Brimstone Bride
Brimstone Bride
Barbara J. Hancock
Stranger, Seductress or His Salvation?One hundred years ago, Adam Turov, master of Nightingale Vineyards, bartered his soul for freedom from the Order of Samuel and their Rogue daemon allies. But he didn’t know true damnation until Victoria D’Arcy crossed the billionaire vintner’s threshold. . . Sworn to protect her, Adam must deny every fibre of his being to resist a voice that sounds like an angel and her potent charm.An unwilling pawn of the Order, Victoria must betray Adam to save her young son. Yet the more time she spends at his estate on her clandestine mission, the harder it becomes to deny the Brimstone heat scorching a path of desire between them…
Stranger, Seductress or His Salvation?
One hundred years ago, Adam Turov, master of Nightingale Vineyards, bartered his soul for freedom from the Order of Samuel and their Rogue daemon allies. But he didn’t know true damnation until Victoria D’Arcy crossed the billionaire vintner’s threshold... Sworn to protect her, Adam must resist with every fiber of his being a voice that sounds like an angel singing and her potent charm.
An unwilling pawn of the Order, Victoria must betray Adam to save her young son. Yet the more time she spends at his estate on her clandestine mission, the harder it becomes to deny the Brimstone heat scorching a path of desire between them...
“I heard you humming. I felt it,” Turov said. “I’ve never felt anything like it before.”
He didn’t touch her.
He didn’t have to.
The heat in his blood did.
He was damned and the Brimstone that sealed his deal with daemons sang its own song to her music-starved ears.
“It won’t happen again,” Victoria promised.
He looked into her eyes.
“I hope that’s a lie,” he said.
His gaze dropped to her open lips, but he didn’t close the distance. The heat between them flared. He seemed mesmerized. But then he straightened up and backed away before she made the fatal mistake of wanting his kiss enough to make it happen herself. His jaw hardened and the expression in his eyes cooled. She could still feel his Brimstone heat, but he was no longer controlled by it.
“Good night, Victoria.” His voice was rough. “I told you that you’d be safe here and I meant it. From every danger...”
BARBARA J. HANCOCK lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where her daily walk takes her to the edge of the wilderness and back again. When Barbara isn’t writing modern gothic romance that embraces the shadows with a unique blend of heat and heart, she can be found wrangling twin boys and spoiling her pets.
Brimstone Bride
Barbara J. Hancock
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For those that champion the silenced
and love the lost.
Contents
Cover (#u37f7eb29-c2f1-5ff4-907b-7b9f62eb19d9)
Back Cover Text (#uec0391fe-9656-54f6-992b-4852ba34152d)
Introduction (#u9d8b9469-4fbd-54b3-8304-fcb9dec851e2)
About the Author (#ua6f8ef2e-1954-535d-84f4-0401a144f21b)
Title Page (#u47fcd14a-bab9-5880-8688-32a9deb92004)
Dedication (#u28d52d3e-0b80-5a41-8d7e-3ce97da8e88d)
Chapter 1 (#uf0f303bc-606e-5263-8f88-32aab0689a0a)
Chapter 2 (#u3a9acd7a-4ac8-5b97-9a17-8dd6dab0a81e)
Chapter 3 (#uf58d61c0-9c01-5686-9c47-4ad28b065563)
Chapter 4 (#u90d26f8c-bd24-56ab-aed6-bc0f9bb7aaa0)
Chapter 5 (#u7b21c1b1-de1b-5c94-9fcb-d54c6cda91b0)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#u74923b9c-4c95-5f6f-9521-7fcd7cae7a48)
Playground sounds made the danger beside Victoria so much worse. High-pitched laughter and conversations about make-believe seemed surreal. Across the mulched expanse, her sister, Katherine D’Arcy Severne, pushed Victoria’s toddler, Michael, and her own baby, Sam, on the swings. She glanced toward Victoria and waved. Vic waved back.
Pay no attention to the madman beside me, Kat. Keep my Michael and your Sam safe.
The monk sitting beside Victoria on the park bench was in a businessman’s suit, as if he’d dropped by the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, playground during his lunch break. He crossed his legs gracefully like a civilized man. Kat probably thought he was a father watching his child play instead of an evil man come to threaten their own. Victoria had been resting in the sun when he’d approached. She’d actually smiled at him when he’d joined her on the bench.
And then he’d revealed his true purpose.
“The Order of Samuel has proven time and time again that you cannot run. You cannot hide. You will learn this lesson or your child will join us. A half daemon brother would be unusual, but I’m sure we could train him, put him to good use for Father Reynard’s cause.”
“Stay. Away. From. Michael,” Victoria said. Her voice cracked with emotion. Her baby was only two. Katherine pushed her nephew higher and he squealed.
Victoria’s throat had yet to recover from the injuries she’d sustained in the opera house fire set by Father Reynard. They’d blamed it on an obsessive fan. He’d been obsessive all right. But not a fan. He was a daemon hunter and she and Katherine had been his reluctant bloodhounds. They’d been born with an affinity for Brimstone blood that inevitably led them to the daemons Reynard hunted. Violence. Blood. Pain. No rest. No peace. He had dogged their steps for as long as they could walk.
He’d died in the fire, but apparently his cause hadn’t.
“I will leave your daemon spawn alone, only if you set my brethren free. This man is our greatest enemy. He must be stopped,” the monk in disguise said.
He held a magazine in his hands and tilted the cover so she could see the man who graced it.
Michael’s laughter floated to her ears as his doting aunt pushed him on the swing. Victoria had fallen in love with a daemon. Her affinity for the Brimstone in his blood had drawn them together, but it had been more than that. He’d been a stop to running. He’d been hope. He had died trying to protect her and Michael. The Order of Samuel said they were warriors for heaven. They lied. The members of the D’Arcy family were tools used by one faction of daemons to hunt another.
Politics.
The D’Arcy ability to draw and be drawn to daemon blood had placed them in the middle of an otherworldly civil war.
Love wasn’t allowed.
Ironic that her favorite role to play had always been Juliet. She’d traveled around the world to sing the part of a tragic romance again and again.
“What do you want me to do?” Victoria asked.
The man on the cover of the magazine was a beautiful stranger in a designer suit. Behind him, a vineyard stretched in seemingly endless verdant rows. He stood with one foot on the threshold of a historic stone building, a massive wooden door with iron hinges looking rough-hewn and craggy in sharp contrast to his polished clothes. There was a gleam to the black waves of his hair, but those waves and his sun-kissed skin seemed more in keeping with the door than his suit. Victoria had grown up in the dramatic world of the opera. She knew a costume when she saw one. The man’s civilized suit was a lie.
“You will gain his trust. You will learn his secrets. Once you discover where he keeps his prisoners, you will free them,” the monk said. “Once they are freed, they will use their combined strength to kill him. In this way, you will guarantee your son’s safety.”
