The Initiative: Book One of the Jannah Cycle

by D. Brumbley

Just the idea of him going down underneath her dress to pull a garter off with his teeth gave her chills. “I should have picked a longer dress.”

  “No you shouldn’t. I wouldn’t change a thing.” They finally got to what was obviously the head table, and he stopped with her to let some of the other guests make their way into the gathering area and get comfortable. He ran a hand up over her shoulder to brush his thumb against her necklace with a quiet smile. “Your mom’s?”

  Anna nodded as she looked down at the gorgeous necklace again, and it felt, for a moment, as if her mother really was there with her. Anna hadn’t been raised a religious person, but she did hope that her mom was out there somewhere in some kind of afterlife, waiting for all of them to be with her again. Anna’s eyes prickled with tears, but none fell this time. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Just like she was.”

  “It is.” He didn’t want to make her cry, so he didn’t dwell on it, instead just leaning down to kiss her as people began coming up to congratulate them as the whole party filtered into the reception area. They had to be social, if only for a little while, but Logan was going to make sure it took as little of their night as possible.

  14

  Logan and Anna didn’t have to move much during the reception to talk to people and well-wishers. Anna took random moments to sit on Logan’s lap to torture him, they smiled, were pleasant, danced, ate like royalty, and shoved cake in each other’s faces. It was one of the most perfect days of Anna’s life. Once it was dark they were able to sit by themselves for awhile and Anna moved back to sitting on Logan’s lap. The crowd had dwindled but it was still a loud group of people having a great time, and Anna sighed her contentment from Logan’s lap. “I still can’t believe this day. It’s been incredible.”

  “Yeah it has. The first of many.” He clicked his glass against hers, even though neither of them had alcohol in them. Many of those in attendance had gotten in deep with the open bar, and Logan didn’t mind. The fire was going hot and everybody seemed right at home, exactly the way he wanted it. For the most part, things had been fairly sedated for the two of them, talking with everyone they almost never got to see and weren’t likely to see again, though neither of them had mentioned their Jannah acceptance to anyone. Logan looked off at the other side of the bonfire where his brother was currently dancing with Rachel, and sighed, putting his arms back around Anna’s waist. “I need to go see if I can take care of business with Liam’s girls. Are you okay here for a bit?” Most of her exes had left as soon as it was polite to do so, and those who remained certainly didn’t scare Logan, but most of her family had also left half an hour before when their father couldn’t stay around any longer. Cory and Ben were the only ones left.

  Anna nodded and she slid off of his lap slowly. “I’ll go steal more dances with Ben and Cory. Don’t take too long, alright? I’ve waited long enough for you, Husband.”

  “We’ll ditch this place right after, I promise.” He gave her a lingering kiss as he stood up, then ran his eyes over the crowd until he found the person he was looking for.

  Liam was still focused on his dance with Rachel at the moment, so when Logan got up to his first target, she was sitting by herself on her phone instead of paying attention to anyone or anything else. “Hey, Margo.” He said from the other side of the table, then glanced at the house. “I’m gonna run back into the house and grab a few more bottles of wine, the table looks like it’s running out. Care to come along? I’d like to talk to you about something.”

  Margo raised her eyebrow as she looked up at the groom, then shrugged and stood up, quietly following Logan before she glanced back at Liam still dancing with Rachel. Margo watched Liam a moment then turned her attention back to Logan as they walked. “You know, for being nearly identical, you and your brother are quite different.” Margo was Liam’s longest girlfriend of the three, and it showed in the way that she looked at him with Rachel. She clearly loved the man. All three of his girlfriends were quite different in appearance, and she’d been teased that she was part of Liam’s ‘collection’, but she didn’t care that often. She was the most average-looking of his girlfriends, with dark brown hair and an average body shape and weight, but she never left him with any complaints. The only thing that was truly remarkable about her appearance was her dark blue eyes, and even in the night Logan could see her emotions in them. She cared about Liam, and she wanted him to be happy, even though she wished that it was a one-woman show. Margo knew that she had no hold on Liam, though, since she hadn’t managed to get pregnant.

