Cursed by Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

her
as if he had invented kissing solely for her enjoyment while having a
legally-wedded wife tucked away somewhere.
    Except at Reds or Bengals games, yelling
was one thing she absolutely did not do or allow—no matter how provoked. Not
even the day after Halloween when her twenty-two third graders practically
scaled the classroom walls, buzzed on sugar. Yelling was strictly forbidden,
deserving of a ten-minute time-out.
    “Aren’t you going to get that?” she
asked, when the refrain repeated.
    “No point.” He reached into his pocket
and shut the thing off without checking the display. “The garage reception is
lousy, and there’s nobody I’d rather talk to than you.”
    Her heart melted a little, but her head
warned her about smooth-talking strangers. Next, he’d be offering her candy and
asking her to get into his car.
    She took a giant step back and scanned the
rows of parked cars. The Spock-eared guy from the studio stood beside a Jeep a
couple of aisles over.
    He waved and nodded. “Congratulations,”
he said. “You were the hit of the show.”
    “Thanks.” Wondering how that guy had sneaked
up on them, she waved back.
    “Yeah, thanks.” Gabe’s voice echoed off
the concrete walls.
    Funny that she hadn’t heard Spock
approaching. Had she been that focused on Gabe? Every other sound seemed to
bounce around the garage like thunder in the Grand Canyon. She waited for Spock
to get in his Jeep, but he fumbled with his keys, dropped them, and cursed.
    Accepting the twinge of uneasiness about
Gabe and Spock as fair warning to get home, she opened her car door wider. “I’d
better be going.”
    “I didn’t mean to offend you,” Gabe
rushed to say. “With what I said before. If that’s why you’re leaving. I’d
really like to continue our conversation about the Sleeping Lotus.”
    “Sure.” She maintained a careful
distance. “Let’s see what we can find out about provenance first.”
    The muscles in his jaw rippled as he
clenched his back teeth, but he accepted the suggestion with a stiff nod. “I’ll
call you after I talk to Granddad.”
    “Perfect.” Placing a foot inside the
car, she was ready to slide behind the wheel. Ready to get away from Gabe, away
from the spooky garage, and away from Spock who still hovered nearby.
    “As soon as we discover its history, we
can start making plans.” Gabe’s eagerness stopped her, in an awkward half-in,
half-out-of-the-car pose.
    She froze, processing the words, then
pivoted with one foot on the ground, one on the floor mat. “Plans to do what?”
    “To sell the Sleeping Lotus, of course.”
    She blinked, then blinked again. “ Sell
it? Oh, I don’t plan to sell the Sleeping Lotus. At least, not yet.”
    Gabe’s mouth dropped open. He couldn’t
have looked more shocked if she’d slapped him. “You’ve got to.” The lines of
his face tightened. His volume hovered on the verge of escalating again. His
hands gripped her shoulders. “I need that money. Didn’t you hear what it was
worth?”
    Narrowing her eyes, she pointedly
removed his hands from her shoulders. He stepped away, reluctantly.
    “Well, yes.” She spoke slowly,
cautiously, the way she talked to overly excitable eight-year-olds all day
long. “And that will be a nice little bonus to play with or save for a rainy
day, but money isn’t everything. There’s a lot more at stake than that, you
know.”
    Apparently, he didn’t know. He couldn’t
think of anything more important than the money the Lotus would bring. “What
else?”
    “There’s art, there’s history, there’s
tradition,” she began, but she immediately recognized his intention to object,
and of course, those weren’t her immediate concerns. “There’s the curse. I want
to find out more about the curse, okay? You don’t want to do anything to tempt
fate, do you? Tempt it, or worse, flaunt it, or make it really mad?”
    She’d never seen anyone look more
appalled.

Chapter Three
     
    Sell the Sleeping