Called to Order (35 page)

“My son asked me to speak with you. He would like to know if you are surely in love with Adam.”

Anna smiled. “I am.”

Jonas took a deep breath and nodded solemnly. “Have you heard the saying that when a daughter marries, the parents gain a son, but when a son marries they give away a child?” Anna nodded, but said nothing. “I am afraid today I will lose two children.” He cleared his throat. “Annalise, I am grateful for your place in my home. You will always have a place among my family and under this roof as well as under the roof my son has seen built for you.”

“Thank you, Jonas.”

“Do not thank me yet, child. I have been put to two tasks today, one, to take you wherever you wish to go if you ask to leave. Do you wish to leave this place?”

“No. I wish to marry Adam.”

He nodded as if he approved of her choice. “I will do anything to help my children,” he stated as if he needed to be sure she understood this. She slowly tipped her head as if to say of course. “It is a difficult task, trying to show your children the right of things. Sometimes age does not ensure wisdom. I have been requested to ask if you will visit with my son before the ceremony. I will not be far if I am needed, but you would be alone with him.”

A frown knitted across her brow. “Of course I will meet with Adam—”

“It is not Adam who has made the request. It is Cain.”

“Cain is here?”

“He is. He came to me this morning. He has promised me that if he can have a few uninterrupted moments with you, he will then hand himself over to the council and allow the bishop to determine his fate.”

“The bishop? What will happen to Cain?”

“I do not know. It is not my place to decide.”

“Does Abilene know he’s here?”

“My wife does not need to know. I ask that you not mention his presence either. I will do practically anything for my children, but I will hurt my wife for no one. Not even them.”

“But if they sentence him to death, she will be hurt. You are leading him to a fate that could very well be death. He would be better to run.”

“It would hurt my wife more to hear horrific stories of her son becoming an animal like his great uncle. We have never had another case of two males sharing a mate’s dreams. Perhaps they would choose to keep him under observation in hopes of another explanation. If they destroy him, they will never have those answers.”

“I don’t want any part in Adam’s brother’s death.”

“Does that mean you will not see him?”

Anna thought for a moment. If she saw Cain, Adam would be angry. He would be furious with his father for arranging such a meeting. However, it could possibly be the only peaceful way to deliver Cain into the custody of the council…where he might die. Was it better to deny him and hope that he ran? Anna thought about Jonas’s uncle Isaiah. He had escaped execution and in turn, raped and murdered hordes of innocents. If Cain’s fate was to become the same monster his unanswered uncle became, then it would be the blood of innocents on Anna’s hands.

“Where is Adam?” she finally asked.

“He is with his sister and Silus. They will be here at dusk when the sun is less of a threat to Adam.”

Anna looked out the window. The sun was in the westward sky, but it would still be at least an hour or so until dusk. “Where is Cain?”

“He is in the next room.”

Talk about pressure. Anna sighed. “Okay.” Before Jonas had time to reply, the knob clicked and the door opened. Cain’s form filled the frame. It was still jarring to see Cain who looked so much like Adam yet was so different. Anna understood how she had first gotten them confused, but that was a mistake she could never make again. Although their hair, height, eye color, and build were identical, she now saw differences in their appearances.

Cain held himself a little more in the shadows. His eyes were bracketed with lines from scrutinizing life. His brows always hung cynically lower than his brother’s, and he did not have the laugh lines Adam had. But most different of all were his eyes. Where Adam’s were alive and observant, Cain’s were cold and severe. They cut from one direction to the next with acute accuracy and the sharpness of a knife’s blade. When they cut to her own eyes, her lungs filled with an icy breath despite of the heat.

“Leave us, Father,” Cain said without taking his eyes from Anna.

“Cain, you will not harm her—”

“Never.” The terse word cut through the air like the hiss of a python.

Jonas looked toward Anna, but she would not take her eyes from Cain. Before he left the room, he said, “Call if you need me, Annalise. I will be in the next room.” As the door clicked shut behind him, the air seemed to fill with some heavier element that was worthless to her hyperventilating lungs. She wanted to stand, to step away from the bed, but she feared if she did so, she would fall or worse, faint.

Cain eyed her for a few moments before speaking again. It was as if he were measuring her sincerity in meeting with him. When he did speak, his voice was harsher than she would have expected from a man trying to make amends. “You will control your fear or find yourself thrown back on that bed and bonded before your groom even arrives.” Perhaps he wasn’t planning on making amends after all.

Chapter 25

Anna felt as if a hundred birds were flapping wildly in her chest. Cain gave a depreciative laugh, not cruel, but still mocking her in some way. Her fear of this man, so similar to Adam yet so different, was beyond her control. Her body reflexively went into shock in his presence. It was not a numbing shock like when a train crashes and you have no real comprehension of the damage, but that odd, melting-down part of shock when too much adrenaline makes your body quake and your finger tips feel so cold your teeth chatter.

He growled, and in a streak of heat and movement, he was leaning over her, his face a mere inch from hers. “I said, control your fear.”