Children laughed and ran and played all around them. Tears burned behind her eyes. But she forced them to dry. She waved again and this time Michael waved back, still laughing. Katherine was looking at Victoria closely now. As if she sensed something wrong. But the monk had already risen, prepared to walk away. He didn’t need her answer. He could sense her defeat in her slumped shoulders and her trembling wave of reassurance to her child.
“I’m not a spy. How will I do this?” she asked his back. He paused and halfway turned back to reply.
“He has Brimstone in his blood. He’s damned. Your affinity is the perfect weapon. His home is a fortress. You will penetrate his defenses. Seduce his secrets from him. Free our brothers. Capture him. Then, you and your family will be left in peace.”
He lied.
She would never know peace.
“Who knows? You might even enjoy yourself. You have proven you have a taste for damnation,” the monk said. His knowing laughter didn’t blend with the innocent laughter of the children around them. It jarred. It condemned. Her cheeks burned. Not because she was ashamed of loving Michael’s father, but because this man didn’t deserve to pollute what they’d shared by mentioning it. Daemons were nearly immortal beings who lived in the hell dimension. They were different but, like men, they were only damned by their actions, not by their blood. Michael’s father had been heroic in the end, sacrificing himself for his child even though he’d been a daemon.
The children on the playground seemed to sense the evil in their midst. They parted as the monk passed as if a snake slithered among them. One little girl began to cry without obvious cause and a kind woman ran to see what she could do to help.
The monk had left the magazine beside her on the bench. She picked it up. The man on the cover hadn’t looked at the camera. The photographer had caught him in a moment of reflection, with dark shadows from the vine-covered building on his face. The photograph drew her as if the Brimstone in the man’s blood could already sense her affinity. Yes. He had secrets. She could see them in his shadowed eyes.
A single tear did fall then. The monk had already walked away. His laughter drifted back to her on the humid Louisiana breeze. She had loved and lost, but she wouldn’t lose again. Only one tear fell. It rolled down her cheek to fall on the back of her hand. It glistened there, useless.
She would do what she had to do to protect her son.
She willed the unshed tears to dry as she widened her eyes and clenched her jaw. The magazine crinkled in her ferocious grip.
Her son’s vigilant protector, the hellhound Grim, wasn’t allowed to materialize in the playground, but Victoria saw a shimmer of shadows near the swings, too dark to be cast by the blossoming grove of cherry trees that surrounded the park.
The wind blew and petals fell like pale pink rain. They settled on Katherine’s dark hair and the children laughed. They raised their hands to the sky to try to catch the drifting blossoms. Near the shadow of Grim, the petals shied away in puffs of disturbed silk as the giant dog shook his sooty coat to maintain his disguise. She could imagine his movements because she knew he was there. No one else noticed. Just as no one else had heard the monk’s threats.
During the fire, Katherine’s husband, John Severne, had risked his life to give Grim to Victoria’s son. His sacrifice had saved Michael. The fearsome beast had been Severne’s companion for two hundred years. Now, he watched over her son.
But Grim wouldn’t be enough.
Victoria had to do more.
Even if it meant continuing to be a servant to madmen whose evil requests damned her as if she’d sold her soul.
As the playground full of children continued to laugh and play, fear burned hotly inside her chest, exactly as she imagined the damning fire of Brimstone might burn in daemon veins.
Chapter 2 (#u74923b9c-4c95-5f6f-9521-7fcd7cae7a48)
Few people had gotten close enough to see his scars.
Adam Turov sat with his chest facing the back of a wooden chair. He gripped the polished cherry slats with white knuckles, but he didn’t flinch as he hunched his bare back for Dr. Verenich. The Brimstone in his blood wasn’t always enough to heal the injuries he sustained hunting devils with no care for how much human blood they spilled.
“Live for a century, learn for a century,” the doctor murmured under his breath as he plied needle and thread to close the dagger slash too severe to knit itself. “I have learned to use specially constructed thread in your treatment, shef. And yet you have not learned to avoid daemon-cursed blades.”
“Without effort, you won’t pull fish from a pond,” Adam said. He could fight the doctor saying for saying. He’d learned all his Russian idioms firsthand before the Revolution.
“So, no pain, no gain?” The doctor chuckled grimly as he worked on the man he still referred to as his boss as his father had before him, even though Adam Turov had also become his friend. Gloves protected his hands from Brimstone’s burn, but every now and then they’d sizzle and hiss, and smoke would rise into the air as he pierced Adam’s skin with his needle and fireproof thread. “I’ll tell you what you have gained, my friend...” He urged Adam to turn his back toward an antique mirror with a gilded frame. It was Tsarist, of course. The Turov family had brought a king’s ransom to California during the Revolution. They survived by adapting, persevering. They had worked through the darkest hours. Sweat and blood had replaced diamonds and tiaras.
Reflected in the mirror, Adam Turov didn’t look a day over thirty, even after a life-threatening battle with evil monks from the Order of Samuel and their Rogue daemon allies. On a good day, in fine clothes, he would seem even younger. Too young to successfully run the oldest winery in Sonoma, California.
“Wings. Over all these years, you’ve developed a macabre pair of wings,” the doctor said.
Adam could see them. The scarifications the doctor pointed out by gesturing in the air above them. The tracery of scars swept down his back on both sides like folded wings. The irony caused a grim smile to curve his lips. There. That expression was older. Much more in keeping with his actual age.
“A dark angel indeed, Doctor,” he said.
He could remember the initial beatings with a lash that had begun the “wings.” And later, every hack and slash. Every stitch. Every battle. He could remember the face of every monk he’d delivered to hell. None of the monks in his memory were the one that most haunted him. Not yet. Father Malachi had wielded the lash with enthusiasm. The younger the novitiate, the better. The Order purported to be the last line of defense between hell and Earth, but they lied. In truth, the faction of Rogue daemons that wanted to overthrow Lucifer’s Army and wage war on heaven had corrupted them. The Order of Samuel wasn’t holy. They were as damned as he was.
He liked to think he escorted them to their just ends, one monk at a time. He might never reclaim the soul he’d sold, but he could face his own damnation one day if he delivered every single monk to hell before him.
“No, not an angel. You are more like the legendary firebird caught in a greedy prince’s golden cage,” the doctor said. “You will insist on attending the party, I’m sure. Movement will cause great pain. That was a deep wound. You should rest. Heal.”
The doctor was already wiping Brimstone blood and ash from Adam’s lean, muscled back in preparation for the evening suit that waited across the foot of his bed. It was a disguise. He used the expensive, tailored clothes and the carefully cultivated sophistication of a vintner to hide his true warrior’s nature.
But he’d been hiding it for so long that his disguise came naturally to him now. He ran the Nightingale Vineyards as easily as he battled evil monks.
“I prefer the nightingale to the firebird, Doctor. The firebird was my mother’s favorite. I named our best pinot noir in her honor. There’s nothing golden about me. I’m far too dark for that comparison,” Adam said.
