Matt listened with an increasing sense of seriousness. To his credit, he didn’t do much more than wrinkle his nose when she told him of how his own past life perished. Instead, he just sat there watching her speak, the wheels constantly turning in his mind.
“So, was that it?” he asked her, tapping a finger to his brow. “Dabney killed Matthew and you woke up?”
“Well, no,” she admitted, though she was rather reluctant to speak of her own death. He must have sensed it, because Matt gestured for her to continue. “After…after Matthew died, Elizabeth couldn’t stand the thought of being with Lord Dabney again, so…” Ellie swallowed hard. She could do this. “So, she threw herself off the cliffs.”
“Then the stories were true, how tragic.”
“I know. It’s awful. But she figured that since she was the object of his desire that if she died, he would somehow be lost too. I must say, it seemed to make much more sense in her head than it does mine. I have no idea how curses work, but it just seems to have been passed along to each generation. From what I can tell, when the next Hargrove woman comes of age, James shows up to see if she is his long, lost love; that is to say, me. If she’s not, all evidence indicates that he leaves her alone. If she is, well, she doesn’t live much longer than their meeting. Every time Elizabeth and Matthew are reincarnated they die. What?” she asked, suddenly self-conscious. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Matt simply continued to grin. “I just love it when you get all scholarly like that on me.” Moving in, he laid a kiss on her lips, then slumped back against the pillows once more. “It’s just so damn sexy.”
Though she smiled at his charm, Ellie couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right. “Your sister said there wasn’t much time. What do you think she meant?”
Matt scoffed. “She was probably just trying to add some dramatic effect. You don’t know Phoebe like I do. She loves to do that stuff to the tourists. Says they just eat it up. Makes her a right foul git sometimes, if you ask me, but she has quite a few repeat customers, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Worry furrowed Ellie’s brow. “But what about the cards? She couldn’t have stacked the deck like that, could she?”
“Of course, she could. She’s a professional.”
“But would she?”
Matt thought a moment, before pursing his lips. “Well, no, probably not, especially after seeing how serious you were about the whole thing. But hey, don’t worry. We’re going to figure this out. I promise.”
“Yeah. I suppose.” Getting up, Ellie began searching for her clothes.
“What are you doing?” he asked, sitting up again.
Ellie tugged on her jeans and threw a sweater over her head, before reaching for her boots. “I just a need a little air. I’m okay,” she assured him, and he sat back once more. “I just need to get away from this room and all things Elizabeth for a few minutes.” With one last, quick kiss, she headed for the door. “If I’m not back in half an hour, come find me.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Chuckling, Matt snuggled down into the covers and Ellie left the room, shutting the door behind her.
CHAPTER 16
The house was quiet. Almost eerily so. Usually, even when most of the staff were sleeping, there was somebody lurking around the halls for one reason or another. Tonight, however, she found the long, lavishly decorated corridors completely deserted.
Retrieving her coat, Ellie walked out onto the terrace and stared at the ocean. A cold wind whipped around her, sending her red hair cascading out around her shoulders. She loved the English coastline at night. It was almost magical, the way the waves crashed against the cliffs, and the white rocks of the cliff face gleamed in the moonlight. She could stand there staring at it for hours. She only wished she could do so without worrying whether she was going to make it through the night.
Walking out a bit further, Ellie clinched her coat tighter around her neck and leaned against the stone ledge of the terrace.
“Are you waiting for me?” a deep voice asked from out of the darkness.
Ellie jumped violently. She squinted into the night, trying to decipher where the voice was coming from, but she was unable to see so much as an outline of a body. “Who’s there?”
The man laughed coldly, and a tremble of fear played down Ellie’s spine. “Why, I’m insulted you don’t know, Elizabeth,” he said. She was certain he was getting closer. “After all, you are my wife.”
