by Carol Davis
“My name is Abby Sullivan, sir,” she blurted.
He seemed momentarily shocked, and she heard Aaron suck in a breath. Then Jeremiah looked her up and down, head tilted a little, appraising her.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she said.
“Hmpf,” he grumbled.
She supposed that was a start.
Then he demanded, “How did you come to be here?”
With her heart still pattering madly, she answered his question in as few words as possible. They didn’t seem to make him any more displeased than he had already been, and she wondered how many times something like this had happened before. There were other islands nearby, so surely people with boats took a wrong turn now and then. It wasn’t as if this place was out in the middle of the ocean, like Hawaii, or on some other planet.
And they did seem to have an established system for dealing with—being rude to—outsiders, so maybe things like this happened a lot.
Not people falling in love with Aaron, though. Surely that didn’t happen a lot.
“I love your son, sir. Jeremiah,” she said firmly.
He went on scowling for a moment, then clenched a hand into a loose fist and shook his head. “You seem unalarmed,” he said finally. “That seems improbable, if you came here by accident.”
“Alarmed? Why would I be alarmed?”
His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t answer, so she turned to Aaron, who didn’t seem inclined to answer, either. His palm was warm and damp, as any nervous person’s might be, and it made her remember holding hands with her first boyfriend, back in her freshman year of high school. His hands had been perpetually damp, but colder than Aaron’s.
“She feels the pull of the bond, Father,” he said quietly. “As do I.”
Jeremiah’s gaze moved back to Abby. This time, he seemed to be considering her in a different way. She had no idea what Aaron meant by “bond,” but it seemed to be a word that carried a lot of weight.
After a minute, Jeremiah muttered, “Unlikely.”
“Even so.”
Jeremiah thought that over for a moment, then he heaved out a deep breath and shook his head again.
“Find yourselves some food,” he told his son with noticeable reluctance. “Rest for a while, if you need to. I’m going to discuss this with the others, and with your mother. This will not be simple, Aaron. Don’t deceive yourself into thinking this will be at all simple.”
“Yes, Father,” Aaron said.
The door rattled in its frame when Jeremiah closed it on his way out.
Eleven
The house got very quiet after Jeremiah had gone. The windows alongside the door didn’t provide a view of much of anything, but Abby supposed that the people who had been talking outside had followed Jeremiah somewhere. It made her stomach wobble to think she was the topic of so much discussion; she certainly hadn’t ever been before. At least, not that she’d been aware of.
Aaron gestured for her to sit down in a chair near the fireplace, even though the fire wasn’t lit. Her feet were tired after the long walk, so she accepted the offer and straightened her skirt a little primly after she sat. After a minute, Aaron sat down cross-legged on the rug and lowered his head into his hands.
“What’s ‘the bond’?” she asked.
He lifted his head to look at her, but didn’t seem eager to answer.
“You said I was affected by ‘the bond’,” she pressed. “What is that?”
“I think you’d call it ‘finding your soulmate’.”
That made her mind skip a beat—hearing the word spoken aloud. Yes, she thought. Yes. It was love at first sight, but it was something more than that, something a lot stronger than infatuation. What she’d come to feel about Aaron over the past few days was unlike anything she’d ever felt before. She’d had crushes now and then, starting when she was in kindergarten and running right up through a few months ago, when a tall, gorgeous client named Doug had spent some time working at her office. Those feelings had been strong, and she’d spent a lot of time able to do nothing but daydream about the boy—or man—involved, but they were nothing like this. This kept waking her up at night, leaving her breathless.
“I feel like… like I’ve always known you, somehow,” she said. “Like all of this makes absolute sense. Like I knew it all along, somewhere inside me. This isn’t some arbitrary thing, some kind of rebellion against my life. It’s—I mean, we…”
Abby squeezed her eyes shut and pinched her knees through her skirt. This couldn’t be real, could it? All of this? She wasn’t the type of girl to dance naked in the rain with someone, then roll around in the mud. She’d never even had sex outdoors before. Sure, her birth control pills—the ones she’d been careful to go on taking, when Aaron wasn’t looking—would prevent her from getting pregnant, but neither she nor Aaron had said anything about condoms. She supposed he didn’t have any, and the ones Lane had brought to the resort were still there. Or wherever Lane was now. He’d only planned to be there for the weekend, and this was… what? Tuesday? Wednesday?
No, he had to have gone home by now. Back to his life.
A life that, somehow, had started to seem like more of a dream than being here with Aaron did.
This was all… pretty insane.
“Are you all right?” Aaron asked. “You look very pale.”
“They’ll decide I should go home, won’t they? Your father and the others. You won’t be able to talk them into accepting me.”
Aaron turned to stare into the cold fireplace. “They’re wary of sending people back to the mainland after they’ve seen too much of this place. People can have all the good intentions in the world, but they let things slip. They confide in a friend, or have too much too drink and entertain the crowd with what they’ve seen. Our safety depends on secrecy, Abby. The… people on the mainland don’t like anything that’s different, anything they don’t understand. They view us as a threat.”
“No, they don’t. I don’t. Why would they?”
