I would object if you changed your mind. He’s not good enough for you.”
“That line is getting old.”
He picked up the journal from the table beside him and opened it. “Your late husband’s?”
She nodded stiffly, resisting the urge to rip the book from his hands before his very presence in the same room could taint it.
“‘Anessa has agreed to become my wife. Her father was glad to be rid of her, and I am relieved that I can save her. We will depart directly for my estate. The sooner she is out of the public eye, the better. I can keep her safe in the country.’” Adam stopped reading aloud and laughed. “So noble of him to rescue you. What were you then? A nobleman’s daughter?”
“I was.”
“And what was your crime that your father was so happy to see you gone?”
She shrugged, not wanting to give him even that much information. Her hands closed around the edges of the small end table. At this point, she wasn’t above throwing furniture.
He stepped forward, all of the smugness leaving his expression, replaced with an earnestness she had never thought to see in his face. It was more terrifying than the arrogance, and for a moment she remembered another life, when if it hadn’t been for the war and the angels, and knowing what would come, she might have welcomed him. But not today.
“I can give you more than this, Eve.”
“More was your dream, not mine.” She sat down in a chair, hoping he would do the same. That he would be forced to keep some distance between them.
He did, but barely, perching on the edge of the seat across from her. “Yet here you are, about to become the wife of a very rich man. If you want money, I can make you a queen, Eve, an empress.”
They’d had this conversation once before. In a golden city, while his memory had still been lost. Did he realize it? It made her head spin to hear the words again. She would never forget any of it. “That has never been my ambition.”
Adam closed the book and set it back down on the table. He leaned forward, placing his hand on her knee. “We were made for each other, Eve.”
She tried to ignore the way his touch clouded her mind. Heat spread up her thigh, tempting, inviting. More of his games. It had to be.
She brushed his hand from her leg and rose, needing more space between them. The last of the sun cast a red glow through the window. She watched it set, hugging herself and waiting for her mind to clear and her thoughts to organize into the truth she had known for too long.
Michael would not like this. She could still see the angel’s cold face as he whispered the punishment he would rain upon her and all her line if she forgot the lessons of the Garden and let Adam into her body.
If Adam had come to her in her last life? She shook her head. She couldn’t even think of it. He hadn’t, and she hadn’t. Besides, she had been too distracted by her past husbands to have noticed him anyway, lost and drugged into memory and dreams. If it were a choice between Thorgrim and Adam, it would always be Thorgrim. Regardless of her sanity.
She kept her tone even and cool and hoped he didn’t notice her trembling. “Michael would as soon see us both dead than allow it. He’d rather burn the world himself than give it into your keeping.”
“Michael has been absent for millennia. This is what you were made for, Eve. For me. To love me.”
“I was made to correct your mistakes. So that our people would survive and live to their potential, instead of being ground beneath your heel. I was made to love everyone but you.”
His silence was the sound of a thousand men marching out from Troy, and she felt his eyes on her, staring, searching for some weakness to exploit. No. She wouldn’t remember that now. She wouldn’t give him a way in. Whomever he had been then, as Paris, he wasn’t the same man now.
“At least help me find the Garden. I’ll go there and bother no one. Exile myself to prove that all I want is you.”
She turned back to him, frowning. Even if she had believed him, and she didn’t, it made no sense. He honestly thought the Garden could be found? Perhaps time hadn’t healed everything, after all.
“It was burned to the ground, Adam. Gone, all of it, wasted.”
His eyes hardened to slate, and the room was suddenly too warm. She felt his mind touch hers, insinuating itself into her consciousness like a worm burrowing into freshly turned soil. She clenched her jaw and shut her mind of everything but the memory he searched for. The Garden, scorched to ash, flared brightly into her mind. He was unbelieving at first, then angry, trying to force himself deeper, pressing against her thoughts and the image of smoke and cinder. She imagined her thoughts, her memories into stone, forcing him back.
“Not like that, Adam.” She couldn’t keep the resentment from her voice, or the anger from her face. Her nails dug into her palm, but she didn’t dare touch him even to slap him. “You won’t violate me. Not then and not now.”
He crossed the room, and had her by the arm before she even thought to move. His anger, his frustration, washed over her in pounding waves of red light and burning heat. Her breath caught, her mind throbbing.
“You will give me what I want, Eve.” His grip was hard, and he twisted her elbow. “It has always only been a matter of time.”
Then he let her go and left the room. She rubbed her arm and wilted against the windowsill. Her head ached from his attempted invasion, but he hadn’t managed to break through her defenses. Whatever power he had, he hadn’t quite mastered it. Of course, he’d probably never needed to learn any kind of subtlety.
She followed the black cloud of his anger as he stormed out of the house and drove off, until he recognized that she was following his mind, and he was gone.
Eve joined the others for dinner. The dining room table was covered with take-out boxes of various sizes, serving forks and spoons sticking out of them. Rene, Garrit’s father, had heaped his plate high already. She sat down in her usual seat beside Garrit, and he smiled.
Juliette glanced behind her. “
She didn’t meet Juliette’s eyes. “Ethan had another engagement.”
Garrit passed her a carton and she served herself. He’d ordered beef adana kebabs and there were already two of them on her plate. Probably to keep Rene from eating them all. Garrit knew she loved them.
“
Eve tried to smile with some kind of reassurance as she served herself from a container of tabouleh. She could have used another hour to herself before dinner, crying with relief that he was gone and no one would die today, but she didn’t have it. And they needed to know. It would be their lives and their blood spilled, in the end.
“Ethan was not exactly the man he led you to believe he was. It’s no fault of your own. My brother has always been brilliant at games of deceit.”
There was absolute silence. Eve could feel them absorbing her words, and then winced at the white-flare of their shock. After fighting against Adam’s invasion of her thoughts, filtering out their emotional responses took more effort than she had the patience for. She pinched the bridge of her nose against the throbbing behind her eyes. It had been a very long time since she’d had to exercise those particular muscles.
“We had no idea, Abby, or we would never have brought him.” Rene said.
Eve let out a breath, steadying herself. She didn’t want them to see her fear or her worry, and absolutely not her pain. “I know.”
Garrit was watching her, but she kept her gaze on her plate. The timing of all of this was atrocious.
“Am I the only person at the table with no idea of what’s going on?”
She flinched at his accusation, bitter and needling, more than his tone. If she didn’t meet his eyes now—she lifted her gaze, her expression carefully neutral.
“The man your parents brought to meet me, Ethan, is Adam.”
Garrit’s jaw tightened and his mouth thinned into a line of frustration. Better than anger, she supposed. He pushed his plate away and stood up, his gaze going from Eve to his father. Garrit shook his head just once. “Excuse me.”
