Only once they’d waited long enough to be totally sure the coast was clear did they venture back to clean up the remains of their picnic.
As they were packing up, Clark came across an untouched red thermos he hadn’t noticed in the hamper. “Is this yours?”
“Oh, yeah.” She tried to shove the thing behind her back. “It’s nothing. A cleansing solution. I was supposed to try and get you to drink it.”
Clark recoiled. “Not the one you used on that evil Victorian eBay doll from your website?!”
That client testimonial still haunted him.
Prior to curse removal, Wilhelmina Spindlehausen showed the propensity to randomly turn off light switches in any room she occupied. Her glass eyes followed me everywhere, and she emanated a chill that could permeate a ten-foot radius.
“No.” Riley looked up and to the left. “I mean, I diluted it. Like a lot.”
Taking the thermos from her, Clark unscrewed the top, checking to see if the liquid inside bubbled. “It smells like pure petrol.”
The thermos had a bumper sticker on the front that read Stay Shameless. Certainly a fitting moniker.
“I can’t believe you were trying to poison me during our truce.” That snake had done him a favor, breaking up the chummy scene.
“Okay, first of all, I didn’t give it to you, did I?” She stuck her nose in the air. “And besides, cleansing dolls is one of my most regular sources of income. You’d think the freaky factor was the selling point, but I guess some people bring them home and end up with buyer’s remorse.”
Clark swirled the thermos. The liquid inside was so aggressively herbal his eyes started to water just from the smell.
“Not for all the gold on god’s bloody green earth am I ingesting that.” He could admit that whatever she’d used in that salve had proved remarkably effective. But still, a man had limits.
“That’s fine.” She snatched it back, spilling a little on both of them. Clark was relieved to find it didn’t singe his flesh. “I’d ruled out cleansing as a strategy anyway. I’m pretty sure it only works on objects.”
He was unreasonably annoyed that she’d had an ulterior motive. It shouldn’t sting that she’d done nothing but prove his initial assessment of her correct.
“I suppose it would have been too much to hope your hamper was truly altruistic.”
Riley blew out a frustrated breath. “I did pack the basket as a peace offering originally. It just so happened that while I was at the pub last night having dinner, Ceilidh told me about this local wild mint that I thought might work well in a cleansing solution, so . . .” She shook her head. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. You and me, we both know we’re nothing but the job, right?”
“Absolutely.”
Clark said he wouldn’t forget they weren’t friends, and unlike this brother, he kept his word.
Chapter Thirteen
Riley was starting to think it must be sacrifice. Her charms had flopped majorly. They didn’t repel Clark—they didn’t even make him pause in the entryway. Cleansing had always been a long shot, and at this point, she was confident she’d made the right call ruling it out. She could, with some moral backbends, justify B&E, but even she drew the line at potential poisoning.
No. Sacrifice made more sense. Not least because the more she got to know Clark, the less Riley wanted to drive him away. The process of curse breaking had never felt bad—wrong—before, but this time, every exercise felt like trudging uphill. Obviously she needed to switch directions, and fast.
Sacrifice. She ran her fingertips across Gran’s handwriting, the familiar loops and curls across the page—One thing you value in exchange for another.
“You’re supposed to feel the lack,” Riley told her clients. “That’s how you know it’s working.”
And besides, she’d done harder stuff in the name of her professional pursuits than run off some random guy. Telling her mom she wanted to pick up the mantle of curse breaking some twenty odd years after her dad left them over it, for example. But past experience didn’t matter. There was something about Clark that got under her skin. He thought her mere presence on the site was such a danger to his career. She might as well prove him right by blowing up his redemption gig.
A combination of bitterness and guilt kept her up at night, even if nothing about her plans seemed to trouble Ceilidh.
“It’s like that one Buffy episode where Sunnydale students keep getting caught in a loop repeating the tragic love story of some couple from like the 1950s,” she said after Riley updated her on her latest theory regarding the curse.
Ceilidh, Riley had begun to suspect, was a romantic.
“It’s not like that, really.” Riley had to explain the whole “curses can’t interfere with free will” thing again.
It would be easier, actually, if she could turn off her brain and let the ghost of Philippa Campbell choreograph what needed to be done.
“If it’s bothering you so much, why don’t you just remind yourself of all the reasons you didn’t like him before?” Ceilidh suggested, following Riley’s complaints about her inconvenient conscience.
And . . . that wasn’t a bad idea. Not at all.
The next day Riley set up shop in the room Clark was excavating.
He’d moved upstairs, finally, to one of the south-facing bedrooms. Like all the parts of the castle that backed up to the cliffside, this space had sustained less damage than those that faced the road. All the walls and ceilings still stood in good repair, as well as most of the floor—though some of the wooden boards had warped from water damage. The sagging remains of a bed could be found in the center of the room, the linens so moth-bitten they might as well have been thread.
Operation Roller Skates would serve two purposes. One, she could observe any annoying habits Clark had that she might have missed. Personally, she was hoping for nose picking.
Her second goal was simply to bother him—make sure he kept up his side of the loathing. Riley would have made a deliberate plan to provoke him if she didn’t think simply being herself would achieve the same outcome.
He made her job easier by providing a camp chair that she unfolded with a satisfying snap. She didn’t know why he brought it. Presumably he took breaks sometimes. But the thing was pretty comfy and even had a cup holder for her water bottle! Score.
After planting herself in his periphery, she took out a magazine. This shouldn’t take long.
She’d worn an outfit designed to provoke him. A white peasant blouse see-through enough that the bra he’d gotten up close and personal with during that trip to her bedroom showed through, plus a pair of ass-squeezing vintage bell bottoms she’d thrifted. When topped off with stiletto boots, the outfit was deliciously impractical, breaking almost every rule he’d given her about proper work-site attire.
Infuriatingly, Clark managed to ignore her for most of the morning, even if he did huff out an irate little breath every time he walked past her chair.