Page 77 of Necessary Cruelty

The whispered words were harsh and clipped, but Mama had already turned away to rush back toward the house.

My first thought was that his voice sounded so much older than he looked.

In fact, I’d assumed on first glance that he had to be significantly younger than me. His angular body was small with thin shoulders, but the gaze that narrowed on my face was heavy with the knowledge of a hundred years.

I approached the table, but didn’t try to sit down. For some reason, it felt like I needed to wait for his permission.

Some indication that I was welcome.

But he didn’t do what any normal boy of his breeding would and stand up to pull back a chair for me. Instead, he glared with obvious derision in his gaze.

“Why are you here?” he asked, voice caustic.

“To play.” The words weren’t even sarcasm, I just found myself repeating what Mama had said although I didn’t have any idea what she’d meant. This boy definitely didn’t seem like the playing type, and I really wasn’t either. Plus, there didn’t seem to be any toys or games around. “Whatever that means.”

“I don’t play with the help.” The look he cast over me was cold, judgmental. “You should just go back in the house and clean something.”

His words were obviously meant to be insulting, but I recognized that they lacked a certain amount of heat. He was saying what he thought was necessary to get me to leave.

Why did he want so badly to be left alone?

“What are you doing out here?” I asked, surveying the table. It was laden with plates of cakes, cookies, and little sandwiches with a creamy filling I didn’t recognize. There was an elaborate tea set, but the cup beside him was full and untouched. My stomach rumbled, but I knew better than to eat anything without asking. Mama had been very clear about that. “Just sitting?”

“What are you doing here?” he snapped. “I told you to leave.”

“I’m not very good at following instructions.” Without waiting for an invitation that would clearly never come, I plopped down across from him at the metal table. Wrought iron dug into my backside, and I couldn’t help but wonder why a family with so much money would buy a chair this uncomfortable.

“Hungry?” he asked, cold gaze passing over the spread of food. All of it was balanced on the serving platter in the same towering configuration it must have been in when it emerged from the kitchen. Not even one bite of it had been touched. He waited until I reached for one of the glistening cakes filled with buttercream. “Although you should know it’s all poison.”

I pulled my hand back as if I’d been burned, staring into his pinched and expressionless face. It was impossible to know if he was telling the truth. But the rumbling in my stomach wasn’t something easy to ignore. As I stared into his cool blue eyes, the color of a crashing wave under storm-darkened skies, I picked up the sugary confection and brought it to my lips. Our eyes held as I took a large bite.

It tasted like burnt sugar and rich possibility.

A smile touched his lips, so brief I would have missed it if I hadn’t been so rudely staring. But he didn’t seem bothered by my inability to look away. If anything, just the opposite.

His face fascinated me in a way that I was too young to understand. It was all sharp angles and lines that seemed drawn by a too heavy hand. He was beautiful, but desolate at the same time. Cheeks hollowed beneath the dark circles under his eyes and his lips pinched painfully tight, even as he glared across the table at me.

I’d never seen anger like this in someone I had only just met. It should have made me want to run as fast as I could in the opposite direction. But instead it drew me in.

That was the first warning I ignored.

We sat in silence for longer than should have been comfortable, assessing each other like two combatants meeting across the battlefield. I told myself it was a battle I could win, even if I wasn’t sure that was true.

“My brother and I like to play tag,” I told him, finally breaking the long silence. Mama had told me to stay out here with this boy until she finished her work, and that was what I would do. But I wouldn’t sit here in silence for hours and hours on end. “Do you like that game?”

His assessing gaze roved over me, but his expression gave absolutely nothing away. “Only if it’s downhill.”

It was only then that I looked down to see he wasn’t sitting in one of the pretty wrought-iron chairs, but a different one. Dark metal spokes poking out from beneath the tablecloth.

He was in a wheelchair.

With an angry jerk of his arm, he wrenched the chair back so I could get a good view of what had been hidden beneath the long tablecloth. A blanket laid over his lap, but it was obvious at a glance that his legs were thin, muscles wasted from disuse.

When my gaze again rose to his face, his eyes were full of challenge. He dared me to pity him, to feel sorry for the boy that had to farm for playmates from among the help.

“Can you walk at all?” I asked.

He jerked his chair back to the table, hiding the gleaming metal of the wheels from my view. “Some days are better than others.”

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