Copyright © 2013 Tawdra T. Kandle
All rights reserved.
Published by Hayson Publishing
St. Augustine, Florida
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Dedication
To my two biggest cheerleaders
Catie and Stacey
With love and thanks for your support and steadfast belief
For proofreading and promoting,
For biscotti and bottles of wine,
and for generally making my life possible.
You rock beyond the telling.
Acknowledgements
Recently my daughter asked me how I felt about seeing The King Series come to an end. I admitted that there was a little sadness, but mostly satisfaction that the story has been told. And of course, I have heaps of gratitude to these characters and this tale, because it launched me into a wonderful new world and helped me realize my dream.
The original members of A Writer’s Block always cheered me on, gave me good advice and the best critiques. I am so excited about the terrific things in store for all of us!
A million trillion thank yous to Christine Powell Gomez for all of my covers, especially this one. You captured the essence of this story perfectly. Your patience and talent know no bounds!
Julie Titus, you are quite possibly the most selfless person I know. You never blink at any changes I throw at you, and you work your formatting magic with grace and verve. Thank you, my friend!
Stacey Blake, did you ever think you would be learning so many new tricks? Thanks for conquering the formatting world so that my books can be in wider markets.
Stephanie Nelson, your wraps rock. Thanks for making my paperbacks so pretty!
To everyone in my PBT family. . .wow. You blow my mind on a daily basis. We are without doubt the best team in the book promotion business. Thank you for posting, cheering and always being willing to help.
Mandie, there are no words. I am forever grateful to the Powers That Be that brought us together. Thank you for listening to me, giving me the sagest advice and keeping me on the straight and narrow. I can’t wait to see your book dreams come true!
Thank you to my Street Team for jumping in and spreading the word on The King Series. You all surpassed my wildest expectations. Can’t wait to give you more good stuff to share!
This last year was not an easy one for my family, but I was privileged to watch my children roll with the waves, exhibiting grace and humor under circumstances that might have overwhelmed people twice their age. I love you all. You make me laugh and keep me motivated.
My husband never blinks when I’m lost in my characters’ stories, never fails to rearrange his life to make mine possible and never lets me stay in crappy motels (possible because he’s afraid I might run into Sam and Dean there). I love you forever and always.
To all the fans of The King Series. . .thank you. Every message, email and post telling me that you love this story, that the characters speak to you, that you can’t wait for THIS book. . .it humbles me.
Tasmyn and Michael’s story comes to an end in this book, but stay tuned. We’re not finished with King yet.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Epilogue
About the Author
“So what happened next?”
I startled out of my reverie. “I’m sorry?”
Aline Reynolds flipped a hand over impatiently. “Michael showed up on your doorstep after you waited days to hear from him. . .after you’d been separated for months. You stopped right there. What happened next?”
I smiled just a little and closed my eyes, leaning my head back against the soft chair where I always nestled in Aline’s office.
“After I held onto him for. . .oh, I don’t know, about five minutes. . .it felt like I could never let go again, but finally he asked me if he could come in. So I broke all the rules my parents gave me about boys being over when they weren’t at home, and I took him into the living room. I figured under the circumstance, my mom and dad would understand this time.
“We sat down on the sofa, and for a few minutes, we just looked at each other. I didn’t know what to say, because there was so much inside of me to tell him. I could hear him, though. . .and it was the best thing ever. I had forgotten how clearly I could hear him—or maybe I’d blocked that memory on purpose.”
“What was he thinking?” Aline was pretty good at keeping me from hearing her thoughts, but she couldn’t hide her feelings so well. Sometimes when I was telling her the story of what had happened last spring, she seemed more like an audience than a therapist.
“He was thinking just the most wonderful things. He had missed me, and even though I could feel that hurt and pain, I was amazed that he still loved me that much. And how happy he was to be with me, and that we were whole again, and no one was ever going to pull us apart.”
Aline sighed just a little, and I stifled a grin. Having the most romantic boyfriend in the world could elicit envy, I knew.
“I finally told him that I was so sorry for what I had done to us. And Michael took my face in his hands, and he looked into my eyes, and he said I didn’t ever have to be sorry. He said that he knew I’d been under some pretty strong bad influence, and I realized he meant Marica.”
The pang of mixed shame and regret struck just as sharply as it had that da
y. Aline picked up my wince.
