A Legacy Divided

by Holley Trent

  “What was it?” He wanted to grab her and kiss her until she squealed, but if he started that, he’d never get any words out of her, and they had so much to catch up on. “Actually, hold that thought.” Grimacing, he shifted her on his lap and then picked her up. He carried her to the sofa and let out a breath of relief as his body settled comfortably lengthwise onto it. “I’m going to need to call my grandmother soon. She was in my head and is probably wondering why she got thrown out.”

  “Call her.” Lora lay on her side atop him and laced her fingers through his.

  “In a minute. You said there was something in your dream.”

  “Mm. Desert roses. Do you remember bringing me a potted one after your grandmother hired me?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t think you’d keep it. I fully expected to see the janitor hauling it out of the office hall by the end of the day.”

  “I would never waste a good plant, in spite of who gave it to me. Why did you give it to me?”

  Running his hand along her side, he shrugged beneath her and then reached down to grab the blanket from the sofa crease. There was a draft from the vent overhead, and Lora tended to burrow when there was too much cool air blowing. “Maybe I thought it seemed benign. It wasn’t like I could ask anyone for advice on what to give you. They’d want to know why I would get you anything at all, and I didn’t have a good answer except for the fact I felt like an asshole.”

  “You were an asshole.”

  “I’ll admit that. Not just to you, though. I was an equal-opportunity asshole. I guess I felt worse about it where you were concerned, though.”

  “So, that’s all this is? You feeling sorry for me?”

  “No, sweetheart, not at all. I mean, maybe at first there was a little of that. I didn’t want you to feel like an outsider. I’d gotten used to seeing you around, and I was afraid you’d leave someday.”

  She expelled a soft laugh. “You Afótama and your reluctance to let anyone leave the clan...”

  “If you were Afótama, you’d understand. You’d feel how unsettled we are collectively when one of us leaves the fold. Takes a while for us to rally around and fill in the holes in our defenses. And also, I thought you were interesting. I wanted to know what made you tick, especially since no one else seemed to be able to figure that out.”

  He lifted her left hand a few inches and studied the elegant tapers of her fingers.

  He’d bought a ring for her before Tess returned to the Afótama, hoping that one day they’d figure out “them” and that there’d come a time that made sense for him to give it to her. He didn’t know if they’d ever find a good time, but he vowed to give it to her anyway. If she said no—so be it. At least she’d know where he stood, and would stand, in spite of everything.

  “In my dream,” she said sleepily, “I was sitting at my desk, and I was rooting around in the cup beside the potted desert rose. You know the one I use to store paper clips and binder clips?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess it all came rushing back then.”

  “So, you remember everything?”

  She nodded. Carefully, she eased back a bit and looked up at him. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “He first tried to contact me around seven months ago.”

  “Anders did?”

  “Yes. I didn’t want to tell you this because I didn’t want you to think I was unhappy. I got in contact with Social Services and was trying to find out a little bit about where I came from. I wasn’t a little baby when I got to Norseton, so it didn’t make sense that I didn’t remember anything from before then. Social Services didn’t have much to show me except for the same paperwork I’d already seen.”

  “It’s not real.”

  “I know. And, I guess, the more I dug around trying to ferret out names and stories, the more traps I tripped. He got in touch with me because of the fact I was trying to find out more about myself. I was so stupid to leave my cell phone number in all those information inquiries. He left me a bunch of voicemails. I thought he was nuts, but then I remembered his voice. It was like…coming out of a long fog of hypnotic suggestion.”

  Jody held his tongue, suspecting he already knew what Magnus had done. He was probably to blame for Lora’s fractured early childhood memories.

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to know this, but I believe his plan was for me to hurt Tess. Your grandmother wasn’t a threat anymore because she was out of childbearing years, and with your mother being gone—”

  “He had something to do with that, didn’t he?”

  She nodded slowly. “I’m not supposed to know this, either, but he did. Keith went to Cuba looking for seaside land because of a lead he gave him, and of course he knew your parents were going to go after him. Tess had gone missing. They damned sure weren’t going to lose another of their children if they could help it.”

  “But what was his end goal to the scheme supposed to be?”

  “To make his line the important one.”

  “Not Ótama’s.” Just like Claude had said.

  “He wanted to correct what he perceived to be a wrong. He thought that of all the daughters of Alfarinn, Ótama wasn’t the one who deserved to be chronicled. He considered her to be the chief freak. Nothing to be celebrated. Before I left, I was trying to think of a way to explain all this to your family, but he quickly got aggressive. He wanted to come to Norseton and was trying to gaslight me into inviting him. He told me I wasn’t so important that anyone would care who visited me.”

  “Bastard.”

  Lora nodded, teeth notched into her lower lip. Slowly, she sat up and pulled in a weary-sounding breath. “Joseph…you understand that I can’t go back to Norseton now.”

