Free PerpetualPleasure by Dita Parker

have. Knock yourself out.” Lucie
plopped into her office chair, a comforting mammoth of a Chippendale, and
watched him go back to her life, all of them, in rapture.
    MacCale smiled at some of the pictures, frowned before
others, and didn’t say another word until he got to the late twentiethcentury shots.
    “Just one question. No, two.”
    Lucie straightened in her seat. “Shoot.”
    “Have you ever met someone like you?”
    “No. But it’s not something I advertise. ‘Oh. There’s
something you should know. I’m immortal. I hope that’s okay’.”
    “It’s fine by me,” he said. His smile wavered and then
burned out. “You have led an extraordinary existence. It opens up so many
possibilities it boggles the mind but you’re also sentenced to solitude.”
    How right he was. How very dead-on he was every time he
tried to pin her down.
    It annoyed her. More than that, it frightened her.
    Get him out of here. Now!
    “Is there a question hidden in there somewhere?” she
snapped.
    He never even blinked. “Do you consider yourself blessed or
cursed?”
    She raised her brows, but decided to tackle that one for
him. “I know immortality is something many people dream of. I wouldn’t
recommend it to anyone.”
    “Because you’re destined to loneliness,” he stated. “Because
at the end of day one hundred thousand and one, it all seemed old no matter
what the latest fad happened to be. Because there’s no one to share your life
with.”
    He was an intuitivist all right, the best she had ever
encountered.
    Throw him out. Do it!
    “That is more than the two questions I already answered.
Now, if you don’t mind, I have business to attend to.” Lucie stood to send him
a message of dismissal.
    “Please, don’t let me keep you.” MacCale turned back to the
wall and the portraits, at his leisure. “Brunch at one?” he quipped without
looking at her.
    What? “I want you gone by one o’clock.”
    “Brunch at noon then?”
    Unbelievable. Did he ever run out of words or steam?
    “I need to shower. There’s this event in town this weekend.
The Scottish Games. And I’m a part of it and I still have a lot to do.” Lucie ran
through the explanation not caring if it sounded like an excuse. It was the
truth, and he was the main reason she was running behind schedule.
    MacCale turned around as if moving in slow motion. “The
Scottish Games?”
    He’d never heard about it? Definitely not a local. “Yes.
It’s like—”
    He raised his hand. “I get it. Men in skirts.”
    “Kilts. Considering your name, there may have been plenty in
your family at one time.”
    “Screw my family. I want to hear about yours. What happened
to you, Lucie?” His voice was soft, those tigerish amber eyes staring at her.
Calm. Kind. So beautiful.
    Snap out of it.
    She would never see him again. If he told someone in town,
they would shrug it off with a smile. No one else would believe him, so what
did it matter if she told him or not?
    Nothing like a sad little secret to make a man lose any
further interest.
    “My father came from France a widely traveled man. He was
the quintessential explorer, and among the multitude of things he brought over
was a box I was warned against touching, ever. Maybe Papa knew what powers it
held. At least he suspected, because one day it was gone.
    “My parents’ and nannies’ watchful eyes protected me as a
child but there was nothing to stop me when I came across the box as an adult.
I was my father’s daughter, devil-may-care and too inquisitive for my own good.
And what I expected to find was some artifact or other. Never in a million
years did I think it might be an…entity.”
    Her voice was calm, but her hands shook. They always did
when she thought about that day, of the mistake she’d made and could never
undo.
    “I peeked inside, and instantly it came at me. I managed to
close the lid but it was already entering me through every orifice. It blinded
me, made me deaf and dumb. I