Page 22 of Immortal by Morning (Argeneau #37)

Abril was in her office when Crispin found her. His intention when he started looking for her was to find her, kiss her, and

seduce her. Her being on the phone when he entered the room, however, put paid to that plan.

For a moment, he simply stood there in the doorway looking her over.

While she’d been wearing jeans earlier, in the dream she was now dressed for business in a blouse and skirt.

She looked very professional... sexy professional to his mind.

When she didn’t hang up to greet him, Crispin realized that this wasn’t going to be a quick phone call.

He gave up his position by the door and walked over to sit on the couch across from her desk to wait.

Abril didn’t even seem to notice his presence.

Her entire attention was on the phone call she was participating in.

Crispin hadn’t originally intended to listen in on the conversation.

He was a big believer in privacy. However, the anxiety and stress and plain unhappiness in her voice soon caught his attention and had him listening closely.

“But I can help you,” Abril said, sounding almost desperate. “You don’t have to marry him. They can’t make you. I can come

get you and take you away. You can live with me.”

A moment passed where Crispin could barely hear someone speaking on the other end of the phone, but not well enough to understand

what they were saying, then Abril cried, “No! Please, Mary. I can help you. Let me help you. You are too smart to throw your

life away like this. Please let me help you.”

This time when Abril fell silent there was no faint speech coming from the other end. Instead, he could hear the loud buzz

of the dial tone. Whoever she had been talking to had hung up.

Crispin waited several minutes, but when tears began to slide silently down Abril’s cheeks, he stood, took the phone from

her hand, and ended the call from her end as well. He then knelt beside her, took her hands in his, and asked, “What happened?”

For one moment, she simply shook her head, but then she gasped, “They want my little sister to marry Agustin and she’s agreed.

How can they do that? They know he’ll beat her. He would’ve beaten me if I hadn’t run away and they’d been able to force our

marriage. Now they’re just going to sacrifice Mary to him in my place. They don’t care about the hell they’re casting her

into. I don’t think they care about any of us. We’re all just tools to use to get things they want.”

“Who are ‘they’?” Crispin asked with a frown.

Shame flashed fleetingly across her expression, and then she lowered her head.

“Who?” Crispin insisted, knowing it was important.

“Our parents,” she whispered miserably.

Crispin stiffened, then straightened, scooping her up into his arms as he went. Carrying her back around her desk, he sat

down on the couch and settled her sideways in his lap. For one moment, he wasn’t sure what to say or how to start the conversation

they needed to have, but finally he asked, “Are your parents the reason you wanted to be a vet? Are they the reason you prefer

animals to people?”

A sigh sliding from her lips, she leaned her side against his chest and nodded. “They are both very religious.” Her mouth

tightened. “But not the good kind. According to the religion I was brought up in, women are less than men and should be submissive

to them. Our only purpose is to produce more children, preferably boys. To that end, education is considered useless for a

female. We shouldn’t even think about going to college or university. In fact, females are not even allowed to finish high

school. Most girls are dragged out of school at sixteen and forced to marry someone of their parents’ choosing.”

“Like Agustin?” Crispin suggested when she fell silent.

Abril’s mouth tightened and her chin came up.

“Agustin wanted me. I suspect mostly to be able to torture me,” she said grimly.

“We’d known each other all our lives and he was a bully all our lives.

He came by it naturally. He was just like his father who beat his mother nearly to death several times that I know of, and took his fists to his children too including Agustin.

Agustin grew up to be just like him. He managed to control himself at school after being suspended the first time he beat up somebody in the yard during recess, but then he just took to beating up kids on the way home.

He was bad as a child, but just got worse as a teenager.

While he still bullied the boys, he started harassing the girls too.

Running up and groping them, acting like a pig. ”

“Including you?” Crispin asked stiffly.

Abril shook her head. “He couldn’t bother me. At least not at school. I was always in the library, talking to Mrs. Thompson

or reading the books she gave me.” Smiling faintly, she told him, “Mrs. Thompson was the one who gave me a love for learning

and encouraged me to get a higher education. She said my grades were good enough that I could get grants and scholarships

to attend university or college and she planned to help me do it.

