Ever Bound (14 page)

“You gave your soul to her.” Her voice was hollow. “And you didn’t even love her.”

I could have argued the point, but she slumped in a pitiful, stricken posture.

“Do you remember the day we sat beside the pond and you put a worm on a hook to prove what you were made of?” I glanced quickly to catch her expression from the corner of my eye.

The ghost of a smile twitched on her lips. She looked down and sighed.

I took her hand and clasped it between mine. “Well, I knew on that day, you were so much more than I could ever be. My father had to worm my hooks almost up until the few months before that day. You are so strong, Annabeth. You have this will that the forces of nature couldn’t battle. I witnessed it that day. You intimidated me. A sixteen-year-old princess who by all rights should have been repulsed to dirty her frock with worm guts. Oh, not you. You feared nothing. You’re strong enough to find the truth in all this confusion. I wasn’t willing, and I didn’t want her. Grace poisons everything she touches. She poisoned me. I need you to save me.”

“Then don’t marry her. Marry me.”

I scooped her off the rock and into my arms. Dragging her to the pond’s edge, the cool water cascaded from between our skin as our bodies collided against the bank. She was so warm.

“You crazy girl,” I managed through the shock of our bodies touching so intimately. “This wedding isn’t for her.”

Annabeth scrambled to crawl free of me, but I wrapped my arms around her from behind. She sobbed. “But Mama’s planning a wedding and there’s already a guest list and—”

I rolled her back to me and held her face in my hands. “The ceremony is for you. You will be my bride. Not her. When we’re wed, we’re running so far away from this place, it’ll only be an occasional hiccup in your memory.”

Annabeth was so stricken her mouth fell slack.

I could no longer deny myself the taste of her lips. I lunged for her. When our mouths met, her lips were the inside of a rose petal and her breath a cherry breeze. I breathed her in and shuddered at her response.

Her wet arms slid around me and her nails grazed my scalp as she took handfuls of my hair and firmly but gently held my face to hers. She whispered my name over and over as she kissed me.

“I could say I love for eternity but the words aren’t enough,” I said against her hair.

Annabeth put her hands on my face and met my gaze. “Our souls are ever bound to one another?”

“Those words are just right.” In a deepening kiss, I lost my soul that night. I eternally and irreversibly belonged to Annabeth Rollins.

After I kissed her forehead, her cheeks, the elegant curve of her jaw and then her sweet lips, her gaze bore into me. A magnet inside her pulled me, and as if she felt the draw, she nodded, digging her nails into my lower back.

A cold knot fisting in my stomach, I dragged myself back.

“I have to practice control with you.” I was breathless. “When I show you the full extent of my devotion, you deserve much better than a soggy pond bank.”

“I want you to be so in love with me that you can’t stop yourself.”

“I’m so in love with you that I can do nothing but. Now go, before anyone suspects you’re missing.” I pulled away so she could flee from me.

Annabeth dove under the water toward a small pile of clothes waiting for her on the other side of the pond. The silvery moonlight slid over her milky white skin as she dressed. The sun nor the moon could stand beside her and be anymore glorious.

* * * *

To make Mrs. Rollins’ plan work, I had to be better than an actor in a Shakespearean drama to fool Grace. Luckily, she was too overjoyed about the occasion to push me for exclusive time. And Mrs. Rollins kept her so busy with wedding plans, there wasn’t much time for her to consider it. The one time she did, the excuse of needing to wait to be intimate again until after the ceremony if we were to follow tradition worked perfectly.

As the wedding approached, Annabeth made few appearances.

The most contact I had with her had been fleeting glances. So as far as I knew, the ceremony was still on, but we had taken the whole not-seeing-the-bride-before-the-wedding tradition to ridiculous levels.

Two days before the wedding, Grace found me in the parlor talking over some business with her father.

Actually, he was talking, and I was listening, or pretending to be. In the last few weeks, I’d never seen him so jubilant. And his breath didn’t smell of alcohol. I felt almost sorry for him. What if he’d been tricked as I had? What if after years he’d truly seen no other way out?

