The Lost Enchantress (22 page)

“What are you up to, Hazard?”

“Nothing. The deal I’m proposing is exactly as I’ve outlined it. You have my word.”

“For what that’s worth.”

“For what it’s worth,” he agreed.

She weighed it for a few seconds and shook her head. “No. I’m not buying it. No one in his right mind would pay that kind of money to rent a pendant for one day.”

“What about someone no longer in his right mind?” His voice was low and hard, his eyes dark. “Someone who’s been the victim of a curse that only the pendant can break? Someone like me.”

S
omeone cursed . . . Someone like me.
There was no mistaking the meaning of those words, and half a dozen responses raced through Eve’s head, all of them variations on “You must be joking; evil curses don’t exist.”

But it was her misfortune to know they probably did exist, and just one look at Hazard’s unsmiling face made it plain he wasn’t joking. He never smiled much, but there was something different about him at that moment; he didn’t look merely serious, he looked haunted.

“I’m not sure I understand,” she said. “What kind of curse are you talking about? And what does it have to do with the pendant?”

He dragged his hand through his long dark hair, sweeping it away from his face except for one slightly shorter lock that insisted on falling alongside his eye. “I’m afraid it’s a long story . . . and somewhat complicated.”

“I promise to stay awake . . . and to refrain from singing,” she added, offering a small smile of encouragement.

He didn’t smile back, so she took a sip of brandy and waited.

“It happened a long time ago,” he began. “I was younger . . . much younger. I suppose you could say it started with an altercation between me and another man, a sorcerer as it turned out, although I didn’t know that at the time. And back then, if anyone had tried to tell me what he was, or that magic was as real as the wind or tides or the blood pumping through your veins, I would have laughed in his face and offered to buy him another drink.”

So there was a time when Hazard didn’t believe real magic existed. That fit with his claim that he had no power of his own, but it didn’t solve the mystery that was Gabriel Hazard. There were still unanswered questions, and the prospect of getting some of those answers had her leaning forward in anticipation.

“What kind of altercation?” she asked him.

“The over-a-woman kind.” He said it with a shrug. “It was all pretty straightforward. He thought the woman in question should marry him, I disagreed, and so I took her from him.”

“Did anyone bother to ask the woman what she thought?”

The question seemed to take him by surprise.

“No,” he said after a few seconds. “No one did. He didn’t care and I didn’t have time.”

“You didn’t have time?” she challenged, irritated on the woman’s behalf.

“It’s the truth,” Hazard insisted. “When I arrived at the church, the ceremony had already begun. I couldn’t risk waiting around to ask for permission.”

“Ceremony?”

He nodded. “The wedding ceremony. Did I mention that I stole her from the altar on their wedding day?”

If anyone but Hazard had said it, Eve would have laughed and doubted their veracity. Instead, she took a deep breath, trying to picture it. “You just walked into a church and . . . what? Announced she couldn’t marry him because you loved her more?”

“No. I didn’t love her more. I didn’t love her at all, in fact. At least not then,” he added with a quiet note of regret. “And I didn’t walk in; I rode in . . . just as they were about to exchange vows. And I didn’t say
anything
. I swept her off her feet—literally—and galloped off with her.”

“Did you say
galloped
? As in galloping on horseback?”

“Exactly.”

As bizarre as it sounded, she believed it. She believed it because . . . because Hazard was Hazard. And she had no trouble conjuring a mental image of it happening: she saw Hazard dressed in something suitably swashbuckling, charging down a flower-decked aisle astride a black stallion, the winsome young bride melting in his arms.

Suddenly concerned, she looked hard at him. “I’m assuming she went willingly?”

“Very willingly.”

No surprise there
, thought Eve with a wistfulness she told herself was silly but entirely natural. What woman hadn’t fantasized about being rescued by a knight in shining armor and carried off in his arms? And handsome, charming, chivalrous Hazard was born to play the part.