“I…I can’t,” she stuttered. Her throat seemed made of china. It was impossible to swallow or relax the tight spaces enough to breathe in even a swallow of air.

He snarled and turned. His wide shoulders dimmed the room as he stood in front of the window. He was not as loose and relaxed as he usually appeared. His muscles seemed braced for a battle. “What is it about you that intoxicates the very air of this space, something so sweet it almost wets my sinuses with each breath?” Anna kept him in her peripheral, but her gaze went to the basket of Adam’s items beside the bed. Tucked into the side, was the brown wooden hilt of his whittling knife. “I wonder if it is your blood that makes my senses drunk or if it is simply the fragrance of you.” She kept her spine as straight as possible and reached down to the basket blindly. Her fingers closed over the smooth rounded handle of the knife. Cain continued to speak as if he were talking himself through a complicated algorithm. “It reminds me of spring during those last days before summer when the air is punctuated with the heavy perfumes of gardens.” She moved the sharp pointed knife onto her lap and folded it in the pleats of her apron and gown. Her eyes returned fully to Cain’s back.

He sighed and dropped his hands from the window frame. “Are you planning on stabbing me with that
pricker
, Annalise?”

Something dark filled her, as if a heavy cloth had been thrown over the birds flapping in her chest. Everything inside of her stilled. Once she’d almost fallen down a flight of stairs as a child. She’d caught herself just before her body was propelled off the edge, yet her muscles tightened so painfully in anticipation of the blow that she had to mentally tell her heart to beat again. Cain had just given her that same feeling.

“Lay back.”

She scoffed at his words and said no, yet her body reclined onto the mattress. Her hand still fisted the knife, but due to her angle, she now held it at her hip. She tilted her chin in an attempt to watch Cain, but the angle was awkward and she could not seem to make herself sit up. She heard a footstep, and the birds returned.

Cain stepped back into her field of vision, his hands casually in his pockets as he stared down at her through Adam’s silver eyes. A snap of breath puffed out is nose as if he found something comical, but his placid mouth was not amused enough to grin. “You see, Annalise, I have realized that when you are afraid, I have control. I can feel your blood pounding through your veins as if it were calling to me. Your heart pounds a tattoo loud enough to smother all the creaks of the house. For a man who never had much talent, I find it difficult to resist experimenting with this new gift.”

“Please don’t hurt me,” Anna begged as water spilled from her eye and rolled beneath her neat, little bonnet. She refused to admit it was a tear driven out by emotion.

Cain’s face never took on an expression, so when he reached for her, she flinched regardless of his composed features. Her eyes had somehow closed but opened again when he ran his thumb over the moist flesh next to her eye. “Do not cry for me, Annalise,” he whispered. She was terrified, yet her body found comfort in his touch. She told herself it was the familiarity of the hand. It was Adam’s hand. But those silver eyes, they were Cain’s, and they watched her with such shrewdness Anna was certain he knew the game she was playing in her head. He knew she was not feeling his comforting touch but his brother’s. The hand dropped to his side.

Anna had always believed there were certain places on the body a person could tolerate being touched by a stranger, the shoulder, the top of the head, like when an adult tousles the hair of a child. It was as if those places were open ground. And then there were places that were private. Not necessarily the breasts or the apex of ones thighs, but those places somehow seemed knitted more tightly to nerves, like one’s earlobes or hips or ankles. When Cain reached for the knife in her hand, his cool fingers brushed such an unnamable place. It was informal, his touch, yet it triggered that sense of violation deep within Annalise.

He removed the knife from her white-knuckled grip and held it between his large fingers. It was more a crude tool than a weapon, yet it was all Anna had at her disposal. Removing it from her hand was like stripping away a layer of flesh, tearing down a protective boundary.

He scrutinized the knife and then returned his gaze to hers. She thought she saw something wounded behind those familiar silver irises, but it was gone before she could examine it. He held the blade where she could see it. “Did you plan on stabbing me, Annalise?”

He reached for her hand again and replaced the knife. Her fingers did not feel like her own. He wrapped them around the wooden handle and held them in place. He lifted her weighted arm, his hand wrapped tightly around her own and the knife and placed the tip over his heart. The sharp, little blade pressed into his black shirt making a small canyon in the tightly knit fibers. “Here then, right into the heart. Go ahead, end it.”

She understood how insufficient the small knife was. He was immortal. The damage she could do would be nothing more than a splinter upon the hand of a giant. He released her fingers, and the knife thumped to his lap in a soundless muffle. She stared up at him as his gaze penetrated hers. He slowly leaned forward until his face was a mere inch from hers. His hot breath punched her lips with warmth. He inhaled and shut his eyes as if savoring her scent. “Honeysuckle.”

When his eyes opened, his pupils had taken on the shape of catlike diamonds. Anna now understood a vampire’s eyes changed in such a way when their owner was aroused or enraged. He leaned forward, closing the distance, but stopped before his lips could fully press into hers. Their breath mingled, and the flesh of her mouth prickled at the barely there contact.

