by Jane Kindred
“To absent friends and absent lovers,” said Freyr. “May their journey continue in the arms of the earth.”
“To absent friends and absent mothers,” Lukas echoed, seemingly unaware he’d gotten it wrong. I supposed it was still appropriate.
The bottle was empty, and when Lukas went back to the table, he returned with three unopened bottles in one hand and a corkscrew and his glass in the other. “Why don’t we take this to the garden? It was Aravella’s favorite spot.”
* * * * *
The garden was a different experience after dark, lit with tiny bulbs bordering the walkways and troughs—just dim enough that they didn’t obscure the starlight visible through the trees overhead, so that it really felt like being outside.
Lumi wandered among the potted trees, sipping her wine. “This is just wonderful. What a lovely idea.”
“Part of my grandfather’s design when he had the place built after the family moved here from the ‘old country’,” said Lukas. “He wanted a greenhouse inside the house.” He spread his arms, a bottle in each hand, one with the corkscrew sticking out of it. “Voíla.”
Freyr nodded appreciatively. “It’s like a Grove in miniature.”
“Every tree in its right place,” said Lukas, setting the open bottle down and tugging the cork out of the other. “So many in here, you’d think the house would be overrun with babies.” Freyr laughed.
“Babies?” I repeated, amused, thinking he was mixing up his words again.
“Because of the saplings.” Lukas refilled my glass. “You must have one in the Grove. I don’t know where it is, but you wouldn’t have heard the communion otherwise.”
Lumi had said something about my “tree” earlier. I glanced at her as she came full circle around the rose trough. “Did my mother plant a tree for me?”
“Something like that.”
“I was supposed to tell you about that, wasn’t I?” Lukas sat on the edge of the trough. “Your tree—we all have one. Even old Justus’s tree is still out there in the Grove, though he’s gone. Brought it with him from Sweden in the hull of some ship, packed in dirt. Along with my grandmother’s, but Ulla’s didn’t transplant well. It was a risk he took, to establish new roots for the family here. She didn’t thrive. He hoped they’d have more children, but she died a few years after they settled here, just after Per and Signe were born.”
“Your grandmother didn’t thrive or the tree?”
“Can’t have one without the other, Millie. That’s what it means to be rådande.”
I glanced at Lumi again with a quizzical look, uncertain whether Lukas was saying something in English or Swedish. Or just drunklish.
Lumi smiled. “The rådande are known by different names depending on where you are in the world. The Apostolous would say ‘dryads’.”
“‘Hamadryad’ would be closer to the term,” said Lukas. “We are intimately bound with our trees. If the trees die, we die.”
I raised an eyebrow as I swallowed my wine. “Hamadryads? As in wood nymphs?”
All three of them shuddered. “That’s considered a racial slur among the families,” Lumi said gently. “We use the term ‘tree spirits’.”
I looked back at Lukas, sure he would laugh and say he was pulling my leg, but he drank from his bottle and shrugged. “You asked me what I was.”
I’d tried to tell myself the strange things I thought I’d seen and experienced on the grounds of the Strand were nothing more than my overactive imagination. And now here he was telling me my imagination hadn’t even come close. This was more than I could swallow.
I frowned, regarding the three of them. No one cracked a smile—at least, not an amused smile. “You’re a tree spirit,” I said to Lumi with disbelief.
“No. Freyr and I are merely… What would you call it, Frey?”
“Caretakers,” he said. “We tend the Grove, keep it safe from the outside world.”
I laughed nervously, downing the rest of my wine. “I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous. I’m not a tree spirit.”
Lukas poured me another glass. “Have you ever traveled?”
“Traveled? Of course I’ve traveled. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Where?”
I shrugged as I sipped, trying to think of places I’d been. Money had always kept me from traveling far. “Lake Tahoe, Yosemite. Big Sur.”
“But never farther than a few hundred miles from the Grove.”
“You’re suggesting I’d—what, I’d die?—if I went any farther from my tree?”
