Ever Tempted by Odessa Gillespie Black Page A

were worth an arm and a leg. All I could picture was her cutting off one of my arms and one of my legs for repayment. I was famous for taking everything literally when I was small.”
    Allie turned to look at me. “So there was life before the Rollins Manor.”
    “Not much of one. I didn’t begin living until Ava tricked me into finding you.” I kissed her nose.
    Allie cuddled deeper into the crook of my arm.
    Ricardo gave Allie a crooked grin. “Then Nelvi had to bathe him in the contaminated water. He looked better but the faint smell of the diesel was nauseating.”
    “Ok, that’s enough making fun of me.”
    “So not all of your childhood was miserable,” Allie said.
    “There were some highlights.”
    The cove shrank as we pulled away from it. In the distance, a small dot grew into what looked like a small wad of moss miles from us. I hadn’t been back to the island since my mother had sent me there to live permanently when I was fourteen. I’d stayed for a year.
    It had been the family vacation spot until it became my prison.
    Now it was the only place I could imagine I would be safe for a week.
    Funny how things changed in eight years.
    “So have you made any major landscaping changes?” I said as the island grew larger in the distance.
    He gave vivid detail about recent alterations to the grounds, the foliage, the flowers that grew naturally on the island that we had to pay for and cultivate as if they were babies on the East Coast.
    Allie smiled as she stared at the island. The little boat pressed through the clear water and bounced over the small waves.
    Nausea stabbed at the pit of my stomach when Ricardo pulled up to the darkly stained wooden dock. I’d spent days beside the little tool shed situated at the end, waiting for my father to rescue me, but he always did just what my biological mother said. He left me there for months on end to be with her.
    Neither of them could compare to my first mother and father. Mama and Pop would never have disowned me the way the current egg and sperm donor had.
    They would always be my real parents.
    I fully believed that if my first mother had seen me shift, she would have waited—praying the whole while—until I’d shifted back to human form and hugged me until my fears and insecurities had abated. She’d have never been ashamed of me. If she’d hidden me, it would have been for my safety, not due to her embarrassment.
    Unconditional love.
    White sand on the beaches radiated warmth the way it never had when I’d been forced to live here. Sure, I’d had all a boy of fourteen would ever need or want during that stay, but loneliness I never thought I could fill ate my insides down to almost nothing when my Uncle Thomas had rescued me.
    Thank God, he’d visited when his wife, Ethel had passed away.
    He’d taken me in as if I were his own and gave me the means to travel anywhere I wanted.
    As soon as I remembered that I belonged at the manor, we showed up on the doorstep and were both accepted in as if we’d always lived there. Mostly.
    It took some convincing to get Ava to hire him, but that was a story for another day.
    The walk to the main house wound up the other side of the beach. Between us was a line of newly planted bushes. The wooden siding on the mansion gave it the illusion of being much smaller than it was. It looked as if it belonged in the woods somewhere in Nebraska, but my parents had been eccentric. They liked to place things out of their natural habitat just to be different.
    Ricardo led Allie and me to the golf cart and carried us to Pym Point. It was the name of the house and also the highest point on the island.
    In front of the house was the cliff I had almost fallen from when I was a boy. I’d been raking leaves backward toward the cliff to watch them fall. On the beach that early in the morning the seals were at play. They always came in to sun and snort at each other as they splashed in the water.
    Just as I had turned to watch the