Page 50 of The Defiant Curse

The hair on the back of his neck stood, and he didn’t like that shift in energy.

“Ceit and I look alike?” she asked.

Michael moved closer so they could both look at the painting. He’d get it down for her, except it was on a rail, and it was a bitch to remove without a ladder. That wasn’t an easy reach by any means.

It was pretty high up there.

“Yeah, you do. She was young, but you’re her doppelgänger. We can’t explain it. That’s the last mystery we have. We put it all to bed, but that. We just didn’t know what to do about it.”

She didn’t know what to say.

As she stared at the painting, one thing occurred to her.

“She looks…sad.”

Oh, and she knew how that felt.

“Yeah, she does. She had a hard life. Her father sold her to a man for a dowery to get rich and pay off debts, likely against her will, and then murdered her when she wanted to go home.”

She let him talk.

“In his letters to his lover, he never cared about her, and that was painfully obvious. He said he loved her, but not like that. Her letters to him painted a different story. At first, she hated him, and then, the switch was flipped. It had to be when she got pregnant. She believed it was a girl. It wasn’t. Duncan’s bloodline never produced a female heir.”

Elizabeth listened to the abridged version of the tale. Honestly, she didn’t have time to research this.

He kept going.

“When she got the letter from Duncan, she was told about him loving Ciarán Begbie. She felt betrayal, and rage. Honestly, it pissed her off more than you’d think it would. Back then, I’m sure arranged marriages were common. She flipped her lid, and cursed him.”

Oh, well, yeah.

If she was carrying her husband’s child, and he broke her heart like that…then again, her husbands all slept together, so…

But still, as a woman, who had been betrayed and lied to, once by Chris, and then once by her partner in the FBI, she got it.

It sucked.

Michael kept going.

“She got a witch to curse his bloodline.”

She stopped him.

“So, she was pregnant with his child, and then decided to curse his bloodline, including her child?” she asked.

He paused.

“Yeah, I guess.”

That made her sound like a horrible mother. God knew she’d never curse her children—if she believed in shit like that. Then again, here she was playing doppelgänger in a haunted castle in Scotland, so who was she to talk?

“She had the baby, and then she went to throw herself out the window, but Oison Darragh showed up, and clocked her in the face with a chain. She fell out the window and to her death.”

Again, she stopped him.

“Wait. What?”

He wasn’t sure what he said to confuse her.