Stepping from the shadows, James stood before her, looking as handsome as he ever did in his long, brown coat. His dark eyes were so menacing at that moment that they were almost black. He was staring at her as if she were the canary he finally managed to catch. He just stood there; the cat, licking his lips.
Suddenly, Ellie felt more like Elizabeth than she ever had since coming here. “I am not your wife,” she declared, squaring her shoulders and staring him down. Where she got the nerve to do so, she wasn’t sure. “And quite frankly, I don’t think Elizabeth was either. You may have gotten her to marry you because she was obeying her father, you may have gotten her in your bed because that was her duty, but you tricked her into thinking she wanted all of that.”
James laughed, and she wondered how she ever could have found the sound pleasant. “My dear, love is a trick. I merely seduced you into believing I was everything you wanted.” Hatred flashed in his eyes, and overhead, thunder pounded across the heavens. “I could have been everything you wanted. I still could. But you’ve always chosen that McKinnon over all the riches and treasures I could ever give you. He is not worthy of you.”
“You’re wrong.” Her voice was hardly above a whisper, but it was coated in steel. “He is every bit as worthy of me as I am of him. He is a good man, with a kind heart and a keen mind. He cares about more than my body and fortune. He doesn’t need treasures and riches. He is everything I could ever want. It’s you, James, who are not worthy of me. And you never have been.”
Lighting flashed against the cliff, casting his features in anger in the bright light. The sickeningly sweet smell of roses drifted through the air, and Ellie used her sweater to cover her nose and mouth, determined not to fall for his seduction.
“I could have given you everything. Fortune, a home, a child. I did give you those things!” he insisted, he voice rising to an unnaturally high octave. Ellie winced. “All I asked for in return was a cooperative wife that would ensure my name did not get dragged into the mud like my idiot father who squandered all of our wealth!”
Ellie’s eyes widened in surprise. “So, you couldn’t give her your fortune any more than you could give it to me now, could you? I knew it. You wanted her to make you rich, not the other way around. You wanted the power and prestige that came with the Hargrove name, the wealth that came from the brewery. Your vineyard was your legacy, but you had run out of the funds to keep it going, hadn’t you?” When he just stared at her, his mouth gaping like a fish, she actually giggled. “You knew she wouldn’t love you. You knew she would figure out who you were, how dangerous and obsessively deranged you were. You knew she was in love with Matthew.
“So, you seduced her instead. But what kills me, is that you didn’t even believe you could do that on your own. You tried and failed, didn’t you? Probably even multiple times. So, you turned to black magic instead. What did you use, James? A love potion? Did you diffuse it into a scent as well? I know you were slipping her something to drink, just like I know you put something on the roses you brought me the other day. You used whatever aid you had to get her and me to do your bidding by manipulating us sexually.
“But you miscalculated, didn’t you? You believed that you could just control someone like that and get away with it, but you were wrong, weren’t you? Elizabeth had already found her soul mate. Matthew McKinnon was her soul mate. And there was no way you could separate the two of them. That kind of love, it has a power all its own. They may not have been able to be together, but that didn’t mean
that power was any less potent, or that love was any less strong. And whatever protection those kinds of feelings gave Matthew and Elizabeth that night was violated when you killed him.
“And she wasn’t about to let you get away with it, was she?” Ellie asked, watching him with a vindictive glee she was positive was not her own. In fact, she felt as if there was more than one version of herself within her mind that night, and it absolutely terrified her. “Elizabeth knew that she was the one thing you wanted above all else,” Ellie continued, staring at James as if she were daring him to disagree. Where had all this assertiveness come from? “And she made sure you could never have it. Didn’t she? She killed herself right over there, just so you would never be able to hurt anyone in the Hargrove line. Whatever dark magic you had been using backfired when she hit those rocks and you have been cursed ever since.
