“I never considered myself the marrying kind.”
The words held the bitter ring of truth, and succeeded in holding her questions at bay. They didn’t speak again until they got to the garden door, with its little panel of inlaid engraved glass. He opened it for her, playing the polite gentleman, and she gave him a tense smile, like she thought she could see right through his act.
Some of that icy restraint slipped away as they walked into the garden, which was maintained by a careful and discreet employee that had been hired at his mother’s discretion. Most of the plants in it were native, though a few were things that were often found in an English country garden. His parents wanted it preserved, as history intended, and Caledon Cullraven had, like many British lords, thought of himself as a competent conqueror capable of bending the land to his will with all of the dominionistic arrogance he held in his arsenal. But nature was not stifled as easily as that.
Nadine bent her head to the bronze sculptures of wildlife that stood on their pedestals scattered throughout, rendered to such exquisitely fine detail that they looked capable of springing to life. Looking at the one of a fox sparrow, done to scale, she asked, “Who was the sculptor?”
“No idea. Lost to time, I suppose. Like everything else.”
She continued to wander up and down the rows, careful not to tread on the seedlings. Moving, rather deliberately, to the banks of black hellebore growing along the side of the house from their moldering trellis. Also part of the original garden layout, the hellebore had flourished gloriously, with chthonic black blooms that looked out of place with all of the blue and white flowers.
“This is the hellebore?”
Thehellebore, she’d said. Which implied a distinction. Who had she talked to about it?
“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. They can burn your skin if you touch them with bare hands. And a large dose of them can be fatal.” She made a strange face at that, but rather than question it, he decided to move on. “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.”
“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? You seem less tense out here.”
She looked up at the cloudy sky and the silvery light gilded her in profile, sparking off her hair and making it glow like old wood. “I’ve always liked being outside. It’s people who are the problem.” Her fingers spread, rubbing at her arms absently. “Sometimes I feel anxious in new places. I used to think I wasafraid of being lost, but then I realized I was afraid of who might find me.”
And he had, of course. He’d been following her all this time, and now the trap was closing in. “Tell me Nadine,” he said. “Do you see yourself more as the hunter or the hunted?”
“Uh, I guess I’ve never really thought about it.”
That fucking stammer. “Never? You must have some idea.”
She gulped. “Are you asking if I want to be hunted?”
“Do you?”
She didn’t say no.
That would stay with him after this, and after everything else that came to follow. He would remember that she had looked at him with those big grey eyes that invited one to give chase, and she hadn’t saidno.
The tension thickened, swelling. She averted her eyes from it and him, going to the ground. Then she bent in a savage flurry of movement, snatching up something from the soil. He recognized it immediately, because she wore its twin around her throat.
“This is Noelle’s,” she said. “She never takes it off.”
(Help me)
Cal closed his eyes briefly.
“It appears that she did.”
Nadine stared at him, hard and unforgiving. Then her eyes moved past him, to the treeline. “Someone’s out there,” she said abruptly. “In the woods. Someone’s watching us.”
“No one’s there,” Cal said, though he wasn’t certain. Someone could be there. But it was far better for her to think herself safe, than to see this as a prison and have it become a grave.
“Isawthem.”
“Nadine.” He surged forward, gripping her arm as she nearly took a spill into the hellebore. “Jesus.”
