. “Why would we want to do that, when you can hop on a plane and be there within hours?”
Her expression went vaguely horrified. “A plane?” she repeated, voicing the word as if it were something unspeakably vile. “I can’t get on a plane. No way.”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, no. Don’t. Dinah. Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who’s afraid of flying.”
She made a mild face at him. “Well, of course I’m not afraid of flying. Just how flaky do you think I am?”
He sighed in relief. “Good. So what’s the problem?”
“It’s because of the curse,” she told him.
Marcus was afraid to ask. Nevertheless, “The curse?” he repeated cautiously.
Dinah nodded. “Yeah. The curse. The gypsy curse.”
Two
It had taken her forty-five minutes to convince him to accompany her to Georgia, two hours for them to pack and shower and tie up loose ends and plot their driving strategy, twenty minutes to argue over whose car they would take, and thirty minutes to get out of San Francisco.
Now as they sped east, with San Francisco Bay shimmering beneath them like smooth black satin, Dinah felt herself relaxing for the first time since the call to the Georgia Lottery.
Until Marcus said, “Okay, you promised if I came with you, you’d tell me about this gypsy curse.”
Oh, yeah. That. Funny how blackmail had a bad habit of backfiring on a person.
She sighed heavily. “Well, it’s sort of complicated.”
He chuckled wryly. “Yeah, I bet. Family curses sorta tend to be that way.”
She nodded. “True.” But she said nothing more, hoping he might take the hint and let it go.
No such luck.
“Dinah?”
“Hmm?”
“The curse?”
“Right.”
She continued to gaze out the window as she spoke, though, because she didn’t want to see Marcus’s expression as she explained. People who didn’t suffer from family curses just never got the whole family curse thing.
“It dates back to the seventeenth century,” she began. “According to the story, one of my more vicious Meade ancestors—not that there were a lot of vicious Meade ancestors,” she hastened to clarify. “Most of them were totally passive and decent. In fact, the ones who first came to this country in the 1800s were Quakers who—”
“Dinah?”
“Hmm?”
“The curse?”
“Right.” She backpedaled and started again. “This ancestor, apparently obsessed with a beautiful, young gypsy girl, kidnapped her and locked her way up in the tower of his castle. And to get even with him—and to prevent him from committing his nefarious deeds—her family put a curse on him that would also hex all of his ensuing progeny.
“Which I guess is understandable,” she qualified, “all things considered. I mean, if someone locked up a member of my family way, way up in a dark, dank, stinky tower and tried to commit nefarious deeds with them, I’d want to do a lot more than put a curse on him. I’d want to wrap both hands around his throat and—”
“Dinah.”
“Hmm?”
“The curse.”
“Right. Where was I?”
Marcus glanced over at her with narrowed eyes. “The, uh, the curse,” he told her.
“Right,” she said again. “To make a long story short—”
“Please do.”
“—what the curse amounts to,” she continued, “is that anytime anybody in my family tries to travel higher than a certain height, something nefarious happens to them. In the case of my vicious ancestor, it was spontaneous combustion.”
Marcus swerved into the shoulder a bit, but recovered admirably. “Spontaneous combustion?” he echoed.
Dinah nodded. “Pretty nefarious, huh?”
“You said it.”
He glanced over at her again, and the slash of illumination from a bluish-tinted street lamp briefly threw his features into stark contrasts of shadow and light. He had such incredible cheekbones, she noted, not for the first time. And he looked so handsome and dramatic, all dressed in black—black jeans, black sweater, black leather jacket.
Two words, she thought. Yum. Mee. And two more words. Major loss. To the feminine gender, at any rate. Honestly. It sure was a good thing that she was a levelheaded woman. Otherwise, she might very well have fallen in love with him by now. And wouldn’t that just be about the dumbest thing she’d ever done in her life?
Yeah, good thing she was so levelheaded.
“So how high a height are we talking here?” Marcus asked, stirring her from her musings.
“Well, tower-height, obviously,” Dinah replied. “Though the castle was up on a big hill, too, so a bit higher than tower height, I guess. It was the only way the gypsy family could keep my ancestor from committing those nefarious deeds. It’s also why so many members of my family live at sea level, and why none of us work in tall buildings. If anyone in my family goes too high up, we pay for it. Big-time.”
“How so? Surely someone in your family has tested the curse by now, haven’t they? After all, it’s been hundreds of years.”
“Oh, yes. Several people have tested the curse.”
“And?”
“They’ve all met with nefarious ends.”
There was a moment of silence from Marcus, then, “What happened to them?” he asked.
“Oh, gosh, all kinds of things,” Dinah said. “For example, there was my Uncle Sebastian, who tried to climb Mount McKinley.”
“And what happened to him?”