He smiled wistfully, still without looking at her. “I’ve put everyone in a difficult position.”
“That’s what my father always says, when I do something he doesn’t agree with. That I’ve made things difficult for him. As if I lie awake at night thinking up ways to complicate his life.”
“My father says the same.”
She looked around, taking in all the details of the house. Unlike the cabin, it was obvious that people lived here, had made this small building their home for a long time. The dining table had four chairs around it, and in the area that served as the kitchen she could see piles of dishes and pots, and a mound of fresh vegetables. A comfortable-looking chair near a window was piled with clothing she guessed might need mending. Firewood was stacked near the fireplace. Through a partially open door she could see part of a bed covered with a bright quilt; nearby was another door that was closed. A second bedroom, she thought.
Small decorative items were placed here and there: carvings of animals, a bundle of dried flowers, a colorful hand-knitted blanket. Pretty things. Much-loved things, she decided.
“This is your home,” she said softly, feeling more than a little awed. It was so different from her father’s house, where everything seemed devoid of charm and warmth.
She thought about her father, about what his reaction would be when he found out she had abandoned her home and her car and her job—her entire life, really—after she’d spent a few days with a good-looking man. But people did that all the time, she was pretty sure, and it couldn’t possibly end in disaster every time. There had to be couples out there who’d made sudden decisions and had lived happily ever after. Her parents had been happy together until her mother had died, and they hadn’t known each other very long before they married.
It was possible, wasn’t it? To be truly happy, for a lifetime?
Still holding one of her hands, Aaron laid his head on her lap as if he intended to fall asleep there. He wasn’t at peace—she coul
d tell by the way his shoulders were hunched—but at least for the moment he seemed to be where he wanted to be. Smiling at that, she ran her fingers through his hair, combing the soft, dark strands into place.
“This is my home,” he murmured. “Here. With you.”
Quite a bit of time had gone by when the front door opened again and Jeremiah came back in, accompanied by a woman who could only be Aaron’s mother. She looked fairly tall for a woman, round-hipped and strong-shouldered. Her thick, dark hair was gathered into a bun at the nape of her neck, and she was dressed like Aaron’s father in loose pants, a blousy shirt, and simple shoes.
She looked, Abby thought, like a woman who could easily kick the butt of anyone who crossed her.
Most of the women Abby had seen here had looked like that, come to think of it.
Aaron’s mother took a long look at her, then moved to the kitchen area, opened a cupboard and brought out some cups and a pitcher. After she’d placed those things on the table, she took out a loaf of bread and a knife.
“Come,” she said. “We’ll have something to eat, and talk.”
She sliced the bread as they all sat down around the table. The loaf had berries in it, Abby noticed, and it looked sweet, something like the honey cakes Aaron had given her at the cabin. The pitcher contained only water, but that was fine; as Aaron’s mother poured it into the cups, Abby realized how thirsty she was.
“My son likes to balk,” his mother said suddenly.
Aaron frowned at that, then dropped his gaze to the table. It was clear that he was waiting for his parents to begin eating before he did so much as touch his cup. That didn’t seem balky to Abby, and she wondered if stern discipline was the general rule in this house.
“Rachel,” Jeremiah said to his wife. “The girl doesn’t need to know–”
“She needs to know what she’s stepped into,” Rachel said firmly, but not at all angrily.
Something changed in Aaron’s expression. He tried to mask it, but it had been plain on his face for a moment, and Abby suddenly understood a lot about the relationship between mother and son. He’d said Luca was his older brother, so Aaron was her younger child, her baby. As first-born, Abby guessed, Luca had probably gotten the lion’s share of his father’s attention, and had probably been groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Aaron, on the other hand, was the “spare”—free to soak up his mother’s affection. A little more free to make up his own mind.
So if Abby was going to stay here, she needed to win over Rachel, not Jeremiah.
“The bread looks delicious,” she said softly.
Rachel cut her an extra-thick slice, then went back to the kitchen to fetch a little bowl of honey. The bowl looked handmade, and had been painted with blue stripes by someone whose grip on the brush had been a little wobbly.
Aaron, Abby guessed. When he was a little boy.
She wondered what he’d been like. Loud, or quiet? Helpful around the house? Or had he preferred to play outside, running around with the other children, playing ball, stomping in puddles?
She remembered him dancing around in the rain, and splashing her in the stream, remembered how playful he’d been. No, she thought, he hadn’t been a quiet child. She thought that might have been Luca: silent, focused, wary of the rules.
She’d picked the right brother, she decided, and smiled across the table at him.
“Luca isn’t going to eat with us?” she ventured.
Neither man said anything. After a moment, Rachel said softly, “Luca will join us later.”
He was off sulking somewhere, then, Abby thought.
She ate two slices of bread and drank three cups of water, doing her best not to seem greedy. No one raised an eyebrow. She was their guest, she decided, and maybe they were accustomed to feeding their guests well. Besides that, no one she had seen looked particularly underfed. She’d thought they might be, living in a place like this—but maybe food was plentiful here, particularly during the summer. Maybe these people knew how to gather all they needed from the land, even though Aaron had said the island wasn’t very big.
