Her unease must have shown because his mouth curled. “I like your dress.”
Nadine felt a blush rise to her face as she stared at his bare throat, unable to meet his eyes. “I like your, uh, pin,” she said lamely. In a rather strange touch of whimsy, he was wearing a bird-shaped lapel pin that appeared to have been carved from a single piece of onyx. “Is that a crow?”
“It’s a raven.” She tensed a little as his fingers slid down her exposed back. “So you’re Noelle’s little sister. Nadine, wasn’t it?” As he swung her around, he brought their clasped hands up in a way that left no doubt who was in control. “She made it sound like you were still in play clothes.”
“Well, I’m not,” she said. “Clearly.”
“Clearly,” he agreed, and she felt her blush deepen when his eyes dipped to where the satin drape of her dress was apparently doing very little.
“Is that all she said about me?” she asked, squirming a little in his firm hold. “That I’m her little sister?”
“She also mentioned that your parents were dead and that she often feels lonely.” Nadine tried to hide the stinging effect his words had on her when his eyes studied her face. “Will you be staying us as well?”
The idea of staying under the same roof as this very intimidating man sent a chill scuttling through her. “N-no. I live with my aunt in Pineview. I’m finishing college up, um, right now actually. It’s my last year.”
She hoped he would ask her where, and in what. But he didn’t. Because at that very moment, a little orange bird fluttered between them in a panic, followed in swift pursuit by a raven. Nadine felt the unpleasant brush of feathers on her face even as she stepped back, badly startled.
“What wasthat?”
“A raven needs a sparrow,” Cal said, watching the birds. “They thrive on them.”
Okaaaay, weirdo.
The song had ended. Nadine stepped back and Cal was accosted by one of the older, hovering women, who were beginning to look rather stifled and bored in the heat.
Cal’s sister was vamping around the bar area. She looked bored, too, watching the man pour her drink behind the counter with the expression of a cat watching a mouse.
“Can you just add gin in it? I am going todieif I have to drink one more glass of watered-down champagne soup.”
“Yes, Miss Cullraven,” he said, a bite in his voice.
“More wine, please,” Nadine said, when he glanced her way. She’d been told that he was on loan from the local bar in town, but he didn’t look entirely happy to be here. Maybe he thought she was going to get drunk and cause a scene.
Or maybe it’s something else.
“You,” said the sister—Odessa. “You were dancing with my brother. I saw you.”
Was she drunk? “Yes?” Nadine said, when the bartender slid her another spritzer.
“Be careful.” She smiled brilliantly, teeth catching the sun. “He bites.”
What?“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said nervously, but Odessa was no longer paying attention.
Forgetting her earlier resolve, Nadine took herself and her newly refreshed drink into the house, seeking shade. She nearly ran into a housemaid. The woman took one look at her and quailed, gripping the linens she was holding like she thought they’d be seized from her.
“Um, hi? I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t—oh.”
The woman was already walking very, very quickly in the opposite direction.
Like she couldn’t wait to get away.
The upstairs rooms were off-limits but the guests were, in theory, free to pass among the lower rooms as they wished. That was where they’d had the reception, actually. In the massive dining room. “I wanted a beach wedding,” Noelle had confided to Nadine, as the makeup artist contoured her face and touched up her eyeliner. “But Mrs. Cullraven insisted I have it here. And since she’s paying for the whole thing, I didn’t really feel like I could refuse.”
Nadine thought that was weird. Did the woman think they were poor? They certainly didn’t have maids and fountains and dining halls, but it wasn’t like they were scrambling to pay their bills, either. Both of them had trusts. Nadine’s had gotten her through college.
Maybe if you were this rich, everyone looked poor by comparison. She had seen the carriage house in the back, the wraparound porch. There was even a statuary garden with gleaming bronze statues of various forest animals, and menacing black flowers creeping up the walls in the shade.
The house was old—late-Victorian, according to Mrs. Cullraven—and it looked it. The floors were travertine paneled wood, and the doors were so thick they muffled sound. There were rooms for things Nadine didn’t even know peopleneededrooms for things: a flower-cutting room adjacent to the solarium, a fucking sun room. The sun room didn’t even get any sun, according to their society wife-cum-tour guide, who informed them that Caledon Cullraven—the one who’d built the house, not the one she’d danced with—hadn’t bothered consulting with an architect, too intent as he was on his own vision for Ravensgate. Otherwise he might have been told beforehand that he had built his house in a place where most of it was always going to be in shadow.