“Ah, but you’re forgetting how the prince was cursed by the firebird for his greed. Capturing the firebird was a mistake. It proved deadly. A dark enough tale, indeed,” the doctor said.
“Nothing heals more than movement,” Adam said, dismissing the fanciful talk. He rolled his shoulders to illustrate. The doctor hissed, but Adam ignored the agony that flared outward from his damaged skin. “We must keep moving forward.”
He’d been damaged for a long time. Agony was a familiar friend.
He’d been nine when the Order had stolen him from his family. He’d been infinitely older when he’d escaped. In experience if not in years.
“Victoria D’Arcy is arriving tonight. That’s why I completed a sweep. To clear the area so I could focus on her,” Adam said.
The doctor busied himself, cleaning his instruments and packing his case while Adam dressed. His bag resembled a traditional black leather satchel, but it held the instruments necessary to be the private physician to a powerful man who’d sold his soul a hundred years ago. Dr. Verenich was the second-generation descendant of a physician who had followed the Turov family to America.
“You must protect her?” the doctor asked.
“Those are my orders. I haven’t decided if I’ll be able to follow them,” Adam said. She’d been hunted by the Order of Samuel. They were her enemy, but she was their pawn. She wasn’t coming to the Turov estate as his friend. Adam had been kidnapped, beaten, tortured, programmed to become a daemon slayer so that he could be used by Rogue daemons to overthrow Lucifer. But it had been a Loyalist daemon that had saved him. And it was the new Loyalist king that he now served.
A daemon that claimed Victoria D’Arcy as his stepchild.
He’d been warned by the daemon king that the Order of Samuel was sending Victoria to infiltrate Nightingale Vineyards and uncover his secrets.
The woman he welcomed tonight might well be the most dangerous threat he’d ever faced. He was supposed to help her even as she planned to betray him.
* * *
She was afraid. Fear always made her angry. She rebelled against it. How many times had she stood on an opera house stage bathed in light and draped in a character’s costume—completely armored in powder, wig and an imaginary persona—to sing out in protest against her plight? She had fallen in love with a daemon. She’d gone against the Order of Samuel. She had survived. The father of her baby hadn’t. The Order had killed him. She’d barely lived. For their baby.
Everything had changed when Michael was born. She was no longer a rebel. She was a mother. Now she had to be cautious for two.
Tonight, as she hurried toward Nightingale Vineyards, more than her voice was lost. It was as if her very heart had been ripped from her chest and it beat elsewhere. Slowly, steadily, but threatened; each beat might be its last if she didn’t do as she was told. The new leader of the Order of Samuel, Father Malachi, held her strings and she was a puppet who could dance only to evil’s song.
She’d flown into California in a plain summer suit of black linen. The gray shell sweater underneath the blazer stretched loosely to brush the top of her thighs. As she was only five foot three, it didn’t have to stretch far. She’d pulled an oversize black fedora low over her eyes. Only her heels and handbag betrayed any personality. She’d grabbed them too hurriedly to think of disguise. Red. A holdover from a much bolder Victoria. That flamboyant woman seemed a lifetime ago.
Katherine had handled the other packing. She’d sent Victoria’s bags ahead to the vineyard’s estate house. Victoria hadn’t told Kat about the danger Michael was in. It was only a matter of time before Katherine discovered her nephew was being stalked by the Order of Samuel. By then, Victoria hoped to have accomplished what she’d been sent to do.
Anything to save her son.
Katherine thought she wanted to visit the vineyards as a retreat to rest and recuperate. Her voice hadn’t been the same since the opera house fire that had almost claimed her life. Doctors said she would recover. That she only needed time. Yet it seemed ages since she’d been able to sing.
She admitted to no one that it seemed ages since she’d wanted to sing.
She’d left her toddling son with his daemon nanny, Sybil, and his hellhound, Grim. Surely, they could protect him even better than her until she could arrange their freedom. One more task for the Order.
But wasn’t it always one more, one more, one more?
She stepped into a coffee shop for an espresso after her flight. While she ordered, she noticed a thick-browed man in a nearby queue. He hadn’t been on her plane, but he had been at the Shreveport airport. She was certain she’d seen him there. He wore a simple suit with a boxy cut and he was bald, stocky, his face smooth and plain, but he didn’t move like a casual traveler.
Maybe he was an off duty soldier.
Maybe he was a ninja in disguise.
But Victoria suspected an even more nefarious origin.
She sipped her small, rich coffee. She even managed a smile for the barista who had boldly scrawled bella on her cup instead of Vic. His dark eyes flashed above a bright smile, but he didn’t distract her from the suspicious-looking man who now placed his order at the register beside her.
She didn’t catch the man’s name. She didn’t have to. Now that he was closer, she could see the movement of his muscles beneath his suit jacket. Its loose cut couldn’t hide his extreme physicality.
Suddenly, the man looked up and met her gaze. He took his coffee from the barista, ignoring the tip jar with its yellow smiley face sticker. She glanced away. Why should she give him an intimate glimpse of her fear?
He had to be a monk from the Order of Samuel. His smirk and the black gleam of his large pupils seemed too knowing. The monks were following her to make sure she complied.
Victoria abandoned her steaming cup in the waste bin, no longer needing the caffeine. She was wide-awake. The whole shop full of weary travelers must see her heart beating in her chest. The Order didn’t have to follow or threaten her further to make sure the job got done.
One threat toward Michael was enough.
Yet the look in the monk’s eyes did quicken her steps. She hurried outside to the waiting row of taxis, and took the dark gaze with her. His eyes had held no sympathy, only the fire of fanaticism. That hateful glow had haunted her life. She refused to let it haunt Michael’s as well.
* * *
The Turov mansion was a California Craftsman castle with hints of Imperial St. Petersburg in its columns and arches. The cab approached down a long, winding drive. Rather than the expected cedar shakes, the house was constructed of rough gray brick, its roof gleaming slate instead of Spanish tile. Several turrets were capped in domes of copper that glimmered gold in the sunset. The material was echoed in hammered metal on the mansion’s gutters and window frames. She had time to appreciate the gleam as the car neared the entrance where the driveway ended in a circular loop. There was something that touched her about its design. It was art, not merely architecture. There was personality evident in every curve, passion in every turret.
But the hundreds of shadowed windows seemed to warn that the walls might shelter a difficult personality and a dark passion.
When she saw the main house, her first thought was forever. She’d traveled the world. She’d walked on ancient cobblestones. She’d sung on stages much older than she was. Nightingale Vineyards hadn’t been here forever, but it seemed to proclaim that it would be. Maybe she was attributing Russian determination to its every brick, every line, because she knew its owner’s heritage. It was natural to assume the house was a reflection of the man.
Since the house intimidated as much as it piqued her curiosity, she looked away.