“I don’t regret sending you to school now. You’ll need all the education you can get when you take over the shipping part of the business.” With his hands in his suit pocket, he stared out over the grounds.

I nodded.

“Son, you will do great things.” He patted my shoulder and looked on with me at the fields where sharecroppers worked the apple orchards.

I wished I could be here to do the things Mr. Rollins went on and on about, but with his other daughter by my side. I’d have made many changes. Namely paying the sharecroppers what they were worth instead of just enough to keep them in Mr. Rollins’s stead.

He looked over my shoulder and nodded to me. “I’ll leave you two to talk.”

“You’ve been distant as of late. You hardly act as a man preparing to take a bride. I should see at least some happiness in your eyes.” Grace sauntered slowly to the window, her emerald green skirts rustling behind her. She busied herself with straightening white gloves on her long slender arms and abruptly glanced at me over one of them. “Or are you getting cold feet?”

I started to shake my head, but the look in her eyes stopped me.

Where brown irises normally were, black filled the whole pupil. In the next instance, the brown reappeared. “Well?”

“I’ve not changed my mind, if that’s what you are asking.”

“What a travesty it would be if you didn’t show. I’d hate for you to miss the first day of our forever after.” Her tone was flattened, her irritating, vivaciousness gone. “But then it will happen whether you are there or not. Time and space will never separate us, Colby.”

I didn’t like how she’d said that.

Looking absently over the fields, she seemed to forget I was there. Something in the blue skies and sunlight caught her gaze as she stared off.

“I have some things to tend to in the barn.” I backed out the door afraid to turn my back on her when she was like this.

“Forever, Colby.” Her voice was hollow.

I had to find Mrs. Rollins.

* * * *

After sending word in a note with one of the house maids to Mrs. Rollins that we had a problem, I went to the barn and waited.

“You said it was urgent.” Mrs. Rollins rushed through the back side of the outbuilding.

“Grace is in danger of becoming completely insane. Before, she knew what she was doing. Now, I’m not so sure. Not only is she taking indecent liberties with your husband, her father, she’s talking nonsense and looking off into the distance as if she were seeing things no one else can see. And as crazy as it might sound, her eyes did the weirdest color change today. They went from solid black back to brown.”

Mrs. Rollin’s brow furrowed.

“I might just be losing my own mind having to spend so much time with her, but I just got the weirdest feeling that she was going to do something bad. I don’t know when. I just know. I fear for the whole household when she learns of my betrayal.”

“I’ve noticed she’s not as quick to spit orders and flagrancies around, yes, but I credited it to her feeling peaceful about the wedding.” Mrs. Rollins paced.

“Maybe Annabeth and I won’t have to leave here.” I stepped in front of Mrs. Rollins path. “If she thinks the wedding is for her, but learns at the last minute that it isn’t, she’ll lose the rest of the mind she’s so delicately holding on to. At which time you can commit her without having to lose the only daughter who really cares anything about you. Don’t you see? Given her dangerous behavior, any one of the servants would gladly agree that she’s insane.”

Mrs. Rollins’s face darkened and tears rimmed her eyes. “I can’t say I’ve never considered it, but with the recent happenings, I think you’re right. I’ll contact someone and let you know what I discover.”

She should have hated me for coming up with such a plot, but deep down inside she knew Grace needed serious help before she hurt herself or someone else.

Mrs. Rollins fled the stalls.

Annabeth stepped from the back of the barn.

My heart beat like horse hooves on the cobblestone drive. I hadn’t had a moment alone with Annabeth in days.

She watched her mother go. “What’s wrong? What were you and Mother talking about?”

For fear of someone seeing us, I stayed back, but it was increasingly harder to do. “If I didn’t have to spend so much time away from you, you’d know some things have changed.”

Annabeth’s face darkened. She clasped her hands at the waist of her dress. “Us?”

I turned on her. Glancing over her shoulder, I was sure no one was behind her when I took her hand. Pulling her to the back steps of my cottage to the hidden bathing area, I scooped her into my arms.

In a quick movement, I kicked the tub to the side and pressed her up against the wall in the corner.

