With that face, and the type of clothes she’d seen him in the night they met—simple but impeccably tailored, reeking of money—Riley had figured he was too vain. But apparently a visit to her bedroom wasn’t worth the effort.
“I’m sorry you’re unwell, Dr. Edgeware.” Getting to mess with him after he’d mocked her and the curse felt so fucking sweet. “But I simply can’t be held responsible for your actions.”
It was his own fault, really. Clark had sealed his fate through false chivalry. If he hadn’t insisted on giving her his gloves, she would have been the one to wind up splotchy, her sleeve insufficient protection against the stinging nettle wrapped around the dagger.
She’d immediately recognized the leaves sprouting perpendicular to each other in pairs, dark green and oblong with tapering tips—and accepted the risk of retrieving the cursed artifact.
Her grandmother instilled in her early the value of plants and herbs—to help or to hinder—and she’d been studying them ever since.
He looked down his nose at her. “You’re claiming a cursed dagger did this?”
“Not exactly.” There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that the dagger was cursed. It was drenched in scent signature. But she couldn’t exactly have said, Here, smell this, yesterday without Clark thinking she was even more ridiculous than he already did.
It didn’t matter that she knew she was right. No tool existed to populate the kind of evidence he would believe. She had nothing to point to, no way to make him understand what she knew in her bones.
If he wouldn’t take her word for it that the dagger was cursed, why should she tell him it had been covered in nettles? She knew he’d reach for the artifact eventually, and had decided to extract a little payback of her own in the meantime.
Honestly? She’d gotten lucky the hives appeared as quickly as they did. Clark appeared to have sensitive skin.
“Charging into a cursed castle and denying the existence of said curse is a textbook way to get your ass handed to you.” Riley abandoned the doorway. She’d wasted enough time on Clark Edgeware already.
“Is that what your textbooks said?” He stepped forward onto the paisley-printed carpet, sidestepping Riley’s suitcases. Evidently he’d taken the fact that she hadn’t slammed the door in his face as permission to follow her inside. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, considering the appalling underfunding of the American education system.”
Riley popped open a tube of lipstick and leaned toward the mirror over the desk. “It’s amazing that you can manage to reek of superiority so soon after getting incapacitated by a common weed.”
Riley raised the deep raspberry color to her mouth while reveling in the reflection of the scowl he gave her.
Let him watch her get ready if he wanted to so badly. She certainly wasn’t going to entertain him just because he’d invited himself in.
While Clark attempted to melt her with his eyes, she took an obnoxiously long time tracing her lips, blotting, and reapplying until the shade was perfectly vampy.
It wasn’t until she’d finished and replaced the cap that she caught a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye. Clark walked over to the corkboard that hung where there had previously been a benign landscape of a field of heather.
“Why have you installed a murder board in your room?”
“It’s not a murder board.” Though Riley had to admit she saw the similarities. She’d divided the big rectangle into four columns using string—WHO, WHEN, WHY, HOW—and then tacked Post-its with ideas and potentially relevant information about the curse underneath each corresponding section.
Marching over, she reached for the Post-it he’d plucked carelessly from its pushpin, but he dodged her at the last second.
“ ‘Clark suggests dagger made for a woman,’ ” he read aloud, spinning to avoid her. “Is this your professional curse-breaking strategy? Writing down things I say?”
Riley ducked under his arm to snatch the note back, accidentally knocking the metal lipstick tube she still clutched into his knuckles.
Clark hissed, cradling his raw, red hand to his chest. “Ow. Fuck.”
She should leave him to suffer. See how many days it took him to work out the right combination of hydrocortisone and antihistamines to clear up the swelling.
But even if said person lived so far up his own ass that he couldn’t see daylight—Riley didn’t like seeing anyone in pain. She marched into the room’s en suite to rifle through her army of lotions and potions, looking for a small brown jar with a homemade label.
It was one of her best concoctions. Adapted from a recipe in Gran’s journal, tweaked after reading her mom’s old nursing school study guides. Riley had played with the formula for years, swapping St. John’s wort for calendula, adding and removing rose, then peppermint.
After finding it at the bottom of her bag, she stared down at where she’d marked the ingredients and the date it was made. Riley knew firsthand this salve helped soothe everything from swelling to irritation in record time—but Clark would probably scoff at anything she gave him.
Well, she told herself, if he did, that would be twice he’d brought about his own misery by underestimating her.
“Here.” Coming back into the bedroom, she gently handed him the jar. “That will take the sting out of the welts and reduce the redness until it heals.”
Clark traced a thumb across her peeling label, probably finding her handwriting wanting. “You made this?”
Riley nodded. She’d always found the medicinal applications of plants interesting—had even thought about becoming a nurse, like her mom, after high school.
But she hadn’t ended up finishing more than two semesters of college. Her mother had wanted her to go, had taken out the loans to make it possible, but Riley saw the way the mounting bills—not just tuition but textbooks and lab supplies—stressed her out. How she sat at the kitchen table after the late shift at work, doing the math on an old yellow legal pad over and over.
I didn’t like it, Riley had said, casually mentioning that she’d dropped out on an average Tuesday. Her mother hadn’t said anything in reply, just kissed her hair on her way out the door as she headed back to work another double.
Clark took the top off the jar and stuck his nose in, wrinkling it after a moment. “Smells like a candy cane.”
“Then don’t use it.” Riley reached to take it back, but once again he eluded her. Damn his superior wingspan.
“Now, wait a moment.” Clark studied her reaction while he held the mixture out of reach. She had a feeling he treated everyone like slides under a microscope. “That was a neutral observation. I haven’t rejected your act of mercy.”
“Yeah, well.” She exhaled heavily through her nose, reminding herself that she was trying to appear calm and unaffected. “Don’t get used to it.”
“I won’t,” he said softly, looking down at her offering in his hands. “But thank you.” He raised his gaze to meet her eyes. “You didn’t have to do this. I appreciate it.”