Ever Tempted (15 page)

“Yeah. You have trouble. Go on.”

“Well, this time, I was groggy for longer afterward than I ever had been. I was exhausted from hunting.” I cleared my throat.

Allie stopped tapping and gripped the armrest.

“She was in my room when I returned. I entered with no idea there was anyone there. I was sort of between shifts in my mind, I suppose. On the bed, in the dark, there was a nude woman with the same color hair and a body very similar to yours. I thought you’d come to find me and had been successful. Only after I was indisposed, did my vision right itself and my senses fully return.”

Allie’s knuckles went white. She shook her head. “Please. Tell me you didn’t.”

“No. Of course not. But things did happen before I realized you weren’t there with me.” I was in hell.

Allie faced me. “What things?”

I winced and took a deep breath. “We kissed.” I took her rigid hand. “But I swear, I stopped after a few seconds. I needed you so badly that I guess I just thought it was you. I don’t know. I sent her away. I thought I would simply come home and tell you what I’d done, but before I could, the same girl showed up at the house looking for a job.”

Allie leaned her head back on the headrest as a tear trickled down her cheek. She didn’t speak, but left her limp hand in mine.

“Say something.”

“You don’t want me to. Not right now.” She closed her eyes.

I put her hand on the armrest and stared out the window beside her. I should have told her as soon as everything started, but things had a way of snowballing.

And they say snowballs don’t have a chance in hell.

The Rollins Manor seemed almost foreign. The summer air was thick and heavy, dark clouds looming over the towering wings of the house. The grass was a little longer than I preferred to see it, and the bushes under the windows had grown stray sprigs as if they’d been neglected.

In my absence, the groundskeepers would probably slack on their duties.

Allie straightened her hair and pressed the wrinkles out of her pants suit as she stepped out of the car. She maintained her refusal to make eye contact.

My stomach had seven thousand butterflies fighting for the same space, and her silence did nothing to help matters.

Dalton made no rush as he sauntered toward the car to collect our bags. He leaned on the rear quarter panel and folded his arms. “It’s about time you got back. That personal assistant of yours is trying to make me wear a uniform. I’ll quit before I’m seen dead in a penguin suit.”

Allie patted Dalton’s shoulder as she stared up at the house with determination. “Don’t worry. I’ll put her in her place.”

That statement stabbed me in the gut.

Irritated, I grabbed our bags and busied myself with loading them on the cart.

“I’ll see you inside. I have a bitch to fire or kill, whichever I decide to do first.” Allie finally looked straight at me. “And Dalton, please take Cole’s bags to his cottage. He’ll be sleeping out there indefinitely.”

I bumped my head on the trunk lid. “Dammit.”

Dalton stared after Allie who was already on her way inside. “She’s fired up about something.”

“Yeah. You could say that. Would you bring these in? I need to catch up to her before she does something stupid.” I shoved the cart to Dalton.

“Trouble in paradise already.” Dalton shook his head as he took the handle.

“Just shut up and bring the bags.” I raced in after Allie.

Five staff members stood in the corner, one with a clipboard and the others listening.

Allie was nowhere to be seen.

“It’s about damned time.” Shelby glared at me from the living room entrance.

“Where’s Allie?” My heart slammed in my chest. A slow ache started in my temple.

“Kaitlyn’s doing damage control. As usual. Don’t worry. She’s got your wife in the cottage talking her off the ledge.” Shelby waved me into the living room. “And as for Grace, I drugged her. She should be out long enough for us to talk. I did a little binding spell to keep Grace inside her until the body dies.”

Apprehensively, I followed her.

Shelby plopped on the sofa and regarded her nails with a sly grin. “Boy, do we ever have some catching up to do.”

“I’d say. Since when were you able to cast spells?” I went to the fireplace. Someone had decided a painting of Grace Rollins needed to stare down over the living room.

“Seems I’ve always been able to do it. I just didn’t know that’s what I was doing.” Shelby busied herself with straightening her blouse.

“Where did she find this?” Her eyes seemed to see everything in the room and dig into her audience’s soul. Grace may have been beautiful, but the painting was unnerving.