She giggled against my lips as our worlds collided.

Me, in my brown worn britches, white, tattered shirt and questionable suspenders, working to get as close against her, in her fancy, hand-tailored dress and perfectly set hair. We were a sight, but we matched. My dark skin against her olive complexion was something the most prominent painters in that time had failed to capture. Two things that weren’t supposed to exist in the same space but had a connection. Like light and dark, day and night, good and evil, because against her goodness I could only be evil. They all were polar opposites, but wouldn’t mean as much without the other.

With her forearms caught against my chest, her hands were at the base of my neck. Her mischievous fingers found a way to play at my buttons. I took her hands before she got the third button undone.

“I tested fate enough the other night. I don’t want to give God an excuse to keep us apart.” Pulling her hands to my mouth, I kissed each of her fingers. “And I do love you too much to control myself. I swear it’s something beyond me that gives me the strength.”

“You are a goody-goody, Mr. Kinsley.” Buttoning my shirt, she sighed and patted my chest.

A jolt of lightning shot through my heart when the back door creaked.

“Just the way I raised him,” Mama said as she happened upon us through the back door with a bowl of slop in her hands.

Annabeth gasped.

Mama smirked and ambled off the back steps. “Don’t mind me.”

“You didn’t tell me she was in the house.” Annabeth slapped my chest and backed up a step.

“You didn’t ask.” I kissed her nose, her cheek, and then her chin. “Now where were we?”

“You were calling me down for being a sinner and reminding me of my eternal fate if I looked upon you with lust.”

“I don’t remember breaching all those subjects.” Causing my own pulse to quicken, I traced an imaginary line on her neck with my finger.

“You didn’t have to. It was the conviction in your tone. You should be a preacher.”

“The thoughts you provoke in me could bar me from heaven. In fact, with my luck, instead of hell, he’ll sentence me to an eternity without you in retribution for my sins.”

Her eyes widened and she put her hand over my mouth. “We will not have talk of funerals so close to my wedding. And we really should be more careful. Mama told me of her plan. What we are about to do is crazy. You do realize this?”

“I do, and a day doesn’t go by that I don’t fear I’ll lose you.”

“‘I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.’” Lord Alfred Tennyson’s words came to life falling from her lips. I’d never cared for their meaning until she’d spoken them.

“What we have could never die. When we’re cold in our graves, it will still live on.” With a final kiss on the back of her hand, we gazed at each other a few long seconds.

Mama rounded the corner of the house and pulled up her skirts to take the steps.

Annabeth swooped in to happily kiss her cheek. She looked both ways before she left the back confines of our cottage and hurried to the big house.

“Mrs. Rollins told me of your wedding plans.” Mama stared after Annabeth. “If she wasn’t the most wonderful child in the world, I would argue with you until I could no longer speak. This is very dangerous.”

“It will be worth it when we are all happy, Mama.” I kissed her cheek. “We aren’t doing anything to Grace that doesn’t need to happen for everyone’s safety, including her own. If she isn’t soon stopped, she might move to killing people.”

Mama nodded and leaned her head against my cheek. “You’re right, but I can’t help but wish you could still run away. If she finds out your plan, she will be furious.”

“She’s not going to have time. Her Mama keeps her too busy, when she’s not staring off into nothingness and talking to things that aren’t there. It has to be this way.”

“Mr. Rollins will never allow her to be locked away.”

“That’s why we have to show the world how crazy she really is.”

* * * *

The cobblestone walk from the carriage house to the main house sizzled in the July sun. Ahead, I wasn’t sure if it was a mirage or if the heat had finally gotten to me. It appeared as if winter had swarmed the outside of the house. Different sorts of white flowers were placed and planted as far as the eye could see, and in a few days, Annabeth would step from the shadows of the house in an elegant gown most had never seen the likes of in these parts.

The fantasy whisked away as the same heavenly blanket of white bombarded my senses inside the house. Crisp white table cloths. Long, pressed white drapes in places where dark ones once had hung. Strings of pearls draped over mirrors, holding back curtains, lining the stairs. White roses shrouded with tulle clung to the stair case rails.