“Mrs. Thompson knew about my home life and the religion we belonged to. She knew most girls from our community left school

at sixteen, the legal age where parents could take them out of school without getting into trouble with the government. Most

of them were pulled out to get married. Others who didn’t already have offers for marriage were pulled out to help on the

farms and such at home. But Mrs. Thompson spent a lot of time with me, telling me that I didn’t have to have that life. That

I could get a degree and have a career and life outside of the community my family belong to.”

“And it worked,” Crispin said solemnly. “You are obviously educated, and you have a career.”

“Not the career and education I wanted,” she pointed out, but then said, “When my parents announced that Agustin’s father had petitioned for me to marry Agustin, I begged them not to agree.

I told them I wanted to finish high school and go on to college or university and a career.

I told them he would rape and beat me, probably to death, if they made me marry him.

“They didn’t care. They said it wouldn’t be rape, he would be my husband. They said any beatings he had to administer would

be my own fault because I’m so rebellious, and they would no doubt even be needed to keep me in line. They scorned my getting

an education, saying it was a waste for a female to bother with that nonsense. I didn’t need an education to open my legs

and make babies.”

Crispin had to bite down hard on his tongue to hold back the words that wanted to explode out of him. The people she was describing,

her own parents, were cold, heartless bastards. No doubt abusive too, although she hadn’t mentioned them beating her. At the

very least they were emotionally abusive. His heart ached that she had suffered this, and he wished he’d encountered her years

ago and had been able to save her from it.

“So, you ran away,” Crispin said softly, remembering what she had said at the start of this conversation. She’d run away and

her parents were now making her sister Mary wed Agustin in her place.

This was a shared dream and he knew she was reliving something that had happened years ago; at least ten, possibly fifteen.

She was no longer sixteen and he suspected this Agustin would not have waited this long to get himself a wife.

So, in her dreams, her past and her present were colliding together.

It made him wonder if their talk earlier was what had brought her past into her present.

His asking about her family. He was sorry now that he had.

He would do anything to take this pain away from her.

“Yes,” she sighed the word. “I was desperate. I knew that if Agustin got his hands on me, I’d eventually end up dead. He hated

me.”

Crispin frowned at the words a little confused by them. “Why would he insist on marrying you if he hated you?”

“So he could rape me and beat me as often as he wished,” she said unhappily. “To punish me for calling him a big ham-fisted

oaf when he was picking on one of my younger brothers, and for rejecting him when he told me he was going to marry me one

day and shut my sassy mouth.”

“I see,” Crispin said. “I presume Mrs. Thompson helped you run away?”

Abril shook her head. “I would never have risked involving her. She could’ve lost her job, or been harassed by the community

if she had.”

“Then how did you get away?” he asked.

She hesitated, and then explained, “They told me that I had to marry Agustin on my sixteenth birthday a month beforehand.

It was so that I would have time to sew a dress for my wedding. That gave me a month to scrape together some money. Which

I managed through doing chores and whatnot for anyone willing to pay me.”

After a thoughtful pause, she said, “In truth, I suppose Mrs. Thompson did help me run away. She was the one who hired me

for the most tasks, and convinced others to do it as well. She also paid me really well.”

“Your parents let you do that?” Crispin asked dubiously.

“Oh, no,” she said at once. “They had no idea. I started leaving early for school, and coming home about an hour or two after school ended. I told my parents I was spending that time using the sewing machine in the home ec class to make my wedding dress. That’s the only reason they allowed it.

Otherwise, I would have had to hand stitch it all, and I was rotten at sewing.

Couldn’t manage a straight seam to save my soul, and they knew that.

Using a sewing machine was the only way I could have finished a dress in time. ”

“But while they thought you were making your dress, you were...” He let the sentence trail off because he had no idea what

kind of chores she might have done.