Page 11 of Charming the Cowboy
“I think it needs to be really festive. Would one of your horses be okay having a giant fake spider on their rump? It’s very light.”
“No. That would get in the way of the harness. Also no. Again, no.”
“Okay, we can put the giant fake spider on the wagon.”
“You really want to decorate the wagon?”
“Yes. I wanted all to be very festive. But I need to work on my spooky stories. The only scary story I have in my back pocket right now is about the time my great-great-great-grandfather got cursed by a witch.”
“What?”
“Oh yeah. Didn’t you know that?”
“I mean, your brother mentioned something about a curse once, but I thought he was trolling me.”
“Oh no,” she fixed entirely authentic, round eyes on him. “He was being deadly serious. You see, our entire family is cursed to never have a love affair work out.”
“That’s not real,” he said.
“It is very definitely real,” she said.
“And what exactly did your great-great-great-grandfather do to deserve that?”
“Oh, he was a horrible playboy. He had gotten several women pregnant and abandoned them. Ruined reputations, ruined marriages. But then, he seduced a young woman who was shamed in front of the entire town. Ostracized by her family. She was so angry that she cursed him with her own blood. And his.”
“What?”
“She cut her own palm, and then she walked up to him and slashed his arm. Then, she transferred her own pain, all the rejection, all the grief, onto him. She said that nobody in his bloodline would ever get happiness from love. And that they were always doomed to end up alone. And that had been true. Of everyone. There are no long marriages, no intact families. My dad was a good man. I often wonder if he died for it. You have a higher survival rate if you just suck, because then the family can get broken up that way.”
“Come on, Eliana, curses like that are not real.”
She spread her arms wide. “Then how do you explain all that?”
“I don’t know. Life is random, and sometimes hard. My dad is dead, and nobody cursed my bloodline. That I know of.”
“Well, that’s the thing. There can always be secret curses that you don’t know about.”
“I don’t think my family is cursed.”
He didn’t. He just thought that life was hard sometimes. And good people died. Kids lost their dads, and it wasn’t fair. That was what had happened to her, it was no curse. He wouldn’t be convinced otherwise.
“Well, that’s nice for you. Mine definitely is. And I don’t think that you, as a non-cursed person, can comment on what it is like for me, a cursed person.”
“And has the curse directly impacted you?”
“Well, I think so. Differently, though, than everybody else.”
Her face went bright red. “What?”
“Well, everyone else in my family seems to have… Well, they have… You know my brother.”
“Yes. He’s my best friend.”
“And you know how he is with women.”
“Yes,” he said dryly. “Successful.”
“Exactly. Everyone else in my family has a great love life. You know, physically. I, on the other hand, am doomed to never have…” She snapped her mouth shut.
