“Ahh, thank you, Mary,” Lawrence said, taking the drink from her. He then sat back as if making himself at home.
“A lovely little garden you have here. Mary is quite competent, I’m sure, but unless you wish to see those Japanese plums die, I would rehire some of the staff you let go after taking residence. The gardener, at least.”
He didn’t flinch. “A reference, I assume, to Camaret-sur-Mer, when Laria tore my flowering heather to shreds in a fit of rage?” He looked down into his drink. “Where is your lovely sister these days?”
His own siblings were far from here, in their homeland, or were, at least when he’d left them. Most importantly, neither brother seemed to be aware of Alessandra—yet.
“I believe she’s with my brothers. Thank you for asking.”
Lawrence’s undertone of pure hatred began to grate.
“What do you want, Lawrence?”
“Just to ask what you hoped to gain by telling Alessandra such tall tales? I’m surprised she has not turned us both into local law enforcement.”
I’m not. Though I am surprised you waited this long to badger me about this.
He’d taken a calculated risk that night. Given how impossible Lawrence had made his task, he’d decided the only way he could get information out of Alessandra was if he shared a partial truth with her. Only now, she understandably wanted nothing to do with either of them. He may have to end this much sooner than he would like.
“What would you have me do? Have her cower in fear every time I’m near?”
“Instead, you helped bring about the very thing you feared. Her ‘abilities,’ as you call them, would most certainly have lain dormant if you hadn’t come here threatening her.”
Kenton rolled his eyes. “A tired old argument. And if she’d come into contact with another vampire? What then?”
“Perhaps nothing. The likelihood of her becoming a hunter—”
“Doesn’t matter. The possibility is still there.”
“But why not wait to find out before killing an innocent?”
“Innocent,” he spat. “And this is where we will always disagree.”
He thought back to the other day at The Witch’s Brew. “She knew of my presence in the coffee shop. I could see it, and you likely did as well.”
“Being aware of us and becoming a full-fledged vampire hunter are two very different—”
“How many times? How many times will you try to convince me—”
“Of the truth? I will never stop.”
Lawrence was giving him a headache.
“Can we not agree to disagree?”
The Scot’s glower told him he took exception to the sarcasm in his tone. Little wonder he took such a sunny view of the Cheld—they were his own family’s descendants, the traitor.
“Shouldn’t you be somewhere?” he pressed. “Hiding in the shadows, protecting Alessandra perhaps?”
Lawrence took another sip of a drink Kenton knew he had no taste for. Only one thing tempted their taste buds now.
“I know you’re here, so she’s in no danger.”
He sat up.
“I ask again, what do you want?” This time, he was not so cordial.
“Merely to propose a gentleman’s agreement.”
“If only two gentlemen were present.”
The term was a sensitive one, even all these years later. Back in the day, when the two men had been border lords—one in England, one in Scotland—“savage” had been a slur the English had leveled at the Scots. Never had there been a fiercer conflict than that between his family and Derrickson’s clan.
Surprisingly, Lawrence did not rise to the bait.
“Go ahead,” he offered reluctantly, “what are your terms?”
“You’ve already admitted you want Alessandra alive for long enough to learn her secrets. We both know I wish her alive indefinitely. And so, we are at an impasse. I propose a two-week truce.”
Did Derrickson think him daft?
“So you can wait for your reinforcements? You expect me to sit here while the great Clan Karyn descends on Stone Haven to pull the Cheld from my evil grasp?”
Lawrence put his drink down on the cast-iron table between them.
“I’ve not sent for them, nor do I intend to, Kenton. You have my word. They are . . . otherwise occupied.”
Truth. Lie. It mattered not.
“There will be no truce. I’m done with this game, Lawrence.”
“Her family—”
“Is small. And while your siblings are ‘otherwise occupied,’” he said, knowing he tipped his hand, “so are mine.”
“There are more of them.”
He shrugged, knowing he took a risk by killing her now. But it would be more dangerous to let her live if Lawrence persisted in his interfering ways.
“So help me, Kenton—”
The maid was coming. She was some distance away, though close enough for him and Lawrence to hear her footsteps.
They waited.
“Mr. Morley?” Mary poked her head out of the door that led to the patio where they sat.
“Aye, Mary?”
When she startled, Kenton realized his mistake.
“Yes?” he corrected.
Lawrence snickered beside him.
“You have a visitor asking to see you, sir.”
He didn’t spare the Scot a glance. Few knew him in this town. Surely—
“A Miss Alessandra Fiore.”
Though he and Lawrence had both watched her from afar, Kenton had not seen her properly since that night on her porch. Since then, she’d kept mostly to her house and The Witch’s Brew. Nothing out of the ordinary that he could tell.
“Show her back here,” he said, his tone even, his heartbeat unaccountably quickening.
Kenton looked into the green eyes of his nemesis. The shade was a reminder of their differences. Somehow it always reminded him of Scotland. Of Lady Isobel and the bloodline of hunters she’d created, intent on eradicating their kind.
And one of those unwitting hunters was about to step onto his patio.
