Page 71 of Once Charmed, Twice Cursed
Fortuna help me, I internally beg.Let him be there, please.
It’s the last favor I’ll ever ask of the goddess, I vow it.
The trees part. The clearing unfolds before me.
And my chest seizes. Because there he is, in the October sunshine, facing away, shirtless and with an axe in hand. I haul the reins hard, jerking my mare to a stop.
Then I just stare, my ability to breathe forgotten. “Beautiful” is a word that can’t even touch this man. As I watch, hesets a log atop a chopping stump, then takes aim with the axe and brings the blade down, splitting the wood into halves. One skitters across the withered grass toward me. Weston chases it, his head down, the axe gripped by the haft.
When he reaches the log, he catches sight of the mare’s hooves and freezes.
He looks up.
My world cranks to a halt. Those tawny eyes widen. Then Weston’s brows snap low, drawing a cruel line across his features.
My pulse wobbles.
Weston straightens. Slowly. Despite the chill, he’s slicked in sweat, and he is...not happy to see me.
In fact, he looks downrightangry.
“Bria.”
I flinch. This isn’t how I imagined our reunion. At all. “Um. Hi.”
His gaze peels away from mine, fixing on some distant point across the clearing. “If you’re here to tell me about your engagement, I already know. So. You shouldn’t have bothered. Congratulations, though.”
The forest goes quiet, the burble of birdcall fading. I pore over his words, again and again, but they don’t make any more sense the fourth time than the first. “Engagement? What’re you talking about? I’m not engaged.”
His eyes flick to my left hand. “Oh. Already married, then, I guess.” He sniffs and resumes his study of the treeline, despite the fact that my ring finger is bare.
I shake my head, trying to clear the fog of confusion, but it does me no good. “Weston? Will you look at me? What’re youtalkingabout?”
His jaw hardens, taking on a mulish cast. “Your marriage. To Calder Hawthorne. You don’t need to be gentle about it, or anything. I’ve known for a while. And I’m happy for you. Really. Calder’s a good man. He was one of the only ones who would actually set foot in the ring with me. He’ll be good to you. Your dad and I agree on that, at least.”
Shock makes my vision fade at the edges. “My dad? When did you see my dad?”
He scowls. “When I came to see how you were doing. And to propose to you. Again. Which was...what, three times? Four? You’d think by the time I lost track, I’d have realized it wasn’t going to work out for me. But you know what they say.”
I don’t know what they say. And I am...so lost. So I try again. “I’m not married, Weston. Or engaged. Calder Hawthorne did propose, but I turned him down.”
He blinks. His gaze slides to me.
“And what do you mean, ‘you know what they say?’ What do they say, exactly?”
He hesitates. He runs a hand through his gilded hair, which takes the opportunity to spring every which way. “You know. That proverb you always hear.”
“Whatproverb?”
Color seeps into his cheeks. “Hope springs eternal,” he finally says.
A shiver coils at the base of my spine. Something about that answer feels so violently appropriate that I drop the reins entirely. “So...you’re saying you came to my house?Afterthe last time I saw you in this clearing? And you proposed to me, via my father?”
He squints. “Didn’t he tell you?”
Wingbeats erupt inside my chest. “No. Did you honestly expect him to?”
“Well, I thought...” He looks taken aback by my father’s duplicity. “I mean, I guess he didn’t say, one way or the other. But he told you were already promised to Calder Hawthorne. And that you’d been struggling ever since... Since...”—he swallows hard—“Since I did what I did to you. And that you’d be better off never seeing me again. Because if I’d been the sort of man who deserved you, I never would’ve?—”
