* * *

Before Adair and I could speak in private, there was dinner with the girls to endure. The meal was set at a dining table that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a castle. The chairs were as ornately carved as thrones, the windows covered with long, heavy drapes of burgundy and gold. The walls were still fitted with iron brackets meant to hold flaming torches, now made obsolete by a huge crystal chandelier. It was too grand a setting for our small party, and made for a strange, off-kilter meal.

For dinner, Terry had roasted squabs and fresh greens tossed with olive oil. I assumed all the food came from their larder as the island appeared to have neither a chicken coop nor a garden. Adair and the girls ate with their fingers like hedonists, and their mouths were soon slick with squab fat and oil. The girls kept Adair merry, joking and flirting, and something was going on under the table, too, no doubt, a bare foot nestled in his lap or an eager hand stroking his thigh. They did their best to make me feel like an intruder, but I would be damned if I would let them intimidate me.

“How did you two meet Adair?” I asked as I picked at my salad with a fork.

Robin and Terry exchanged looks before the blonde answered. “It happened here on the island, actually. We were staying on Corsica, on holiday. Terry and I always go on holiday together, ever since we were kids. We go anywhere there’s sun and heat . . .”

“And pretty men,” Terry added, winking at Adair.

Robin poked tentatively at a piece of arugula. “Anyway, by the middle of the second week, it was getting sort of boring—”

“Too many German tourists,” Terry interrupted, rolling her eyes. “Hans and Franz with their wives and their little Hanslings in tow. And the men all squeezed into Speedos. Too much white, middle-aged flesh on display for my taste. And, besides, it’s not a proper holiday unless you find a complete stranger to shag. . . .” Terry watched to see if she’d managed to shock me, but I betrayed nothing.

“We hired a boat to take us out on an excursion, you know, to explore the little baby islands off the coast,” Robin continued, fishing a segment of tangerine out of her salad between thumb and index finger, “and we came upon the black beach below. We’d never seen nothing like it, so we talked the captain into dropping us off for an afternoon of sunbathing.”

“Oh, but it was too bloody cold for sunbathing,” Terry said.

“We thought the place was deserted. So there we were, lying topless in the sun,” Robin went on as though she hadn’t been interrupted, “when we see him wandering toward us, head down, all lost in thought. I couldn’t believe my eyes at first. I mean, we thought this place was deserted. Who’d have thought someone was living here on this rock all alone?”

“He invited us in for a drink, and one thing led to another . . .” Terry grinned wickedly at me, to make sure I understood what “the other thing” had been.

“. . . and we’ve been here ever since,” Robin finished.

“How long has it been now? Three months? Four?” Terry touched Adair’s arm lightly to get his attention. There was something possessive about her gesture and he didn’t seem to care for it, but he didn’t say anything to her. He was a gentleman—up to a point.

“Four months? That’s an awfully long holiday,” I said, looking from one woman to the other. “What about the people back home, your family, your jobs? They’re okay with the fact that you seem to have—um—checked out?”

“I suppose they’re wondering if we’ve gone mad.” Terry laughed raucously, throwing her head back, apparently not concerned in the least what anyone thought of her. “But they know we’re adventurous girls. We couldn’t turn down the opportunity. There’ll be time enough to settle when we’re older. In the meantime, will we ever get another chance to have an island all to ourselves, and to live in a fortress—with a man like Adair? Not bloody likely.”

Adair pushed back from the table and rose. From the smoldering look on his face, I could tell that he’d had enough. “If you don’t mind, girls, I think Lanore and I have something to discuss in private.” He helped me up from my chair. “Let me show you the island.”

The wind had eased since the sun went down, making it mild enough for a stroll. We were finally alone together, Adair and I. I was curious: in the house, he had seemed so changed, but maybe that was an act. Maybe he didn’t want to lose his temper in front of his guests. Now that there was no one nearby, he could say what was really on his mind. Given how we’d parted, Adair might do or say anything—he might take me in his arms and kiss me, or he might chastise me for leaving him without a word in four years. He could even keep me here against my will, as he’d done once, though I sensed that he’d lost that kind of fire. I tingled from head to toe with wild impatience, waiting breathlessly to see if Adair would do something—or if I would be the one to do something impetuous. It felt like a devil was whispering in my ear to open the door to trouble and tell him that I’d missed him, that I had feelings for him that I’d never confessed. I kept my hands shoved into my pockets and my arms pressed tight to my sides until the feeling passed, until I could be sure that I wasn’t about to do something I’d regret later.

