Rather than doing the smartthing and backing away fromhim, she took a step forward.
âRoxie,â Luke said, his voice low in warning. âBe sure before you start something youâll regret later.â
âIâm not starting anything,â she said, and knew it was the truth. âIâm finishing it. Call it closure, call it once more for old timeâs sakeâ¦call it whatever you want. Iâm going to call it the goodbye kiss I never got.â
Working methodically when her hands wanted to shake and her pulse wanted to race, not even entirely sure what had got into her, Roxanne slipped off her gloves. Then she got him by one lab coat lapel in each hand and used that purchase to rise up onto her toes as his eyes went dark and her own blood heated.
He moved as she did, and they met halfway.
And kissed goodbye.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Roxanne Peterson â After giving up relief medicine for a place to call home, Rox never expects to find herself handling an outbreak in her hometown of Ravenâs Cliffâ¦or needing the help of the man who broke her heart.
Luke Freeman â The hotshot toxicologist has his dream job leading a CDC outbreak team, but this is the first time heâs been called on to handle a town overrun by both an outbreak and a two-hundred-year-old curse. Will his toughest case yet cost the life of the woman he once loved?
Perry Wells â The mayor wants the best for the residents of Ravenâs Cliffâ¦or does he?
Bug Dufresne â Lukeâs teammate may be key to figuring out what is making the townâs residents sick â and why some of them simply become ill while others become murderous.
Patrick Swanson â The chief of police is fighting a losing battle against a serial killer, a missing woman and a deadly outbreak. Maybe the town truly is cursed.
Theodore Fisher â The eccentric businessman has offered to lift the curse by restoring the old, burned- out Beacon Lighthouse. How is he connected to the mysterious caller pressuring the mayor to sell him the property?
May OâMalley â When Lukeâs teammate becomes ill, heâs forced to face some hard truths about himselfâ¦and his past.
The Seaside Strangler â This fanatic killer believes that sacrificing a woman to the sea gods lifted the townâs curse five years earlier. Now he must kill again to save Ravenâs Cliff.
The well-dressed man â He keeps an injured, unconscious woman in the caves beneath Beacon Lighthouse. What is he after?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Though sheâs tried out professions ranging from cleaning sea lion cages to cloning glaucoma genes, from patent law to training horses, Jessica is happiest when sheâs combining all these interests with her first love: writing romances. These days sheâs delighted to be writing full-time on a farm in rural Connecticut that she shares with a small menagerie and a hero named Brian. She hopes youâll visit her at www.JessicaAndersen.com for info on upcoming books, contests and to say âhiâ!
Special thanks and acknowledgement to
Jessica Andersen for her contribution to The Curse of Ravenâs Cliff mini-series.
Chapter One
Overtired, overworked and frustrated beyond belief, Dr. Roxanne Peterson pressed her cheek to the cool glass door of her small-town clinic. Even after nearly seventy-two hours of fighting the mysterious illness that had overtaken isolated Ravenâs Cliff, Maine, she still couldnât believe her town was in the throes of a deadly outbreak.
And it was her town, whether or not the intransigent locals accepted her as one of them rather than a newcomer.
Sheâd chosen this place, these people, despite the seaside townâs remote location, nearly perpetual overcast gloom and the curse that supposedly haunted the area. Honestly, sheâd chosen Ravenâs Cliff partly because of those things, and because her years of relief medicine in third-world countries had made her want to settle down somewhere, amidst people who needed her.
Sheâd never expected to be thrust back into desperate working conditions in Ravenâs Cliff, fighting a mysterious deadly disease with too little help and not enough equipment or supplies.
Yet that was exactly what was happening, she thought on a long sigh, looking through the glass door of the clinic to the world beyond.
It was pitch-black and raining outside, and thick fog made it difficult to see the shops lining the main street of the seaside town, which led to the town square on one side, the boardwalk and fishing docks on the other.
In past years, even this late on a rainy night, a few locals and tourists would have been window-shopping, exclaiming over the moored fishing boats, or leaning over the cliffside railing to catch a faceful of sea spray from the breakers that pounded the rocky Maine coastline.
There was nobody out tonight, though. Not with death stalking the streets of the quaint fishing village in the form of a strange diseaseâ¦and what it made its victims become.
The locals were calling it the Curse, referring to a local legend about the townâs sea-captain founder. Rox didnât put much stock in curses, but the disease certainly had terrifying consequences. Some patients became seriously ill. Others went psychotic.