Aside from being separated from her mother and brother, life was good in Alessandra’s little corner of the universe. She’d just gotten her dream job and had a whole summer to prepare for it. Maybe she didn’t have a boyfriend, or even a glimmer of a boyfriend, but relationships had never worked out for her anyway. Toni thought she chose unavailable men because her father had run off, but she always joked that she simply had bad taste. Didn’t matter. She was happy.
Or at least she had been until these two good-looking jerks had shown up to ruin everything.
With every step she took closer to them, the awareness that had begun creeping down her spine more than two blocks away intensified. No matter how much she wanted to dismiss Kenton’s words, write him and his pal off as two crazed lunatics, well, that was pretty much impossible now.
Since that night on the porch, Alessandra had vacillated between whether she should call the police or check in to the psych ward of the local hospital. Toni had told her to call her mother, but what exactly would she say? “Hey, Mom. So these two guys showed up in town, each claiming the other wants to kill me. And my body must have been taken over by an alien, because I suddenly feel like I can take on the world with my pinkie finger.”
Toni said she looked the same, which was some comfort, but there was no longer any denying that she didn’t feel the same. She hadn’t the first clue what was happening to her, but she knew someone who did.
Two someones, in fact. And they were both waiting on the patio for her.
They stood, Lawrence in jeans and a T-shirt, Kenton dressed in gray pants and a perfectly tailored sport coat that made him look like a poster child for GQ. But that jaw. Damn, the guy was fucking hot.
“Alessandra,” they said in unison. The glare they shot each other reminded her that these two apparently hated each other. And yet . . .
“Are you friends now?” she said, unable to keep the
sarcasm from her voice. “Or have you been conspiring behind my back—”
“I can assure you,” the velvety voice of Mr. Polished said, “we are anything but.”
The tick in Lawrence’s jaw confirmed the truth of Kenton’s words.
Mimicking the baddest of badass women from every movie she’d ever watched, her penchant for all forms of entertainment with strong female leads a joke among her friends, Alessandra said, “I want the truth.”
She hated the fact that Lawrence and Kenton looked at each other before answering. Apparently the good ol’ boys club was alive and well within the lunatic murderer community.
“Then I will give it to you—”
“And how, Lawrence, do you propose to do that?” Kenton snapped.
If she were ever to witness a murder, it would be here, in the otherwise idyllic spot on a perfect June day. She had never seen a look quite so menacing as the one Lawrence now leveled at Kenton.
“With half-truths meant to lure her away from the one person who can keep her safe?” Lawrence bandied back.
“Come inside with me,” Kenton said. “He was just—”
“No.” She used a firm tone so there would be no misunderstandings.
Lawrence took a step closer to her. Instinctively, she moved away from him, toward Kenton.
“Don’t go in there, Alessandra,” Lawrence said. “I cannot protect you if you do.”
She was so confused. But before she could decide which of them to trust—if, indeed, she wanted to trust either of them—Kenton grabbed her hand, yelling, “Run!” and without thought, she did. One moment, they were standing on the patio beside Lawrence. The next, they were inside Kenton’s foyer.
Alessandra had never moved so fast in her life. They’d raced across the patio so quickly, she hadn’t had a second to think. The housekeeper was nowhere to be seen. Lawrence, on the other hand, stood just outside on the patio, screaming at them both.
“No! Kenton, no!”
“Come,” Kenton said, gesturing for her to follow him. Though it confused her why Lawrence didn’t follow them inside if he felt so strongly about it—surely he didn’t take matters of politeness this seriously?—she was too flustered to ask about it. Instead, she let Kenton lead her up a set of interior stairs and through a hallway. Brochures lay scattered on the table, a reminder that this residence had been a bed and breakfast a mere week ago.
She’d been here before. Even though it housed guests, the Henry Hutton Mansion also used to give tours. It had been built just before the Addy Hutton Mansion next door, the residence he’d had built for his daughter, close enough so that you could see the other from the front porch.
Though it was the smaller of the two, Alessandra had always liked the Italian style of this home more than the stately Victorian next to it. The last time she’d been in here was when her brother and his college buddies had come to visit. Rumors of hauntings had lured them to rent rooms on the third floor of the mansion for the weekend, despite the fact that her very free house was just a few blocks away. Of course, they’d not run into any ghosts that weekend.
“Can I get you something to drink? Tea perhaps?”
Was he serious?
“Tea? Your frenemy is standing on the patio downstairs screaming—”
“He is not . . . my friend.”
Kenton indicated for her to sit. The couch looked as if it would break under her. Pale pink and faded, Alessandra knew much of the furniture was original, though restored, something that had made the B&B guests feel as if they’d stepped back in time the moment they walked inside.
“How did you find me?” he asked.
She sat, perching on the edge of the couch much as she had been perched on the edge of sanity for the past few days.
“Seriously? Two mysterious strangers waltz into town and purchase the largest, most expensive homes in Stone Haven, which, to my knowledge, were not for sale. Did you think that would go unnoticed?”
