“They’ll find her. I know they will.”
Fresh guilt stabbed. I should have been worrying about Jenny and Kyoko, not my attachment to Hudson. “Thank you for your help and for picking me—us—up.”
We hugged and then I walked away. A cluster of hens herded around my feet for half the block, then disappeared. I glanced back at Ari and waved. She waved back and went inside.
The walk did nothing to clear my head, but it felt good to stretch my legs. The FBI chairs had been hard and cold, but I had hope of my butt regaining its normal shape. I wasn’t used to riding in cars as much as I had the last several days, either, and my leg muscles were stiff from lack of use. I took the long route back, stopping by a corner grocer to purchase bananas, ice cream, and a bottle of wine, then by the take-and-bake pizza place, ordering a large. Cleaning up my ransacked home was going to be a long, appetite-inducing process, and I doubted I’d be up for cooking tomorrow, either.
It was nearing sunset when I hiked up the stairs to my loft. It would be good to be home, no matter what its condition. I’d open the patio doors, let in the ocean breeze, and get my life back on track. Without Hudson.
“Hang on, Ari, I think I hear her coming now.”
I pushed through the door at the top of the stairs and came face-to-face with Hudson. His blue eyes stared into mine, his expression serious. A shark fin circled his feet, bobbing up and down out of the floor as if it were water, and a fuzzy patch of white fur sat in the center of his forehead. Fear and . . . something. I hadn’t seen the white fur often enough to know what it meant.
“Looks like she stopped to pick up a few things,” he said into a cell phone pressed to his ear. “Including pizza.” He took the cold pie from my hand without breaking eye contact. “Sorry to worry you. Thanks again. Bye.”
He slid the phone into his pocket.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” I said. My heart fluttered, caged hope battling to be freed. I thought I’d steeled myself against Hudson, inured myself to my growing infatuation—or at least I’d started to. I couldn’t afford to let my feelings for him take root. Given the preview I’d just experienced, losing Hudson was going to hurt. A lot.
If only I’d given myself this cautionary advice a few days ago. Between the blackmail and the kidnappings, I’d missed the moment my attraction had changed to affection, but at this rate, I was in serious danger of falling in love if I didn’t take a step back now.
“Do you want me to leave?” Hudson asked.
“No.” It came out too weak to sound sincere.
“You don’t look happy to see me. I can go.”
“No,” I said, stronger this time. “I’m just . . . surprised.”
“Where else would I be?” he asked. “You’re here. And you have pizza. It’s a no-brainer.” He smiled a crooked, teasing smile, and my emotional brick wall toppled.
Oh, damn. I was going to be miserable when this ended, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.
“I thought you’d been scared off,” I said.
“By what? A few guns, a few ninjas, a SWAT team, and the FBI? I’m made of sterner stuff than that. Plus, how can that compete with pizza?”
I chuckled. “Are you hungry?”
“Now that you mention it . . .”
I set my grocery bag at my feet and wrapped my arms around Hudson, lifting myself on tiptoe to kiss him. He kissed me back, sliding his free hand down to cup my butt.
“That’s more like it,” he said.
My apartment was exactly as I’d left it: trashed.
We ate on the patio, where it was clean and we could watch the sun set. Hudson uncorked a Cabernet. Cool evening air settled around us, and we ate listening to the muted sound of the city.
“I need a new couch—two new couches,” I said. I shifted to look back into my lit apartment. I was thankful the ninjas had done no major damage to the gas lines in my walls—Antonio had given my loft a rigorous inspection earlier that day—but my gratitude was buried beneath a rubble of self-pity. “New locks, too,” I added.
“I might know someone who can help you with that,” Hudson said.
“Nothing electric. Just a nice solid lock. Maybe one of those bars that locks in place on both sides of the frame.”
“Like on a bunker?”
“Exactly.”
“You don’t think that’d be overkill?”
“How about five locks up and down the door?”