“I do not wish to harm you, Annalise, but I also cannot seem to stop myself from stealing your kiss,” he whispered against her mouth. “Let me.” His lips pressed into hers, firm yet soft. His tongue skimmed the sensitive seam where her outer lips turned soft and wet. The act twisted something tight in her belly, but the reaction was smothered so deeply in guilt and a sense of betraying Adam that she refused to feel it.

“Give me this, sweet Annalise. Let me have my kiss without my brother’s presence in your mind.”

She didn’t know if it was fear that made her obedient to his command much like her inability to sit up, but for some reason her body relaxed, and all thoughts of Adam vanished as Cain sealed his mouth to hers.

His hand coasted over the material of her dress, and her body reacted with shivers as the flesh of his palm touched the soft skin at the base of her neck. His fingers curled delicately around the curve of her throat, supporting her as he coaxed her mouth open and began to slowly invade her. His thumb made soft circles just below her ear, and the flutter of her rapid pulse seemed to ricochet off his touch.

His kiss was nothing like she expected. His lips were Adam’s yet not. Cain’s kiss was surer, more direct. He seemed to know exactly how to kiss a woman as if he had kissed hundreds. The idea of him kissing other women made her own mouth begin to move, and suddenly she was kissing him back. It could not have been jealousy, she told herself, but her inability to name the emotion that stabbed her at the idea of Cain kissing other woman had her mind whispering that jealousy it was.

Her back rose off the bedding as he pulled her closer. The kiss, now a two-party experience, had warmed like a lost ember that slowly builds in force and heat until it scolds a hole right through its host. He was burning a hole through her.

“Sweet, sweet, Annalise,” he whispered as he kissed the corner of her mouth, her jaw, the most sensitive place of her throat. His fingers held her at the base of her skull. Her braids loosened, yet she could not formulate a complete thought on why that would not be a good thing. Her bonnet had disappeared, and her bare feet curled and pressed into the bedding, her legs restless and wanting.

Fingers moved in her hair as the kiss continued. She gripped his shoulders. The ping of a hairpin hitting the wooden floor sounded as if landing miles away. He deftly undid her braids and fanned her now-wavy hair over her shoulders as he eased her back onto the pillows. His weight pressed into her as his arms banded around her ribs. Her breasts were heavy and sensitive, the press of his chest against hers a welcome comfort.

The echo of their breathing and the soft rustling of clothing filled the room. He kissed the sharp crest of her cheek, her closed eyes. His tongue traced the shell of her ear, making a cool line from her lobe, down her throat, to the wing of her collarbone. She arched against him as he pressed kisses into the curve of her shoulder.

Their moans began to meld as one. “You feel like no other female I have ever known,” he whispered reverently as his mouth continued to burn her heated flesh. “My beautiful Annalise.”

“Oh, Adam…”

He stilled, the halt in his movements not as jarring as the stillness of his mouth upon her skin. He emotionally withdrew himself from her so quickly that she suffered an overwhelming sense of falling. The small puff of silent laughter he released punched against her skin. With his face pressed deep within a tumble of her hair and the curve of her shoulder, he sighed.

He slowly eased off of her, and she was crushed with a new weight. Her heart broke for this man, Cain, not Adam. How could she have done such a thing? Made him think there was more of her heart than what already belonged to his brother? He turned, cradling his brow in his palms, covering his eyes. He was breaking before her eyes. She shut her own eyes as a sense of self-disgust settled into her bones. “I’m sorry.”

“This is not your doing.”

For some reason she believed he was being sincere, he did not blame her for his suffering. She slowly sat up. She pulled herself up beside him and sat contemplating their situation, all resolutions splashing in and out of the whirlpool of her mind seeming incomplete and worthless.

After several moments of silence, she finally asked, “What will happen to you?”

“I do not know.”

“Will you just hand yourself over to the council? Let them decide what is right in a situation they have no precedence for?”

“I gave my father my word.”

“But…”

He faced her, his eyes tense and ravaged with stress. “Annalise, if I were to leave, I do not know if I am strong enough to stay away. You have yet to take Adam’s blood, but he has taken your heart. What does that leave me? I do not wish to become some
feeish
animal that needs to be hunted and destroyed.”

“Do you feel your control slipping?”

He shook his head in bewilderment. “Honestly, no. I feel a pull to you, yet I have the common sense to deny myself for Adam’s sake as well as yours. Yesterday I stood at the end of the valley, as close as I could get to the rising sun, hoping for some singeing sense of penance yet felt nothing but the prickling warmth I have always felt under the sun. I am not dizzy, and I still crave food as much as before. My only true symptom is the dreams. I think if I could reason with the council, which I still feel rational enough to do, they may actually allow me to live.”

“But where will you go?”

“There is a safe house. It is where the council meets, and below ground there are cells. I will appeal to them and confess my wishes to serve my sentence there.”

“I do not understand what you are being sentenced for. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

He smiled, but his eyes remained sad. His fingers gently fondled a thin braid still woven in her hair that was now hanging over her shoulder. “Sweet Annalise, don’t you see? Adam claimed you the moment he returned home with you. When I approached you, I was breaking a sacred law among our people. It is a crime that must be punished.”