The inhabited portion of the estate was surrounded by landscaped gardens that eventually gave way to rolling hills of endless cultivated greenery. The grapevines stretched as far as Victoria could see. The magazine hadn’t captured the truth of the expanse. The setting sun bathed the vines in a warm russet haze.
The scent of roses enveloped her when she stepped from the car. Loamy earth, green vines and roses. She breathed deeply, reluctantly soothed. She’d paid the driver before she exited the vehicle. There were no bags beyond the purse she carried herself. The cab drove away and the night deepened as she paused. The garden beckoned, but the house waited, with only the windows on the ground level aglow. She would have to go in. She had to do what she’d come to do.
All around her, the vineyard grew. She swore she could almost feel the pervasive, steady creep of its tendrils. So alive. It was early in the growing season, but soon grapes would be plumping in heavy bunches. What was it like to choose a place, set down roots and thrive? No running. No hiding. It was all so beautiful and real. She could never give this to Michael, but she longed for it. The permanence.
For a while, she was alone beneath a sky gone violet and beginning to wink with waking stars.
And then she wasn’t.
She tried to ignore the sudden pull of Brimstone, holding herself in place because if she didn’t she would immediately move to its source. And its source was her enemy in spite of his allure.
Adam Turov.
It had to be.
“I can do this,” Victoria whispered under her breath, the hoarse sound of her voice still a surprise, though the fire had been over two years ago. She shouldered her handbag and moved toward the portico over the front entrance.
“There’s no turning back once you step through that door,” a voice said from the shadows.
The glow from the windows did little to illuminate her welcoming committee. He didn’t require illumination. She knew who and what he was before he came closer. As he approached, she instinctively inched away and looked over her shoulder.
The Order of Samuel had used her affinity to hunt daemons. She’d been a reluctant bloodhound since she was a young girl. She still was. It hadn’t ended. The man at the airport was stalking her. He might be out of sight, but he wasn’t out of mind. She reminded herself that this time she was here willingly. Her job was to uncover Turov’s secrets and help the Order shut him down.
For Michael.
She forced herself to halt her retreat.
Adam Turov stepped into the light near the front door and he surprised her. He seemed nearer to her age than she’d expected. But she knew he wasn’t. He was much, much older. Fear fluttered in her stomach and she tightened her impressively toned diaphragm against it. She was a welcome guest. A harmless opera singer looking for a restful vacation. She needed to act like he was her host, not her prey.
Her throat might not be up to par, but her core was as iron as ever. For Michael.
“Mr. Turov. It’s nice to meet you,” she said. She recognized him from the magazine she’d been shown. But that didn’t matter—she could feel the Brimstone in his blood. He had already found her because that Brimstone drew him to her like a moth to a flame. The thought was heady as well as frightening. He was tall, sinfully attractive and powerful. Her temperature had risen. His would run hotter than 98.6. Her cheeks flushed. The earthy spring air was cool against her skin. It was the Brimstone, but it was also the man and her deception. Her job had always been to create beautiful, dramatic fabrications onstage, but she wasn’t comfortable with lies offstage.
“Welcome to Sonoma. Are you ready to leave work and worry behind? I’ll show you to the cottage where you’ll be staying. You can freshen up and join us for a drink,” Turov said.
“Do you always personally greet your guests?” she asked.
He didn’t confirm his identity. He probably knew he didn’t need to. He was famous. One of the most eligible bachelors in California. Of course she would recognize the Turov eyes, nose and chin that had graced his father and his grandfather before him. He couldn’t know she was privy to his deal with the devil. He was the only Turov left and had been for over fifty years. Brimstone fueled his longevity. But it had come at great price. What kind of man would sell his soul for wealth and acclaim? Never mind the permanent feel of the estate around her and the rich earth beneath her feet. It would all be ashes eventually. The devil’s due.
“No. Not always,” he said. Only that. No explanation. Her flush deepened as he looked closely at her, one brow slightly raised.
The damned master of Nightingale Vineyards offered her his arm and she lightly accepted it. Little did he know her work—the most important performance of her life—had only just begun. Her heart pounded as they walked around a manicured lawn to a rose-covered arbor that created a dark tunnel. There was discreet outdoor lighting to show them the path. But would he need it if he’d walked this way for decades?
Her son had Brimstone blood. This was different. Turov was no daemon. He was a human who had sold his soul. His was not an innocent, natural burn. He was dangerous in spite of his tailored suit and his cultured accent.
Who was the prey in his garden? She was afraid the tables had been turned already.
“You’ve lost your voice?” he asked as they walked through rose-scented shadows.
“I’ve strained it. There was a fire a couple of years ago. I breathed in extreme heat and smoke. The effects have lingered. I can talk, but I can’t sing. Not in my former way. I might never be able to sing professionally again,” she said.
“That’s a shame. I’m sorry. Never is such a long time and I’d love to hear you sing. Perhaps our pinot noir will soothe your throat,” he said.
She was used to taking on roles, but she wasn’t a spy. She might as well have “fraud” written on her forehead in scarlet. Her affinity was supposed to help her, but she was afraid it did the opposite. She couldn’t be as tactical and distant as she should be. Her senses were completely taken over by the heat in his blood. His arm was solid and strong under her fingers. His warmth radiated outward to counteract the night air. It was as if she walked with a flame. Her feet faltered. Her throat reflexively opened. For the first time in a very long time she felt a song well up in her chest.
“For you,” Turov said. They exited the arbor tunnel into a private courtyard ringed by high hedges. At first she mistook the cottage as a part of the hedge, but it was actually a stone building completely covered in lush vines of dark red roses. They tumbled and curved and twined, a profusion of color as the night came on, a riot of greenery and blossom.
“Oh,” she breathed out. She risked no other syllable. Her chest was full. Her lips trembled. She wanted to sing. It was the Brimstone. Katherine had shared the truth about their affinity and how their gift for music responded to daemon blood. They’d used music to drown out the magnetic pull, but in special cases the music seemed to resonate with the power of Brimstone. She had to keep up her guard. She couldn’t afford to allow this man to inspire her to song. Not if the song would bind them together. He was bound for the hell of the Order of Samuel’s clutches. That was all.
The cottage would have been a perfect retreat if that was what she’d truly come to California to find, but the song bubbling up in her made it a dangerous place.
“Your bags are inside. I know you’re tired, but join us once you’re refreshed,” Turov said. “I can’t claim it will actually heal your throat, but the wine is excellent. It will help you relax after your flight.”
“Thank you. I’ll join you soon,” Victoria said. Her voice was a classic film star’s dusky tones. Accidentally throaty and seductive. This was the first time she’d heard it that way since the fire. Always before it had seemed scratchy and ugly.
He opened the door of the cottage and then stepped back to hand her the key. It was a skeleton key made warm by his touch. Her fingers closed around it. She didn’t mean to fist them tightly, but tension betrayed her. He seemed to note her discomfort and watched her gather her composure. His gaze on her throat, moving as she swallowed, felt intimate—and intimacy with him would be dangerous. His many years of life left him too experienced and perceptive. If he got too close, she wouldn’t be able to keep her secrets. Yet she was here to get close. Close enough to fulfill a dark task.
