Passion - By Lauren Kate Page 0,34

but he was clearly distracted. He kept looking away from the woman. His eyes darted around the lawn, as if he sensed Luce behind the roses.

When his gaze swept over the bushes where she crouched, they flashed the most intense shade of violet.
Chapter Six
THE WOMAN IN WHITE HELSTON, ENGLAND

JUNE 18, 1854

By the time Daniel got to Helston, he was angry.

He recognized the setting at once, as soon as the Announcer ejected him alone onto the shingle banks of the Loe. The lake was still, reflecting big tufts of pink cloud in the evening sky. Startled by his sudden appearance, a pair of kingfishers took off across the field of clover and came to rest in a crooked moorland tree beside the main road. The road led, he knew, into the small town where he'd spent a summer with Lucinda.

Standing again on this rich green earth touched a soft place inside him. As much as he worked to close every door to their past, as much as he strove to move beyond each one of her heartbreaking deaths--some mattered more than others. He was surprised at how clearly he still recalled their time in the South of England.

But Daniel wasn't here on holiday. He wasn't here to fall in love with the beautiful copper trader's daughter. He was here to stop a reckless girl from getting so lost in the dark moments of her past that it killed her. He was here to help her undo their curse, once and for all.

He started the long walk toward town.

It was a warm and lazy summer evening in Helston. Out on the streets, ladies in bonnets and lace- trimmed gowns spoke in low, polite voices to the linen-suited men whose arms they held. Couples paused in front of shop windows. They lingered to speak with their neighbors. They stopped on street corners and took ten minutes to say goodbye.

Everything about these people, from their attire to the pace of their strolling, was so infuriatingly slow. Daniel could not have felt more at odds with the passersby on the street.

His wings, hidden beneath his coat, burned with his impatience as he waded through the people. There was one fail-safe place where he knew he could find Lucinda--she visited the gazebo in his patron's back garden most evenings just after dusk. But where he might find Luce--the one hopping in and out of Announcers, the one he needed to find--that, there was no way of knowing.

The other two lives Luce had stumbled into made some sense to Daniel. In the grand scheme, they were ... anomalies. Past moments when she had come close to unraveling the truth of their curse just before she died. But he couldn't figure out why her Announcer had brought her here.

Helston had been a mostly peaceful time for them. In this life, their love had grown slowly, naturally. Even her death had been private, between just the two of them. Once, Gabbe had used the word respectable to describe Lucinda's end in Helston. That death, at least, had been theirs alone to suffer.

No, nothing made sense about the accident of her revisiting this life--which meant she could be anywhere in the hamlet.

Why, Mr. Grigori, a trilling voice called out on the street. What a wonderful surprise to find you here in town.

A blond woman in a long patterned blue dress stood before Daniel, taking him utterly by surprise. She held the hand of a pudgy, freckled eight-year-old boy, who looked miserable in a cream-colored jacket with a stain underneath the collar.

At last it dawned on Daniel: Mrs. Holcombe and her talentless son Edward, whom he'd given drawing lessons to for a few painful weeks while in Helston. Hello, Edward. Daniel leaned down to shake the little boy's hand, then bowed to his mother. Mrs. Holcombe.

Until that moment, Daniel had given little thought to his wardrobe as he moved through time. He didn't care what someone on the street thought of his modern gray slacks or whether the cut of his white oxford shirt looked odd compared to any other man's in town. But if he was going to run into people he'd actually known nearly two hundred years ago wearing the clothes he'd worn two days ago to Luce's parents' Thanksgiving, word might begin to travel around.

Daniel didn't want to draw any attention to himself. Nothing could stand in the way of finding Luce. He would simply have to find something else to wear. Not that the Holcombes noticed. Luckily