“I bet you lost everything. I bet the fact that your family was penniless became the talk of the town, and I bet, no matter how many years you have lived, waiting to reclaim it, that you are still worth next to nothing.” Glaring at him, she smirked. “And I bet you hate it. Well, it serves you right, doesn’t it? Your curse doesn’t just affect you, James, it affects Matt and me as well. And I hope you die knowing it was your own fault that things turned out this way.” Her chest heaving, Ellie stood there, mere steps away from him, and wondered if she had just made the biggest mistake of her life.
Yet, to her astonishment, James simply began to laugh. “Ah,” he said, gathering himself once more. “There you are, Elizabeth. It’s so nice to finally see you again, after all of these years.”
“I wish I could say the same.” Ellie clapped a hand to her mouth. The words had been issued from her lips, but it was not her that said them. Could it really be Elizabeth speaking to him like that? Or had she finally lost her mind?
“Welcome back, my dear,” James crooned, slowly walking towards her. “I have missed you deeply. It has been too long.”
James reached for her hand, but Ellie instinctively stepped back and his hand dropped away. Thunder echoed behind the house. Was he somehow controlling the storm? Or was it just a coincidence that there was a wild storm, both when Elizabeth took her own life and now?
“You may think of me as you wish,” he told her, “but you would never have been susceptible to my charms had you not already been attracted to me.”
Alarmed, Ellie clenched her fist. “That isn’t true.”
“Oh, but it is, my love. It was always true. You were in love with McKinnon, yes. And somehow, your infatuation with him allowed you to shirk my advances and later break the spell my potion had cast on you. But in your own way, you were attracted to me, too. You were in love with me, too.”
“No.”
“Yes. You enjoyed the flirtations. You enjoyed my hands on you. You enjoyed the possibility that maybe, if you let yourself fall a bit, you could have everything you ever wanted. And a part of you wondered if I would be the one to give it to you. I did not force you to marry me, Elizabeth. Your father took care of that. And you married me without issue, not just because it was your duty as a daughter and your contribution to your family, but because somewhere in that flippant little heart of yours, you wanted to know what it was like to be the wife of a wealthy Lord. You wanted to parade me around on your arm like whatever new dress you were sporting that week, and show me off, trying to impress your friends. Part of you had to want me, you see, or my spell would never work.”
“I didn’t want you then, and I don’t want you now,” Ellie insisted, but she could already feel her resolve beginning to weaken. Could what he was saying be true?
“The ironic part of it all,” James told her, “was that I truly did love you. And I knew, if we gave it a shot, that one day, you could love me too. You were mine, and you were going to stay mine. One day, you would understand.”
“Then why force me?”
“I simply did not have time to wait.” In the moonlight, she could see that his expression was completely unrepentant. “Nor do I have time to wait now.”
CHAPTER 17
He started forward, and Ellie took a few more backward steps, until she found her back pressed up against the wall of the house. “That isn’t love,” she said quietly, and James froze on the stone steps. “You say you were in love with me, but that kind of want, that kind of possession, that isn’t love. You didn’t love me. You were obsessed.”
For a few seconds that seemed to string out into an eternity, they stared at one another, neither sure which one of them was going to move first. And then James lunged forward, seizing her around the waist and lifting her off her feet. Though she kicked and struggled, his hold on her only increased, until she could barely breathe within his grip. Unable to break free, Ellie cried out; soft at first, as she tried to catch her breath, then stronger and louder until she saw a light come on upstairs.
“Matt!” she screamed, hoping he or someone else would hear her. “Matt, it’s James! He’s here! Help me!”
James roughly turned her over and threw her over his shoulder, his strong, muscular arms, pinning her to him. He made it down the stone steps from the terrace and out into the grass.
Was he taking her towards the cliffs? Did he believe that if he couldn’t have her, no one could? She knew all her other past lives had ended badly, that both she and Matt were quite possibly going to die tonight, yet somehow, that didn’t scare her nearly as much as the thought of going over those cliffs and down into the ocean that absolutely terrified her. She had already died that way once tonight. She was in absolutely no hurry to do it again.
