“Ha ha.” He kept his eyes on the blade. “Very amusing.”
“No. I’m serious, Clark.” Riley prowled toward him, twirling the dagger with alarming flippancy, her generous hips swaying. “It’s like this red fog is rolling in across my vision.” With each step, she cut off his path to the door.
Somehow, his back found the wall.
“You’re trying to fuck with me.” His brain knew that, even if his body didn’t—all his hair standing on end, adrenaline coursing through his veins. “It won’t work.”
Riley aimed the blade at his breastbone, the tip of the dagger barely prodding one of the buttons on his shirt. “Are you sure?”
With a flick of her wrist, she sent the small plastic circle plinking off the floor.
Clark’s breathing stuttered. There was something about this woman. Clark didn’t know how to describe it in words. It wasn’t just the danger talking—he was pretty sure he wouldn’t get hard from just anyone threatening him at knifepoint—it was her. Not just that she was beautiful—plenty of beautiful people left him cold. Riley was . . . more.
This close, every inhale carried the scent of her shampoo—cheap, artificial strawberry. Like fucking lube. He bit off a groan.
“What’s the matter?” Riley leaned forward to whisper in his ear, her warm breath falling against his sweat-slick skin. “I thought you weren’t afraid of me.”
“I’m not,” he ground out around his straining jaw. Fear-laced lust threatened to buckle his knees.
“No?” Riley raised the dagger from his chest to rest above the hollow of his bare throat. “You look pretty worked up to me.”
This was an absolute nightmare. A woman with no sense of right and wrong held a knife half an inch from his jugular—Clark had to shallow his exhales to avoid getting nicked—and all he could think about was leaning closer, death be damned, so he could kiss her again.
“Tell me something, darling,” he said in a desperate attempt to distract himself.
“ ‘Darling,’ huh?” Riley sounded almost impressed. “Bold of you to offer me endearments from the business end of a blade.”
“Let’s say that dagger is cursed.” He pressed his palms against his thighs to keep from reaching for her. “Shouldn’t you, I don’t know, fix it?”
“Me? But I’m a charlatan.” She moved the dagger until it almost but not quite caressed his pulse point. “Unless you’ve changed your mind?”
“I haven’t.” Enough of this game. Clark wrapped his hand loosely around her wrist, the one supporting the dagger. Though he was barely touching her, the threat was there.
“Drop it or I’ll make you.” He could feel the delicate arrangement of her bones, the strain in her tendons.
Riley stared at his hand and bit her lip.
“Go ahead,” she said, sounding a little breathless.
Clark squeezed until her hand flexed, controlling the pressure so she’d be forced to release the weapon.
After a moment of her hectic pulse under his thumb, the dagger clattered to the ground.
They stood like that for a beat, Clark holding her wrist, their furious gazes locked, before Riley wrenched free.
“Just so you know, curses don’t work like that.”
“What?” Clark barely had enough blood left in his head to breathe, let alone think.
Riley shook out her wrist. “A curse can’t brainwash someone. Can’t alter free will.”
Was she admitting she’d made the whole thing up, then? Not just this little murder foreplay act?
“I’m not following.”
Riley pressed her lips together. “Do you believe in fate?”
“No.” Clark believed in science.
“Okay, me neither,” Riley admitted. “But you get the general concept, right?”
He did. “A fixed sentence by which the order of things is prescribed.”
“Exactly.” Riley’s eyes fell absently back to the dagger, still lying in the dirt at their feet. “The parameters of a curse are similar. It can’t control how people think or feel, but it can manipulate external forces, throw obstacles into your path, obscure information it doesn’t want you to find.”
She made curses sounded like an interfering busybody. “I think I’m going to need an example.”
“It’s like with that football team I helped.”
Clark nodded. The one from her website.
“Their curse couldn’t possess the quarterback and make him throw lousy passes, but it could ensure that pages of his playbook blew away or that the road he always took got closed down for construction so he couldn’t make it to practice.”
Fascinating. If she hadn’t just admitted to lying to him, Clark might have felt a twinge of interest in her theories about the supernatural.
“And that curse was only around for a decade. Strength multiples with age. Arden Castle’s curse has lasted at least three hundred years.”
He picked up the dagger. “I have to give you credit. You’ve put a lot of depth into your deception.”
Even though his gloves were huge on her hands, Clark could still make out Riley giving him the middle finger as she left the room. “I’ll let Martin know I’ve found the first cursed artifact.”
“I thought we agreed it wasn’t cursed?” he shouted after her. Turning the blade over in his hand, Clark didn’t feel any emotional shift. He was still angry and confused and turned on—and still angry and confused about how turned on he was.
“Check your hand,” Riley called back.
Sure enough, angry red welts had begun to swell across the palm that gripped the dagger’s handle. “Oh, fuck me.”
Chapter Five
When incessant knocking woke Riley before dawn the next day, she had a feeling she knew who had come calling.
Quickly, she threw on a pair of jeans and an oversized wool sweater, unwilling to confront the enemy in her pajamas.
Sure enough, when she opened the door—
“What the hell did you do to me?” Clark Edgeware stared back at her, his blotchy fist raised.
“My, my.” Riley tsked, not bothering at all to hide her mounting glee. “Someone’s grouchy this morning.”
She’d ask how he knew where she was staying, but this town had one inn with ten rooms. And she’d learned almost immediately upon arrival that the proprietor enjoyed running his mouth as well as the front desk.
Clark’s nostrils flared. “You’d be grouchy too if you’d spent half the night trying to make sure you didn’t spread a burning itch to your unmentionables.”
Riley looked pointedly at the angry red marks covering his hands and winced. “You should really take care of that.”
“Why do you think I’m here? Tell me what you’ve inflicted upon me so that I can undo it.”
Riley leaned against the doorway and gave him a full-body once-over. Even discounting the hives, he looked different today. His jawline had gone from barely shadowed to full-on ebony stubble. Must have forgone his morning shave in his rush to come over here and glower.