Hacienda Moon (The Path Seekers) (25 page)

25

Tandie sat inside Chelby Rose, rocking back and forth, her chest pounding with grief. Feeling like a prisoner of her mind, she held the necklace with the combined charms of both Alice and Breena. Eliza never stood a chance against those two monsters.

Like his daughter, Thomas fathered a child outside of wedlock which meant that Ella and Alice were both enemies and sisters in love with the same man, Enrique Fontalvo.

Tandie sat at the base of the stairs, her legs too weak to stand. Burying her head between her knees, she tried to ground the spinning room. Fear and sorrow had won. It was too much. She should never have come here. Taking on the spirits of two witches was something
beyond her ability.

Knocks echoed around her. Were they real or part of a vision? She couldn’t tell the difference anymore. And she didn’t have any strength left to answer the door even if they were genuine. Slamming her hands over her ears, she willed the taps to stop; and they did. For the longest moment, there was only silence.

And then Tandie opened her eyes and focused her teary vision on Eric Fontalvo kneeling beside her, sadness in his handsome face. A flush of adrenaline tingled through her body. “You came back to me,” she said and threw her arms around his neck. He embraced her, pulling her body up against his. “Oh my God, where have you been?” she whispered in his ear, enjoying his scent and wanting to savor the taste of him. “I thought you were never coming back.”

“Are you kidding? And miss the chance to see you suit up in the paint shorts again? Don’t think so.” He pulled back, stared in her eyes, and wiped away her tears with his thumb. “We still have to finish the roof, and the--”

“Shut up and kiss me before I scream,” Tandie said. She had barely finished the sentence when he scooped her up in his arms.

On the way up the stairs, he parted her lips with his, exploring her mouth with his tongue. A groan or something like a moan, or maybe even a growl came from the back of his throat. It was a hungry kiss, one that had crossed over centuries of time, waiting to be experienced again.

Tandie stopped breathing as Eric carried her up to the bedroom she hardly ever slept in. And for the first time since she arrived, she looked forward to being in her master bedroom. Chelby Rose belonged to her now. It felt right that she and Eric would consummate their relationship in this house.

Moving closer to the bed, he deepened their kiss. Tandie ran her fingers through his thick hair, something she’d wanted to do since they first met. The strands were soft and silky just like she knew they would be. A fire ignited in her belly, spreading through her body, and her heart filled with a joy she didn’t realize she could still experience.

Her feet touched cold floorboards. Coordinated as always, Eric set her down without breaking their kiss. It was as if they were two lifelines, one providing the air to keep the other one going. Two people scarred by a past colored by relationships with the wrong people were getting to know one another on an intimate level. There wasn’t a thing wrong with that. Tonight was well worth the wait.

Tandie tugged at the white tee shirt he was wearing, her fingers grazing over his skin as she grasped it. He shuddered and moved his lips away long enough for her to pull it over his head and toss it to the side. He then moved back down to her lips, resuming their kiss with even more passion. His hands moved over the contours of her body, down to her thighs, where he grasped the hem of her dress. Outside the window, that annoying tree tapped away and the infamous Bolivian wind howled on. But nothing could stop the sinfully sweet sensations flowing through Tandie’s body at the moment.

Eric’s hands grazed her bare skin now. He slid her dress up to her throat. Moving back for yet another second, he lifted the dress over her head, tossed it, and pulled her body to him. His bare skin on hers set all of her nerve endings on fire at once.

Tandie moved her hands to the button on his jeans, unsnapping them. Eric wiggled free of both his jeans and his briefs in a flash. Tandie was grateful for his assistance. She would never have gotten them off without busting up the moment. They shared a small laugh as if he’d read her mind and then fell back on the bed behind them.

Legs and arms tangled together, led by a kiss like none Tandie had ever experienced before. His sleek hands popped the hook on her bra and his mouth left hers, leaving her swollen lips yearning for its return. He worked his way down to her nipples, covering them in heat from his mouth as he kissed, tugged, and sucked all together. Tandie arched her back up to him, losing herself in raw pleasure.

Gasping, she called out his name. In response, he moved to her waist, slid his fingers between the elastic on top her panties, and slid them down her legs, dropping them away from her feet. And then he crushed her body against his, lifted her left leg over his thigh, and moved his hand between her legs, gently massaging her sex, wet with pleasure.

“Damn, you’re blowing my mind,” he whispered. “Put your hands on me.” And she did, running her hands up and down his erection, feeling him jerk each time her thumb grazed the sensitive tip.

At once he moved over the top of her, his erection positioned between her legs. But the expression on his face was a pained one, and his eyes were closed.
A struggle.
That’s what he was doing. Deciding how far to go. “If we do this, I don’t know what might happen,” he whispered.

“And if we don’t, then do we wait another three hundred years?” Tandie asked, watching him frown. “I dreamed about you before I ever met you. You’re everywhere. My mind, my visions, my book.” He smiled, and a flash of recognition moved across his face. “You’ve seen something too, haven’t you?” His silence answered for him.
What did he see?

