Just Fooling Around(57)
“The other shoe’s waiting to drop,” he said, but he smiled as he spoke.
She shook her head in mock exasperation. Or real frustration, he amended, as soon as he heard the harsh tone of her voice. “Dammit, Reg. You’ve got to accept that even if you can’t end it, you can live with it. We can live with it.”
“We are going to end it,” he said, because he was determined not to fail today. He’d come to end this curse, he was the closest he had ever been, and he was not about to back off now.
“Good,” she said. “Great. I hope we do. But if we don’t, take a look around. We’ve gone most of the day with very little bad luck. Your siblings are happy with their spouses, and they’re entirely intact. Your plane didn’t fall out of the sky. My house didn’t collapse around our ears. The curse is weakening. With each generation, it’s less of a threat. Dammit, Reg, don’t you see? It’s whittling away to nothing, and in the meantime, I love you.”
Her words cut through him, sharp and terrifying even while they buoyed him up. All his fears, all his walking away, and still she loved him.
“This is it,” Anne said, looking at a raised stone grave. “See?” She nodded to the plaque with Mirabelle’s name engraved. She hadn’t been put into a family tomb, as most of the people in the cemetery, and they couldn’t find anyplace to leave the amulet.
“Maybe we open the grave?”
She frowned. “Ick, but maybe.” She looked up at him and he couldn’t help but smile at her. Yeah, maybe they needed to open the sarcophagus, but he had something to say first. “Anne,” he said. “I love you, too.”
He watched her smile bloom wide, and felt his heart lift.
“Then forget the damn curse,” she said. She grabbed him by the belt loops and pulled him against the stone tombs next to Mirabelle’s grave. He buried his fingers in her hair and pulled her mouth to his, wanting to tell her that nothing in the world would make him forget it. The question was, could he live with it.
He didn’t get the chance to speak, though, because suddenly they were tumbling backwards, falling into the crumbling remains of the tomb against which they’d been leaning. “Shit!” He leaped to his feet, then started pulling rubble off of Anne. “Dammit, don’t you dare be hurt. Anne! Anne!”
“I’m okay.” Her voice was soft, but strong, and limb by limb, she wiggled her body. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
He sat back on his heels, his heart pounding, and Libby’s words running through his head. Life happens.
Yeah, he thought, it did.
And so did curses. Hell, he knew that better than anyone.
The question was, if he was going to be cursed, did he want to be doomed with or without the woman he loved?
The answer was the same as it always had been: he wanted to be with Anne.
But today…
Well, today, maybe he’d finally realized that Anne understood what being with him meant, and it was her decision, too.
He took a deep breath, savoring the moment, then held out his hand. “Come on, sweetheart,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
“Home?” She blinked. “What about the curse? The sarcophagus?”
He glanced sideways at it. “I guess we’ll learn to live with it.”
She clutched his hand and climbed to her feet. “What? Reg?”
“You’re right. Hell, Libby was right.”
Her eyes widened, and she hooked her arms around his neck, then pressed a soft kiss to his lips. “Reg Franklin, I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said, meaning it more than he could ever express.
“Do you mean it? About the curse not mattering to you anymore?”
“I mean it.”
She nodded, her expression pensive.
“Anne? What is it?”
“I’m not sure now if I should even say, but I think I’ve figured it out.” She brushed her palm against his cheek. “I know where to take the amulet.”
THEY HAD TO CALL LIBBY to be sure, but then they headed straight from the cemetery to St. Theresa’s Church on Poydras. The small church that had received funding from Mirabelle’s family. Funding and statuary.
“The angels,” Anne had said. “The inscription talked about returning it to the soul of the angel, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, if Mirabelle wrote the inscription, how could she be certain of how she’d be buried?”
He’d seen where she was going with that. “But if she already had a certain angel to which the amulet belonged…”
“Something on which she’d worked her magic,” Anne had finished.