She shrugged. “We think he was carried off by a California Condor. They never found his body. Except for his one shoe,” she clarified.
“His shoe?”
“And his Coors belt buckle.”
Marcus said nothing in response to that.
“And then there was my father’s cousin, Tilda. She took a job on the 37th floor of a skyscraper once, even though everyone warned her not to.”
“And, um, what happened to Tilda? Did she disappear, too?”
“Well, not physically.”
Another one of those thoughtful glances from Marcus was followed by his softly muttered, “Um, what does that mean?”
“Well, Tilda’s still around,” Dinah said. “Pretty much. Physically, anyway.”
“Which means?” he asked, clearly with some reluctance.
“Well, she spends a lot of her time these days talking to Czar Nicholas.”
“Ah. I see.”
“And Oliver Cromwell.”
“I got it, Dinah.”
“And then there was my great-great grandmother Oneida who—”
“Dinah?”
“Hmm?”
“I got
it.”
“Oh. Okay.”
With a sigh of contentment that she and Marcus were well and truly on their way, Dinah settled back in her seat and gazed out the window at the swiftly passing night.
And she wondered how much longer ’til they got there.
A couple of hours later, Marcus was wondering much the same thing…when he wasn’t still marveling at what Dinah had told him earlier. A family curse. Why did this not surprise him? Not that he’d ever considered her to be flaky. Well, not too flaky, anyway. Not really. No, he liked to think of Dinah as being…unconventional. Yeah, that was a good word for her. Unconventional and…hot.
Yeah, hot was another good word for Dinah Meade. Especially decked out, as she was now, in snug, faded jeans and a cropped red sweater that kept riding up over her torso, every time she twisted in her seat—which was frequently, because she wasn’t the kind of person who liked to sit still.
It was even worse when she reached into the backseat for something. And so far on this trip, she’d reached back there for a lot. First for a bottle of water from the cooler, then for a bag of chips from the hamper, then for one of the maps they’d bought when they’d gassed up.
And every time she went over that seat, Marcus nearly drove right off the road, because her denim-clad rump and her creamy naked torso had been right there for the taking, had he a mind to take them—which he did—and the freedom of movement to manage it—which he didn’t. But, gee, they’d have to stop eventually, wouldn’t they?
In spite of Dinah’s cockamamy idea that they’d drive straight through, Marcus couldn’t see any harm in stopping briefly at a hotel along the way to get some decent sleep.
Or something.
Yeah, maybe, he thought, this cross-country drive wasn’t such a bad idea, after all. So pressing the accelerator just the tiniest bit closer to the floor, he pushed thoughts of business aside, glanced over at his companion and said, “Hey, Dinah. How about reaching back there to get me a bottle of water?”
“Sure thing, Marcus.” She unhooked her seatbelt and joked, “Don’t wreck,” as she knelt on the seat and turned backward to accommodate his request.
Inescapably his attention drifted from the road to the nicely rounded bottom that was now right at eye level, and at the tantalizing band of flesh that peeked out between her blue jeans and sweater. And he tried really hard to steer his gaze back to the highway. Unfortunately, his eyes were slow to follow his command, because Dinah chose that moment to shift positions, and the sway of her rump was just too tempting to ignore. By the time Marcus did finally remember to pay attention to what he was doing, it was too late.
There, dead center of the highway—ooh, bad choice of words, he thought vaguely—were about a million flashing red-and-blue lights fixed atop roughly a billion emergency response vehicles. In one rapid, crystal clear instant, Marcus accomplished several things. He reminded himself that Dinah wasn’t buckled in. He threw his right arm across the back of her legs in a valiant, if totally futile, effort to protect her. He stomped his foot hard on the brake.
And he hoped like hell he could stop in time.
Three
Then she ceased to think at all, because her back was slamming into the dashboard, the SUV was skittering sideways and the tires were crunching over what sounded very much like death. But, strangely, of all the scary realizations running through Dinah’s cognitive system in that moment, one rose way above all the others: Marcus has his hand on my butt. What the…?
Then that thought, too, evaporated. Not because Marcus’s hand moved, but because the SUV stopped. The SUV stopped, but Dinah’s heart kept racing. Which meant, she finally understood, that she was alive.
“Um, Marcus?” she finally asked in a very small voice.
“Yes, Dinah?” His voice, she noted, was remarkably steady.
“What, uh…what exactly just happened?”
“Well, Dinah, we, um…we almost died.”
“That’s what I thought. Marcus?”
“Yes, Dinah?”
“You can, uh…you can take your hand off my, uh, my, um… You can take your hand off me now.”
Only then did he seem to realize where she’d landed, but instead of jerking his hand off of her bottom, which was pretty much what Dinah had figured he would do, Marcus only gazed at her blindly for a moment and continued to keep his hand right where it was.
