A grin. “Wow, you still have such a low opinion of me, don’t you?”
“No, but….” Damn, had I offended him?
“It’s okay,” he said, relenting. “No voodoo dolls. But a Wilcox cousin owns the place, and he generally leaves a room vacant in case anyone in the family needs it for business or something.”
That sounded fairly innocuous. “Okay.” I hesitated, then asked, “How much of Flagstaff does your family control…really?”
The Keurig beeped, and Connor went over and poured his coffee into the mug I’d already set out for him. He settled down on one of the rickety chairs at the kitchen table before replying, “Not as much as you probably think, but…we’ve been there for more than a hundred years. Of course we own a lot of real estate in and around town, same as you McAllisters do here in Jerome.”
Logical enough, I guessed. It was time to get the eggs started, so I decided to let it go for now. “How do you like them? Scrambled? Over easy?”
“Scrambled.”
A boy after my own heart. Runny eggs were one of my irrational dislikes. I cracked half a dozen into a bowl, put in some milk, and beat them to a froth before pouring them into a skillet I’d had preheating.
“I could get used to this,” he went on, watching me as I worked.
“To what? Me in the kitchen? I guess next it would be barefoot and pregnant, right?”
His expression went dark. “No, probably not that.”
Shit. We’d danced around the issue, left it alone, hadn’t addressed it after I’d assured him that the little charm I mentally uttered every time we had sex would be enough to protect me. And it would — or so I’d been told. Even so, I could still hear Margot Emory’s words echoing in the back of my mind.
The wives of Jeremiah’s line would never live to see their children grow up.
“Sorry,” I began, but he shook his head.
“No, we should have talked about it before this. It’s out there, waiting. And I don’t know what to do about it.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I said, trying to sound reassuring, but I didn’t believe my own words. The Wilcox curse had been claiming its victims for the last hundred and thirty years or so — who was I to think that Connor and I could possibly come up with some way of circumventing it?
“Damon hasn’t had much luck with that,” Connor remarked bitterly, and sipped his coffee.
“I know, but….” A sudden thought occurred to me. “When I was told of the curse, the words were ‘the wives of Jeremiah’s line.’ So what if we just stay, I don’t know, shacked up together and never make it official?”
“You think that wasn’t tried?”
“Was it?”
“Oh, yeah.” He drank some more coffee, while I hurried back to the stove and flipped the bacon, then started pushing the eggs around in the skillet so they wouldn’t get too brown. “Jeremiah’s son, Jacob, he had a child with one of his cousins out of wedlock. She went insane and threw herself out of a second-story window.”
Although the kitchen was warm, it felt like someone had just dragged an icicle down my back.
“And that son, Jonah, he thought maybe it was just a coincidence, and convinced his childhood sweetheart — a third cousin — that she should also be with him without the benefit of matrimony. She was knocked down by a runaway horse and killed a week after she moved in. So Jonah got himself a nice biddable second cousin, had a son with her — and then she died of scarlet fever a few months later.”
“Stop it,” I said. I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but I was busy with the food — and Aunt Rachel had trained me so well that I didn’t even think about not tending to it.
“I wish I could,” Connor said, eyes glittering. “But you need to know the truth. I love you, and it kills me that something terrible could happen to you. If we don’t ever have a child, maybe — maybe you’ll be safe.”
I didn’t want to think about that. While I certainly wasn’t eager to have a baby anytime in the near future, I’d always thought one day I would have a family. It’s just what the prima did — married her consort and had children and lived out her days as the matriarch of the clan. Acknowledging that such a future might not be viable for me was not something I wanted to face.
“Well, maybe it’s just the whole primus thing,” I said. “What about the children of the men who were of Jeremiah’s line but were the younger brothers?”
“I don’t know,” Connor admitted, and his dark brows pulled together in a frown. “After Jeremiah — he did have family who came with him, three brothers and a sister, and their children — all of the primuses were only children. Until now…until me.”