  “What are you talking about? You have to. You—”

  She clasped a hand over his mouth, sweetly silencing him. “I can’t. I don’t want to hurt Tess or April, and I don’t know what sort of suggestion he planted in me to trigger his instructions. I didn’t even know I’d been compromised until Claude reached out to me. He monitors Magnus’s activity, and he knew when Magnus finally got in touch. Claude told me that the most valuable thing I had, besides the trust I’ve earned from your family, were my memories of living around you. He told me that Magnus would mine me for every bit of data so he could scatter the Afótama. Obviously, I didn’t want that. Claude told me that Magnus may have already activated me and that I could start undermining the community at any time. Claude had said that they were working to locate Magnus and put him away, so I held out for months, worrying that at any time, I’d turn on you all, and I couldn’t even tell you. I was afraid that if I did, he’d know, and he’d hurt you. As I said, I got scared a few weeks ago. Claude offered to help. I don’t know why, but wiping my memory didn’t work the way it was supposed to.”

  “So, you didn’t have anything to do with it come back so quickly?”

  “No. I mean, I planted a few reminiscences to myself for self-soothing purposes, you know? To help me feel comfortable with whatever happened and for me to believe that the things people like Claude and Shea are telling me are the truth, but I didn’t do anything to specifically subvert the memory wipe.”

  “I wonder why it didn’t work.”

  “I don’t know, but maybe that’s not important.” She brought her face down to his, nibbled at his lips, and sighed into his mouth. “You don’t know what it feels like to be so disconnected for most of your life and then to belong to someone—even if only in secret—and then to have that hard-won security ripped away. Even though I couldn’t remember, I didn’t feel right. I knew something was missing.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about the baby?”

  “Everything happened too quickly. I—”

  “Wait.” He eased himself a bit more upright against the sofa arm and pulled her atop him. She braced herself on her hands, holding her belly off him. “Did you do it on purpose?”

  Her grimace was almost too quick to see, but a rare tell for her.

&
nbsp; “It was a whim. After he reached out to me, I started brainstorming everything that could possibly happen with me consorting with an unpredictable stranger. I suppose getting pregnant was a bit of an excessive reaction, but I thought that if there was a chance anything happened to me—”

  “I’d find my child.”

  She nodded.

  He let her back down onto her side and held her tight.

  “Are you angry with me?” she asked.

  “No. I was, but it’s hard to stay mad knowing you were just trying to minimize the fallout. I still think the smart thing to do is to take you back to Norseton.”

  “That’s incredibly dangerous. If there’s a risk at all that I’ll hurt Tess or April or Muriel, I’m not going to do it.”

  “I’m not going to let you stay locked up down here. Let’s go home. Let him think he’s in control.”

  “But how? If he’s working with mind-invading psychics the way Claude says he is, he’ll know I’ve already told you everything. That’s why the Afótama here in Idylton don’t actively seek out information about Norseton. They want to be clean.”

  “There are ways of keeping folks out of your head. I can loan you my effort, or Ollie can, or even Harvey. Harvey draws magic from both Ollie and Tess. Knowing that, I think that he may actually be able to shield you the best if you let him in.”

  “I can’t ask them to do that. I can’t ask you to do that.”

  “Why the hell not? Do you think us being clan royalty excludes us from doing hard work? It doesn’t. The work we do is just different than for other people. Let us do the heavy lifting for a while. No one will complain, I assure you. After everything you’ve done for the Afótama, people will be tripping over themselves to do you favors.”

  She grinned against his neck and laughed softly.

  He loved hearing her laugh. She kept her emotions so tightly reined that people rarely got to see that there was lightness inside her. She wasn’t the cold woman they all thought she was.

  “There might be a few who want to help me, but there are going to be more who want me to leave for good once they find out how I ended up in Norseton.”

  He didn’t know what he could say in response that she would find truly comforting, so he opted to keep his mouth shut.

  “You’d better call your grandmother,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah. I guess I’d better.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Norseton

  Mallory

  At the tickling press of Asher’s lips against the back of Mallory’s neck, she laughed and gave him a reflexive push away from her. People in the bakery were staring, most importantly—her children. “Quit doing that,” she murmured to him. “I have a violent tickle reflex.”

  Her son, Vann, gave the cuff of Asher’s sleeve a tug and then pointed to the éclair tray. “Aunt Erin eats calls those Vitamin E.”

  “Does she?” Asher fixed his sleeve, briefly exposing the leather cuff beneath.

  Mallory took his arm and peered at the silver glints on the underside.

  What is that?

  The decorative inserts were the same silver color as the polish in her deranged vision nights before.

  Ugh. Psychic crap messing up my perceptions. That’s all.

  “She’s obsessed,” Wendy said, rolling her eyes dramatically. “Mama rations our sugar.”

  “I do not.” Mallory snorted and accepted the box of pastries the bakery clerk, Cici, handed across the case. “I’m just teaching you the lesson of moderation. Very few people have metabolisms like your aunt. Wish I did.”

  “Why?” Asher slung his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.

  Cici usually got her orders right, but Mallory peeked inside the box, anyway, and counted cinnamon rolls, donuts, lemon Danishes, and the lone éclair. Laughing, she closed the lid. “Erin’s upstairs, I take it?”

  Cici’s gaze flitted briefly to Mallory’s face and then back to some spot over her shoulder as it had been before. Mallory had gotten used to Cici’s eccentricities after a few early misreads on her part. Cici wasn’t trying to be rude. There was something in her magic that distracted her from the here and now, and most folks took that in stride.

