For Love Or Money

For Love or Money

Elizabeth Bevarly

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

About the Author

Coming Next Month

Chapter One

Dinah’s fingers convulsed on the telephone. For once in her life, luck seemed to be on her side. Maybe moving to San Francisco hadn’t been such a bad idea, after all.

The lottery ticket she was holding in her hand had come to her attention while sorting through all those as-yet-unpacked boxes that had been stacked in her spare room since moving from Atlanta three months before.

In hindsight, she supposed it would have made sense to call about the tickets before she’d left Georgia—after all, some of them had been months old when she moved. But it had never really occurred to her that one of them might have been a winning combination. Who ever really thought they’d win the lottery?

Still, she must have some deeply buried optimistic streak if she’d packed the tickets along with the other nonessential odds and ends from her kitchen, instead of tossing them out. That same streak must have caused her to call the toll-free number now, to double check—just in case—instead of throwing the tickets into the garbage with all the obsolete business cards and expired coupons amid which they’d been mingling.

Funny, her being a closet optimist, Dinah thought. Her family did, after all carry the infamous Curse of the Meades.

“So how many of the numbers did I get right?” she asked the faceless Georgia Lottery representative on the other end of the line. Her fingers trembled now as she threaded them through her straight, pale blonde bangs.

If she’d gotten three of the six, she’d won enough to treat herself to a nice dinner, she thought. That might be nice. She could take Marcus. And if she’d matched four numbers, she might just cover a month’s rent, which would be really nice. And if she’d matched five—which she dared not even wish for, because that would be asking too much—Dinah could clear a few thousand dollars. Oh, what a luxury that would be. She crossed her fingers as she waited to hear.

From nearly a continent away, the woman from the Georgia Lottery told her, “No, Ms. Meade, you don’t understand. I mean you picked some winning numbers. All the winning numbers. You’ve just made yourself a cool five million dollars.”

Thunk.

It took Dinah a moment to realize it was the phone that had made the sound as it hit the floor, and not her head. Though she had landed on her fanny when her knees buckled beneath her. Five million dollars? she repeated to herself. Five million dollars?

Five Million Dollars!

“Yes, ma’am. Five million dollars.”

Only when she heard the fuzzy reply did Dinah realize she must have shrieked that last out loud. Even so, the voice reassuring her seemed to be coming from a million miles away. Or, at the very least, three feet away, because that was where the cordless phone had skittered when it slipped from Dinah’s fingers.

Hastily, she scrambled across the kitchen floor on her hands and knees and jerked the phone back up to her ear.

“Are you sure?” she asked the woman. She repeated the numbers again for verification.

“That’s the winning combination,” the woman assured her. “We thought you’d never come forward.”

Dinah recalled her bad habit of buying tickets and magnetting them to the fridge, then forgetting about them. Thank goodness her move had made her check the tickets!

“But as long as you’re at lottery headquarters in Atlanta by closing on Monday,” the woman said, “you’ll collect your money with no problem.”

Dinah halted mid-vow. Monday. That was only three days away. And Georgia was…well, more than three days away. At least it was if she drove the distance alone by car or took a train. It would be even longer by bus. But those were her only travel options. No way was she getting on an airplane.

“I’ll be there,” she reiterated firmly.

She scribbled down the instructions, then hung up the phone. Holy moly. She was a millionaire. Or, at least, she would be. In three days. If she made it back to Georgia in time. And, of course, she would make it back to Georgia in time.

She hoped.

A millionaire, she thought again, still numb from the news. She had to tell someone. She had to call someone. She had to shout it to the world. She had to—

A familiar sound out in the hallway caught her attention then, and hastily, she unbolted her back door and jerked it open wide. And when she did, her across-the-hall neighbor, Marcus Harrod, jumped about a foot in the air.

As he always did when returning home from work, he looked like a walking/talking advertisement from GQ, wearing a flawless charcoal suit, crisp white dress shirt, and expertly knotted and discreetly printed Hermès tie.

Dinah bit back a wistful sigh when she noted how perfectly his attire complemented his silky black hair and luminous blue eyes. He smelled marvelous, looked fabulous, made her little heart go pitter-patter, pitter-patter, pit-ter-pat-ter. Too bad he wasn’t her type. Or, more correctly, too bad she wasn’t his type.

