LITMIR.BIZ

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no. Not necessary,” she told him. “I’m intoxicated enough as it is.”

      He feigned disappointment. “What? You started happy hour without me? That’s not like you, Dinah.”

      She smiled at his mention of their usual Friday evening ritual. Dinah worked at home as a freelance writer, so she invariably heard Marcus return home from his architectural firm everyday. Over the last three months, it had become their custom to spend every Friday after work enjoying cocktails and conversation together. It had become even more customary for the two of them to have dinner together at one or the other’s apartment a couple of times a week.

      They’d struck up a nice friendship within days of her moving in to the building. It was just too damned bad she wasn’t interested in him romantically. But she’d never shown any sign that she returned his very profound interest in her, so he hadn’t pressed the issue. Not that he could understand for a minute why she wouldn’t be interested in him. He’d never had that problem with women before. Ah, well. It wasn’t his to question why. But it was his to keep his fantasies about Dinah to himself.

      “You have to help me, Marcus,” she said again, bringing his attention back to the matter at hand. Pretty much. He did still kind of wonder what she had on under that sweatshirt.

      “I’ll be glad to,” he told her. “What do you want me to do? Water your plants while you’re gone?”

      She started bouncing up and down again. “No, I want you to come with me,” she said, her brown eyes wide with excitement.

      The drink he’d been lifting to his mouth stopped just short of completing the action. “Come with you?” he echoed. “Why?”

      “Because I’m going to need another driver.”

      “What are you talking about?” Marcus asked. “You’re planning to drive to Georgia? By Monday?”

      “If we take turns at the wheel, we can drive straight through. We won’t have to stop except for food and restrooms.”

      He eyed her curiously for a moment. “Why would we want to do that, when you can hop on a plane and be there within hours?”

      Her expression went vaguely horrified. “A plane?” she repeated, voicing the word as if it were something unspeakably vile. “I can’t get on a plane. No way.”

      He rolled his eyes. “Oh, no. Don’t. Dinah. Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who’s afraid of flying.”

      She made a mild face at him. “Well, of course I’m not afraid of flying. Just how flaky do you think I am?”

      He sighed in relief. “Good. So what’s the problem?”

      “It’s because of the curse,” she told him.

      Marcus was afraid to ask. Nevertheless, “The curse?” he repeated cautiously.

      Dinah nodded. “Yeah. The curse. The gypsy curse.”

      Chapter Two

      It had taken her 45 minutes to convince him to accompany her to Georgia, two hours for them to pack and shower and tie up loose ends and plot their driving strategy, 20 minutes to argue over whose car they would take, and 30 minutes to get out of San Francisco.

      Now as they sped east, with San Francisco Bay shimmering beneath them like smooth black satin, Dinah felt herself relaxing for the first time since the call from the Georgia Lottery.

      Until Marcus said, “Okay, you promised if I came with you, you’d tell me about this gypsy curse.”

      Oh, yeah. That. Funny how blackmail had a bad habit of backfiring on a person.

      She sighed heavily. “Well, it’s sort of complicated.”

      He chuckled wryly. “Yeah, I bet. Family curses sorta tend to be that way.”

      She nodded. “True.” But she said nothing more, hoping he might take the hint and let it go.

      No such luck.

      “Dinah?”

      “Hmm?”

      “The curse?”

      “Right.”

      She continued to gaze out the window as she spoke, though, because she didn’t want to see Marcus’s expression as she explained. People who didn’t suffer from family curses just never got the whole family curse thing.

      “It dates back to the seventeenth century,” she began. “According to the story, one of my more vicious Meade ancestors—not that there were a lot of vicious Meade ancestors,” she hastened to clarify. “In fact, most of them were totally passive and decent. In fact, the ones who first came to this country in the 1800s were Quakers who—”

      “Dinah?”

      “Hmm?”

      “The curse?”

      “Right.” She backpedaled and started again. “This ancestor, apparently obsessed with a beautiful, young gypsy girl, kidnapped her and locked her way up in the tower of his castle. And to get even with him—and to prevent him from committing his nefarious deeds—her family put a curse on him that would also hex all of his ensuing progeny.

      “Which, I guess is understandable,” she qualified, “all things considered. I mean, if someone locked up a member of my family way, way up in a dark, dank, stinky tower and tried to commit nefarious deeds with them, I’d want to do a lot more than put a curse on him. I’d want to wrap both hands around his throat and—”

      “Dinah.”

      “Hmm?”

      “The curse.”

      “Right. Where was I?”

      Marcus glanced over at her with narrowed eyes. “The, uh, the curse,” he told her.

      “Right,” she said again. “To make a long story short—”

      “Please do.”

      “—what the curse amounts to,” she continued, “is that anytime anybody in my family tries to travel higher than a certain height, something nefarious happens to them. In the case of my vicious ancestor, it was spontaneous combustion.”

      Marcus swerved into the shoulder a bit, but recovered admirably. “Spontaneous combustion?” he echoed.

      Dinah nodded. “Pretty nefarious, huh?”

      “You said it.”

      He glanced over at her again, and the slash of illumination from a bluish-tinted street lamp briefly threw his features into stark contrasts of shadow and light. He had such incredible cheekbones, she noted, not for the first time. And he looked so handsome and dramatic, all dressed in black—black jeans, black sweater, black leather jacket.

      Two words, she thought. Yum. Mee. And two more words. Major loss. To the feminine gender, at any rate. Honestly. It sure was a good thing that she was a level-headed woman. Otherwise, she might very well have fallen in love with him by now. And wouldn’t that just be about the dumbest thing she’d ever done in her life?

      Yeah, good thing she was so level-headed.

      “So how high a height are we talking here?” Marcus asked, stirring her from her musings.

      “Well, tower-height, obviously,” Dinah replied. “Though the castle was up on a big hill, too, so a bit higher than tower height, I guess. It was the only way the gypsy family could keep my ancestor from committing those nefarious deeds. It’s also why so many members of my family live at sea level, and why none of us work in tall buildings. If anyone in my family goes too high up, we pay for it. Big time.”

      “How so? Surely someone in your family has tested the curse by now, haven’t they? After all, it’s been hundreds of years.”

      “Oh, yes.

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