Suddenly, the door from the house crashed open and light streamed out from around the frame. Matt came charging down the steps in nothing but his sweatpants and a pair of slippers like a running bull. He hit James in the small of his back, sending the other man plummeting forward. He dropped Ellie unceremoniously to the ground with a loud thud.
She landed on her side, her arm twisting at an odd angle beneath her, her head smacking into a round rock half buried in the earth. Ellie felt as if she was watching the world move in slow motion. Time itself seemed to be cracking, and her past and present lives collided in a blurred movie behind her eyes. The effect was disorienting.
How many times had some version of this happened? How many times had the soul of Elizabeth Hargrove had to watch her enemy murder the man she loved? The endless cycle repeated on a loop with every reincarnation, and from where she lay, Ellie was helpless to stop it.
Matt charged James again, hitting him hard in the stomach, and the two of them went splaying out across the grass, perilously close to the edge of the cliff. Fists pounded into flesh, the sound of impact echoing into the night, followed by a ridiculously loud clap of thunder and a bright flash of lightning.
She couldn’t tell who was winning. She was desperate for it to be Matt, but she knew in her heart of hearts that his living through this night—that either she or him living through this night—was a long shot. Lord James Dabney had cast his curse well. Ellie trembled with fear.
It wasn’t fair, she thought, watching as both men clambered to their feet. This curse was the by-product of an obsessive greed, of the need to own and possess a woman, while still calling it love. It wasn’t right. And it had to stop.
As carefully as she could, Ellie shifted her weight so she was supporting herself on her elbow. She cried out in pain, wondering if she had cracked it, but her cry went unheard by both men as they continued to pummel each other at every chance they got.
James’s right arm shot out so quickly, catching Matt upside his jaw that Matt flew backwards, landing in the grass. He didn’t move.
Ellie managed to get both hands on the ground and heave her body upward into a push-up position. Her head was spinning. Hot, thick, blood trickled down her skin, obscuring the vision in her right eye. With her luck, she had a concussion. And, judging by the way things kept swimming in and out of blackness, she was fairly certain it was a bad one. Still
she fought to right herself.
A few yards away, James stood over Matt’s unconscious form, glaring down at him with hatred blazing across his face. Lightning flashed again, striking just beside the edge of the cliff. She could see the outline of Dover Castle in the distance, the stronghold looming in the darkness like an omen of doom. She had to keep it together. James knelt with his knees on either side of Matt and placed his hands around the other man’s neck.
The boom of thunder sounded almost gleeful.
How was he doing it? She wondered. She knew he was controlling the weather somehow. Was it part of his curse? Did he have more powers than seduction and immortality? Was that even possible? And, if it was, could she find a way to use it against him?
Beneath Dabney’s grip, Matt’s skin was turning purple, and Ellie knew time was running out. Still unsteady, she climbed slowly to her feet, ignoring the way her knees shook, as if they were threatening to let her fall.
“Help me, Elizabeth,” she murmured into the wind, feeling utterly foolish. She had to be crazy to believe in all of this, but there was no denying it was happening. Crazier still, she suddenly felt strengthened, the symptoms of her concussion disappearing.
Ellie let out a war cry as she launched herself at James. She hit him square on, her small arms wrapping around his muscular waist, her momentum propelling them both forward. They tumbled over the hard, rocky soil, away from Matt, finally stopping in a tangled heap near the cliff.
Ellie didn’t realize her mistake until it was too late. All she had been thinking about was getting James away from Matt; she hadn’t even considered what James would do to her once she had. His long, strong hands closed around her throat, and Ellie’s vision began to blur once more as he cut off all the air to her lungs.
She clawed violently at his hands, her fingernails ripping into his skin, leaving deep, bloody gouges in their wake. His grip only tightened. Ellie bucked as hard as she could with her hips, pitching him forward and forcing him to catch himself. She used his momentary distraction and his loosening fingers to twist her body to the side. He was still straddling her, but at least she was no longer making it easy.
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