There wasn’t much to see on the island or far to go, and before long we were at the black-pebbled beach watching the last wisps of periwinkle sky sink into the sea. For all its roughness, the island was stunningly beautiful. Stars were just starting to emerge from the velvet canopy overhead. There wasn’t the least bit of Italian coastline visible on the horizon. We might as well have been a million miles at sea and staring off the edge of the earth into infinity.

I looked back over my shoulder in the direction of the house. “I don’t think the girls are happy that we went off by ourselves. I didn’t mean to cause a big disruption. I hope this won’t make trouble for you later . . .” I began, but then realized the absurdity of my words, to think that Adair would let himself be bullied by two angry women. The Adair I knew had once fearlessly surrounded himself with murderers and thieves, keeping these villains as his servants, and not one of them had ever dared cross him. Had he changed so drastically that he couldn’t handle two jealous girlfriends?

He shrugged. “If they don’t like it, they can leave at any time.”

“Have you made them—companions?” I asked as delicately as I could. “Companion” was the term we used to refer to ourselves, those whom Adair had bound to him through the gift of immortality. That was what we called ourselves in our more discreet moments; we’d also used “captives” and “concubines,” but mostly “others,” because, by taking our mortality away from us, Adair had made us something apart from humanity. We were the others, no longer human and not like Adair, either.

“I have no need for any more companions. I only let them stay because, well . . .”

I raised an eyebrow. “I’ve seen them. I can imagine why you let them stay.”

He looked at me with mild annoyance. “Don’t tell me that you’re jealous. You have no reason to be—you were the one to leave me, as I remember. You didn’t expect me to be celibate after you left and went back to that man, did you?”

I turned into the breeze to cool my cheeks. “Of course I’m not jealous. Look, we haven’t seen each other in four years—let’s not start off with an argument, okay?”

He let his hands hang in the pockets of his greatcoat as he, too, turned into the wind. The loose strands of his long dark hair whipped behind him. “Of course. I don’t want to argue with you, Lanore.”

I longed to tuck my arm under his as we used to do when we walked along the streets of Boston many, many years ago, but I knew it was one of those crazy urges I had to guard against. It wouldn’t do to get too close to Adair; I could lose my perspective, and it would be that much harder to do what I’d come to do. Instead, I asked, with forced cheer, “How did you end up here, anyway, after Garda? I would’ve thought you would’ve gone to see the world.”

He nodded at the endless horizon. “Don’t you think it’s lovely here?”

“Lovely in its way, I suppose . . . but so isolated, stuck out here in the middle of the ocean. Tell me you haven’t been here alone the entire time since I last saw you.”

He shrugged, a little bit embarrassed by my pity. “Yes, for the most part. After you left, I stayed at the castle at Garda with Pendleton, but I couldn’t stand living there. Your ghost was everywhere: in the mezzanine where we sat in the evenings and you told me about your life, in the bed we had shared. You must admit, when you left I had a lot to think about. I wasn’t going to continue living the way I had before. . . . So I sent Pendleton on his way and came here to be by myself, and every day I circle the stone path and stare at the ocean to clear my head.”

That meant he’d been on his own on the island for nearly four years, if the girls had joined him only recently. “Weren’t you lonely?”

“No, not really. I needed the solitude. I needed to understand myself better and I wouldn’t have been able to do that surrounded by others.” He turned back to the fortress and we started to wander inland again. “What about you?” he asked. “What did you do after you left Garda?”

The wind was at our backs now and blew my hair over my shoulders and into my face and I had to brush strands out of my eyes. “Do you remember, when you’d finally caught up with me, the man who came to my rescue?”

“The doctor. Of course I remember him. I almost killed him.”