“So she was in love with you even though you weren’t in love with her?” she asked.

“She wasn’t in love with me either. We were strangers at the time. I happened to be passing through the village where she lived, and she was so relieved to be rescued from marrying a man old enough to be her grandfather it didn’t matter to her who did the rescuing.”

“At least not then,” she ventured, echoing his earlier words.

“Not then.”

“And afterwards?”

“Afterwards . . . things changed,” he acknowledged. “But that has nothing to do with what happened.”

Eve resisted the urge to press for details. “So the reason you were cursed by this guy who turned out to be a sorcerer is because you rode into town, treated the local church like a stable and galloped off into the sunset with his bride. No offense, Hazard, but what did you expect him to do? Present you with the key to the village?”

“I didn’t expect anything; I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. Actually, I wasn’t thinking at all.” His mouth twisted in a self-deprecating smile. “Did I mention I was bloody drenched at the time?”

“Drenched?”

“Drunk,” he translated. “Bloody, staggering drunk.”

Eve rolled her eyes. So much for the shining armor. “No, but I should have guessed. Suddenly it all makes perfect sense.”

“I suppose it would be truer to say I was bloody, staggering hungover. Drunk is what I was the night before; that’s when I stopped at the local pub and heard all the talk about what a shoddy deal this poor young beauty was getting. It turned out I’d seen the woman in passing the day before,” he revealed, “when I’d stopped at the same roadside inn as she and the aunt who was traveling with her. She’d been called home from London without being told what awaited her.”

Eve’s brow furrowed with surprise. “You mean she didn’t know she was getting married?”

“She had no idea. Her father was in heavy debt to the rancid old windbag who owned most of the village, and everything else for miles around it, and he intended to use her to settle up.”

“That’s disgusting,” Eve exclaimed. “Not to mention illegal.”

He shrugged. “More to the point, it was a particular irritation of mine. I have a dangerously low tolerance for randy old men who prey on women because they can afford to, who use them up and toss them aside like yesterday’s news pages.” The icy black glitter in his eyes underscored his use of the word “dangerously.” There was no doubt in Eve’s mind he was talking about something more serious than your average pet peeve.

“A few pints into the evening I made up my mind someone ought to do something to stop what was happening to the girl,” he continued. “In the morning I woke up on the floor of the pub with that same notion still rattling around inside my pounding skull. And before I knew it that someone turned out to be me.”

Eve couldn’t help being impressed. He was talking about standing up for someone whose own family had sold her out, someone who was a total stranger to him. Who did something like that? She couldn’t think of a single person she knew who—drunk or sober—would dare to pull such a foolhardy, reckless, overbearing, but somehow sweetly noble stunt. Hazard was one of a kind; she was convinced of that. She just wasn’t sure what kind.

“That’s an amazing story,” she told him. “And what you did was very brave. Impulsive, but brave. All in all, I’d say you’re lucky he cursed you instead of shooting you in the back as you rode away.”

“Would that he had,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “I didn’t give him time to do anything. The curse didn’t happen until a week later, when I went back to apologize.”

“God, Hazard, you know there is such a thing as being too damn polite for your own good. Couldn’t you have just called to say you were sorry and kept on running?”

He tensed, his eyes narrowing.

“I did not run,” he said coldly, emphatically.

“Fine, you didn’t run. I still say you should have just phoned in an apology or sent a fruit basket or something else not so salt-in-the-wound, in-your-face confrontational.”

“This had to be done face-to-face,” he countered stubbornly. “The man was too powerful and too ruthless to allow himself to be publicly bested and not retaliate. Jane’s family still lived in the village, and they were still indebted to him. That debt had to be settled. I met with him to appease him, so he wouldn’t punish them for my actions. He thought he’d been cheated out of what was rightfully his, and so I offered him cash in lieu of the bride he thought was his due.”

“Let me guess, he still wanted the bride on the silver platter.”

