She got up from the table and walked around its massive length to stand beside him. A shiver rushed through her, from her toes to the very top other head, just as it always did when he was near.
“This matters so much to you,” she said.
“We’re fighting for our lives.” His attention focused on her—her, not some piece in a game she hadn’t learned how to play. He caught her hands, held them in a grip that should have been numbing but made the blood pound in her temples and gather low in her belly. “Will you give yourself to the Cause, Cassidy?”
He asked—as if he wanted her not for his Cause, but for himself. Only part of her understood what that would mean, stirring within her like a seed in dry desert earth, waiting for the rains to make it blossom.
He was the rain, pouring over her, nourishing her with his touch, his scent, his strength.
And yet she had something he wanted—something only she could give.
“You need me,” she said. “You need me.”
His face was very close to hers, his lips parted, his green eyes as intense as if he’d never lost the gift of sight. His nostrils widened to take in her scent; suddenly he flinched away, letting her hands fall, and the light died in his eyes.
“The Cause needs you,” he said, his voice stripped of emotion. “As it needs everyone of the true blood. I know you will do your duty as a Forster and loup-garou.”
A Forster, and a loup-garou. Not “Cassidy,” or even “Cousin,” but a pair of words that seemed utterly impersonal now. Words like “Cause” and “True Blood” and “Superior”—labels made to build walls between people. Slogans that hid dark places Cassidy didn’t want to see.
Just as Braden didn’t want to see her.
She hugged herself, aching and bewildered. “I’d like to go to my room now.”
In answer he strode across the room and flung open the great doors. “A maid will show you up,” he said. “I will send for you later.”
Cassidy bowed her head and hurried from the Hall. A maid was waiting, as Braden had promised; Cassidy hardly noticed the young woman’s curtsy. She had to get to her room, find the calico dress she’d brought from the ranch—clothing she could move in. She needed to think, and always she went into the wilderness when she was troubled as she was now.
In New Mexico she’d sought the desert. Here was no dry, open plain, but deep woods and moist hills beneath a foreign sky. The woods had called to her; she would go to them, and maybe they would answer the questions she didn’t know how to ask.
The maid showed her to her room and came in behind her. On any other occasion, Cassidy would have been awed by the lavish chamber she’d been given, as she was by Greyburn itself. Her room at the London house had been small and plain; this one was fit for a princess. The wide bed was canopied and richly furnished, matched by elegant carved furniture, heavy patterned drapes, and rich carpet. A huge bathtub stood in front of the fireplace, where a modest fire took the faint chill off the room.
“There’s a hot bath ready for you, miss, and your clothes are in the wardrobe,” the maid said. “I will prepare a gown—”
“My calico dress—do you know where they put it?”
The maid looked confused. The dress probably seemed like a rag compared to Cassidy’s London collection. Cassidy found the wardrobe in the small adjoining dressing room and began to search. The calico had been hung in the very back, behind all the fancy clothes.
The small buttons of her traveling dress refused to give way to her clumsy efforts. “Can you help me with this?” she asked the maid. The girl came at once, undoing the long basque bodice, overskirt and underskirt, and then the corset, with expert fingers.
For the first time in many hours Cassidy could breathe freely. The maid helped her put on the calico dress, and stood back without comment as Cassidy tested her restored freedom. Cassidy unbuttoned her dainty, impractical boots and looked in vain for the shoes she’d worn to England. Someone had decided they weren’t fit for a “superior” Forster.