Eden, yeah, she was definitely a morning glory: as pretty as a flower, with the strength of a weed.
She looked back when she made it to Miriam and although I could tell Miriam was already giving her a tongue lashing, Eden flashed me a smile as if to say it was worth it, completely worth it. I smiled back.
Suddenly, Eden broke free of Mother Miriam and came running back to me as Mother Miriam screeched her name. She stopped in front of me, breathing hard and reached into a small pocket at the side of her skirt. She grabbed my hand hanging at my side and cupped her hand over my open palm, and then closed my fingers around something small and hard. We both looked up at the same time and our eyes met for several long seconds. Then she grinned at me and went running back to Miriam who grabbed her arm and started walking even quicker than before, practically dragging Eden behind her.
I looked down at my hand and slowly opened my fingers. Inside sat a butterscotch candy.
I laughed and raised my head, staring after Eden. It had been her that day, listening to Xander and me as we talked about butterscotch candies beneath her open window. Eden and Mother Miriam reached the main lodge and disappeared inside. I unwrapped that butterscotch candy and popped it in my mouth, trying not to grin around the mouthful of sweet deliciousness.
CHAPTER THREE
Five Years Later
Eden
Through the years, it was our game, Calder's and mine. He would somehow sneak pressed morning glories places where I would find them. Mostly in the Temple, around my seat so any other person would think it was just a flower that had blown in from outside. Some months, I found several, and other months none would show up.
After the second year, though, I started finding them in my room, and I would breathe out a shocked breath and clamp my hand over my mouth not to laugh out loud. How he snuck them in there, I had no idea and I wanted so badly to ask him. But after the day Mother Miriam had caught me playing with the worker kids, she kept a closer eye on me. I hadn't even been able to make it back to my secret spring I'd found when I first arrived. They had me practicing the piano all day long and there was no way to sneak away from that. The silence would give me away. I loved the piano, though. It was my mind's one big escape. I'd sit there and think about Calder as the music floated out around me.
I watched him from my window on the second floor. I had a pretty good view of the path he took to carry the water from the river to the worker cabins. I watched the way he was always smiling and laughing and the way other people, whenever they were around him, seemed to smile, too. It was like he just exuded joy and goodness. I knew from my own experience he was kind, but I also watched the way he rushed to help a woman whose cartful of vegetables had overturned, when he could have turned away, and the way he carried his sister everywhere piggyback, turning his head to laugh up at something she said.
He was working on something, too, and I didn't know what it was. He spent hours after he'd finished his regular work, down by the river hollowing out logs and binding them together. I squinted as best as I could, trying to see what he was doing, but I didn't have any idea. All I knew was he must be smart and industrious.
Perhaps I'd built Calder Raynes up in my lovesick mind to be someone he wasn't. I wasn't sure. It'd been years since I'd actually spoken to him. But the looks we shared in Temple when I leaned up from picking up one of his flowers, made my stomach clench and my heart race. And finding one of them had me walking on air for days and days.
And he was beautiful. There was that.
He had grown tall and broad and his skin was bronzed and smooth. He was constantly without a shirt in the summertime, keeping only a small piece of fabric hanging loosely around his neck so he could wipe his brow as he worked. My eyes wandered unabashedly over his muscled arms and his flat, ridged stomach. To me, he looked like a god who had come straight down from Elysium.
It was sinful to watch his nakedness, I knew, but something in me was wicked and I couldn't stop myself.
His eyes were slanted slightly so that he looked exotic and his dark brown hair was thick and shiny. And his smile . . . his smile lit up my world, even from afar.
He was perfect. And I loved him. I loved him desperately.
And I was destined to marry Hector. Or so I was told. Only destiny hadn't checked with me first. If she had, I would have told her that I was pretty sure Calder Raynes was my destiny—or at least I would have begged for it to be made so.
Instead, I left him butterscotch candies.
It was hard at first. I was never allowed to leave the lodge for one thing, and for another, I didn't exactly blend.
But luckily, the workers in Acadia kept to a specific schedule and I always knew where they'd be and when. And so I would pretend I had to go to the bathroom while I knew Calder and his family were working, and I'd sneak out the back door and run as fast as I could to his small cabin and plant a butterscotch candy somewhere among his bedding or his things. I may have smelled his pillow once or twice, or, okay fine, every single time. I'd close my eyes and inhale the clean, male scent, picturing him on his stomach, his skin a golden contrast to the white linens, his muscular arms wrapped around that pillow, his cheek pressed to it as he slept. And a flock of butterflies would take up a thrilling flight in my ribcage.
In any case, that's how I managed to leave those small sweets for him. I'd return from the "bathroom" slightly sweaty and just a little bit giddy, and I'm sure Mother Miriam, who was Hector's mistress and my piano teacher, wondered what exactly it was I did in there.