“Upstairs. Ava had all the paintings she hated most hid away. Grace found it, restored it to its original beauty, she said, and had it placed where that hideous aerial picture of the grounds used to be. Her words.”

“I painted that hideous picture. Never mind. Where did you put the witch?” I faced Shelby.

Shelby scowled. “She’s resting comfortably in the pit under the house. With all the other dead carcasses. When the body dies, the spell will wear off. Then Grace is free. I’ll have to think up something new to keep her occupied after that.”

“Great. Another dead body to answer for.”

“Again, I’ve got it handled. Are you still planning on adding another episode to Cole Kinsley’s A Hundred Ways to Die?”

Allie and Kaitlyn appeared in the doorway.

Allie looked to Shelby and then to me. She shook her head and started up the staircase.

Kaitlyn stopped me with a hand on my chest at the living room threshold. “Wait. We need to talk.”

“I can’t imagine what could be more pressing than convincing my wife to leave this place so she doesn’t die too. In the meantime, I hope you can come up with a damned good plan on how to deal with Grace when she wakes up.”

“A little more notice would have been nice.” Pushing her hair behind her ear, she gave me a more serious gaze. “All jesting aside, we might be able to help more than you thought. Turns out we have a familial tie to a witch.”

“Good. Maybe you can bewitch Allie into forgiving me.” I was half-serious. A dizzy spell sent my hand to the curved stone threshold for balance. “I need to sit down.”

“Come on. Sit with us a few minutes before you make any more mistakes we can’t fix.” Kaitlyn took my arm and led me to the sofa. “Have you been eating properly, you know, to keep up your strength? You’re not very helpful when you’re unconscious.”

“Only once. I thought it would be enough.”

“You know better. Anyway, after we talk, you should go eat and let Allie release some steam. She’s extremely hurt. Anything she said to you right now would be out of anger. It would do neither of you any good.”

“And you’re bitchier than Grace when you’re raw meat deprived.” Shelby went to the fireplace and took down the painting. She put her knee through the center.

“I’ll try to work on that.” I sneered at her.

“I think you’re probably truly going to pass out when I tell you what we’ve found, but I’m going to trust you the way you need to start trusting your friends and family. You do have a support circle now. Stop trying to run from the pain and the struggle. We’re here for you.” Kaitlyn gazed at me with deep-seated concern. “The chest you told us to locate had pictures of you when you were a boy, pictures of your father, and documents you really should have taken the time to search through before you did away with it.”

“At the time, I was too busy dodging bullets Allie kept shooting at me. What did the documents say?” I braced my head between my hands and fought off nausea.

Kaitlyn sat down beside me. “A lot. There were old newspaper clippings. They were about to fall apart, but they were still legible. First let me tell you about the spell books. We’ve begun searching through the books to find out what spell she used to create this curse of yours. I think we’ll be able to put a stop to Grace. Right now, you need to focus on Allie.”

“It’s going to take more than a little sweet talking to get her to forgive me. I messed up bad this time.”

“I’m pretty sure Ava probably knew about our past before she hired us. I’ve heard plenty of people say she never made an uninformed decision.” Kaitlyn stared at the same vacant space I stared at. She sighed. “I think she knew in the end we would rid this house of the curse and Grace. I think she knew we were more than capable.”

I massaged my temples.

“Only the person who laid the curse on you can take it off, right? Well, if we can find a loophole we might be able to end this whole thing once and for all.” Kaitlyn patted my arm. “It’s going to be okay. I have a feeling.”

“You and your feelings.” I looked up.

She retracted her hand. “Hey, my feelings have gotten you out of a world of shit before. You should trust them more than you do.”

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice right now, do I?” The hurt in her expression stabbed me. “I’m sorry. Allie being so angry with me has me cranky.”

Kaitlyn stood and rounded the living room furniture. She gave me a warm smile. “And you not giving the animal more of what it needs isn’t helping. While we do more research on how to stop curses or slingshot them back at the person who laid them, I need you to regain Allie’s trust. We’re all going to have to work together, and I don’t need you two arguing to distract me.”

