Abandon by Meg Cabot Page B

impolite to refuse to join him. He hadn’t tried to do anything to hurt me except yell at me for causing his horse to slip and possibly injure itself, and then get out of the line I was supposed to be in. And he did run this place, whatever it was. I was a guest in it. I had to do what he said.
    Still, I said as nicely as I could as I took the chair he’d offered, “Listen, this has been very nice, and I hope everything works out with the job, or, um, whatever it is that you do. Thank you very much for the invitation to” — What time was it, anyway? I had no idea. There were no clocks anywhere, and the light outside the gauzy white curtains was pinkish, just as it had been down by the lake. The entire cavern seemed to be cast in a pink glow. Was it lunchtime? Or dinnertime? I had no idea — “eat with you. I’d love to stay, but —” While I’d been speaking, he’d placed thebox he plucked from the shelf down in front of me, then opened the lid.
    And there it was.
    My voice trailed off as I stared at it. I’m not really a jewelry sort of person.
    But this was different.
    “Do you like it?” he asked. He seemed almost…nervous, in a way. Which, considering what a self-assured — one might even say authoritative — person he was, was unusual. “You don’t have to keep it if you feel uncomfortable about it or don’t like it.”
    The stone landed with a soft thump against my sternum.
    Because of course I’d nodded in response to his question as to whether or not I liked it. I’d been struck speechless with desire.
    And then — naturally — he’d come up to the back of my chair to put the necklace around my neck.
    I had never in my life seen anything as beautiful. The stone was the color of a thundercloud…smoky gray at the edges, then turning so dark blue in the middle, it was almost black. It was the complete opposite of the shiny white diamond solitaires and bright blue sapphires all the other girls in my school got from Tiffany on their birthdays.
    Gray, I could just hear them all saying. Gray is so
Pierce.
    “It suits you,” he said shortly, his voice as rough as thunder again. He cleared it. “I thought of it the minute I saw you just now, down there. Only I never thought…well, I never thought you’d turn out to be you, or want to come here with me.”
    I had no idea what he was talking about. Against the white bodice of my gown, the stone was the exact color of the Long Island Sound on a stormy day. It reminded me of the view I saw out my bedroom window back home.
    “Do you know anything about colored diamonds?” he asked. I shook my head, still speechless with the beauty of his gift. He nodded and went on, “They come in just about every color you can imagine. Pink, yellow, red, green, black, gray…but they’re very rare. Any tone of blue, like this one, is the most desirable of all. Men have killed for blue diamonds. Stones like this are buried so deeply in the earth’s crust, you see, they’re almost impossible to find. There’ve been only two or three discovered that were anywhere near as large as this one.”
    He reached from around the back of the chair to lift the heavy stone from where it dangled.
    I still wasn’t quite sure what had happened to me. But out of everything — hitting my head; struggling in the pool; waking to find myself in a strange world covered by a pink sky made of stone; running into some guy I’d met when I was seven who turned out not only to possess the power to make dead birds come back to life but also to magically transport girls from one place to another —
this
was what finally sent me over the edge: that he’d just casually reached over to invade my personal body space as if he had some kind of right to.
    I’m pretty sure he didn’t notice my suddenly blazing cheeks.
    He went right on talking as if nothing were wrong. It was entirely possible, considering that the only company he was apparentlyused to keeping was horses, huge tattooed line