Kenton didn’t answer. Instead, he began removing his sport coat, revealing a crisp, white-and-blue checkered shirt beneath it. She watched him as he carefully laid the coat across the back of a nearby chair.
The heightened awareness that had overwhelmed her earlier had begun to fade. Feeling more like herself than she had all day, Alessandra took a deep breath.
“Something strange is happening to me.”
As if her confession were an invitation, he sat on the opposite end of the couch. So cool and casual. Nothing like the way he’d looked at Lawrence the other night.
“As I told you it would,” he said.
“Please,” she pleaded, hating the sound of her own voice. Alessandra hated asking for anything, hated to beg. But somehow she knew he had the answers she needed.
“Help me.”
He didn’t move, and for a while, he didn’t say anything either. Finally, he sighed and said, “I told you the truth that night on your porch—”
“You mean, before you and Lawrence completely disappeared without a trace?”
He ignored her sharp tone. “Someone in your distant ancestry is descended from an ancient line of Scottish healers dating back to the thirteenth century.”
Kenton leaned forward.
“One of them, a woman named Lady Isobel, became angry when her husband Alec was killed in battle, part of a feud between her clan and an English family.”
At a different time, she would have been totally down for a history lesson, but today she needed some answers. Still, she decided to see where he was going with this.
“Years later,” he continued, “when another member of her kin was killed by that same family, she cursed everyone responsible to feel her own pain. Little did she realize that her husband’s family was as culpable for the attack as their enemies—her father-in-law could have ended the feud years earlier, when he’d had the chance, and did not. The curse had . . . unintended results for both families. It made them . . . different than they’d been. More powerful. After realizing what she’d done, Lady Isobel tried to reverse it. But she was a simple healer, not a witch accustomed to casting spells.”
“Do you believe in witches?” Alessandra asked in shock. Was that where he was going with this? Despite her skepticism, the idea of otherworldly beings . . . she’d been enthralled by fantasy her whole life for a reason. Was he saying—
Kenton looked up to a portrait of a woman on the wall, and Alessandra followed his gaze. It was Addy Hutton, she knew from the tour.
“No,” he said. “Not really. But then, a wife or a mother’s grief can conjure more power, more strength, than a thousand mounted knights riding into battle.”
He looked back at her, the color of his eyes so startling Alessandra feared for her ability to concentrate. She could stare into them all day.
“Her counter-curse, The Balance, or whatever you wish to call it, worked in a surprising way. From that moment on, each and every descendant of Lady Isobel’s line was granted special abilities . . . powers you might even call them.”
His words could not be true, and yet they were. She sensed it in her gut. In her being.
“These abilities lie dormant unless they are needed.”
Alessandra’s chest heaved as she tried to catch her breath. She hadn’t been winded running up those stairs, but now, sitting here with Kenton, listening to his tale . . .
“I can’t breathe.”
He moved closer to her.
“You are overwhelmed as you rouse.”
“Rouse? I don’t under—”
“That’s the word used to describe the exact state you’re in right now. The state you’ve been in since Monday.”
His pinched lips curled in a smile.
“Or since Lawrence and I came to town. We don’t know exactly when it happens or why.”
She had so many questions.
“How do you know all of this? And why is this happening to me?”
“Slow down.”
Kenton’s hand moved to the sleeve
of his shirt.
“One question at a time.”
She took a deep breath.
“OK, let’s start with the fact that I should be running far away, and instead, I’m sitting here with you as if I don’t have a care in the world. Listening to, and maybe believing, this frankly ludicrous story about my ancestors passing down ancient powers through their DNA or whatever.”
If she made no sense, it was because this entire situation made no sense. And because she was distracted by the sight of Kenton’s forearms as he rolled his sleeves back. Just as she’d suspected. Strong and muscular. Dangerous. And decidedly sexy.
When she looked up, his expression had changed.
His pupils were dilated and his eyes were hooded. Then the moment was gone, and he no longer looked as if he would kiss her. Instead, he appeared hard. Determined.
“Every Cheld—”
“Excuse me?”
Now that both of his arms were thoroughly exposed, Kenton crossed them in front of him and sat back.
“The name given to your bloodline. The Cheld.”
“Cheld,” she tested the word on her tongue. “And you believe I am one of them?”
“I know you are. That you can sense . . . that your abilities have begun to manifest confirms it.”
She had too many questions to formulate even one of them.
“Each one develops a bit differently. When it becomes necessary, when a threat is posed—”
“Lawrence?”
He smiled. “Yes, Lawrence.”
She swallowed.
“Their powers begin to manifest. Most become fast and strong. Their senses heighten—”
“Yes! That’s what’s happening to me. It’s as if I can feel and see everything more . . . intensely.”
“All very typical.”
“And smell . . .” The scent she’d begun to associate with him had lured her into the house, as strong then as it was now, a good distance away from him.
“That. And more.”
There was no mistaking that glimmer in his eyes. Desire. Alessandra couldn’t help but imagine what would happen if he acted on it.
“And each Cheld usually develops another ability unique to him or her.”
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