“You’re safe here, Victoria. I read about the fire. How an obsessive fan caused it. Nightingale is a special place. Sacrosanct. We are older and wiser than most retreats. For a long time, I’ve insisted on privacy. I maintain this hideaway at great cost,” Turov said. “Please accept my assurance that no one can harm you while you are here with me.”
In the gloaming, it was too dark to read his eyes. But she recognized a greater danger in that moment than she’d previously acknowledged. She needed retreat. She longed for protection. And the last person she could expect to provide it was the man she planned to betray. His Brimstone blood coaxed her to sing, but it was his offer of protection that weakened her defenses.
“Forgive me if I don’t relax. It isn’t you. It’s me,” Victoria said.
“Yes. I see that. You hold yourself contained. Unusual for an artist,” Turov said.
She hadn’t stepped over the threshold yet. She regretted the pause as soon as his hand reached to tilt the brim of her hat up. Only a millimeter. Only the very tip of his fingers brushed the felt. But her expression felt suddenly exposed to his searching eyes. He lowered his hand. She held her breath. He leaned. Slightly. She might have imagined a lowering of his shadowed face toward hers. She backed up just in case, away from his heat, away from his discerning gaze.
“Join us,” he urged again. “It’s a small party. You’ll be a welcome addition.”
She nodded as she walked into the cottage he’d given her for her stay. The scent of roses would likely always remind her of this adrenaline-fueled retreat. For a few crazy seconds she had thought he was going to kiss her, and she’d recognized the pinch of disappointment in her chest with the realization that she couldn’t have allowed it even if he’d tried.
Chapter 3 (#u74923b9c-4c95-5f6f-9521-7fcd7cae7a48)
Her sister had packed four bags for her. Katherine had spared no effort. It seemed as if Victoria’s entire wardrobe was in the cases as well as some of her sister’s. She shied away from her usual vibrant choices. Instead, she chose a black cocktail dress—a simple silk sheath with a chiffon overlay, complete with satin collar and cuffs. The sheath itself was formfitting and fell to midthigh, while the overlay was longer, with filmy panels that fell to her knees and floated softly around her legs when she walked.
The outfit said she was an opera singer going for a sexy librarian vibe. It also screamed not a spy. Poor Michael. He might be better off if she could do this in a costume and sing the part.
Adam Turov had told her she was safe, but he must sense she was more than she seemed. Even though he had gone back to the main house, there wasn’t enough distance between them to keep the affinity from pulling her toward him. He would be drawn to her too.
That knowledge was frightening...for many reasons.
Michael’s father had been gone for two years.
She’d survived, but she hadn’t thrived.
She’d been a patient, a mother and a sister, but she hadn’t felt like a woman in a long time. She could blame the Brimstone, the affinity, the adrenaline, or she could admit Turov was incredibly alluring without all that. His slight Slavic accent was both sophisticated and somehow rough. She thought he’d rather dispense with polite sophistication and speak bluntly. The mysterious roughness made her long to hear what he had to say. They could never have truth between them, but the idea seduced her.
She couldn’t allow that longing to thrive, so she took extra care with her party persona.
She freshened her makeup, brushed her hair and slipped on a favorite pair of shoes. She hardly noticed the faint light of a waning crescent moon or any movement in the garden as she left the cottage to follow the path to the mansion. She wanted to go to the party in spite of all the reasons she shouldn’t. It was the first party she’d wanted to attend in a long time.
* * *
She’d been dressed in gray and black, but her hair and lipstick had been closer to the truth of who she really was. He’d been mesmerized by the mass of curls under her hat, bright even in shadows. And her lips in soft light had been flush and full and painted boldly. They hadn’t matched the fear in her eyes. More than ever, he wanted to personally hand-deliver Father Malachi to the fires of hell and throw him in the flames. The Order of Samuel specialized in traumatizing innocents, yet they called themselves holy men. It was obvious they haunted Victoria D’Arcy. She was a bold woman shadowed by fear.
When he saw her enter the rooms he’d had arranged for her reception, his glass paused halfway to his mouth. The hat was gone. And her shapeless traveling clothes were gone too. She’d chosen bright crimson heels and she’d refreshed her lips in the same shade. Her hair was a richer, deeper auburn and more subtle in comparison. Against the black of her dress and her pale porcelain skin, those pops of color stunned. The myriad shades of red in her hair seemed almost iridescent in the shifting light.
It wasn’t only him. She entered quietly, but many faces turned her way. She had stage presence. No actual stage necessary. The whole room subtly shifted within moments of her becoming a part of it. It was no longer a miscellaneous gathering. It was a party with an anonymous star at its heart. She wasn’t a celebrity. She’d been away from the opera world too long and even before that her career had been held in check by daemon politics. She simply shone and everyone in the room unconsciously arranged themselves to bask in the glow.
This was the woman the Order of Samuel sent to bring him down.
He lifted his glass. He took a long swallow of Firebird Pinot Noir. He didn’t savor. He gulped. Because he’d rather fight an army of monks programmed to destroy than this one intriguing woman.
* * *
He watched her. She could feel his attention while she spoke to other guests. There were wealthy travelers, politicians, a celebrity chef, an aging rock star and a billionaire philanthropist—it was a posh gathering for an opera singer that had never been free to seek fame. They were here for Turov. He was sharing his guests with her. But he wasn’t being hospitable. She reminded herself that he used his sophisticated persona as a disguise for his covert activities. By and by, she was swept his way. Time and tide and Brimstone. When she took the warmed crystal stem from his fingers, she realized she’d abstained from accepting a glass of wine until she could receive her glass from his hand.
She sipped. And the room fell away. The aroma was delicate black cherry accented with a spicy hint of cinnamon. The flavor was of fruit and earth. But it was the texture that slayed. It was liquid silk on her tongue, soft and velvety. She savored. She swallowed. The rich, full-bodied vintage did soothe her throat and her spirits.
She wasn’t an expert on wine, but she savored this one with her eyes closed, well aware that it was one of the finest she’d ever enjoyed. When she lifted her lids, she met the deep blue of Turov’s eyes. He watched her drink as if her reaction to his wine mattered more than fire and Brimstone. She lifted her glass for a second sip, to savor and swallow again while he watched. His gaze tracked the movement of her lips and tongue and her throat. His intensity made her flush more than the pleasure of the wine or the effects of the alcohol on an empty stomach.
“You like it,” he said.
Though they danced a dangerous dance of deception, she was stripped to raw honesty by the expression on his handsome face. This. The tasting of the wine between them was not part of her mission or their mutual disguises. Her reaction must be honest and real. His art deserved no less.