“I’m suggesting that the pull of the Grove has kept you from going any farther. You heard the Grove today. Do you really find this so hard to believe?”
Certainly something peculiar had happened in the Grove, but tree spirits? I’d wanted an answer from him for the odd occurrences I’d experienced since my arrival at the Strand—the feeling of being watched, his unexplained appearance in a place he hadn’t had time to reach—but I just couldn’t accept this. “All right, let’s see you turn into a tree, then,” I challenged.
Lukas laughed. “I can’t turn into a tree.”
“But you just said you were a…a hamadryad or whatever.”
“That doesn’t mean I can just turn myself into a tree. We are the animate spirits of our own trees.”
“So you can animate your tree in the Grove.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. But I can also step into an abandoned tree temporarily.”
“An abandoned tree?”
“A tree that has no spirit of its own.”
“There are fewer and fewer inhabited trees,” said Lumi. “Especially in this part of the world. The spirits here died off with the indigenous peoples. The rådande are an endangered species.”
Lukas nodded over his glass as he emptied it. “That’s why my grandfather wanted to come here, to start a new grove. The trees in ours were dying of disease.”
“What about these trees?” I indicated the array surrounding us. “Can you inhabit one of them?”
Lukas nearly did a spit-take with the last swallow of wine. “Do I look like I’d fit in a dwarf tree?”
“So you can’t prove any of this, and you just expect me to believe it. I think you guys are shitting me. I can’t imagine why you’d choose today of all days to play a practical joke—”
“You want me to prove it?” Lukas stood, grabbing the open wine bottle. “Come on.” I eyed him dubiously as he held out his other hand. “Seriously, let’s go. I’ll show you.” I shrugged and took the hand he offered, following him to the glass door that led to the outside.
I glanced back at Freyr and Lumi, who remained where they sat, Freyr with his arms wrapped around his wife from behind. I envied them their absolute comfort in each other. “Aren’t you coming?”
Freyr shook his head. “It’s kind of a personal thing.” Lumi gave me a questioning look as if to see if I was okay with that and I gave her a slight nod of my head before letting Lukas lead me out.
We walked away from the house to where the woods were thicker, and I could barely see two feet in front of me. My night vision had never been great. Lukas drank from the bottle of wine and then offered it to me. I’d already had way more than I needed, but I took a sip anyway, and then Lukas polished it off and tossed the bottle aside.
He leaned back against a thick-trunked oak, arms folded as if he were just taking a rest. Then, too quickly for me to make sense of what I was seeing, he simply vanished into it.
“Holy shit.” I grabbed for the space where he’d been, but there was nothing there, and the flat of my hand struck the trunk. As I stood staring at the tree, I felt the same gentle rise against my palm I thought I’d imagined before, as though the tree were breathing. “Lukas?”
The surface of the bark seemed to ripple, and then Lukas was standing before
me once more and my hand was on his abdomen, firm and taut beneath the fabric of his shirt. I couldn’t seem to move away, and Lukas closed his hand over mine to pry it gently off.
“The stain on your shirt that first night,” I gasped. “That was my blood, from my scraped palm. You were there on the path.” Lukas didn’t deny it. I raised my eyes to his, tearing my gaze from his chest that had seconds ago been the surface of a tree trunk. “What were you doing out there?”
“Watching you. Trying to figure you out. I couldn’t quite believe you were here.”
“Stalking me.”
Lukas inclined his head, the corners of his eyes crinkling a bit at the admission. “I guess you could say that. Sorry.”
“And when I was heading for the cottage yesterday with Ares? Did you follow me?”
Lukas’s jaw tightened. “I don’t trust him. I was just making sure you were safe.”
I bristled at his arrogant assumption that I couldn’t take care of myself. “I don’t really need you to play guard dog for me.”
The corner of Lukas’s mouth twitched. “That’s not the end of the leash I’m accustomed to being on.”
