Blood to Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

happened earlier. I should have believed you. Instead, I…" He couldn't go on, but took a drink from the glass instead.
    She moved around the table, kneeling at his feet, his hands in hers. "Jonathan, I forgive you that."
    He bit his lips, then blurted the words she'd expected to hear. "Was he… Gance… because of what that blood in you made you feel?"
    "In the beginning. At the end it was how I felt," she answered honestly.
    "And if Gance hadn't died in Transylvania, would you be here now?"
    "I don't know," she answered. She poured another brandy, noting his disapproval—silent and obvious as always. She looked at him and added, "Should I be here at all?"
    "I brought you here because it is your home. I'd like us to go back to the way things were when we were first married, before any of…"
    She had to struggle to keep from shuddering, from revealing any of the terror she felt at the thought of that life. "Never again, Jonathan," she whispered. "I can't abide being useless, and that is what I have been in this house. What I should like instead is a position. I am skilled enough to be a clerk in your office. We could work together."
    "We're not shopkeepers, Mina. It isn't done."
    "We'd be the first, then."
    "It isn't done. But there are other things. In your free time, you can work with Winnie Beason at the hospital. Take some of that money Gance left you and put it to good use. I can help you with that."
    She considered the compromise, then asked, "And what would you expect of me?"
    She leaned toward him as she spoke those last words. The sweet taste of brandy was on her lips, the heady warmth of it already running through her, driving out the chill of the journey. All he had to do now was kiss her and everything, everything that had happened would be forgiven.
    But he didn't. He actually looked as if he were forming a list in his mind. She picked up the bottle and took a candle from the sideboard. "I'll sleep in the guest room," she said and started up the stairs, moving slowly, begging him to stop her.
    He said nothing, just as she knew he would say nothing the following day, and the months and years after.
    At least he had made her decision easy.
    Concentrating on that small bit of happiness, she went to bed.
    She woke late in the morning, not surprised to find that Jonathan had already left for the office. His note mentioned an early appointment that would be impossible to postpone. It asked that she please stop by the office so they could go to lunch.
    Not likely today, she thought. There was too much to do.
    She stepped outside, inhaling the damp June air, taking in the quiet of the street, the splashes of sunlight in the puddles from last night's rain. A messenger on a bicycle passed by and she hailed him, asking him to find her a cab and send it to the house in an hour. She tipped him well and went inside to pack.
    There wasn't much she wanted to claim, and little that she really needed. From her room, she took her clothes, the pictures of her parents, a few keepsakes. From downstairs, her typewriter and her favorite photograph of her and Jonathan, taken soon after they returned from her first journey east. Since they'd recently married, she considered it their wedding picture.
    She moved through the rooms, running her hands over furniture willed to them by Mr. Hawkins, realizing that nothing in these walls mattered at all to her.
    Except the memories, she thought. And in this house only the earliest ones had been good.
    Jonathan's Aunt Millicent would undoubtedly tell him that at least he should be thankful she left so soon.
    She heard the driver outside and went to the front door, where she already had her trunk waiting. She reached into her handbag, her fingers closing around the key Mr. Quarks had given her, the freedom Gance had spoken of.
    For being an utter libertine, he was remarkably astute.
     
    The trip took them past the children's hospital. Mina asked the driver to stop for a moment. As she expected,