“It’s beautiful. Pure pleasure on my tongue. I want to sing—and that is high praise. I haven’t wanted to sing for a long time,” Victoria confessed. This time when she swallowed, she also swallowed emotion. The lovely black cherry flavor lingered as a reminder of her honesty. She hadn’t told anyone the truth about her lack of desire to sing. Not even Katherine.
“You honor my family,” Turov replied.
His voice was rougher. Not as polished. In this moment, his disguise slipped. His face was both harder and more vulnerable. The set of his jaw was a tight line, but one made of marble that could be chipped if she wished it.
This man was the man she’d been sent to harm.
She swayed on her feet as if she’d forgotten to eat before a major dress rehearsal under hot lights. Turov snapped out of his trance. He took her glass and set it on a nearby table, urging her to patio doors that were already thrown wide. They walked through together with his warm hand on her back. Solicitous? Was he the host vulnerable to her enjoyment of his wine? Or nefarious? Was he the damned man who had sold his soul for success? There was no way to tell. Victoria could only step out in the cool air and breathe deeply of rich earth and growing things.
They walked out onto the broad expanse of a decorative-tiled veranda, framed by stone columns and a black slate rail. She leaned against it for support, but also to look out at the vineyards that stretched far into the night. Better to look there than to face her host. How could she read him when she was too afraid of what she might see? She needed to turn him over to the Order. To free their brethren. If he wasn’t a greedy man who had sold his soul for success, who and what was he? She couldn’t afford to care and yet she was intrigued by him. It was as simple as that.
“The Turov family has grown grapes here since they fled the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century,” Turov said. He had come to stand beside her. His profile was strong and proud. Anyone unaware of the Brimstone in his blood would assume he spoke of history rather than from personal experience.
“And you’ve built on what they established,” Victoria said, playing along.
“In Russia, there’s a saying. ‘You live. You learn.’ I have found this to be true,” Turov said.
It was a confession, but one that was revealing only if you knew his Brimstone secret.
He had refined Nightingale Vineyards’s pinot noir since 1918. He. Personally. He had overseen the process of living and learning for one hundred years.
Michael’s father had been much older, but he’d been a daemon, not a man. Standing beside Adam Turov was different. He wasn’t an immortal creature. He was a human whose life had been extended by selling his soul. How? Why? It didn’t matter. It would be wiser to see him as corrupt and leave it at that. She didn’t need to understand him. She needed only to betray him.
“Sometimes I feel as if I’ve missed a few lessons along the way,” Victoria said. “Opera is all-consuming. Life is more complicated. Reality is harder to navigate.”
“You’ll rest here. You’ll recover. There’s something about being surrounded by growing things. It rejuvenates. Even a jaded soul like mine,” Turov said. “Complications fall away. Simplicity reigns.”
She looked at him then. The house blazed with light behind him. The soft haze from a sliver of moonlight came from the cloudless sky. People laughed. A piano played classical jazz while glasses clinked and indistinct conversation whispered all around. She was most vulnerable when she was seduced into thinking it might be possible for her to relax. Always, after, she regretted her weakness. Her greatest enemy wasn’t someone trying to sell her safety and protection. Her greatest enemy was her wanting what they were selling with all her heart.
Nowhere was ever safe. Any haven was a lie. Her life would always be too complicated to set down roots.
“I look forward to relaxing,” she said. She’d played this role a thousand times. The ingénue. Young and naïve. It was impossible to tell what he thought of her performance.
A figure revealed itself, moving in the shadows of the grounds in between the house and the vineyard. From grass to walkway to grass again, the figure crept.
The transformation in Turov was absolute. In a nanosecond, he went from cultured host with a hint of the Carpathians in his voice to a no-nonsense ruler whose California kingdom had been breached.
“Go to your cottage and lock the door. Don’t let anyone in except me,” he ordered.
He easily vaulted over the rail, dropping a story below onto the manicured grass. The party continued behind her while Turov ran across the lawn. The atmosphere was no longer seductively normal. Now, she strained at noises and squinted at shadows.
Before Michael was born, she probably would have obeyed such an order. She was no spy. She was no warrior. Before the fire, she could sing. That was all. And now even that was in question. Instead of going back to her cottage, Victoria moved quickly to the stone staircase that led down to the lawn. She couldn’t afford to be the woman she’d been before she’d become a mother. She’d longed for love. She’d longed for life.
She still longed for those things, but now she wanted them for her baby instead of herself.
She’d recognized the stocky figure of the monk who was following her. She needed to stop Turov before he confronted the careless man, or her mission would be over before it had begun.
* * *
What could be more innocent than strolling through the garden, softly humming under the stars? Her heart pounded. Her steps were hurried and clumsy. She’d chosen her shoes for the party, not for a walk on the loose pebbles of a dimly lit path.
Still, she hummed.
She needed to draw Turov away from the monk.
The tune was scratchy and unused. A few bars from Romeo et Juliet. “Je veux vivre.” “Juliet’s Waltz.” Her hum was rough and unmelodic to her trained ears. She didn’t even know if it would work. She could only try. And pretend her effort was only about distracting Turov from the monk stalking her. The tightness in her chest and the heat of her flushed cheeks against the night air mocked that lie.
She had to keep Turov from finding out why she was here and inadvertently uncovering her ties to the Order of Samuel. She couldn’t allow him to confront or capture her evil stalker.
But she also had to know.
Would her music act as a conduit between her affinity and the power in his Brimstone blood in the same way that Katherine’s cello had called to John Severne?
From the moment when she’d first heard his voice tonight, she had to know.
She’d loved Michael, but his power as a full-blood daemon had completely overshadowed any she might possess. Their relationship had been fast and entirely based upon his fire. She’d been eclipsed and consumed by his daemon light.
And then that light was gone.
She walked and hummed in the darkness because she suspected there was a different sort of light to be found.
To be reclaimed.
Her own.
The night was silent as the soft noise of the party faded behind her. It was foolhardy to go too far into the darkness without telling anyone where she had gone. She wasn’t dressed for a hike. In addition to the handicap of the heels, her dress was thin and the air was chilled. This wasn’t the stage. If something failed, there wouldn’t be a props manager to fix it. If she forgot her lines, there was no prompter to help her. She’d had no rehearsal to prepare for confronting an evil monk alone in a deserted garden...or a damned man for that matter. What if she encountered Turov on the starlit path with no one else around?
The idea frightened her, but not only that—there was also a hint of awakening in her quickened heartbeat and her rusty hum. Its tingle felt like an adventure waiting to happen.
A hard figure crashed into her and a cry replaced her hoarse hum, cut short prematurely by a cruel hand over her mouth. She was held in the hateful grip of the monk who had followed her to Sonoma. She recognized his stocky build and bare head in the moonlight.
