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{ Chapter 19 }
Laney closed her mouth, her body unable to move from the spot where she was sprawled naked over Wes’s chest.
They’d eaten. He’d shown her two other interesting and very rewarding ways in which their bodies could fit together.
And now she couldn’t move.
Wouldn’t move ever again, if she could convince him of it.
His hand stroking her hair draped along her spine stilled.
That was never good.
“There’s something else you need to know about the box, Laney.” His words were hesitant—he didn’t want to talk more about the box. Yet he was.
Her head dipped down, her forehead landing on his bare chest. “No. No more on the box. I don’t care about the damn thing. I don’t care on what coin Morty failed to leave me. I just want it to be done.”
“Except it can’t be.”
She groaned into his chest. “Why not? Why can’t we just toss the box out the window and be done with it?”
“Because it’s not safe. It’s always better to know where the devil is than where the devil is not. And we have to get the devil box somewhere where it can no longer touch us. No longer make innocents suffer. Until then, you’re not safe—especially if you leave me.” His head dipped down, his lips brushing against her hairline. “And beyond that, I need you.”
Her head popped up and she looked at him. “Need me for what?”
“To carry the box—to hold it. I cannot do it.”
She pushed away from his chest, her brow furrowing. “You what? It’s just a box, Wes.”
“Except it’s not.” He shook his head. “I know you don’t believe me about its power, about its curse. But the blasted thing has a power—a power I succumbed to once.”
Her eyebrows pulled together, her hand splaying on his chest. “What happened?”
“I had to retrieve the box from someone that stole it from Captain Folback—the captain that brought me aboard theFirehawk. A good man.”
“It wasn’t easy to get back?”
He shrugged. “I got the box, but in holding the blasted thing, it changed me. I went someplace dark—the box took me over from the inside out. If it wasn’t for my crewmate, Des, the Earl of Troubant, taking it from me, I never would have recovered. Some people are immune to the box—don’t feel the power of it. Des, his wife—you. You are the only people that I have seen that do not sway when they are near the box. Your eyes don’t gloss over. Mine do. For the rest of us—for the cursed rest of us—the Box of Draupnir is evil and it will rip our lives apart with the promise of riches and power.”
“That is silly.”
His hands clasped onto the sides of her face, his eyes so serious it stole her breath. “No. Not silly. Real. Real and terrifying.”
As much as she wanted to dismiss this—dismiss this whole supposedly cursed box as lore manifested by the twisted imaginations of a group of sailors stuck in windless waters—what she saw deep in Wes’s dark eyes scared her.
Scared her into nodding.
She would have to believe it. Believe inhim, if not in the box.
And the box scared him.
“That’s where we are travelling to—to Des and his wife, Jules, at their estate in Somerset.”
“We’re going to the man that set the blasted box onto Morty?”
“We are. He never intended your brother any harm, Laney. He never could have predicted what was to happen.”
“But he did know—he knew because he was the one that sent you to protect Morty.”
