“It didn’t sound like nothing.”
“My parents are very old-fashioned. When we bring women home to this place . . . it gives them certain expectations.” He glanced at the empty pots and dying plants, and the decrepit wicker furniture; it was a harsh look, almost scornful. “My father is very eager for me to settle down.”
You didn’t bring me here, she wanted to say, but after the way he’d kissed her in that room, she was feeling too cowed to be combative. “And you don’t want to?”
“I never considered myself the marrying kind.”
A strange twinge uncoiled beneath her ribs, sharp and unpleasant. With his face half in shadow, he looked every inch the menacing figure the town wanted him to be.
His will runs deep, Helena had said, and Nadine could see that now, in all of that power contained in his tall and graceful frame. It was a body built for dueling and horseback riding, formidable and magnificent; and she wondered what it was about himself that made him think he wasn’t good enough for a Cullraven bride of his own.
If that’s even it at all.
She had a feeling it wasn’t. The way he moved through this place, while familiar, were not the movements of a man at ease in his own home.
He stepped forward to open up the second engraved glass door for her. “After you.”
She stepped out into an explosion of brazen greenery, barely tamed. The garden was filled with bronze statues, similar to the workmanship and detail of the woman-deer statue out front, but unlike that one, these were all completely natural-looking. Animals in their habitats. There was a parade of quail, a stag and his doe, and even a large bear. On a stone stand, overlooking a spray of white flowers on tall stalks, there was even one of those sparrows.
Nadine was reminded of the White Witch’s palace, where she turned all her enemies into stone.
“Who was the sculptor?” she asked, curious.
Cal gave a careless shrug. “No idea. Lost to time, I suppose. Like everything else.”
It was a rather gloomy and morose garden, in spite of its sulky beauty. The flowers all blossomed in cool tones of blue and white—redwood sorrel, canyon snow irises, white yarrow, and lupine. There were roses and what looked to be camelias closer to the house, but they were being strangled slowly to death by the native plants, which seemed to have launched a full-on war against their cultivated cousins.
Set back against the house, away from everything else, were several clumps of plants growing in the shade, bearing bruise-colored blooms. There was so much of it that the leaves had partially engulfed the wrought fence that barred the garden from the woods, hiding the bars almost entirely from view in patches and giving the impression of a dense, dark wall of leaves.
Nadine looked at the fluted star-shaped flowers, all of which pointed upwards, and found them faintly sinister, as if they might start weeping blood from those oedemic petals at any moment.
“This is the hellebore?” she asked, in a low, awed voice.
“Yes. They’re the original plants from my great-grandfather’s time. Fascinating, isn’t it? That they’ve survived all these years? Hellebore is often associated with death and the occult, but in spite of their moribund reputation they’re tenacious—and poisonous.”
“Poisonous!”
“Oh yes.” He glanced at them indifferently. “They can burn your skin if you touch them with bare hands. And a large dose of them can be fatal. I’ve always thought it interesting that my great-grandfather would equate such potency to his own impassioned feelings, but then, he was Victorian. They tended to be morbid.”
(He buried her beneath the hellebore)
Nadine stared at the soil. It seemed a lighter color than the surrounding earth.
“Who tends to them?”
“We have a gardener. One of the servants does it—I’m not sure which one. Do you like to garden?” Cal asked idly, prowling around the edges of the garden with his hands hooked through his belt. “You seem less tense out here.”
Above them, clouds broiled tempestuously, promising a late-afternoon rain. Nadine rubbed at her arms, even though it wasn’t quite cold. “I’ve always liked being outside. It’s people who are the problem.” She hesitated. “Sometimes I feel anxious in new places. I used to think I was afraid of being lost, but then I realized I was afraid of who might find me.”
“Tell me Nadine.” He was looking past her, into the thickly wooden expanse beyond the fence. “Do you see yourself more as the hunter or hunted?”
“Uh, I guess I’ve never really thought about it.”
“Never?” He sidled a little closer. “You must have some idea.”
“Are you asking if I want to be hunted?” she asked nervously.
Cal’s gaze snapped up as his posture shifted in some indefinable way. “Do you?”
