Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 80283 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 401(@200wpm)___ 321(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80283 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 401(@200wpm)___ 321(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
“I’m awake now,” I say, threading my fingers into his hair.
He scowls. “Seriously, Elizabeth. Your fever is back up to one hundred and three. I’m calling for a helicopter to airlift you to hospital.”
“I don’t need a hospital. I always get worse before I get better. You’ll see. I’ll be fine when I wake up tomorrow.”
“I’m calling. Now.”
“No,” I insist, curling my fingers into his neck when he tries to stand. “Please, don’t go. Stay and…touch me instead.” I take his hand, guiding it to my breast.
His breath catches and his fingers twitch, squeezing the soft flesh for a split second, sending an electric jolt of hunger through me before he pulls his hand away as if I’ve burned him.
He surges to his feet, backing away until his shoulders hit the closed bathroom door. “You’re out of your mind with fever,” he says in a tight voice. “Get in the bath.”
“I’m not out of my mind,” I insist, though I suspect that’s a lie. I should be dying of embarrassment right now, but I don’t feel anything except…hungry.
Hungry to be touched and kissed, to feel real again after years of floating through life, always distant from my body. It isn’t safe to feel too at home in my own skin. My brain knows the rules and respects the limitations of being a woman cursed to die on her twenty-sixth birthday. My body just…wants.
“You’re my brother’s fiancée,” Jeffrey says in a rough voice.
“No, I’m not. He’s going to marry Sabrina.”
“You can’t know that.”
“But I do know that. I’ve known it for a long time. Sabrina is going to marry Andrew in my place, and I’m going to do what firstborn children in my family always do.”
His brows pinch together. “You still think you can see the future? Like when you were a child?”
“No, I can’t see the future. I never could.” I sigh, too exhausted to come up with a credible lie. I might as well tell him the truth since he seems to like it so much. “A woman kidnapped me from a playground when I was seven years old. She told me that my family had been cursed for being terrible people in the past, and as a result, I would die on my twenty-sixth birthday.”
“Jesus, Lizzy.” Pain flashes in his eyes. “That’s awful. But it’s not true. You have to know that by now. That woman was clearly out of her mind.”
“Only she wasn’t.” I stand on only slightly shaky legs. “So many of my ancestors died at twenty-six, Jeffrey. And everything else she told me has come true.”
“Like what?” he challenges, before holding both hands up between us. “No. Don’t. We’ll talk about this later, once your fever is down and you’re in your right mind again.”
“I don’t want to talk about it later.” I step closer until only a whisper of humid bathroom air hangs between us. “I don’t want to talk at all, and I don’t think you do, either.”
“Get in the bath, Elizabeth,” he says, his voice hard. “I’ll be back with medicine. If we can get your fever down in the next hour, I won’t call for help.”
“You won’t call anyway,” I say calmly, grateful that my fever seems to provide a protective shield against the shame of rejection. “As you know, there’s no cell service here, and I hid the landline phone.”
He blinks. “You what?”
“I hid it. It was the first thing I did when I heard you pounding at the door. I hid it, so you couldn’t bust in and call your brother to rat me out. Then I was going to sneak out the back and run around to my car, but I got too dizzy and had to lie down on the floor. The rest, as they say, is history.”
Jeffrey’s eyes blaze hot enough to make me take a step back. “We’ve had a working phone here the entire time?”
I cross my arms over my chest. “Maybe.”
“You made me drive into the village at the crack of dawn to call the doctor when we could have called her the night before and had medication waiting for us at the chemist’s in the morning?”
My tongue slips out to dampen my dry lips. “There’s no need to get upset. We have the medicine now, that’s all that matters.”
“That’s not all that matters. You could have started the antibiotics sooner, and maybe you wouldn’t still be so sick.”
“I’m fine,” I say, even as I begin to shiver violently, my body betraying me again. “Or I will be. I told you, I always get worse before I get better.”
“You’re getting worse, all right,” Jeffrey mutters.
I scowl up at him. “I’ll take this opportunity to remind you that you weren’t invited on this trip, Jeffrey. If you’re unhappy, you can go.”
“Maybe I will,” he says. “And leave you here to die of pneumonia.”