Myth said that the dark soul would follow them, would stop them through eternity from finding each other or finding whatever it was that would forever protect them and break the curse.
And Mrs. Byrne believed the dark soul was watching them.
Colin didn’t believe in lore, myth, magic and curses and he certainly didn’t believe in dark souls coasting through eternity on vengeance.
But he took middle-of-the-night threatening phone calls after an attack on a dog and a break-in deadly seriously.
What Colin knew was that he hadn’t lived a sainted life, as, apparently, the misguided angel who was lying pressed to his side had. Colin had made people angry, he’d made enemies; enemies who might use Sibyl to get to him.
All Colin knew was that Robert Fitzwilliam said what Mrs. Byrne had said – that someone was watching them. It now became apparent that someone had tried to run them down with a car. And now someone had shot Sibyl’s dog and ransacked her cottage. All of this, for what seemed like no apparent reason at the time, but now Colin thought it was to warn him.
Colin came to a decision.
Tomorrow, Colin would call Robert Fitzwilliam and task the man with watching Sibyl, protecting her and finding out who was behind these plots while Colin kept steady at his task of winning her.
Chapter Sixteen
Hope
“It’s rather nice of your young man to send a limousine,” Bertie Godwin told his eldest daughter.
Sibyl stared at her father and used every ounce of willpower not to scream at the top of her lungs.
Sibyl Jezebel Godwin was in a carefully controlled rage. This was unprecedented, considering that Sibyl’s rages were usually considerably uncontrolled.
However, yesterday while she was standing outside Customs in Terminal Four at Heathrow airport waiting for her parents to come through the doors, her mobile had rung.
It was Colin.
After she’d answered, without even so much as saying hello, he commanded, “I want you and your parents to come to Lacybourne for dinner tomorrow night.”
Sibyl felt her heart constrict painfully and she stared unseeing at the people marching tiredly through the doors of arrival dragging their luggage behind them as she listened to Colin’s inconceivable order.
“Please tell me you aren’t serious,” she breathed.
For the last week things had been different between them. Entirely different. So much so that part of her feared her magical powers were forcing Colin away and bringing Royce out of the dream world and into the real.
But this order was from the Old Colin.
Their relationship was temporary. She knew that. He knew that.
Why on the goddess’s green earth would he want to meet her parents?
It was cruel.
He interrupted her careening thoughts. “I’m very serious.”
“Is this an order?” she asked, her voice sharp.
He didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
Her breath, and her sharpness, went out of her.
“Why?” she whispered, that one word, she hoped over the miles, expressed the many nuances of her question.
“Just be at Lacybourne at seven thirty,” he’d replied and if she could credit it (which she decided later she could not), he sounded gentle.
And therefore she didn’t even say good-bye; she simply flipped her mobile shut.