Hierarchy Read Online Free PDF Page A

yourself.”
    Anger glittered in his cold blue eyes briefly, then disappeared. “It’s better to put such things from your mind.”
    “Easier said than done.”
    He shrugged, looked vaguely uncomfortable. “It gets easier with practice.
    Although it’s better still to simply avoid it by not getting attached to begin with.”
    Bronwyn nodded. “It’s the price you pay for love. I’d rather suffer over it the rest of my days than not to have had her in my life. She was … special in so many ways.
    I can’t imagine, don’t want to imagine, what my life would’ve been like without her.”
    He looked surprised and disbelieving. “If you could erase the memories and the pain with them, you wouldn’t?” he asked curiously.
    “Not if it meant having to give up the memories.”
    He frowned at his glass, turning the stem between two long, elegantly tapered fingers. “Stephen mentioned something about a tattoo your grandmother had given you.
    Do you mind if I see it?”
    Bronwyn studied him doubtfully, but finally extended her arm across the table, palm up. Constantine stared down at the tattoo, feeling oddly breathless. He’d wondered if his reading had been clear, mostly because he had never truly believed he would see it.
    After a moment, he reached to trace the markings on her wrist that were indisputably
    ‘natural’. It might be nothing more than a strange sort of coincidence that she’d been born with a birthmark that so closely resembled a sunburst and then, just as coincidentally, freckles had formed on her skin in the shape of a crescent moon and stars.
    Anyone looking for designs in nature could find them if they looked long enough and hard enough—clouds that seemed to be the face of a woman—or dragon. The natural 16
    swirls and knots in a piece of wood that appeared to be a horse or a bird.
    He didn’t believe that. In a sense, he supposed he wanted to.
    He didn’t find the woman seated across from him un desirable—far from it, as surprising as that was to him—and yet she was so far from the woman he’d imagined all these centuries that he almost felt cheated. He’d expected her to be perfect in every way.
    He’d expected her to be the epitome of beauty in his eyes, he realized wryly—this very ordinary woman who was no more than just pretty, but whose smile made him want to smile back at her and whose laugh made him feel a strange stirring of warmth inside.
    This woman who could give him the one thing he had never been able to have for himself, no matter how great his powers had become over the centuries. This woman who was meant to give birth to the first vampire since their beginnings when the progenitors of the vampire race had emerged from their mother’s wombs, who would be more powerful than any who’d come before him, who would be a day-walker.
    * * * *
    Bronwyn wasn’t quite sure of how she felt about her evening once she’d returned home, partly because she was more than a little addled with the alcohol she’d consumed and partly because she was a lot addled about the men she’d met. She couldn’t deny that she’d enjoyed herself. She’d never had so much attention from so many good-looking men! The pink halter, she decided happily, was a lot more flattering than she’d thought it would be!
    Actually, she’d really liked the way it looked right off, but she’d been a little doubtful about it because she thought it might be too ‘young’ for her—and it was a lot more risqué than anything she’d ever worn before.
    She’d felt ‘wicked’ leaving her breasts unfettered—because the thing was backless and she couldn’t wear a bra—but the odd thing was that she’d liked feeling that way.
    Maybe she’d caught their interest because she’d appeared to be a bit on the slutty side? Or maybe it had all been in her attitude? Maybe, because she’d felt pretty and sexy, she’d come across as more attractive?
    Shaking the thoughts, she dressed for bed and crawled in,