Darknight(70)

He frowned, and I went around the bed so I could give him a quick hug. “You’re not all clinging to it. You seem like you’re trying to change things.”

“I do?” he replied, surprise clear in his features.

“Well, you’re not doing every little thing Damon tells you to, and you seemed willing enough to make peace with my clan, even if they’re not meeting you halfway. So I definitely don’t think you’re stuck in your family’s past.”

A hand lifted to brush back my hair and push it behind my ear. “You have a generous soul, Angela.”

It was such an out-of-character thing for him to say that I couldn’t help raising my eyebrows.

“You do. I wish things were different, that there wasn’t this cloud hanging over us. You deserve better than that.”

There was such a note of melancholy in his tone that I felt my breath seize in my chest. No, we really didn’t deserve this. I’d always thought all that “sins of the fathers” crap was just that — crap — and never more so than now. Connor certainly shouldn’t have to suffer just because his great-great-great-whatever-grandfather had been a first-class son of a bitch. Damon I wasn’t so sure about. As far as I could tell, he’d pretty much earned whatever he got.

“Well,” I said, attempting to sound casual, “I guess the best we can hope for is that Damon will hook up with some fourth or fifth cousin who’s willing to be queen for a day.” Again I thought of the young woman I’d seen with Damon at the potluck, and wondered if that was exactly what he had planned. “If he has a son, then you’re safely out of it.”

“Not exactly. I’m still of Jeremiah’s line.”

Crap. Trying to untangle all this was like trying to unwind all the fine chains at the bottom of my jewelry box — no matter what you did, you found another knot to slow you down. “But it would get him off your back a little, wouldn’t it? At least if he had an heir, he wouldn’t care so much whether you did or not.”

“Probably. But it’s sort of awful to wish for someone else to suffer that kind of fate, isn’t it?”

I knew that, of course. Even so, I replied, “I did say ‘willing,’ you know.”

“Yeah, you did. I just don’t want to think about it right now.” He kissed the top of my head, then let go of me and stepped away. “For now I just want to think about getting some food inside me. And coffee. That must be why my brain still feels so fuzzy.”

A good excuse, but I guessed his real reason was that he didn’t want to discuss the subject anymore. I couldn’t blame him; it was almost New Year’s. A fresh start, and not the sort of day that we needed to drag a bunch of baggage into. Whatever the true solution to the situation might turn out to be, I didn’t think we were going to discover it today.

So I followed him downstairs, and hoped I could push everything aside and just enjoy my time with him and my friends. At least we’d already made plans that would fill it up pretty well — a movie after lunch, then come home to change and have Syd and Anthony meet us after that. We’d probably share a bottle of wine here first, have some cheese, that sort of thing, and go out to eat afterward. Things should be busy enough that I wouldn’t have any time to worry about Damon Wilcox or the curse that hung over his family like the proverbial sword of Damocles.

That was the plan, anyway.



* * *



Sydney and Anthony were late coming over — “it took us more time than we thought to get settled,” she told me breathlessly over the phone, which I thought was probably Syd-speak for we decided to test out the hotel bed first. No matter, since Connor had made our dinner reservations for eight-thirty. When my friends did finally appear, she looked more or less calm and composed, but I caught a faint pinkish blotch on her neck that I guessed was her attempt to cover up a fresh hickey. I tried not to smile; I’d resorted to the same subterfuge on numerous occasions over the past week.

“Awesome belt,” she said, nodding as she gave my outfit the once-over.

Flagstaff was just as casual as Jerome, so something sparkly for New Year’s wasn’t really appropriate. I wore a black long-sleeved wrap T-shirt and some new skinny jeans tucked into my riding boots, along with the concho belt Connor had given me and some turquoise pieces I’d owned since high school. The ensemble had met his approval as well — he said my butt looked very “grabbable” — but I wasn’t going to repeat that particular comment to Sydney.

“Thanks,” I replied. “Connor gave it to me for my birthday.”