Page 49 of It's Holy Matrimony, Baby

“It’s okay,” he says. “We have plenty of time.”

He’s wrong though. We don’t. I have less than a month to talk him into signing the papers or we’ll still be married at the two-year mark. And if that isn’t tempting fate, I don’t know what is.

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m sitting cross-legged on the couch nursing my coffee while Nox crouches over the pieces of the busted coffee table. It’s the first morning he’s been home when I’ve woken up since I moved in. Hollander is perched on the back of the couch behind my head, his giant paws kneading the cushion. Every now and then he swats at my hair like he wants to remind me that he’s there.

“Tell me about this curse,” Nox says while he examines the ends of a couple of the pieces.

After the stupid thing collapsed when he walked out days ago, I’d dragged it all outside and dumped it in a pile. I’d also tossed the manual. But this morning he hauled it all back into the living room. Shifting my cup to one hand, I scratch the tip of my nose. “There isn’t much to tell. Curses aren’t real. Karma isn’t real. I didn’t do something hideously bad in a past life, or at least I don’t think I did. It’s my family’s urban legend.”

“Maybe it’s not real.” He looks up at me as he pulls a little bag of screws and a screwdriver out of his back pocket. “But I think you do believe in it. Or you’re at least worried that it might be true. What you told me about your brother. And your parents. Humor me?”

“Okay.”

“But first come down here.” He hands me a table leg and part of the frame as I slide onto the floor beside him. “I need you to hold these two pieces together.”

There’s something about watching a man, who isn’t my brother, put together furniture, which is fascinating and new for me. It makes my heart pitter-patter and my insides tighten. His big hands and tight biceps flex in such a manly way. I can’t rip my gaze off them.

“Go on,” he says.

“Right.” I swallow to clear all the excess saliva pooling in my mouth. Almost need a bucket. “Well, according to my grandmother it all started because of her sister. Patty was the kind of girl who loved love.”

“Nothing like you then,” he says, a twinkle in his eye.

“No, nothing like me. Grandma says that Patty used to fall in and out of love every other week. She was stunning of course, and the boys used to flock to her. They’d buy her things and take her out dancing or whatever. She was never without a beau. And then she got a job as a receptionist, where she met James Carter. He was older than her by several years. Worldly, sophisticated, and her boss. She fell instantly in love with him. Grandma says that she tried to warn her about him, that a lot of people did, but Patty wouldn’t listen.”

Nox takes the finished section and hands me another leg and piece of frame. “So she fell in love with a man her family didn’t think was right for her?”

“No, it was more than that. She fell in love with a married man. She didn’t know that when it started though. Grandma always says that Patty was heartbroken when she found out. They’d been seeing each other for six months when she learned that he had a wife. Patty promised Grandma she wouldn’t see him again, but...”

“Sometimes it’s not that easy to turn off what our heart wants,” Nox says, and there’s a softness in his voice that makes my stomach clench. The more time we spend together the harder it is to ignore how my heart reacts to him.

“I guess so, because they carried on their affair. He told her he was going to leave his wife. That he wasn’t in love with the woman. That he would marry Patty as soon as he could work out how to tell his wife. And get a divorce. But that she would have to be patient as the woman had left her family in Romania to be with him, and he felt guilty that she would have no one to turn to.”

Nox hands me the next pieces of the coffee table, the frame taking shape. He’s so good with his hands, and so patient with me. Building this crappy coffee table when he hates it. When he’s working fifteen hours a day and the last thing he should have to do is come home to work on projects that are my fault.

“Anyway, the wife found out before he could tell her. She walked into his office with plans to celebrate their second wedding anniversary and found him and Patty doing the deed. She was so angry she started breaking things and screaming at them in her native tongue. James called security to escort her out, and as the two guards dragged her from his office she looked daggers at Patty and cursed her. She told her she would only have two years of happiness, the same amount of time that this woman had spent as James’s wife. After that the one she loved would be ripped from her hands. Her family would suffer like she suffered. Her family name would be cursed with the same fate. Patty told Grandma it was bone chilling the way this woman stared at her as if she was dead and intoned the same thing over and over.”

“What happened with Patty and James?” Nox asks, putting the screwdriver down and picking up the frame of the coffee table to turn it over.

“Nothing at first. James started divorce proceedings. That took a while. Patty stood by him. Once that was done, he asked her to marry him. By this point the curse had become a laughable story. No one took it seriously. Patty said yes and planned their wedding. I don’t know if she chose the date she did as a giant screw you to the woman, but they were set to get married on the second anniversary of their first meeting. Patty stood at the front of that church in her white lace dress waiting for him for hours. He never showed up. He’d died in his sleep. Had a heart attack. Patty was heartbroken. Inconsolable. A couple of weeks later she overdosed on sleeping pills her doctor had prescribed to help her rest.”

“That’s a horrible story,” he says, picking up the tabletop and slotting it onto the frame.

“It really is.” I lean back on my hands and watch him. Wish he wasn’t wearing a shirt, even if it does stretch thin over his muscles as he moves. “But that’s the McClain history. Grandma married. Her first husband had an affair. Second husband died in a plane crash. She didn’t bother after that. My aunt dated a woman for two years. She didn’t believe in that “hocus pocus,” as she calls it. Turns out the love of her life is a serial killer who’s now spending the rest of her life on death row.”

“Seriously?”

“Crazy, right? My mother has a time limit on her relationships. In and out in eighteen months, but even so her judgement isn’t all that good.”

“And your brother.” Nox lays on the floor beside me, his head under the coffee table while he adds more screws to the structure.

“Couldn’t help himself. Fell hard. Whirlwind romance. Married six months in. They thought they could make it. I thought they would make it. We didn’t have a clue she had stage four cancer.” I take a breath. Nox must think I’m insane. Or my family is insane. “Curse or no curse, no one has worse luck than the McClains.”

“That’s one hell of a list.” He wriggles out from under the coffee table.

“Do you want to sign those papers now?”

“Why would I want to do that?” he asks.

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