  “Thank god for that.” He teased as they headed toward the house, passing the outermost of the people who were still hanging around and enjoying the cool night. “I think we would’ve driven each other more than a little crazy by now if we had both been born with my tendency to be overly serious most of the time. There’s only so much of that a person can take. Any fun our parents had in their genes, they shared it between Liam and Larissa.”

  “He’s more serious than you give him credit for. Maybe not around you, but it’s there.” Margo didn’t look back again, though anytime she wasn’t with Liam, she wanted to be with him. She was more serious than Liam was, certainly, but she had a lot of fun with him. He was definitely playful and wild, but he was also smart, caring, and considerate. Most of the time. “He told me that you’re going to Jannah, and that probably makes you worried, leaving him and Larissa behind. But he can handle it.”

  “I know he can. Especially with Larissa around to help keep him in line.” He grinned at that thought, since Larissa wasn’t what anyone would consider bossy, but she certainly had her moments where Liam was concerned. She might have been shy with the rest of the world, but not with the two of them. “There are things that would make me feel better about leaving him, though. I think Larissa and Cory are doing pretty well together, especially given how much they’ve been stuck to each other all night tonight, so I don’t really worry about her. But I do worry about Liam.”

  “Don’t worry about him. I’ll make sure he’s alright, make sure he’s fed when he needs to be. That’s the main thing to worry about. If there isn’t food around for him, he’ll go straight to beer. I’ll take care of him.” Margo gave Logan a reassuring smile. “I’ve been with him for two years now.”

  “I know, that’s why I’m coming to you first.” He said with a smile that was quickly fading, since it wasn’t really a conversation he had been looking forward to. They were approaching the house, but they were the only people in sight, and that had been by his own design. In case she started screaming at him. Logan had never completely been able to get a fix on Margo when it came to knowing what to expect from her, so he didn’t want to take any chances. “I like you, Margo, and I know how much you love Liam. I’ve never once had a problem with you or the way you take care of my brother. But I need to be the serious brother here for a minute.” He opened the door to the house and started heading toward their wine cellar, following a trail that lots of people setting up for the party had obviously been following that day from the trail through the dust in the house. “I want to leave Liam in the best possible kind of situation when Anna and I go up to join the Initiative. And the best situation not just for him, but for this estate. You already know we’ve got about seven hundred cousins and second-cousins and ninety-seventh cousins twice removed who would love nothing more than to try and press some kind of inheritance claim on this place, especially if I’m going to be on another planet.”

  Margo looked down at her feet as soon as he said that, since her mind went immediately to the fact that she hadn’t given Liam a child and she’d been with him for a couple of years. “Are you going to ask me to leave him alone to give him a chance to make a baby with someone else?” Her parents loved Liam, to such an extent that it seemed they loved him more than they loved her. She was the second oldest of five, and as soon as Liam had picked up spending time with Brianne and spending less with her, they told her that Liam was trying to let her down easy b
ecause she was wasting his time.

  “I’m serious, not a complete asshole.” He said with a slightly reproving glare at her, but he knew that wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility for their world. He’d heard of people being set aside for a lot less than infertility. “I would never tell somebody who loves Liam as much as I know you do not to be with him. I know you’ll take care of him when I won’t be around to, and that’s a comfort.” They finally got down into the wine cellar itself, and Logan sighed as he leaned back against the wall, since there was no subtle way to get to the point. “He’s been with you the longest, but he’s been with all three of you back and forth for long enough that it’s looking like it’ll be a while before he has any kids. Otherwise I imagine he’d have had them by now. What I’m suggesting doesn’t have to do so much with having children as it does handling this place and taking care of Liam. I’m going to talk to all three of you tonight, and what I want to know is if you’ll consider marrying him, without knowing whether or when you’ll have any kids, without any other guarantees except that you know what kind of man he is and you know he loves you. All three of you.”