Damn. All of the good ones were taken. Or else all the good ones were gay.

When he saw that it was Dinah, Marcus fell back against his own door and expelled a gasp of relief. “Jeez, Dinah. I hate it when you do that. You nearly gave me a coronary.”

“Marcus!” she cried, ignoring his condition. “I have got the most unbelievable news to tell you!”

“Okay, Dinah, let me get this straight.”

Marcus Harrod tipped the bottle of single-malt Scotch over a cut crystal tumbler, and tried to digest everything his across-the-hall neighbor—and the object of most of his sexual fantasies these days—had just told him.

But instead of processing her news about winning the lottery, all he could do was think about how incredibly sexy she looked. Even in ragged jeans and slouchy yellow sweatshirt, with her blond hair bound haphazardly atop her head in something vaguely resembling a ponytail. If you disregarded all those straggly pieces framing her face. Although, even those straggly pieces were awfully sexy. Made a man want to lift a hand and skim it oh-so-slowly over her—

“I know it’s hard to believe,” she said, interrupting what had promised to be a damned nice fantasy. She paced restlessly from one side of his living room to the other, her sock-clad feet silent on the expansive, expensive, Aubusson.

“But it’s true. It’s true!” she cried again, pivoting around to smile at him. “I won the lottery, Marcus! I’m rich! I’m rich! I’m rich!”

“You’ll be rich,” he reminded her. “On Monday.”

“Right,” she agreed, sobering. Some. For a second or two.

Then she started bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, her smile dazzling. She paced to the other side of the room, perched herself on the edge of an exquisite Chippendale chair for a nanosecond, then shot up and started pacing again.

“You have to help me, Marcus,” she told him as she passed by him quickly enough to create a breeze.

“I’ll help you,” he promised. “First by fixing you a double Stoli, straight up. I think you could use it.”

She spun around with enough force to send a less grounded individual spinning right out of the room. “No, no, no, no, no. Not necessary,” she told him. “I’m intoxicated enough as it is.”

He feigned disappointment. “What? You started happy hour without me? That’s not like you, Dinah.”

She smiled at his mention of their usual Friday evening ritual. Dinah worked at home as a freelance writer, so she invariably heard Marcus return home from his architectural firm everyday. Over the last three months, it had become their custom to spend every Friday after work enjoying cocktails and conversation together. It had become even more customary for the two of them to have dinner together at one or the other’s apartment a couple of times a week.

They’d struck up a nice friendship within days of her moving in to the building. It was just too damned bad she wasn’t interested in him romantically. But she’d never shown any sign that she returned his very profound interest in her, so he hadn’t pressed the issue. Not that he could understand for a minute why she wouldn’t be interested in him. He’d never had that problem with women before. Ah, well. It wasn’t his to question why. But it was his to keep his fantasies about Dinah to himself.

“You have to help me, Marcus,” she said again, bringing his attention back to the matter at hand. Pretty much. He did still kind of wonder what she had on under that sweatshirt.

“I’ll be glad to,” he told her. “What do you want me to do? Water your plants while you’re gone?”

She started bouncing up and down again. “No, I want you to come with me,” she said, her brown eyes wide with excitement.

The drink he’d been lifting to his mouth stopped just short of completing the action. “Come with you?” he echoed. “Why?”

“Because I’m going to need another driver.”

“What are you talking about?” Marcus asked. “You’re planning to drive to Georgia? By Monday?”

“If we take turns at the wheel, we can drive straight through. We won’t have to stop except for food and restrooms.”

He eyed her curiously for a moment. “Why would we want to do that, when you can hop on a plane and be there within hours?”

Her expression went vaguely horrified. “A plane?” she repeated, voicing the word as if it were something unspeakably vile. “I can’t get on a plane. No way.”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, no. Don’t. Dinah. Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who’s afraid of flying.”

She made a mild face at him. “Well, of course I’m not afraid of flying. Just how flaky do you think I am?”

He sighed in relief. “Good. So what’s the problem?”

“It’s because of the curse,” she told him.

Marcus was afraid to ask. Nevertheless, “The curse?” he repeated cautiously.