He shook his head. “No, he knew it was too late for that. Jane and I were already married.”

“Married?” It burst out more loudly than she intended, making her especially glad they were sitting away from other diners. “After one close call, I’d have thought she . . . Jane . . . would want to get to know her next groom before taking the plunge.”

“It wasn’t a matter of choice,” he said matter-of-factly. “I hadn’t thought about where I would go or what I would do with her after I rescued her. We were alone together for over a day; her reputation was compromised. We had to marry.”

They
had
to marry
?
She had trouble processing that.

She understood there were people whose attitudes about such things were stricter than her own, but marrying to protect a woman’s reputation seemed excessive and outdated . . . something out of the
Amish Guide to Dating
or a Regency romance.

Of course, he did say it had happened a long time ago. And that he was much younger. He still looked young at first glance, with his long dark hair and air of barely leashed energy. But all you had to do was observe his manner for a short while to detect a degree of effortless polish and absolute confidence that can only be developed with time. And then there was that grim and ravaged look she’d caught a glimpse of, a dark shadow falling across his lean face. At those moments he looked much older than his age, which Eve guessed was thirty at most.

If this happened when he was in his teens or early twenties, he wouldn’t have been as polished, or as haunted. She imagined he would have been impetuous and quite gallant. Then there was the fact that his dashing rescue had occurred in a rural area, where things, including social mores, can move a lot slower than in places considered more urbane. A young and idealistic Hazard might very well deem it his duty to step up and save the girl’s reputation by marrying her, just as he later returned to the scene of the crime and tried to set things right with the man he’d offended.

It still niggled at her that there was something a little off about the story . . . that is to say, something beyond the overall wackiness of it. And the fact that he was a married man. The fact that he was married really shouldn’t make any difference to her, especially since it apparently didn’t make any difference to him. It wasn’t as if she harbored visions of dinner leading to bigger and better things.

“So. You’re married,” she said. “Your wife must be very open-minded. Or doesn’t she know you take other women to dinner at restaurants on Zagat’s list of Most Romantic?”

“I
was
married,” he countered. “It was only for a very short time. A year and a half after we married, Jane became ill with pneumonia and died. She and our daughter, both within a day.”

“Oh, Gabriel, I’m so sorry. How awful for you.” She used his first name without thinking, the same way she reached out to touch his hand, briefly covering it with her own. “It’s bad enough to lose someone you love, but to suddenly have both of them taken from you . . . I know how hard that must have been for you . . . how hard it must be still.”

“Thank you. For a long time life was . . . unbearable. And then I became numb.” His mouth crooked. “Numb is easier.”

The sadness of that statement made her heart hurt. Numbness did seem easier than soul-searing grief; the problem was it didn’t last. You could go floating along in your little bubble of numbness for weeks or months or years, and then one day you glimpsed or heard or brushed against something so familiar it might as well be encoded in your DNA, and the bubble bursts and your heart lifts, because you’re certain it’s her silky brown hair you saw, or his smooth laugh you heard, or the fox fur trim on her hood that you felt, the fur that always tickled your cheek when she bent down to kiss you, but of course it’s not, and you remember why, you remember why those things will never be again, and the fresh pain is enough to take your breath away.

The silence continued; Hazard seemed lost somewhere far away.

“Tell me more about the curse,” she urged. She knew that even when you believe you’re numb, distractions can be a blessing. “Did he refuse to accept your apology and curse you instead?”

“No, he accepted my apology, grudgingly. And my money, with slightly more enthusiasm,” he recalled dryly. “And then as I was leaving he had his men jump me. Three of them. We fought, I lost. It was . . . a very long night.” There was no mistaking the bitterness that whipped into his voice. It kept her from asking for a more detailed account of what transpired during that very long night. The faraway burn in his eyes and the unyielding set of his jaw made it clear that whatever happened had been painful, and not pretty. “By the time he got around to the curse I was barely conscious; my memories of what happened are hazy.”