“That’s a lot of keys to carry.”
“Good point.”
“I brought a new dead bolt. Thought we might start there.”
I smiled.
While Hudson replaced my old dead bolt with a new one, I swept the last of my broken mementos into a large trash bag.
“Do you want to tackle this tonight?” Hudson stood beside the kitchen, looking toward my office.
I walked to his side, and he wrapped an arm around me. I snuggled up to him.
“Not the office.” I couldn’t think about the office yet. Every single folder and its files were strewn across the floor, mixed with glass shards and paper clips and pens and tacks and dirt from broken potted plants. “But let’s straighten the library.”
“The library?” Hudson echoed.
I gestured to the built-in shelves on the right side of the short, wide hallway between the dining room and the office. “It was more impressive when the seating was intact.” My oversize leather chair with matching ottoman had been gutted, and the stuffing was clumped among the book rubble. The ninjas had swept the books from the shelves by the handful.
More glass mixed in with the books and stuffing and dirt: shards from picture frames and a collection of Italian glass votive candle holders Ari had given me three Christmases earlier. I finished pulling the remaining few books from the shelves, then cleaned the swirls of dust the forensic woman had left behind when she brushed for prints. Hudson started wiping down books and setting them in a stack for me to go through.
“So where have you traveled?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t get away much.”
Hudson read titles as he stacked the books. “Italy Day by Day, Discover Peru, The Rough Guide to Amsterdam, Back Roads Ireland. You don’t consider this getting away much?”
I didn’t meet his gaze. “I like to read. I’m sort of an armchair traveler.” Not by choice. I did my best to disguise my bitterness.
“You’re the most well-traveled armchair explorer I’ve ever met.”
I was glad when he dropped it.
Hudson swept a spot of the floor clean, then sat cross-legged and picked up another book, brushing glass shards into a growing pile. “I really hope the elephantini curse has been lifted.”
“Me too,” I said.
“You know, at first I thought it was just me. I mean, it was just the cars I was driving or riding in, just my cell phone that died.”
“Mmm.”
“But then the FBI showed up, and they started having the same problems I did.”
“Maybe Jenny did more than change the length of Kyoko’s life,” I said, inwardly cringing at blaming an innocent animal.
“That’s a stretch, though not much more than the life-lengthening formula. But it doesn’t explain how the elephantini would affect—infect?—people she’s never been near. Take the ninjas’ van that night when they grabbed us or even the FBI van this morning. If the ninjas had been near Kyoko at that point, they wouldn’t have bothered with kidnapping us. And the FBI seem to know about Kyoko, based on today’s questions, but I don’t think they’ve ever been in her presence.”
“Hmm.”
“Plus everyone’s cell phone seems to have been on the fritz since Jenny showed up, including every single one of the ten thousand I’ve purchased in the last few days.”
My gut constricted. He wasn’t going to let it drop. A Rubik’s Cube spun in front of his chest, the sides sliding and twisting, the colors lining up. I’d tried pretending boredom with his elephantini curse theory
and I’d tried dismissing his reasoning, but it wasn’t going to be enough. I needed to distract him before he reached the inevitable conclusion. His superstition and the nonstop problems had blinded him to the obvious connection between the electronic failures and me, but given a little more time to think about it, logic was going to lead him to the correct answer.
The only problem was, I couldn’t make myself stop him. I could think of plenty of ways to distract him—asking a man about himself was a surefire way to change the topic and make him forget for a while. So was sex. But as curious as I was to learn more about Hudson, and as happy as I’d be to lead him upstairs and have my way with him, something stopped me.
Hudson had come through a lot with me during the past five days. He had been rock solid by my side, trusting me and supporting me the whole time. He’d passed the family test at the da Vias’. I felt closer to him than I had to any man in a long, long time. I trusted him.