“I have a message for you, D’Arcy. From Father Malachi. You met him in Louisiana. I bet you didn’t realize you were talking to the best and brightest of us all. Father Malachi has chosen me to deliver another warning. We are always. We are watching. Do not distract or delay. Free our brothers before Lucifer’s Army comes with the waxing of the moon. You have one month. Or your son will pay the price.” His spittle-fueled voice dampened her ear. She was crushed breathless by his powerful arms. His words and the physical abuse of his bruising hold made her recall the madness she’d seen in his eyes.
“Release her and die,” Turov ordered from the shadows.
Gone was any hint of sophistication.
This was his truth.
He stepped into the soft glow of garden lanterns and starlight. The seriousness of his face was revealed.
Hard.
Fierce.
His jaw was no longer marble, but iron.
Adam Turov reached behind his shoulder and with a metallic rasp he drew a small sword that glinted, sharp and deadly with purpose.
“Remember what I have said,” the monk growled. He flung her away and Victoria fell, but even the sharp sting of gravel against the side of her face didn’t distract from the monk’s surprised scream. It gurgled in his throat and was cut off as his stocky body fell heavily, dead and headless. She heard a light, sickening thump as his decapitated head hit the ground and rolled to rest several feet away. She’d lived a much more violent life than your usual run-of-the-mill opera singer. Would a normal woman have recognized the sounds in the dark?
“I said release her and die. Not or,” Turov clarified softly, as if the dead man might question his semantics.
Victoria shifted to look toward Turov without being obvious. He wiped the blade he’d used on the monk with a pristine white handkerchief, rolling the silky cloth to cover the blood before placing it back in his pocket. Then he sheathed the blade at his back beneath his jacket. When he had finished the practiced moves of cleanup, his sophisticated costume was in place again. He straightened his cuffs and rolled his shoulders before he reached to help her to her feet. The monk didn’t move at all.
“Is he...?” Victoria said, although she knew the answer. The monk was dead.
“He gave up the right to your consideration when he hurt you,” Turov said. “My people will take it from here.”
The Order of Samuel was violent and ugly and murderers, all. And the man she was supposed to best had just dispatched one without a blink of effort.
Turov took her hand and led her back toward the house. She didn’t resist. Suddenly, her bold humming seemed reckless. This was a man with Brimstone in his blood. She couldn’t afford to play games with the affinity that even now made her tremble near him. That awakening in her earlier hadn’t been about anticipating an adventure. It had been a warning.
Adam Turov had killed the monk to protect her. But what would happen to her when he discovered she was on the Order of Samuel’s side against him?
* * *
A little over an hour ago she had left the cottage for a party. Now she returned with blood on her shoes. She didn’t notice the blood until they were inside, and even then not until Turov knelt to take her shoes from numb feet.
“I’m sorry. I’ll replace them,” he said. “I didn’t mean to spoil your shoes.” He tilted one shapely pump this way and that, as if appreciating its curves in spite of the blood. “From several years ago, I think, but I’ll manage.”
She backed away as he left the room to throw the shoes away like some bizarrely opposite Prince Charming. And, yet, he did have charm. Out in the dark, under the stars, with blood dripping from the blade he’d used to save her, he’d been charming as hell.
“You followed me into the garden even though I told you to come back to the cottage. Why?” Turov asked when he returned. He didn’t stop inside the door. He continued with purposeful steps all the way to her. When she backed up at his continued advance, he followed until she bumped up against a bookcase. The scent of aged leather bindings filled the air to pair with Turov’s Brimstone heat.
She wasn’t afraid. Not of him. She was afraid because she refused to be a damsel in distress. No matter how distressing her life became.
“You may not be able to sing, but I heard you humming. I felt it,” he said. “I’ve never felt anything like it before.”
He didn’t touch her.
He didn’t have to.
The heat in his blood did.
The Brimstone that sealed his deal with daemons sang its own song to her music-starved ears. He’d made the choice to barter his soul. He wasn’t a knight in shining armor. Too bad for her that she seemed to prefer much darker heroes.
“It won’t happen again,” she promised.
He leaned down to catch her whispered words. She was sure the breath that propelled them from her lips bathed his. He was close enough to taste with only a tilt or a sigh. She held very still. Apart. Contained. While her former nature urged her to boldly tilt, sigh, move to join him.
She ignored the urge to sing. She refused the desire to touch her mouth to his.
He looked into her eyes. His were brilliant blue, so bright to have seen so much, so clear to have just killed in her name. Where was his damnation hidden? Where was his shame? He looked undaunted and strong and so damn noble it made her ache.
“I hope that’s a lie,” he said. His gaze dropped to her open lips, but he didn’t close the distance. The warmth between them flared until she tasted salty perspiration on her upper lip when she moistened it with her tongue.
His eyes moved to watch the pink flick of her tongue tip. For a second, he seemed almost as if he would dip to claim it. He seemed mesmerized. But he straightened up and backed away before she made the fatal mistake of wanting his kiss enough to make it happen herself.
He blinked. The move was gloriously slow, as if he really had been in a trance and had needed to force himself to lower his lids. When he opened them again, his jaw had hardened and the expression in his eyes had cooled. She could still feel his Brimstone heat, but he was no longer controlled by it.
“Good night, Victoria. I told you that you’d be safe here and I meant it. From every danger,” he said.
* * *
He was shaking with it—anger, desire, the willpower it took to not pick her up and carry her away from the life she’d been forced to lead. His men were already discreetly cleaning up the mess he’d left them in the garden. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to kill one of his “brothers.” The Order was twisted, obsessive, and they never stopped. There were times when it had been kill or be killed, although his primary mission was to capture them and turn them over to the justice of Lucifer’s court. One of the reasons his body quaked from adrenaline overload this time was that capture had ceased to be an option as soon as the evil monk had hurt Victoria.
He was supposed to be a sophisticated vintner with her. No more. No less. But she stoked the fire in his blood until his disguise went up in smoke.
He checked on his men. They had standing instructions. When he saw all was in hand, he turned away to seek sanctuary in his own rooms. What the guests would make of his and Victoria’s early disappearance from the party wasn’t his concern. He needed to wash away the blood and forget the look of fear in her eyes.
She’d pretended not to fully understand what had happened, but a darker knowledge had been in her hazel gaze when she’d trained it on his face.
A spiral iron staircase provided an outside entrance to his private retreat in the house. It was almost hidden by his mother’s roses. She’d loved the climbing vine varieties and he’d continued to have them tended after she was gone. They’d become a profusion of tangles near the staircase where he’d instructed the gardeners to allow them to grow unchecked. In this back corner of the house, he had a bed, bath and study that were completely separated from guest bedrooms. Guests were rarely invited to stay longer than a night. He didn’t run a bed-and-breakfast. He only allowed visitors at all in order to provide an alibi for his actual activities beyond wine making.
As he climbed the familiar treads of the staircase, it wasn’t the Brimstone in his blood that made him see red. His memory called up the image of the petite opera singer in the grip of a madman trained to be merciless. His anger came from the same sense he’d always had of a wrong that needed to be righted—magnified by fury at an innocent’s pain.