“So Michael believed that the fault for your break up could be laid totally at the feet of Marica Lacusta?”
I nodded. “And in a way, I understood that. It made it easier to blame someone else. Easier to forgive me, easier for us to move on. We’d had some experience with people around Marica and Nell doing strange things—like Amber. She thought they were her friends, and she lied to her parents, took part in coven activities. . .so it’s not as odd as it might seem for Michael to believe that.”
“And what do you think about that? About Michael blaming Marica?” The therapist was fully back in charge, I thought wryly.
“I thought—I don’t know. Like I said, I understand it. And it would be pretty easy for me agree to that. But I think it might be letting me off the hook too easily.”
“Really? In what way?”
I shifted uncomfortably as I tried to put my feelings into words. “Marica was influencing me. That’s true. But she never tried to get me to break up with Michael. She never said that if I didn’t end the relationship, she wouldn’t work with me. I was aware of her feelings, but the decision to act—that really falls squarely on me. I heard what Michael thought that day last December, and I made the choice to walk away.”
Aline cocked her head, considering me. She was quiet, as though she were listening to a voice I couldn’t quite hear. According to her, the only gift she possessed from her family—one of the extraordinary first families of King, Florida—was that of empathy and insight. I recalled our very first session together, a little over a month ago, when she had told me that she considered herself an excavator more than anything else. “You already have the answers,” she had told me. “I’m here to give you the tools that will help you uncover those answers.”
Now she nodded at me. “Tell me something, Tasmyn. And you don’t need to respond right away; you can think about it until next time, if you want. But I’d like you to consider this: what if you heard Michael think that same thing today? What would you do?”
I didn’t need time to mull over my answer. I had mulled it over more often than I liked, and sometimes, in my nightmares, Michael had never really come back to me. There was still so much I had to sort out about the mess that was my life last spring. But this was one answer I already had.
“I would tell him that I had heard it. I would ask him why he was thinking that. But I wouldn’t leave him. I know I can’t handle that pain again. If any good came out of all the misery. . .well, it’s that I know one thing for sure. Michael and I--we’re meant to be together, forever. And that’s the most certain thing in my life.”
Perriman College was still a little old-fashioned when it came to freshmen. Our dormitories were co-ed in theory; the boys occupied the first three floors, and the girls lived on the upper three levels. My room was identical to every other one in Rollins Court; two beds, two desks and two closets housed within ecru-painted cinderblocks.
I liked my roommate, Sophie. She was quiet and very focused, and it was fairly easy to block her thoughts. I even kind of liked our room; we had decorated it with posters and girly curtains, and it had a certain character in spite of the institutional feel.
But I didn’t head back to Rollins after my weekly appointment with Aline. It was Friday, and although I knew that Michael wouldn’t be out of class yet, his dorm was closer and much more appealing to me. I knew the path to Gilbert Hall with my eyes closed.
I climbed the steps to the second floor and knocked at the door. I didn’t expect an answer; Michael’s suite mate, Charlie, was a soccer player, and he had practice or games nearly every afternoon.
I pulled a key out of my pocket and opened the door. It was definitely against the dorm rules for anyone outside the occupants of a room to have a key to it, but Michael had broken that rule right away. Charlie was pretty easy going and didn’t mind me having access to their suite either.
Upperclassmen really had it good, I reflected as I locked the door behind me and glanced around the small living room. Michael and Charlie shared this common area, a tiny kitchen and a bathroom, but they each had their own bedrooms on opposite sides of the suite. Sometimes four boys shared a suite this size, but because Charlie was a junior and an assistant resident advisor, he and Michael had scored this living arrangement for just the two of them.
I headed straight for Michael’s room and dropped my backpack just inside the doorway. The room was pure Michael, I thought with a smile as I sprawled out on his bed. The dark blue comforter was pulled over the sheets and pillows. He had a few posters on the wall, mostly old obscure bands that I never would have heard of if I didn’t know Michael. A picture of the two of us dominated the small bedside table.
I closed my eyes and breathed in the scent so uniquely his. It was still very fragile, this love between us. We hadn’t lost any of our history, but we had lost time. Michael tried not to talk about anything that had happened during those months apart, but sometimes I heard things cross his mind. He hadn’t done anything wrong, of course, but the pain of our separation still lingered in his thoughts.