  Margo was thrown for a loop when he said that he wanted to ask if she would consider marrying Liam, since there wasn’t a day that went by that she didn’t hope he would ask her. But the loop turned a twist in her stomach when he said ‘all three’. “You want him to marry all three of us? What if he doesn’t want to marry all three of us? How do you know he even wants to get married? He hasn’t even touched on the subject more than five times in my entire relationship with him, and I only know because I’ve been hoping for over a year now that he would ask me.”

  “I’m going to talk to him last. If all three of you are on board, I’ll be able to convince him into it.” He didn’t smile when he said it, since he didn’t expect it to be a smooth conversation. “He doesn’t want to get married, or at least he didn’t the last time I talked to him about it. But we’re nineteen. At the very outside, if he and the three of you stay here on Earth, you’ll be like Joseph tonight for Anna. He doesn’t want to get married because he feels like he has to choose between the three of you, and you know Liam well enough to know that making up his mind on anything has never been his greatest strength. Man can’t even decide what brand of beer he prefers, for crying out loud. So when it comes to this, this is me taking eldest privilege into my own hands.”

  Margo looked around and grabbed a bottle of wine that was one of her favorites, then looked down at it as she shook her head, since she was going to need a drink after this conversation. “If he wants to marry me, then I’ll do it.” She said softly and she still didn’t look up at Logan. “I already hate sharing him with anyone else, but I hate the idea of losing him more. But if he’s just dating them because he’s trying to push me out, then I don’t want to be involved.”

  “He’s not.” Logan said quietly, sifting through the bottles with his head low and obvious guilt on his face. “He picked up Rachel right after Melanie died.” Logan said without looking over at her. “He never told me why, but it didn’t have anything to do with you. You two had been together a year and everyone knew things were going really well. Melanie liked you a lot, by the way, in case you ever wondered. It was hard to tell with her, sometimes.” He moved past that quickly, since there was a lot behind that statement that he didn’t really want to think about on his wedding day. “Anyway, he never told me why, but whenever I mentioned it to him, he would always start talking about somebody who’d had a kid recently somewhere else, one of his friends or the damn Carters and their fucking twelve kids I think now or something. I think he got with Rachel because he started getting nervous about being able to get somebody pregnant. It didn’t look like I was going to end up providing anybody to take over the estate, so he thought he had to start taking more chances. Then a few months ago, after being with Rachel for most of a year, Brianne comes along.” He finally looked back over at Margo briefly and shook his head. “He’s not trying to push you out. He loves you. All three of you, I’m pretty sure, but he’s been with you the longest, like you said. It’s just more complicated than that.”

  Margo finally lifted up her blue eyes and looked at Logan briefly before she looked down at the wine again. “I don’t know why it hasn’t happened. I worked extra jobs to pay Doc Weber to send off for testing so that she could give me more information. Nobody knows, I didn’t tell Liam I did it. But Doc said I’m fine, that I should be able to have babies. She tried to tell me that there are a lot of things that could prevent it from happening, but I don’t have to be a genius to know that the less time he spends with me, the less likely it is to happen.” Margo rubbed the dust off the label on the bottle meticulously as she avoided looking up at Logan again. “You don’t need to hear my troubles. Anyway. I love Liam. I want to be his wife. If this is what he wants, then it’s what I want too.”

  Logan nodded, since he hadn’t expected her, or any of them, to be happy about the arrangement on the face of it, though he hoped they would be happy eventually. All he could do was try to make sure they all had the opportunity to get to that point. “Thank you.” He eventually said, picking up a few bottles and tucking them into one arm to carry them back out to the party. “In case I don’t get the chance to say it between now and another planet. Thank you for loving my brother.” He tried to manage a quiet smile, then headed for the steps leading back up into the rest of the house and back out toward the party.