Dinah nodded. “Yeah. The curse. The gypsy curse.”

Chapter Two

It had taken her 45 minutes to convince him to accompany her to Georgia, two hours for them to pack and shower and tie up loose ends and plot their driving strategy, 20 minutes to argue over whose car they would take, and 30 minutes to get out of San Francisco.

Now as they sped east, with San Francisco Bay shimmering beneath them like smooth black satin, Dinah felt herself relaxing for the first time since the call from the Georgia Lottery.

Until Marcus said, “Okay, you promised if I came with you, you’d tell me about this gypsy curse.”

Oh, yeah. That. Funny how blackmail had a bad habit of backfiring on a person.

She sighed heavily. “Well, it’s sort of complicated.”

He chuckled wryly. “Yeah, I bet. Family curses sorta tend to be that way.”

She nodded. “True.” But she said nothing more, hoping he might take the hint and let it go.

No such luck.

“Dinah?”

“Hmm?”

“The curse?”

“Right.”

She continued to gaze out the window as she spoke, though, because she didn’t want to see Marcus’s expression as she explained. People who didn’t suffer from family curses just never got the whole family curse thing.

“It dates back to the seventeenth century,” she began. “According to the story, one of my more vicious Meade ancestors—not that there were a lot of vicious Meade ancestors,” she hastened to clarify. “In fact, most of them were totally passive and decent. In fact, the ones who first came to this country in the 1800s were Quakers who—”

“Dinah?”

“Hmm?”

“The curse?”

“Right.” She backpedaled and started again. “This ancestor, apparently obsessed with a beautiful, young gypsy girl, kidnapped her and locked her way up in the tower of his castle. And to get even with him—and to prevent him from committing his nefarious deeds—her family put a curse on him that would also hex all of his ensuing progeny.

“Which, I guess is understandable,” she qualified, “all things considered. I mean, if someone locked up a member of my family way, way up in a dark, dank, stinky tower and tried to commit nefarious deeds with them, I’d want to do a lot more than put a curse on him. I’d want to wrap both hands around his throat and—”

“Dinah.”

“Hmm?”

“The curse.”

“Right. Where was I?”

Marcus glanced over at her with narrowed eyes. “The, uh, the curse,” he told her.

“Right,” she said again. “To make a long story short—”

“Please do.”

“—what the curse amounts to,” she continued, “is that anytime anybody in my family tries to travel higher than a certain height, something nefarious happens to them. In the case of my vicious ancestor, it was spontaneous combustion.”

Marcus swerved into the shoulder a bit, but recovered admirably. “Spontaneous combustion?” he echoed.

Dinah nodded. “Pretty nefarious, huh?”

“You said it.”

He glanced over at her again, and the slash of illumination from a bluish-tinted street lamp briefly threw his features into stark contrasts of shadow and light. He had such incredible cheekbones, she noted, not for the first time. And he looked so handsome and dramatic, all dressed in black—black jeans, black sweater, black leather jacket.

Two words, she thought. Yum. Mee. And two more words. Major loss. To the feminine gender, at any rate. Honestly. It sure was a good thing that she was a level-headed woman. Otherwise, she might very well have fallen in love with him by now. And wouldn’t that just be about the dumbest thing she’d ever done in her life?

Yeah, good thing she was so level-headed.

“So how high a height are we talking here?” Marcus asked, stirring her from her musings.

“Well, tower-height, obviously,” Dinah replied. “Though the castle was up on a big hill, too, so a bit higher than tower height, I guess. It was the only way the gypsy family could keep my ancestor from committing those nefarious deeds. It’s also why so many members of my family live at sea level, and why none of us work in tall buildings. If anyone in my family goes too high up, we pay for it. Big time.”

“How so? Surely someone in your family has tested the curse by now, haven’t they? After all, it’s been hundreds of years.”

“Oh, yes. Several people have tested the curse.”

“And?”

“They’ve all met with nefarious ends.”

There was a moment of silence from Marcus, then, “What happened to them?” he asked.

“Oh, gosh, all kinds of things,” Dinah said. “For example, there was my Uncle Sebastian, who tried to climb Mount McKinley.”

“And what happened to him?”

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