I definitely kept my mouth closed as much as possible about our time apart. I never mentioned Marica or Rafe Brooks, the friend who had briefly become. . .something more. Michael might not blame me for anything, but I certainly blamed myself.
That was part of the reason for my weekly visits to Aline. My parents had insisted that I needed some kind of therapy, and Rafe’s grandmother, Caroline Brooks, had suggested Aline. With her family history, she was perfectly qualified to counsel someone like me; she was familiar with all of the old King families and their various powers or skills. Even though I wasn’t from one of the original families, the gifts I possessed made me unique. Thanks to Aline’s help, I was learning to control the additional power that I’d uncovered during my time with Marica. I tried not to think of myself as a freak of nature anymore, but it was tough sometimes, when even a little bit of temper or upset made all the pictures tremble on the walls.
Aline had asked me to tell her the whole story, and I had spent the last six weeks doing just that. Some of it was so painful that I ached for hours after our sessions. It made me feel better to curl up in Michael’s arms and remind myself that it was all over, that I was safe and me again.
Actually, we had both gone a little overboard with the togetherness in our initial weeks at Perriman. It was the first time that we’d had total freedom to be with each other away from my parents and our homes. We spent every waking, non-class-attending moment together. About a week after classes began, Michael steered me toward an empty table at dinner.
“We need to talk,” he began, and my heart thudded painfully. It only took a moment, though, for me to hear what he was thinking. I sank into my chair in relief, my hands shaking.
“Are you okay?” Michael reached over to rub my arm lightly. “You went real pale on me there.”
“I wasn’t sure what you were going to say. You scared me.” I tried to smile a little, to sound less serious, but it didn’t work.
“I’m sorry!” Michael groaned. “I didn’t mean to do that. I just wanted--”
“No, I heard you.” I managed a better smile this time and covered his hand with my own. “And you’re right. Neither of us are doing justice to our schoolwork. We’ve got to be a little more disciplined or we’re both going to flunk out of college.”
We worked out a compromise: we still ate all of our meals together, but after dinner on weeknights, we parted at the dining hall and returned to our own rooms. The payoff was that we rewarded ourselves for good behavior by spending every weekend together, from breakfast until Michael dropped me off at my room, usually around midnight. So far, it was a good plan, and I knew we both felt more virtuous.
Now, as I gazed at the photo of us on his nightstand, my inner ear pricked: Michael was close. I could hear his thoughts, weeding them out of the miasma of other students in the hallway and the rooms around us. I smiled and lay waiting for him.
He was whistling as he let himself into the suite. I heard the refrigerator door open, and he thought, Dang, Charlie drank all that soda I bought. I wonder if he left me any chips. Eavesdropping in his mind, I saw him choose a bottle of water and take a chug of it. He was heading toward the bedroom, without a notion that I was waiting for him. I didn’t move as the door opened, and then I felt his surprise, followed shortly by the touch of his lips on my cheek.
“Are you asleep?”
I sighed happily and opened my eyes. “No. Just lying here waiting for you.”
The bed dipped as he sat down next to me. “A nice surprise. I didn’t expect you to be finished with Aline so soon. Did. . .everything go okay?” Michael’s voice was cautious, but his mind was worried.
I turned onto my side and curled my body around him, smiling as he ran a finger lightly down my cheek.
“Yes. I finished telling her the story today.”
Michael raised one eyebrow. “The story, huh? Which one?”
I traced the side seam of his jeans with the edge of my fingernail. “You know. Last year. This spring.” I attempted a smile. “The dark ages.”
Michael’s tension level went up a notch, and he shifted uneasily. “Oh.”
That familiar terror and anxiety gripped me. On the surface, the deep rift that I had torn between Michael and me last winter had healed, but I knew that some cuts were still raw and bleeding. I bit my lip and hid my face in the pillow.
“Hey.” He touched my chin gently until I turned my head again. “Come on. Don’t shut me out. I want to know all about it.”
“Sometimes I’m not so sure,” I said quietly. “I think it’s easier to pretend it never happened.”
“No,” Michael said, finality in both his tone and his mind. “We know that we’ve got to be completely open with each other—or things go wrong. I didn’t mean to react that way.”
I flipped onto my back, heaving a deep sigh. “I can’t do this. I don’t want you to apologize for letting me see how you really feel. Yes, it hurts me to see you remember. But I need you to be honest with me—like you said, completely open. Okay?”
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