In my life, I’d only trusted two men: Caesar and my grandfather Leroy Sterling. Definitely none of the men I’d dated made the cut. None of my previous lovers would have broken the law to protect me. Granted, they hadn’t been given the chance, and also, breaking the law for me wasn’t exactly a rousing endorsement, but I couldn’t help but place Hudson in higher esteem for his actions.
Maybe this was nothing more than a textbook case of trauma-induced trust, I considered, trying to be logical. I understood the last few days had been a cocktail of extremes—stress, lust, fear, relief—and I probably wasn’t thinking right. I should tackle Hudson and not let either of us form a full, coherent thought for at least twenty-four hours. After that, I could reassess my feelings more rationally.
But my usual solution didn’t feel right. Hudson had placed a great deal of trust in me, and I wanted to return the favor. For the first time in my life, I wanted to explain my curse to a man.
A jolt of raw panic spun me on my heel, and I sprinted to the kitchen, out of Hudson’s sight. I wanted to tell him about my curse because I wanted him to stick around. I didn’t want this relationship to end before it really began. I was thinking long-term. I never thought long-term. Long-term was for other women, women who were normal. Women who had more hope and more blind faith than I did.
Women who didn’t risk their lives by trusting their lovers.
If I told Hudson about my curse, I’d be handing him the very information Jenny had blackmailed me into this mess with in the first place.
I clutched the edge of the sink and took deep breaths.
“You okay?” Hudson called from the library.
“Yeah, just thirsty,” I said. I turned the water on and put my wrists under the cold flow. The shock felt good.
What was it Nana Nevie told me when I’d confessed my first adult crush? You don’t walk into love, Eva, and you don’t fall. You throw yourself into it. It’s all or nothing.
Genevieve Blandiana, or Nana Nevie, was the family expert on love—not because she had been married seven times, but because her gift was relationship-related prescience: She could literally see if a relationship was going to last, and for how long. Her gift was strong, and it worked on the men she fell in love with as well as it did on anyone else she saw. She’d married each husband knowing full well the exact length each relationship would last. And each and every man she’d loved with a youthful, innocent intensity.
I’d never understood Nana. I didn’t understand how she could throw herself into marriage after marriage, knowing each was doomed to end, sometimes within months, sometimes after a few years. It made no sense to toss my heart out there, only to have it trampled, because the trampling was inevitable. The women in my family had no trouble attracting men; we had trouble attracting men who stayed. They always left. Nana’s men left her amicably: She was friends with all of her former husbands, worked with several of them still, and regularly attended various events with them. Sofie’s men disappeared, drifting out of her life in slow increments until one day they stopped showing up. Annabella’s men abandoned her, though maybe that was what she preferred—I’d never discussed men with my mother.
Men didn’t leave me. I left them. I appreciated them while I had them, and then I left before they could. It was beyond time to leave Hudson. He was hammering cracks in my emotional walls, catching glimpses of my secrets. By all rights, and by habit and logic and every self-preservation instinct I possessed, I should have been severing all ties with him. ASAP.
Yet, for the first time since I was a teenager, I didn’t want to run from the risk. For the first time in my life, hope outweighed fear. I trusted Hudson. But did I trust him enough?
You don’t walk into love, Eva. You throw yourself into it. It’s all or nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“You sure you’re okay? You look a little pale,” Hudson said, coming up behind me.
I turned the water off and dried my hands, then snuggled into his chest for a hug.
“I know this is tough. I’m so sorry they destroyed all your things,” Hudson said. “If you want, we can go back to my place tonight.”
I shook my head. “I’m good. Really. Let’s finish the library. We’re halfway done.”
We resumed our previous positions, Hudson cleaning the books and stacking them for me to place back on the shelves in order.
My hands shook too badly for me to do anything but stand there.
“I think there’s something else going on,” Hudson said, falling back into his musings. “I mean, I’ve lost count of how many cars have broken down. Don’t you think it’s bizarre?”
I took a deep breath and threw myself off the cliff of certainty. “No.”