I blushed, remembering the pictures of Aravella, naked and collared at his feet, and the excess of wine I’d drunk exacerbated the heat in my cheeks. Lukas was still holding my hand. My head was swimming. I swayed slightly, and he caught me with his other hand at the small of my back, and then drew me subtly closer. And then not so subtly. I knew I should stop this. Lukas had drunk way too much tonight. I’d drunk too much. We were dangerously close. We couldn’t do this. But we’d done it before.
“Millie,” he whispered, searching my face, his gaze anxious. “Tell me to stop.”
But I didn’t want him to.
Lukas bent his head toward mine, still begging me with his eyes to stop him, and then he closed them tight, like he was bracing for impact, and grasped blindly for my mouth with his. I moaned into his kiss, closing my eyes as well—on my part, out of cowardice, as if not seeing meant I wasn’t doing this—and parted my lips, tasting the lost, familiar essence of him. It was like realizing my sense of smell had been gone and suddenly finding it again, relief and joy flooding through me to have such an essential part of me returned.
Alarm buzzed in the back of my head, dulled by drink, but I silenced it in the rightness of the feel of Lukas’s arms sliding around me, one hand coming up to cup the side of my head—not gentle, but fierce and possessive—as he kissed me more deeply, penetrating, probing, then nipping at my lips like a delicious sweet he was devouring. He turned me swiftly with him, reversing our positions, and pressed me up against the trunk with his body—just as he’d done in my dream—rocking his hips into mine so sharply, I knew they’d bruise, and I didn’t care.
I wrapped one leg around him, threading my hands into his hair and gasping as he let go of my mouth to travel roughly with his kisses down my throat. Lukas cupped my thigh, letting go of the side of my face to grasp the other leg and pull it up around him too, so that my ankles hooked behind him. Then he was frantically unfastening his pants and prying at the waistband of my tights beneath my skirt. He was going to fuck me right here against this tree.
I moaned in anticipation as Lukas nipped at my throat with a low growl in his, but the growl became a kind of agonized sound and his hips stop moving against me, his hands falling away from our clothing.
I clung tighter to him, silently begging for him not to stop, and then not so silently, “Please, Lukas. Please.”
“Fuck,” he whispered against my throat. His hands gripped my shoulders in a very un-sensuous hold, pushing me back against the trunk, and he jerked his head away. “Let go of me, Millie.”
I resisted, clutching the hair at his nape to try to draw him close again.
He reached up and grasped my wrists and yanked my hold free. “I said, let go, goddammit!” My ankles uncrossed behind his thighs and my feet slid to the ground. Lukas backed up, still holding my wrists. I opened my eyes and flinched at the look in his. “This is what they want,” he growled. “Don’t you see?”
My chest was heaving with stirred-up desire and the building anxiety at his sudden change of heart. “Who?”
Lukas flung my wrists from his grip and spread his arms wide at the forest around us. “Them! The fucking trees!” He buttoned his pants almost violently. “The ancestors—my grandfather, my father—goddamn Sebastian! We’re nothing but breeding stock to them. Aunt Clara—” His voice hitched in his throat. “She sent me to you on purpose.”
“She what?” An uncontrollable shaking had started in my legs.
“I never ran a background check on you. I found out who you were because Clara wrote to tell me how pleased she was when I told her I was going to propose to you.” He spat the words out bitterly. “She thought I’d be happy to find out you were my own blood.”
I’d known the story he’d told me couldn’t be right, but I hadn’t wanted to examine it. My records were sealed, and even so, no one in the system knew where I’d come from. “Lukas,” I moaned, clutching my gut as if he’d stabbed me and left me bleeding.
He backed away from me. “Just stay away from me, Millie.” The heat of anger that had replaced the heat of passion in his eyes fizzled out as though sorrow had drowned it. He shook his head. “I can’t be the dutiful Strand.”
As he turned and strode swiftly away, I slid down the length of the trunk, my legs shaking too hard to hold me, and sank to the soft carpet of fallen leaves, burying my head in my arms on my bent knees, trying to breathe. I’d have given anything at that moment to know how Lukas had joined with the tree. For just a few minutes, I wanted to be anyone but who I was.