Which, Dinah decided vaguely, actually wasn’t such a bad thing. Especially when he opened his hand more fully over her fanny and curled his fingers more intimately against her, sending a shot of white-hot need rocketing through her entire body.
Oh, my.
“Marcus?” she said, her voice trembling. She was stunned by the unmistakable passion and desire that darkened his eyes. But he wasn’t supposed to be feeling passionate or full of desire. Not here, in the middle of I-5 South. Not now, when they’d both just been snatched from the jaws of death. Not with her, someone who had two X chromosomes.
Then, suddenly, Dinah understood. They really had just been snatched from the jaws of death. And didn’t she recall something from a college Psych 101 class about people becoming more sexually active after a brush with death, because the sex act was so ultimately life-affirming?
Or had she read that in a copy of True Confessions magazine? She always got those two confused.
At any rate, that was surely what was at the root of Marcus’s reaction now. He’d just narrowly escaped death. At this point, he’d probably be turned on by anyone who was processing oxygen. And Dinah was most definitely doing that, if her still ragged breathing was any indication.
“Are you okay?” he asked, scattering her jumbled thoughts.
She nodded, unable to say a word, uncertain what to say, even if she could speak.
He inhaled a deep breath and closed his eyes tightly, and Dinah took advantage of his preoccupation to scramble back into her seat. After that, anything else they might have said—or done—was prevented by the arrival of a police officer, tapping at the driver’s side window.
With one last fortifying breath, Marcus rolled down the window and pasted on a phony smile. “Is there a problem, officer?” he asked very politely.
She studied her watch and thought about her five million dollars. And she wondered what else on this trip could go wrong.
Shortly after daybreak Saturday morning, Marcus awoke in the passenger seat from a nap that had been anything but restful, just in time to see a sign that read, “You are now leaving Denby, Arizona. Have a nice day.”
He snagged the map from the pocket in the door beside him and scanned it until he found Denby, his gaze traveling a lot farther west than he’d hoped it would. He shook his head ruefully. They weren’t making good time at all. At this rate, Dinah would be lucky to claim a coat check ticket, if not a lottery jackpot. They were going to have to do something to pick up the speed.
“You want to change drivers again?” he asked as he launched himself into a full-body stretch. Or at least as much of a full-body stretch as the cramped vehicle would allow. He braced his forearms against the ceiling and extended his legs forward as far as he could, then pushed hard. Oh, boy, that felt good.
Dinah seemed to be feeling pretty good herself, because when she glanced over at him, her eyes went wide with…something. Something warm. Something wild. Something that looked very much like…appreciation? Well, well, well. Maybe he’d finally discovered the secret to attracting her attention. Take her on a road trip, drive all night and almost get her killed, then, when exhaustion started to kick in, boom, she was his.
Okay, so maybe she wasn’t quite his. Not yet, anyway. She was, clearly, exhausted. Faint purple crescents smudged her eyes, and she looked sort of limp all over. Although she, too, had napped briefly during the night, he knew she hadn’t actually
slept. Despite the fact that they were making lousy time, they really were going to have to stop somewhere before long to get some proper sleep.
Or something.
“Maybe when we stop for breakfast we can switch,” she said, returning her attention to the road ahead, and Marcus’s attention to the matter at hand.
He gazed through the windshield, too, and saw a long, black ribbon of highway bisecting two vast plains of colorless nothingness. “Where?” he asked. “Looks like we’re out in the middle of nowhere.”
“There was nothing in the last town, but the next one is only about a half hour away. We can find something there.”
Marcus wondered if he should introduce into the conversation what was no doubt on both their minds, or let them both go on being deluded for a while longer. Ultimately, though, he decided, What the hell, and said, “You realize, of course, that we’re making remarkably bad time.”
Dinah said nothing, only kept her gaze fixed on the road.
“Dinah?” he prodded.
She expelled a restless sound. “We can make it up. We still have plenty of time.”
“We’re going to have to stop at hotel tonight to get some decent sleep.”
She shook her head. “That won’t be necessary.”
“Dinah…”
“We’ll make it.”
“I’m just thinking it might be better if we—”
“We’ll make it, Marcus. We’ll make it.”
Hoo-kay, he thought, relenting. Score one for delusion. And speaking of delusions…
“So tell me some more about this family curse,” he said suddenly. Maybe, if nothing else, he could get Dinah to admit that the family curse thing was a lot of hooey.
“What about it?” she asked.
“You don’t honestly buy into all that hoodoo. Do you? I mean, we could catch a plane at the next big city, and—”
“No.” Her reply was swift and adamant.
A Forbidden Affair Page 18
