He shrugged helplessly. “Ever since he heard this song, he can’t stop singing it. I have no idea why.”
We listened to Lucian’s broken, half-filled-in lyrics for the next four and a half minutes. I’d never seen him look so energetic. He bopped his head along to the fast-paced beat and sang boldly. I was actually a little impressed. When the song was finished, he leaned back against the seat with his usual blank expression and listened passively to the variety of songs that shuffled through. Two playlists later, we pulled up to a log cabin and the landscape looked vaguely familiar.
“Remember when we went sledding?” Adrian asked as he parked the truck. “That was part of this property, about a half a mile northeast of here.”
That would explain it, then. We climbed out and Adrian led the way to the cabin. A fire was roaring in the stone fireplace of the main room.
“I came up here earlier to start warming it up,” Adrian admitted, looking shy.
I smiled. Of course he had.
He disappeared into a side room and came back without the small lunch cooler he’d brought with him.
“Would you like a tour?” he asked.
I shook my head at him, smiling. “There are three things in this world that require tours: museums, castles, and de la Mara private properties.”
He rolled his eyes and took me by the arms. “Come on; it’s a short tour today due to grumpy tourists. This,” he said, turning me in a slow, 360-degree circle, “is the main room. Notice the shabby-chic sofas, the Stony Creek original area rugs, and the Fields dining set.”
I stared at the dining room table and the six chairs that sat grouped around it. “Are those really Fields?” Trish had told me once that her grandfather had been a carpenter, and a ton of the furniture around the county had been handcrafted by him, once upon a time.
“Yep. Mariana and Dominic thought it would be best to have something that represented the spirit of the town. They actually lived here for a while, while the house was being built.”
“Doesn’t have enough marble to seem like their style.”
“And you’ve managed to sum them up in one sentence. On with the tour.”
He walked me straight forward toward two open doors. “In door number one, we have a bedroom! Door two is a bathroom. Over there is the kitchen. That’s it.”
I was surprised. “Really?”
“The cabin was already here when they moved in; otherwise it would have a six-car garage next to the well out back.”
I suddenly realized Lucian was missing. “Where’s your brother?”
Adrian sighed. “Frankie?”
“Alejandro!” I heard a small voice call from the kitchen.
“He’s recently discovered YouTube. Lady Gaga particularly fascinates him.”
“Ah.” In a weird way, that made sense.
We walked into the kitchen and discovered that Lucian had taken a jar of green olives out of the fridge and was thirstily drinking the juice from it. I shuddered.
“Why is he doing that?” I whispered as Lucian drained the jar and started popping olives onto his fingers.
Adrian leaned in. “Salt content is comparable to blood. It’s one of the ways we’re trying to help him with withdrawals. He’s down to two blood bags a day.”
I blinked. “Oh.”
“You’re gonna get a stomachache, buddy,” Adrian warned. Lucian stared at his brother and slowly chewed an olive off his pinkie finger.
Adrian shrugged. “All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
We walked out as Lucian contemplated the remaining olives.
“Still think he’s cute?”
I looked back at the door. “He’s adorable. Strange and slightly terrifying, but adorable.”
“You’re the only one who thinks so.” Adrian sat down on the couch and stared blankly into the fire. For a moment, he kind of looked like Lucian.
“What do you mean by that?” I sat next to him and drew my knees up to my chin to keep warm. Adrian grabbed a blanket from the back of the couch and handed it to me.
“I don’t know,” he said, propping his feet up on the coffee table. “He just has such a limited world. He’s not allowed to interact with anyone outside our family—besides you, of course, and I had to pull strings to even allow that—and no one in the family pays any attention to him. Which seems so stupid after we went to all the trouble of getting him back. Sometimes I feel like…”
He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the couch. “Sometimes I feel like the only reason he’s important to us is so we can say we won. Julian sure as hell doesn’t care about him, and Mariana and Dominic are so wrapped up in their own lives that they don’t even realize he’s there half the time. I try to help, but he needs more than me. He needs structure and discipline and love—he needs parents.” He smiled bitterly. “We all need parents.”
I’d never heard Adrian say that much about his personal life the entire time we’d known each other.