  Margo stayed behind, even though he had asked her to help bring out more wine. She went looking for something to pull out the cork, and once the wine was open, she didn’t even wait for it to breathe before she took several long swigs. She should have felt happy at the idea of marrying Liam, and she wanted to. It wasn’t as though she was being shackled to someone she hated, she loved Liam. She adored him. But it wasn’t the situation she had hoped to find herself in, and it hurt to know that her only chance of being Liam’s wife was to be one of three. Tears slid down her face as she sat down on the cold ground in her dress and drank more of the wine. She felt defeated and angry, but only at herself. Somehow she had failed at doing what she should be able to do, and this was the price she had to pay for it.

  Logan wasn’t angry that Margo had decided to stay behind, and he could only imagine, from what he knew of the woman, how she must have been feeling. He wasn’t too happy himself about what he felt he had to do, but that didn’t stop him from feeling as though he had to do it. He wished he could have had the conversation with Margo that he knew she had wanted to have in the first place, but that wasn’t the world they lived in. Not yet, anyway.

  When he got back, the dance that Liam had been sharing with Rachel was obviously done, and as he approached, Liam was actually standing and talking with both Rachel and Brianne, laughing at something Rachel had said between sips of his drink. Before Logan could get very close, Liam headed back off toward the dance floor, taking Brianne with him into the pulsing music. The song was nothing whatsoever like the one he’d been dancing with Rachel to earlier, but Logan couldn’t find it in himself to be surprised by that.

  “Hey Rachel, have we got a corkscrew around here somewhere?” He asked as he approached the drinks table, where there were plenty of mostly-empty bottles of wine, but not a corkscrew in sight that he could see.

  The tiny, but busty, darker-skinned woman smiled up at Logan and nodded, though she looked around furiously to try and find one. “You could have asked one of us to go get more wine, silly. You’re the groom. What are you doing looking around for corkscrews?” She laughed and then spotted one several tables away.

  He waited behind the refreshment table for her to get back, and took the moment to look around for Anna, who was sitting to one side of the fire talking with Larissa and Cory. That made him grin all by itself, since she was working every bit as hard as anyone else to make sure the two of them stayed together. It was every bit as important as what he was doing with Liam’s girlfriends, and he hop
ed it would be more pleasant, for Anna’s sake. “Hey, thanks. I think I’ve lost about a hundred of these in my life. Probably means I drink too much.” He worked the corkscrew into one of the bottles and popped it easily, then set it aside on ice to breathe for the next thirsty person to come. “And I’m allowed to play host, it is my house, after all. I promise very soon to resume doing nothing whatsoever I’d consider work.”

  Rachel’s mouth turned up into a smirk and she shook her head as she stood there next to Logan. There was no pain or longing in her hazel eyes as there was in Margo’s blue ones. She pushed back some of her dark hair that was sticking on the back of her neck after dancing with Liam. “Good. That’s how it should be on your wedding night. Heck, every night that you can get with your spouse should be more play than work.”

  “I think if that’s the case for anyone, that’s the sign of a truly happy life.” Logan had to grin and raise a bottle in her direction at that, as if he was about to toast with the whole thing all at once. “I’d like to talk to you about something along those lines, actually, if you don’t mind.”

  “Along what lines, sex? I don’t think I have advice for you on that subject, and honestly, you wouldn’t want it from me. I think that might reveal more about your brother than you’d care to know.” Rachel laughed and poured herself a drink before she looked back out at Liam. Liam and Brianne were certainly getting down and dirty on the dance floor, which wasn’t Rachel’s style, at least not in public. She could definitely get into things behind closed doors with Liam, but she wasn’t interested in sharing that knowledge with the rest of the world. “Anyway, I think Anna knows what she’s doing. Or so I’ve heard.”

  “No, not along the lines of sex. I’m pretty well covered in that department.” He grinned over at Anna, who still hadn’t seen him come back, but it was fun to watch her with her family and his for once. “No, I actually wanted to talk to you about getting married. To Liam.”