The Sweetest Dark by Shana Abe

Author:Shana Abe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Europe, Love & Romance, Juvenile Fiction, Paranormal, Fantasy & Magic, General, Romance, Historical, People & Places, Fiction, School & Education
ISBN: 9780345531704
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2013-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

What he wanted, Jesse knew he could not fully have.

The logical part of him, the serene and celestial part of him, accepted that. She was too young; she was untested. She didn’t understand what was to come.

The enchantment threading through his every atom—tissue, bone, sinew—understood that and was strong enough and bright enough to make allowances for all those things.

But he was more than enchanted. He was a man, too. He was born of dirt, into a world of chaos and lust, and that was also his heritage. And the man in him didn’t care about her tender young years or that she had no idea what she could do or what she would have to give up to do it.

The man in him just wanted. Purely wanted. Burned with want, exactly as he had from the moment he’d watched her walking toward him that night across the train station lot, manifest at last.

Behind tonight’s mask of clouds, the stars whispered to him, cold and insistent:

she is yours and not. forever to be yours, forever to be not.

Right.

It was why he’d stayed to muck out the stalls after today’s journey into town, even though he and Hastings had done it yesterday. Even though it was well past dusk and he’d declined the shared supper of bread and stew that Hastings had offered, and the thought of retreating home was just that. Retreating. He wasn’t fit company for aught but the horses and the stable cats, who endured his ill humor well enough.

Going home meant darkness, and bed, and precious little to distract him from his own thoughts.

Placid Abigail flicked her tail at him when he ventured too near with the pitchfork. The tangerine tom, which had no name, hunched low on the crossbeam separating the stalls, following Jesse’s every move with slitted orange eyes.

The Germans were bombing again tonight, miles up the coast. He wondered if she was hearing it, too, then pushed the thought aside, concentrating on the arc of the iron tines, the span of the ash handle against his palms. Hay mounded up, moved. Mounded, moved. Abigail’s hooves like black crescent moons against the straw.

forever yours, forever not.

Pain began to gather between his shoulder blades, a welcome thing, knifing lower down the path of his spine. He was breathing harder, immersed in the earthy aroma of manure and alfalfa and the greasy bite of the smoke curling from the lanterns. He wished absently for a kerchief; drops of sweat began to sting his eyes.

He didn’t need Abigail’s sudden stiffening to know that she was there, nor the tom’s swift desertion.

The stars announced, here, here she is, and he didn’t even need them to know.

Jesse knew she was there because, very simply, his pain vanished. His irritation with himself and the world: vanished. And as he straightened and turned, all the star-brightness within him flared into that want again.

Abigail backed up hard, knocking into the stone wall. He set the pitchfork aside and placed both hands on her to soothe her, looking past her to the stable doors.

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