Father (Blood Brotherhood 1)

“Because you are a flame to which this moth must be drawn," he growls softly.

Here in the growing dark, reclining with this muscular man dressed in the most form-fitting of active wear, enthralled by his harsh gaze and his powerful form, I would not only be forgiven for forgetting that he is a priest. I would be challenged to make the argument that is what he is at all.

“Who are you? I mean, really?”

“My name is Father Bryn,” he says, releasing my face. I wish he hadn’t. I liked being held, being contained. It made me safer for a moment. “I am an ordained Anglican priest.”

“But?”

“There is no but, these things are true,” he says. “Although…”

“Although is just a bigger but.”

He gives me a look that reminds me very sharply he’s handy with a cane. “Although I do have extra duties that fall outside the knowledge of the laity.”

“Laity?”

“The parishioners.”

“Oh. And what are those extra duties?”

He looks at me with that rugged, handsome, and somehow anguished face. “I slay demons.”

“Oh. Oh. Like an exorcist? I have heard of those. That’s not that strange.”

“Not like an exorcist. More like a faithful mercenary.”

“You do have mercenary vibes,” I agree. I guess I still think he’s talking in a metaphorical sense. Don’t we all have to slay our demons from time to time?

“I intended to keep this from you, and your brother. However, Jonah has made that impossible, so here we are.”

“Are you going to tell Jonah?”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

I feel pleased to hear that. I don’t want Jonah to know what I know. He was brash and he was foolish, as usual. If he knew what was happening here, he’d do something brash and foolish about it. Like telling everybody.

“If he knew, he’d put it online before you could finish telling him.”

“I’ve taken his phone.”

“Then you should take mine too.”

“You haven’t done anything particularly foolish with it, have you?”

“If he knows I have one, he’ll just steal it from me.”

Bryn cocks his head at me. “You spend a lot of time compensating for your brother, don’t you, Nina?”

“I was born underweight and had to spend a month in an incubator. He was normal size and healthy as a horse. I’ve been compensating since conception.”

“Not under my roof, you won’t,” he declares. “Here, everyone is going to be treated on their own merits.”

“Why do you have a portrait of my mother?” I change the subject to one that has been burning inside me since I first saw that painting.

“She sat for it a long time ago. It is a nice piece. I have never had the heart to move it on or take it down.”

That’s a simple, sensible reason. I don’t believe it.

“You were friends?”

“We were young,” he says. “Very young. Teenagers. We didn’t know what we were.”

He has a way of answering questions in full sentences that sound like answers, and still somehow not telling me anything at all. I don’t want to badger him. I know he is capable of great anger and harsh punishment, and I am not in the mood for either.

“How is the shoulder feeling?”

“Better,” I say, somewhat surprised. “Actually, a lot better.”

“Good. Now, go up to bed. Tomorrow is a new day. Sunday, actually. I’ll be taking you and your brother to church.”

I laugh. But he wasn’t joking.

Chapter Six

Nina

So Father Bryn is a priest who slays demons. I’m supposed to just accept that as a matter of fact. Strangely, I do. He looks like a man who has spent a life battling not just his own demons, but the demons of others. When I close my eyes, I see his face floating before my mind’s eye. I hear his voice, though it speaks without content. I am obsessed with him, I think. As I lie in my bed, I cannot think of anything besides him. The nights are long in England. I know logically that they're the same length as nights everywhere else but there’s a sort of heavy melancholy that makes this evening in particular seem absolutely interminable.

When I cannot sleep, I get up and start to roam the halls. The house is quiet and borderline terrifying. I want to go back to the room with my mother’s portrait, but for reasons I cannot understand I can’t seem to find my way back to it. The house cannot possibly have changed in layout. That’s not physically possible. But the idea has occurred to me now and is working its way through my mind. I am starting to feel a little panicky, as if there's some chance of being lost in a twilight maze of old wood paneling and severe pictures.

“I thought I told you to go to bed.”

I turn to see Bryn standing in the hall behind me. He's wearing a black velvet smoking jacket, open at the chest to reveal his muscular frame. I stop and I stare. He’s so aggressively attractive. The way the velvet clings to his biceps is sinful, and the flash of muscular chest through the aperture of the collar is enough to make me start to tingle.