The snap of a broken twig in front of me a few moments later brought my head up with a start. Ares stood before me, hands in the pockets of his sleek suit. “Sorry,” he said, sounding like he genuinely meant it. “I was eavesdropping. I saw you leave with him, and I was worried.” He frowned. “Are you all right?”
I scrubbed my hands over my face and dragged them up over my forehead to clutch the front of my hair. “Am I all right? Sure. For a complete, whorish idiot, I’m perfectly fine.”
Ares dropped to his haunches in front of me, arms crossed casually over his knees. “I wouldn’t say whorish.”
I almost laughed despite the crippling self-loathing that was crawling over me, but the vibration of sound in my throat made me catch myself before it turned into sobbing.
“Would it be awful of me to take advantage of this moment and hit on you again?” This time I did laugh, and Ares smiled. “You have a lovely laugh.”
The unexpected echo of what Lukas had said to me so many times cut the sound short, and I burst into tears after all.
Ares reached out an arm to comfort me, and like a child, I fell against him, clinging to his expensive suit and weeping against his chest. He wrapped his arms around me, making soothing sounds, and I was vaguely aware of him stroking my hair.
“I’m only half joking,” he murmured when my crying slowed. “I’m an opportunistic bastard and I would dearly love to make you forget the last twenty minutes of your life with a mind-boggling, toe-curling orgasm.”
My breath caught in my throat against him. “Why, for God’s sake?”
“Why?” Ares held me away to look into my eyes. “Because you fascinate me. Because you are like no one I’ve ever met before. Because my baby sister was in awe of you.” That much I found doubtful. “And because I know it would make Lukas Strand so furious, his brain might explode to know I touched what he can never have.”
“Well, at least you’re honest,” I said wryly as I wiped my eyes.
“Always,” said Ares. “And deadly serious.” He ran the tip of one thumb across my lower lip, making my thwarted hormones leap to the fore. And he wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes. “Use me, Millie Lang. You deserve a no-strings, mind-blo
wing fuck, and I want to give you one.”
“I’ve had too much to drink,” I blurted.
Ares’s dark eyes—so unlike Lukas’s—twinkled. “I won’t pretend that’s not a factor.” Without further attempts at persuasion, he pulled me into his lap, his arousal unmistakable.
“Here?” I gasped—instead of what I meant to say, which was Absolutely not. I’m not that desperate.
“Right here, where he wanted to have you, where he abandoned you. And after that, other places too.” He tugged at my tights, and I didn’t stop him as he slid them to my knees. I was bare beneath them. Ares wasted no time, his fingers teasing me open, easily sliding into me where I was already damp. I moaned with surprise and relief, my forehead dropping against his shoulder. With his other hand, he drew a foil packet from his jacket pocket, ripped it open with his teeth, and managed to release himself from the suit pants and slide the condom out of the foil and over his cock in one expert move, slipping his fingers out and thrusting into me before I could think better of my implied consent.
He was generously proportioned, and I groaned, clinging to him, as he burrowed in.
“Ah,” he breathed. “Sweet Millie. It’s been too long for you. Let me make you forget that too.” He lifted my chin and pressed his mouth over mine, both tongue and cock opening me with insistence, his hands pushing the dress up past my hips and sliding over my breasts, shoving the bra down so he could graze my nipples with his thumbs.
I wrapped my arms around his broad back, the toes of my boots digging into the dirt as he began to pump me rapidly, and gasped into his mouth with rhythmic sounds that he seemed to swallow into himself with eager answering sounds of encouragement. The realization that he was still on his haunches, the powerful thrusts driven by his muscular thighs as he bounced me vigorously in his lap, aroused me even more.
I tried to brace myself, but I didn’t have his strength or control and my boots slipped in the leaves, which spread my legs wider, tearing my stockings, and the helpless sensation tipped me over the edge. Ares let go of my mouth as if he knew what was coming, and with my weight resting on his pelvis and in his hands that held my breasts, I shuddered and shrieked out the orgasm that rocketed through me.