  “Yes,” Cici said finally.

  “And who are the bonus cookies for? Early for them.”

  “Keith’s upstairs.”

  That shocked the hell out of Mallory. He’d locked her out of his rooms, effectively barring her from doing her job, so she hadn’t seen the man for more than a few minutes at a time in days. She suspected he lurked nearby and chose not to engage with the rest of them, but she hadn’t gone looking to confirm that. If she wanted to engage with childish people, she had three actual children to get her fill of juvenile behavior with.

  She shifted her weight and handed the goody box to Vann. “So he’s the Hall on duty, hmm?”

  Another bakery employee—Brynn—let out a long breath and raised her eyebrows. “Looked to me like he was hunkering down to stay for a while. Nadia had a couple of his bags.”

  “I guess I missed that memo.” She turned and put on the most genuine grin she could manage for the kids. “You know what? We’ll do this another day.”

  She moved them out of the way of the line that was starting to get crowded behind them.

  “But you said we could see the secret apartment today,” her eldest daughter, Micah, said.

  And Mallory had indeed said that. Against her better judgment, she’d wanted to surprise them with an introduction to their new relative. Elliott had been so down in the dumps and feeling isolated. He needed a pick-me-up and Mallory wanted to give him one. She may not have known him long, but he was her brother. He was cagey and weird, but she loved him already. It was hard not to when he was just so damned glad to belong to someone in some way.

  She’d have to figure out something else. The last thing she needed was for the kids to see her going at it with Keith, and she was pretty sure there was a confrontation waiting to happen.

  “Uh…” Asher sucked in some air through his teeth and shrugged. “Sometimes, plans change and you have to trust the grownups to make good decisions, even if you don’t have all the information. When I was about your age, my father had promised me a trip to the shore. I’d been looking forward to it for months. Queen Rhiannon kept him so busy that we never had a chance to get away, usually. The morning of the trip, Father came home from an errand and said the trip was off. Wouldn’t explain why.”

  “Were you mad?” Vann asked.

  “Of course, I was. Later on, I found why he’d had to cancel the trip, and it was a pretty good one, but it was a reason I wouldn’t have understood as a child. In fact, being told the whole truth would have made me worry about things I had no business knowing about. Trust your mom to make a good decision. I happen to know she’s amazing at doing that.”

  “Thanks, Asher,” Mallory said quietly. He was always so good with them. Perhaps there was something in his voice that made them stop bickering and listening, or perhaps they simply listened to him because he wasn’t their mother. Whatever magic he was spinning, they were falling for it.

  He winked at her and a smile bloomed on her face. She couldn’t help it.

  To the children, he said, “So, do I have to walk you home, or can I trust the three of you to get back to your grandmother without making any unnecessary side trips?”

  The kids shared a tricky three-way look.

  “I’m gonna call her in fifteen minutes.” He opened the bakery box, handed each kid whichever treat was theirs, and then shook his phone at them. “Setting the timer now, so get walking. And stay away from the bulk food store. You-know-who might be there.”

  They left, and there was enough pep in their steps to make Mallory think they’d actually succeed in their mission.

  “You’re amazing with them, you know that?” Mallory held the stairwell door open and waited for Asher to pass through.

  “They’re good kids. Afótama kids
are supposedly these notorious handfuls, but yours are a piece of cake.”

  She snorted and bounded up the stairs after him. “Maybe they are for you. They definitely give my mother a hard time.”

  Asher rapped lightly against the apartment door. “I’m sure when they’re more comfortable with me, they’ll be trying to pull plenty of stunts, too.”

  When, he’d said, not if.

  The statement somehow made her feel both pleased and wary all at once. It had been a very long time since any man had suggested any sort of positive possessiveness over her children. She hadn’t wanted that—she hadn’t wanted anyone to get too close. They were still raw from Vann Senior being killed in action.

  Or at least, she still was. It’d been more than five years, and she’d barely let herself breathe since then. She hadn’t recovered from the shock, but maybe her kids had. They were resilient. They’d been so young.

  Maybe they were ready to connect with a steady male influence.

  Of course they were ready.

  But am I?

  “Maybe so,” she whispered to Asher.

  As footsteps inside creaked toward the apartment door, Mallory pondered that readiness.

  “You’re thinking too hard,” Asher whispered as the lock turned. “I’ll take some of that stress from you if you’ll let me.”

  Erin opened the door, and her eyes went round at the sight of the bakery box.

  Peering down intently at Mallory, Asher mouthed, “Will you let me?”

  As she brushed past Erin, she said quietly, “I wish I could.” He was the problem—the source of so much of her angst as of late.

  She’d made the mistake of getting into his bed, and now she couldn’t stop thinking about him. His luminescent eyes. His broad smile. His graceful gait and lithe physique.

  Even the way he flipped his hair. He was so much better at it than Micah.

  Mallory couldn’t understand why he’d possibly want to dote on her—the wrung-out woman with three half-grown kids and heavy bags under her eyes.

  Maybe he’ll come to his senses.

  And maybe she’d stop thinking about him, too.