you.”
A chill kissed the heat coursing through her as reality permeated the pall of lust clouding her judgment. She hadn’t chosen to be one of the women prophesied to bring about the Apocalypse. It wasn’t her bloody fault.
The unfairness of it all choked her, cooling the rest of her ardor.
“I don’t believe in fate,” she bit out at him. “None of us want to bring about the end of the world. And so we won’t. Why not work together?”
He caressed her jaw, causing ripples of goose bumps to erupt on her skin, then slowly moved down the column of her neck, and over the thin, sensitive skin of her clavicles. “I truly believe that you mean those words. But the Fates are cruel, and the only way we Horsemen can fight them, is to stop you.” He paused, his eyes swimming with regret. “For good.” With that, he seized her around the waist and tossed her onto his giant black horse.
Steadying herself on the pommel, Aerin glared down at him.
“There is another way, you know. You could kill yourselves, instead.”
“Don’t you think we’ve tried that?” he asked sadly, capturing her hand in his. “Don’t you think that if there was any other way, we’d take that route instead? I wish we’d met in any other time. That I could have taken you to see the sands of the Coliseum. That we could have climbed the pyramids or swam naked in the Mediterranean. I would have made love to you in fields of Scottish heather. I would have fed you grapes from French vineyards. In a perfect world, we could have explored the fjords of the north on a Viking barge, or ridden the moors of the Druid homelands on the back of Archimedes, my stallion, when the air was fragrant and unpolluted.”
Aerin let his sadness mingle with hers until she felt like it might be the poison that did her in. “Well, you know what they say,” she sighed gustily. “If wishes were horses…”
“Then beggars would ride,” he finished, slipping the reins into her hand and shocking her by slapping his big stallion on the rump and sending them speeding into the woods, back in the direction of Tierra’s car.
After a bit of ground-kissing once she slid from the horse’s back, Aerin tottered to the car and pointed it in the direction of the Maison de Moray. She evaded her feelings by calling Sandra and getting an update on how the meeting with Masashi went and returning a few business voicemails. Since Port Townsend was a relatively small town, she was in the driveway of the mansion before she was ready to be.
She stood at the foot of the long stone staircase that led to the porch with ornate, hand-carved porch railings that reminded her of Victorian lace. The windows glowed with golden light, not that glaring white of energy-saver bulbs, but of the specialty kind that went in Tiffany lamps.
She had family in there. Sisters.
Do you believe in them? Julian had asked.
Aerin sighed, running her hands through the hair he’d taken down as she seriously considered the question. The answer was, not really. Not any more than they could believe in her. That needed to change. If they were going to work together, to figure this mess out, they needed to start trusting each other.
Or, at least, getting along.
Baby steps, she told herself as she climbed the stairs and followed the wrap-around porch to the side entry that went to the kitchen rather than go in the front. Suddenly, she was starving.
A pair of bare, unmanicured feet propped up on the round, antique table that was tucked into the breakfast nook stopped Aerin dead in her tracks. Those feet were attached to long legs, covered only by the customary pair of cutoffs.
Moira.
Okay, so idealistically not the first sister she’d hoped to encounter but, as Sandra would always say, Whadayado?
Closing the door behind her, Aerin hung her purse on an antique coat stand and carefully made her way across the creaky kitchen floor toward Moira. Two old-fashioned gas lamps cast her shimmering auburn hair with a halo of precious metals and caused her porcelain skin to glow with an ethereal beauty. Clinking ice cubes danced at the rim of a tumbler of thick, caramel liquid grasped in her hand. An amber bottle stood at attention on the table in front of her, its label obscured in shadow.
“Hey,” Aerin began, rather eloquently in her opinion.
Moira eyed her like one would an