“’M not ashamed. People just… think poorly of it.”
“Were you ill, Jenny?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No. I sold it.”
“There’s a story there,” he murmured.
She opened one eye again.
“I like a good tale.”
“My friend Hetty,” she said. “She had the loveliest red hair. And then one day, it was all gone. She didn’t tell anyone why, but anyone who bothered to pause half a minute to think could realize. And then…the next Sunday, our vicar preaches on a woman’s hair being her glory and covering.” She growled in the back of her throat. “If I could have, I would have slain him on the spot. I went after her and got the story out of her. That her family was close to ruin and desperate, and she had sold it to the wigmaker for only a few coins. I marched her back to the wigmaker’s and demanded he pay her a fair sum, and then I cut mine, too, and gave her the money.”
She sighed. The words seemed to have exhausted her. “It was just hair.”
Kendrick tightened his arm around her and pressed a kiss to her beautiful hair. “People will think what they like, but you gave your hair to help a friend. There is nothing nobler. And you were right to be angry.” He snorted. “By that vicar’s estimation, I should cut my hair.”
“Don’t you dare,” Genevieve said darkly.
“Oh? Why not?”
“Cut your hair and I’ll get an annulment,” she muttered.
He burst out laughing, his whole body shaking with the force of it, so much so that she shot him an irritated look, like a sleepy cat annoyed at being disturbed.Now the truth comes out, he thought. He got himself under control and assured her, “Never fear, sweetheart.” He stroked his hand over her head again. “All of it is yours.”
“Feels nice. Your hand,” she said, her lips against his chest. She gave more of her weight to his side and relaxed into sleep again.
Kendrick kept up the motion. She was a precious thing, fierce and intelligent and starchy, but full of love and care and belief. Some part of him felt like he knew her already, but maybe that was because her father had penned those novels Kendrick had loved so well, windows to a past he could no longer reach. He and Genevieve shared that common bond. But another part of him thought he could spend the next hundred years discovering new things about Genevieve Dryden.
Not Dryden, he reminded himself. He didn’t know what she would like to use as married name. As changing centuries and shifting language had modified his name, he simply kept both versions and used them as given and surname interchangeably when required. She might not like that.
Perhaps she’d like to pick a new one for them both. A new start. He would not go so far as styling himself setting up a dynasty.
But a new start. That had promise. It might be just the thing for a new direction for the Ossuary, and vampires at large.
ChapterTwenty-Two
“Genevieve.”
The voice pulled her out of the nightmare of darkness and blood. She flinched away from the hand on her shoulder before she placed the voice. “Kendrick?”
“Yes. Bad dream?”
“Old nightmare.” One that broke into intangible shadows upon waking. Sometimes not remembering proved more frightening than the dream itself. An intangible spectre of fear, lurking just out of reach. Genevieve unclenched her hands from the bedclothes. “I’m sorry.”
“What have you to apologize for?” he asked. The question must have been rhetorical, because he continued. “May I touch you?”
She nodded, and as his hand stroked down her back, the tension drained away. “Is it still daylight?” she murmured without opening her eyes. Even through the terror the nightmare had conjured, she still felt exhausted and lethargic.
“Midafternoon, by my reckoning,” Kendrick said, his voice low and raspy.
“We’re married.”
“Mm-hmm.” The sound carried amusement in it.
“Will you tell me your story? About yourself?” she whispered, opening her eyes a sliver. She found his face in the darkness, so close to hers. Maybe it would chase away the lingering shadows. “I like a good tale, too. Are you Saxon? Briton? Celt? Where do you hail from?”
His gaze turned inward. “My name is—was—Cyneric. Old English, they call it now. I have no Norsemen in my line that I know of, though I speak it the way it used to be. You could call me Saxon, I believe, though mayhap there was Briton in my blood. The particulars—the peoples, the year, the region—I don’t remember. They come and go in snatches and images in my mind, sometimes so vivid, I think I could find the spot where the dun in which I grew to manhood used to be. But so much has changed… Thirty-odd years under the sun is a blink compared to centuries in the dark.”
