Page 30 of Charming the Cowboy
She sighed. “No. But I don’t believe that Tarot tells you things to scare you. I don’t think it tells you about things that are beyond your ability to affect them. I think sometimes it can be giving you a warning, but I don’t think it tells you that you’re going to die, for example.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Because that would be useless. Unless you can stop it. And it’s not going to be specific enough to let you stop it. I think that messages like that are meant to make you more engagedand more active in your life. If it told you something that you couldn’t affect at all, then what would the point be?”
“I don’t know. But, I can’t say that I am overly connected to signs and portents in the universe.”
“Well, I tend to interpret things we can know as positive. Helpful. Because again, I don’t believe that the forces in the universe are spiteful or cruel or pointless.”
“Why do you think that you're cursed?”
“To be fair, I’m not sure that I would think that if I didn’t have a mountain of empirical evidence. Because it does sort of go against my general feeling on the powers that be.”
“You know what I think?”
“No. But I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”
“I am. I think that life is random. And often times, desperately cruel. Hank was just pointing out that next year he’s going to be the same age our dad was when he died. He was thirty-five. And there’s no point in purpose to that. That’s not a falling away of something no one needed. We needed him. And he deserved his life.”
“I’m not arguing with you about that. My dad… He was a good man. He was a good man who loved his wife and loved his kids, and who deserved to have more of a life than he did have. I’m not saying that everything in the universe works out for good all the time. But I think we always have hope. We have to. Otherwise, what’s the point of getting out of bed?”
“No point. Why did you come by again?”
He’d gotten so derailed by the conversation that he’d forgotten. “Oh. I found your necklace today.”
She frowned. “I didn’t realize I was missing a necklace.”
He held it up, and out toward her, a strange sensation making his spine tingle. It had been days since she’d been out to the ranch, and he hadn’t seen the necklace until today. She hadn’t realized it was missing.
It was almost as if…
No. He wasn’t going to give any credibility to that level of hocus pocus.
She reached out and grabbed the necklace, her fingers brushing his. His stomach went tight.
There was a great, clattering sound, and the two of them startled, then rushed out of the back room.
“Edgar!”
There was a seagull, dangling in front of the window, bound up in orange lights.
“He was trying to eat my Halloween lights!”
“Oh dear God,” Cooper said.
“Would you get him?”
“I should let him die,” Cooper said.
“Edgar can’t die! He’s a staple of the community.”
“He’s a pain in the ass,” Cooper said.
“Well, he’s going to break my lights. So we’ve got to do something, even if it’s not strictly to save his life.”
“I don’t want to wrestle a seagull,” he said.
“Cooper,” she said, putting her hands up, clasping them. “Please.”
