Going All Out by Jeanie London Read Free Book Online Page A

fiancé. Tallis has placed her love for him above her ambition. The curse you placed on our descendents—”
    “You I cursed, pirate. Our descendents I blessed tonever know the heartache you heaped upon my beautiful granddaughter.”
    Curses. Blessings. A matter of opinion. Gabriel’s only consolation was that by cursing him, this vengeful old grand-mère had cursed herself to share in his fate. Not much of a consolation when he’d had to actually listen to her for two hundred years, of course.
    “As I was saying,” he continued. “The curse is almost broken. You should be grateful, so you can finally rest, too.”
    “I’d rather watch you fail than rest, pirate.”
    “Fail? You seem to have forgotten the new skill I acquired to help me bring Tallis and Christien together.”
    “Oh, no, no, no,” she said in an irritating singsong voice. “I’ve forgotten no such thing. You have every right to be flush with your new skill.”
    A compliment? Had he been alive, the hairs on his neck would have been bristle-straight. This woman loathed him. He loathed her, too, truth be told, but she actually had more of a reason. He had been the biggest fool where the beautiful Madeleine had been concerned.
    But hadn’t he heard somewhere that forgiveness played a part of death?
    Sheer stubbornness forced Gabriel to turn away and pretend to ignore her. He would not ask what she meant because he knew she wouldn’t tell him. No forgiveness with this one. She would only reveal herself when she knew it would stab like a knife, and he’d entertained her far too often with his failures to doubt that. He wouldn’t let her see that her words had hit their mark. And honestly, he wasn’t all that confident of his ability to help Breanne overcome her ambition.
    Even in sleep his granddaughter’s aura gleamed the dullgray of one who would never know any true emotion. She’d wandered through life in pursuit of ambition, restless in spirit and unfulfilled by her goals, never experiencing the plunging despair that made the heights of happiness all the more sweet.
    And Breanne was only one in a long line of descendents he’d watched suffer the same cursed fate because of his selfish actions. When all was finally said and done—and it would be—he wondered if there would be much forgiveness among any of them.
    To his credit, though, Breanne also had him to thank for remaining in one piece after her stupid stunt in the yard of Number Sixteen tonight.
    Not that she knew it, of course. Spirits had no substance in the living world. A fine thing, too, since had he been of corporeal form, he would have broken his bloody neck saving her when she’d fallen off the wall. But he had managed to cushion her fall—a fine feat.
    Generally, spirits could not appear to the living. Apparently only those old enough or powerful enough could learn to summon matter and affect the living world. It had become rather a race between him and the old crone to see who could sharpen their abilities best.
    So Gabriel had practiced summoning his strength to bridge death to the living world. It was draining business, to be sure, but he continued to prevail and proudly added new and useful skills to his repertoire.
    His proudest achievement thus far had been fully materializing to Tallis and her fiancé.
    That had been the only reason he’d finally convinced Tallis to recognize how precious love was. But Breanne was even more headstrong than her sister, and until tonight there hadn’t even been a potential male around.
    But Gabriel had seen the way her aura had sparked off Lucas. Lucas’s aura had sparked right back.
    These two had the potential to share a truly great love. Auras never lied, and he’d grown quite sensitive to reading the nuances of energy that radiated off the living.
    “What shall I do with you, Breanne?” he asked aloud, almost forgetting the old woman who watched him. “Aha. I know.”
    He would start by whispering suggestions while she