* * * *

That night, the doors to Allie’s room were locked.

In the 1800s, that gesture meant the wife was too angry with the husband to visit with him. In the twenty-first century, that hadn’t changed. Begging and pleading through the door would probably do me no good, so I did the next best thing.

I ensured her safety.

Holding a full oil lantern—I preferred those to flashlights—I bounded down the basement steps and shoved open the old door to the catacombs. The musty basement smell instantly changed to moist earth. A normal human wouldn’t have detected the slight stench of death, but I did. It came from the pit.

I couldn’t leave the carnage of my every-other-day-buffet in the woods. I had to conceal the carnage. Hunters could easily figure out that something was amiss if I left half-eaten carcasses strewn all over the woods. So deep under the Rollins Manor, I hid the evidence.

Allie had found the pit in one of the worst ways imaginable in her first few weeks knowing me, so I figured the twins felt it only fitting that Grace should lie in the macabre pit of death until her body met its demise. If Grace were even remotely aware of her surroundings, she was fit to be tied.

I grinned as the odor of decay grew thicker in the air.

I fanned my lantern over the pit and found Grace.

She was just where Shelby said she’d be.

Where she belonged.

Lying flat on a bed of rotting animal corpses. Snoring.

I would have found more humor in the situation if I wasn’t in so much trouble.

I couldn’t imagine Kaitlyn had thought of such a punishment.

Shelby. Definitely.

She was the vindictive one.

Kaitlyn might have tied her to a bed somewhere, but Shelby wouldn’t have given her anything close to four-star treatment.

I went back through the tunnel.

The waterfall was at the end of one of them. Past it was an open field that stretched for miles. I could use the run to burn off some steam. And eat.

I willed the burn to start in my bones. It didn’t.

I ducked my head and waited for the fur to stab through my arms. Nothing happened.

Grace was asleep. What if the whole curse was asleep?

Of all nights for Allie to have me locked out of her room.

After an enormous amount of red meat and peanut butter and anything else in the house that would give me instant protein, I finally found peace enough to sleep, but not without a terrible headache while I searched for dreamland.

* * * *

The next morning, I knocked on Allie’s door. It shoved open with the pressure.

As I started in, I heard her thoughts above me somewhere in the house, not in this room.

If I wasn’t so mad at him right now, I’d find this picture absolutely adorable.
Allie let the wall of anger that normally shielded me from hearing her down just long enough for me to search her out.

In order to keep her from running, I took the service stairs in the back of the house to the fourth floor. The elevator was so noisy she would have detected my ascent. I could picture her running down the stairs to flee from me.

Someone had cleared the cobwebs from their corners and aired out the hallway.

The center room was just as stuffy as it had always been. Boxes stacked against the walls, sheet-covered furniture, tarnished wall-mounted candleholders, but no Allie.

I found her in the last room on the right wing of the house. She sat in the midst of newspaper clippings, old photos and books spread all over the room.

She held up a picture of a boy. Me in the first life. “You looked pissed.”

“I didn’t like photos.” I took it from her and gazed at the stranger staring back at me.

“How did Eliza have this? You looked younger than you said you were when we met.”

“She was a crazy stalker. According to Pop, she followed us all over the state. This one had to have come from a plantation we worked at before the Rollins Plantation. As for the picture, the hormones in food that causes eleven-year-old boys to grow chest hair didn’t exist then.”

“If she was stalking you, it’s likely we’ll find some of your underwear in here too?”

“My dad’s. Not mine. She was crazy, but she didn’t come across as a pedophile.”

“She gave Grace her power to torment you for an eternity. I think she must have seen some of your father in you.” Allie regarded another photo. “I see where your good looks started.”

I took the picture and stared into my mother’s worried face. My heart lurched.

Mama’s fear for me and my father was seated in her eyes even when she tried to hide it with a smile. My mother was so beautiful inside and out.

I missed her so much. “At a time like this, I would have asked Mama what to do.”