Free Cursed by Love by Jacie Floyd Page A

up and licked her lips, before continuing. “‘Only those
with true love in their hearts can keep the segments joined throughout
eternity.’” Her voice rose on the last words and she ended the quotation on a
strangled note. “What does yours say?”
    “Nearly the same.”
    “But what does it mean? Damned if we do,
damned if we don’t?” She clutched his sleeve with strong fingers. Her luminous
blue eyes swam with tears.
    Both his sister and his niece knew tears
were the way to win any argument with him. When faced with female weeping, his
sole instinct was to make-it-all-better. But he couldn’t let a few tears from
Molly force him into buying this baloney about a curse. For her sake as well as
his. “Only if you believe in such tripe.”
    “This is worse than I thought.” She
jumped up and began gathering her stuff. “Much worse.”
    Try as he might, Gabe couldn’t contain a
snort of disbelief. “It’s bull.”
    “You think so?” Molly drew back with
indignation. “Well, how about this? When my grandmother was expecting my
mother, my great-grandmother Dora died. That’s when Nonna inherited the Lotus petals. Her husband died rather spectacularly in an
International incident during the Cold War just a few weeks later.”
    He quirked an eyebrow. “What kind of
International incident?”
    “Did you ever hear of John Eckert?”
    “Hmmm.” The name sounded familiar. Gabe
typed “John Eckert” in a search and scanned the first result. “US pilot shot
down spying on Russia?”
    “So they said.”
    Reaching for her hand, he rubbed his
thumb against her silky palm, hoping to soothe her with his touch. “Was it
true?”
    “According to family legend…” She
exhaled a deep breath. “Probably. The government never acknowledged it, but
they settled a boatload of money on my grandmother so she wouldn’t press for
more information than they wanted to provide.”
    Gabe adopted the reasonable voice that
usually succeeded with everyone from his overly-excitable relatives to
recalcitrant clients. “I’m sure that was rough on your grandmother and your
mother, but a lot of military men die in unfair situations.”
    Molly’s eyes followed the repetitive
motion of his thumb for a moment before she pushed on. “A month after Nonna died and my mother inherited the Lotus petals, my
father left her and filed for divorce.”
    “Sad, but people get divorced all the
time.”
    “Not my parents.” Molly’s voice
rose in volume. Heads around the room turned toward her. She moderated her
tone, and pulled her hand from his. “Not after more than thirty years of being
happily married.”
    If Gabe were of a mind to be moved, or
under almost any other circumstance, the hurt in Molly’s eyes would have done
the trick. But he was a desperate man who needed money and that meant
discrediting the idea of a curse. “He can’t have been happy or he wouldn’t have
left.”
    She dismissed the comment with a sniff.
“And a month later, when I‘d taken the Lotus petals home with me, my fiancé
called off our engagement.”
    “You were engaged?” His heart dipped a
little. The knowledge that she’d very recently loved someone else, might very
well still love that someone, and that the ingrate might very well have
broken her superstitious little heart, damn him, put Gabe on edge.
    He wanted to offer words of comfort, but
in his world of intellect and reasoned action, he’d never been good at
sentiment. He felt an overwhelming urge to throttle the man who’d hurt Molly.
Instead, Gabe reached out again, patting the back of her hand. She turned the
hand palm up and curled her fingers around his.
    She nodded. “Briefly.”
    “You don’t believe it was just a matter
of your fiancé being a jerk? Or of extremely bad timing?” He knew it was the
wrong thing to say as soon as the words came out of his mouth.
    She snatched her hand away from his,
outrage shining behind the sheen of tears. “Of course, I don’t.