“Take away my pain, this loneliness. Show me that you believe I need you,” Tandie whispered. His mouth came down on hers, hungry as before, not weakening at all.

“Protection,” he said, bringing a hitch of reality back with him. He hopped off the bed, fumbled in his pants, and returned with a foil packet.

“Do you always carry condoms around?” Tandie asked.

He gave her a wicked look as he straddled her legs and ripped open the packet. “Tandie, I wasn’t exactly a priest before I came here.”

“Oh. Okay,” she said, watching him work the rubber up his enticingly gorgeous shaft, and feeling a touch jealous of the other women. His entire body was perfect: dark hair tousled over smoldering eyes, ripped abs, muscular arms, and satiny dark skin…a Spanish Adonis.

Bending back down, he clamped on to her breast, and she was a waterfall again, her love a liquid feeding a higher power. Eric moved back to her lips, kissing and exploring her mouth until she writhed underneath him. “No more waiting,” he said, plunging inside her with one well-timed thrust. She cried out and grasped his buttocks, shifting his fullness in and out of her in a rhythm that rocked every organ in her body.

No other man existed. She had found her soul mate, the one who completed her. Against all odds, they had returned to one another.

Tandie and Eric came together many more times as they swept away two and a half centuries’ worth of waiting. 

* * *

Eric had always believed he would never again feel the mind blowing ecstasy he felt when he and Tandie shared their bodies. Like himself, she was lonely, hurt, rejected in a sense. And that dark part of her soul called to him.
Why?
Because he felt the same way. Tortured by a curse that kept him at a distance from the women in his life, Eric’s relationships had suffered. But then one day he spotted Tandie in that airport. Life as he knew it changed. There was an instant connection, a charge that rattled something in both his mind and heart.

It had been a long time since Eric made love to anyone. A few flings had colored the last few months of his life after his breakup with Lisa, nothing more. And he had wanted it to stay that way. He didn’t want to bring his house of pain down on another innocent woman the way all of his ancestors had done.

But Tandie not only ignited him sexually, she also set his heart to beating again. Her body, so perfect and superbly responsive, called to him. The things she said last night drifted through his mind. She had wanted to know if he’d experienced anything supernatural. He never mentioned seeing the ghostly light outside of her grandmother’s cottage or the little girl who healed his wound with her touch. And he most definitely didn’t utter a word about the dream he had of a man making love to a woman as they lay on a mattress made of straw, or the sexual feelings that rocked his body when he woke up.

Tandie wanted him to believe the two of them were the reincarnated spirits of Enrique and Alice. Even though he didn’t say a word when she asked for his thoughts last night, a deep part of him did believe it could be true. What other explanation could there be for his dream about making love to a woman who bore an incredible resemblance to the one lying beside him?

He would try hard to believe for the woman sleeping so peacefully next to him. For Tandie he would fight through a lifetime of curses just to see a smile on that beautiful face. And he was going to find a way to keep her safe no matter what he had to do.

After watching her sleep for the past hour or so, Tandie finally began to stir. Her face was calm, and she barely tossed or turned as she slept last night, a breathtaking beauty. The painful way she looked when he found her slumped on the stairway last night had vanished. Eric made a mental promise that she’d never suffer that way again.

“Wow, that sun is super bright this morning.” Tandie draped her arm over her face.

“If there’s truly a Broken Heart Curse, then I’m pretty sure we fired it up last night,” Eric said jokingly, trying to hide the worry in his voice.

He rolled over, propped up on his elbow, and stared down at her. She moved her arm away and gave him a sexy smirk. How could he think clearly with her looking at him that way? And those eyes, one light brown and one hazel-green, could hold him under her spell forever. As if she read his thoughts, she smiled and closed them.

“I know what happened to Alice, Rose, and the Chelby boys,” Tandie declared, her eyes still closed. Sighing, she described the things that took place in her vision with Rose Chelby. She told him about Alice getting buried alive while she was pregnant with Enrique’s second child. And she mentioned how her grandmother explained the way to break the Cropsey’s curses. There was a trinity: Breena’s pinky ring, Alice’s heart, and something else called the lucky one. The items represented the three babies who met early deaths.

Each cruelty, everything she told him, dug deeper into his soul. Clenching his jaw, he thought of his brother.

“You saw all of that in a vision?” Eric said, his mind swimming with curiosity.

“Not everything. I still don’t know what happened to Eliza Chelby. For some reason, I feel like I have to know.”

“And Enrique?” Eric asked.

“Cursed by Mary Jean’s words.”

“The words of the witch,” Eric said, his face hardening. “They’re what killed my father. We’re always leaving widows to raise children by themselves.” He gave her a long sad look. No one should be put through that. It’s why he resisted Tandie for so long.  “My parents always believed the Cropsey’s curse was responsible.”