“No? So you’re saying all these electrical malfunctions are normal?”
“For me, yes.”
Hudson looked up from the book in his hands. “What does that mean?”
I sank on weak knees to sit in front of him, thinking this might be a better conversation to have eye-to-eye.
“It means that cars typically break down when I’m in them.”
“What, like you’ve got the world’s worst car karma?”
“No. It’s a fact. Why do you think Ari was so blasé about her car breaking down? It isn’t her car—it’s me.”
Hudson was smiling, looking for the joke.
“Same with your cell phones. It’s the proximity to me that keeps killing them. All those phones—okay, the really good ones—should be working fine again by now if you left them at your house. They just needed time away from me.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
I shrugged. My heart hammered in my chest. I still had time to back out. I could burst out laughing and pretend I’d been pulling his leg. Hudson would accept it was a joke, too. He was too pragmatic not to. But the nagging suspicion would be in the back of his head. That suspicion would wedge space between us, and in a few days or a few weeks, one of us would be ending this relationship.
I ground my teeth and took deep breaths. Oh, God, Nana, I hope I’m doing the right thing.
“Think about the last few days. Every time a car broke down, I was in it.”
“So was I,” Hudson said. “Are you saying that I now kill cars?”
“You’ve driven places without me. Your car didn’t die then. And what about Dempsey’s truck? It only died when I was in it. Same with the Tercel.”
“Not every time. It was random bad luck. Really bad luck, but random. An elephantini curse.” He was backpedaling away from his reasoning now. He’d talked himself up to the threshold of making the connection between me and the curse, and now he refused to see it.
I rubbed my palms against my knees to dry them. “Forget the cars, then. What about the cell phones? Every cell phone you’ve had since you met me has died.”
“A bad batch of microchips.” He didn’t sound like he believed himself.
“Your house? How often has the power gone out at your house?”
“Not often.”
“Would you say it on
ly happened when I spent the night?”
“You’re saying you being in my house made all the electricity stop working?”
“Stop working, die, suspend. Something like that.”
“That’s—”
“Preposterous? Impossible? What about Annabella’s house? When we found the ransom note, did you notice the power went out in the entire house?”
“Eva, this is crazy. You don’t kill electricity. That’s not possible. That’s like . . . like something out of a comic book.”
I hugged my stomach and pushed on through the nausea. “This loft is wired with gas for a reason, and it has nothing to do with feng shui.”
Hudson’s smile disappeared, replaced by a furrow between his brows. “You really believe this, don’t you?”
“I do,” I whispered.
He studied my eyes, and his face became a stony mask. Rotten bananas piled up at his feet. My heart squeezed and I dug my fingernails into my palms.
“This has been a really rough couple of days,” he said. “Maybe we should get some rest. Everything will seem clearer tomorrow.”
“No. Time won’t change who I am. What I am.” A freak of nature.
“‘What’ you are? Are you going to tell me that you’re not human now?” Hudson rose. I pushed to my feet, but he kept his distance.
“No, I—”
“I think I’ve been a damn good sport, Eva. I’ve played along, done things I shouldn’t have, because, shit, because it felt right. But this? You? Electricity?” He shoved his hand through his hair, his hard eyes scouring me.
I’d misjudged. I’d jumped without a safety net.
“Hudson—”
“Uh-uh. No. The woo-woo shit stops here. You’re not cursed and neither is that elephantini.” He paced away from me, only half turning when he spoke. “There’s a logical explanation to this, and it’s not that either one of us is crazy. I need . . . I need to think. Good-bye.”
The impact of my heart against the concrete of reality shattered it into a hundred pieces. I’d been a fool to think he’d believe me. I’d been a complete besotted idiot to believe for one instant that love could conquer my curse; worse, that a few days’ drama-filled crush could counter what a lifetime had taught me—I wasn’t permitted long-term love.
Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance Page 32