Clark squeezed until her hand flexed, controlling the pressure so she’d be forced to release the weapon.
After a moment of her hectic pulse under his thumb, the dagger clattered to the ground.
They stood like that for a beat, Clark holding her wrist, their furious gazes locked, before Riley wrenched free.
“Just so you know, curses don’t work like that.”
“What?” Clark barely had enough blood left in his head to breathe, let alone think.
Riley shook out her wrist. “A curse can’t brainwash someone. Can’t alter free will.”
Was she admitting she’d made the whole thing up, then? Not just this little murder foreplay act?
“I’m not following.”
Riley pressed her lips together. “Do you believe in fate?”
“No.” Clark believed in science.
“Okay, me neither,” Riley admitted. “But you get the general concept, right?”
He did. “A fixed sentence by which the order of things is prescribed.”
“Exactly.” Riley’s eyes fell absently back to the dagger, still lying in the dirt at their feet. “The parameters of a curse are similar. It can’t control how people think or feel, but it can manipulate external forces, throw obstacles into your path, obscure information it doesn’t want you to find.”
She made curses sounded like an interfering busybody. “I think I’m going to need an example.”
“It’s like with that football team I helped.”
Clark nodded. The one from her website.
“Their curse couldn’t possess the quarterback and make him throw lousy passes, but it could ensure that pages of his playbook blew away or that the road he always took got closed down for construction so he couldn’t make it to practice.”
Fascinating. If she hadn’t just admitted to lying to him, Clark might have felt a twinge of interest in her theories about the supernatural.
“And that curse was only around for a decade. Strength multiples with age. Arden Castle’s curse has lasted at least three hundred years.”
He picked up the dagger. “I have to give you credit. You’ve put a lot of depth into your deception.”
Even though his gloves were huge on her hands, Clark could still make out Riley giving him the middle finger as she left the room. “I’ll let Martin know I’ve found the first cursed artifact.”
“I thought we agreed it wasn’t cursed?” he shouted after her. Turning the blade over in his hand, Clark didn’t feel any emotional shift. He was still angry and confused and turned on—and still angry and confused about how turned on he was.
“Check your hand,” Riley called back.
Sure enough, angry red welts had begun to swell across the palm that gripped the dagger’s handle. “Oh, fuck me.”
Chapter Five
When incessant knocking woke Riley before dawn the next day, she had a feeling she knew who had come calling.
Quickly, she threw on a pair of jeans and an oversized wool sweater, unwilling to confront the enemy in her pajamas.
Sure enough, when she opened the door—
“What the hell did you do to me?” Clark Edgeware stared back at her, his blotchy fist raised.
“My, my.” Riley tsked, not bothering at all to hide her mounting glee. “Someone’s grouchy this morning.”
She’d ask how he knew where she was staying, but this town had one inn with ten rooms. And she’d learned almost immediately upon arrival that the proprietor enjoyed running his mouth as well as the front desk.
Clark’s nostrils flared. “You’d be grouchy too if you’d spent half the night trying to make sure you didn’t spread a burning itch to your unmentionables.”
Riley looked pointedly at the angry red marks covering his hands and winced. “You should really take care of that.”
“Why do you think I’m here? Tell me what you’ve inflicted upon me so that I can undo it.”
Riley leaned against the doorway and gave him a full-body once-over. Even discounting the hives, he looked different today. His jawline had gone from barely shadowed to full-on ebony stubble. Must have forgone his morning shave in his rush to come over here and glower.
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.