How long had they been here? she wondered. Years? Decades?
That question was still in Abby’s head when Rachel said something to Aaron with a look. He got up from the table silently and left the house, which worried Abby considerably until he returned with a heaping plateful of fragrant cooked meat that he placed in front of his father. Rachel quickly brought several clean plates from the kitchen and passed them out, and after Jeremiah had served himself, he offered a share of the meat to Abby. She had no idea what sort of meat it might be, but it smelled delicious.
It had been a wonderful meal, she decided when they were finished. Simple, but nourishing and good.
Rachel and Aaron worked together to clear the table. Then, again to Abby’s distress, they both left the house.
Jeremiah stayed where he was, at the head of the table. Abby made to get up, to follow Aaron, but Jeremiah waved her back into her chair. Being alone with him made her nerves quiver, and she half-expected him to scold her, to accuse her of some terrible misbehavior that his people wouldn’t allow.
Instead, he looked… tired.
“If you go,” he said, “if you talk of what you’ve seen here to the people on the mainland, you will ruin everything for this community. For our pack. Do you understand that?”
Pack? Abby wondered. “I wouldn’t say anything.”
“An easy promise to make. Not so easy to keep.”
“Why would anyone care?” Abby blurted. “You don’t have anything here worth stealing. The land, maybe, but—”
“Certain parties would care. The wrong kind.”
“I don’t want that to happen. I don’t—I would never wish anyone any harm. You seem like nice people.”
Jeremiah raised an eyebrow. “And you’ve determined that after being among us for barely an hour.”
Abby glanced past him at her yellow bag, sitting slumped on the floor near the fireplace. It was a very bright spot in a room that was mostly subtle shades of brown, red, green, blue. “I love your son, sir. I do. He’s a wonderful man.”
She thought he might argue that, or question again her making judgments after only a short time.
Instead, he said, “I’m aware of what you feel.”
“Then–”
“I would prefer that you had never come here. My son was meant to choose among those who live here, to find his mate here. There are two I thought would be good for him. They’re strong. Smart. Healthy.”
“I’m healthy,” Abby said.
Jeremiah smirked at that, and reached out to push a crumb across the table. “It would appear that way,” he said, but it seemed at odds with his expression.
“I am. I almost never get sick.”
“What about the rest of it?”
“The rest of what, ‘it’?”
“Your life. Your habits. Your expectations.”
“I love your son,” she said stubbornly.
And damn him for not believing her. Whatever had brought it about, she wanted nothing more than to go back to the cabin with Aaron and nestle in bed with him, waking periodically to make love and then fall back asleep in his arms. To begin building a life with him—a life that would last, in spite of anything anyone’s father or brother thought. In spite of anything anyone thought.
“I love your son,” she murmured.
Her eyes were locked on his—on eyes that seemed to peer deep into her soul, and she had to force herself not to look away. Then Jeremiah reached over and lifted her head with a finger placed under her chin.
“I smell it on you,” he said. “I could smell it on you from some distance away.”
“Smell… what?”
But he shook his head. “Go to him,” he said, and got up from his chair. “You’d find a way to do that even if we kept you apart, so you might as well be together. It will help you decide whether the bond is truly there or not.” H
e paused. “As I told my son, this will not be simple. You will have to prove yourselves: to the elders, to this family, and to the rest of the community. If you can manage to do that, you’ll have a great deal of responsibility here.”
“For–?”
“Go to him,” Jeremiah said firmly. “Don’t stray. He’s waiting for you.”
Clearly, he was done talking for now. With Abby frowning at him, lost in confusion, he went into the bedroom and shut the door.
He’s waiting for you.
That was enough to send her out of the house in search of the man she’d begun to feel she couldn’t live without.
Twelve
Somehow, she knew exactly where to look. It was only a couple of minutes’ walk from the house, though that was far enough that she could have spent hours looking in all the wrong places—being watched the whole time by the people who lived here.
She tried to tell herself that they didn’t seem angry at her, or fearful; they were just curious.
No, scratch that; a couple of them were obviously very unhappy.
She found Aaron sitting on a boulder at the edge of the woods, knees drawn up to his chest. She had the feeling that he came to sit there often, to watch the birds and squirrels in the trees, or maybe just to think.
“Don’t do anything because you think it’s what I want,” he said.
“I’m not.”
That wasn’t quite true. His wanting her so badly was definitely part of what was urging her to stay.
There wasn’t room for her to sit beside him, so she leaned against the boulder.
“There are people here who will never accept you, no matter what the elders decide,” he said after a minute.
“There are?”
“Not many. A few. They’ll have their reasons.”
She thought of those unhappy faces she’d passed on the way out here. One of them belonged to a woman about her age, another to an older woman, another to a man with white hair. Another to a man who seemed confused in a way none of the others did. He’d sniffed her repeatedly as she walked by, then scurried off into the woods. That had given her a rush of the heebie-jeebies, but she supposed it was really no different than being scrutinized by some of the homeless people who hung around near her office—the ones who were clearly listening to voices inside their heads.