Victoria was caught up in a war that wasn’t her making. Just as he’d been as a child.
Adam shed his ruined clothes and left them for a housekeeper he could count on for stoic discretion. She’d seen worse. All his people had. The small sword he wore in a specially made sheath that fit close to his body between his shoulder blades he placed in a hidden compartment in the top of his mahogany dresser. He would clean it later after he’d cleaned himself.
He couldn’t afford empathy for Victoria, this sense of connection to her that shook him to his cursed core.
He told himself this even as he recalled the tense moment when he’d almost given in to the temptation to taste her lips.
Steam filled the bathroom when the cool water hit his Brimstone-warmed skin. Clouds of it rolled and swirled, disturbed by his movements as he scrubbed his hair and his hands. Beneath the soap, he felt his scars as he washed. A familiar reminder of what he’d been through and what he still needed to accomplish with the long life the Brimstone had given him.
Father Malachi was his objective. Finding him, capturing him, delivering him to Lucifer’s court. It wasn’t revenge. It was justice. Not only for the abuse he’d suffered at the obsessive monk’s hands—all in the name of “training”—but also to keep him from harming other children.
This dance with Victoria added another element of challenge to his mission. If she knew he was aware of why she’d come to Nightingale Vineyards, she might become even more determined and reckless to find and free his prisoners before Lucifer’s Army came to claim them. The Loyalists came when the moon was full each month. On that night, he held a party to provide cover for the prisoner delivery. The full moon galas were much larger than the occasional dinner parties held at other times. The gala was a coveted invitation, never more so than in June. To commemorate his mother’s birthday each year, he brought in an orchestra, dancing and a Firebird theme. He needed to keep Victoria in the dark until then, or longer if possible.
And while he kept her in the dark he needed to keep himself under control.
The water became superheated to the point of pain as it ran down his skin. Paired with the stitched wound on his back, the discomfort distracted him from the lush, full red lips he saw every time he closed his eyes. They’d been slightly open, welcoming, even though she’d seen him at his most ferocious.
He’d been trained to be a ruthless killer. Though he’d turned those skills on the men who had made him, he was pretty sure that didn’t negate the fact that they’d created a monster.
It had been dark in the garden and she’d been thrown to the ground with her face in the grass, but she’d seen the blood on her shoes.
And a monster had no right to kiss a woman with the voice of an angel, even if she’d temporarily forgotten how to sing.
Chapter 4 (#u74923b9c-4c95-5f6f-9521-7fcd7cae7a48)
Dressing for breakfast with a man who had decapitated an evil monk for you was more challenging than you might think. Adam Turov had secrets the regular world wasn’t privy to. He’d showed her his true nature for several violent seconds. Now, she either had to pretend she’d been disoriented enough to not fully realize what she’d seen, or she had to risk more honest discussion.
Honesty wasn’t possible between them. Not as long as Michael was in danger.
She’d had wine on an empty stomach after a long trip. She’d been accosted in the garden and her host had helped her. She wouldn’t mention the sword. She wouldn’t mention the blood on her shoes. It would only work if he wanted to maintain his disguise enough to play along.
So, she dressed in a light dress with a soft cashmere sweater and sandals. Very holiday. Much innocent.
She matched her outfit to the embossed invitation that had arrived with a fragrant coffee tray at her cottage door that morning. Semicasual, but elegant and nothing that said, “I saw a man lose his head in the garden last night.”
Her sundress was translucent georgette in white with fine satin polka dots sprinkled in black across the skirt. The dots lessened in number until they disappeared completely at her cap sleeves and the cut flared out softly from a pinched waist and tight bodice. She gathered up her hair in a soft chignon with a clip that allowed wayward tendrils to brush her cheeks.
She couldn’t help it if her expression didn’t match the swingy skirt that swirled against her pale legs as she walked out to meet her host. She couldn’t help that her eyes looked wide and dark, much greener than the usual soft hazel that had to be lined with kohl to show brightly enough onstage.
She followed the directions of the invitation to a—thankfully—different part of the grounds, where a table had been set among the wildly abundant roses. Her low-heeled sandals crunched on the path. The silky rose petals were soft and dewy against her fingers when she reached to brush the blooms as she walked by.
Victoria had to present herself at the table as a regular guest even as she decided how best to explore the estate in secret. So far she’d seen no other evidence of Turov’s activities involving the Order of Samuel. None beyond his aiding her against the monk last night.
She had to pretend she hadn’t seen him in the pale moonlight with a bloody sword or that afterward he hadn’t courteously offered to replace her shoes. How else could she proceed? She knew who and what he was. He might have suspicions about her. But she had to pretend innocence over toast and orange juice.
Luckily, Adam Turov had been living a double life long enough to cover for them both.
He sat at the table sipping his juice from a cut crystal glass. His suit was tailored tight to his broad, lean chest. His black hair was as dark and gleaming as the shine of his jacket’s gabardine. He was freshly shaven. Not a wave of his hair was out of place. His blue eyes glittered mildly in the sun as she joined him.
“Just us?” Victoria asked. She took the only other seat at the table. It was on the opposite end from Turov, giving her a reprieve from his Brimstone heat.
“Yes. No one else is staying with us at this time,” her host said. He used a silver knife to spread butter on a toast point as he spoke. Its blunt blade winked in the sun. The larger sword he’d used last night was a secret best kept in the moonlight.
In the sun, Turov was the picture of sophisticated ease.
Victoria blinked and reached for the pristine linen napkin on her plate. Its swan shape dissolved in her fingers.
“I have a meeting that will tie me up until this afternoon, but I hope to give you a tour at some point during your stay,” Turov said.
“Thank you,” Victoria replied.
Swords and winery tours. She doubted the tour he offered would give her the access she needed to find the monks he’d captured and set them free.
Father Malachi had said that they would use their combined strength to kill Adam Turov once they were freed.
The table was a long rectangle of polished glass with hammered copper legs, but she was still closer to Turov than she should be. She looked away from his direct gaze, uncomfortable with the truths that they weren’t free to discuss that were revealed with eye contact. She noticed movement in the vineyard. Dozens of workers in coveralls were obvious among the greenery. She could see their hands busily tending the vines. Occasionally, they would call out to each other, but mostly they focused on the work of their hands.
“Are they pruning the grapevines today?” she asked.
“It’s time for shoot thinning. Every spring we refocus the energy of the plant. Some of the leaves are removed and most of the buds to encourage uniform flowering. They’ll leave windows in the canopy to allow filtered light to hit the cluster of grapes as it grows. We take great care to ensure proper color development,” Turov explained.
His whole demeanor changed when he talked about his vines. Gone was the sophisticated businessman. But the warrior didn’t take his place. Instead, he was all vintner, an artist who worked with nature to sculpt an exquisite harvest.
“I had no idea the process was so complex,” Victoria said. Her mouth had gone dry. No Brimstone heat necessary. His honest passion for his work was seduction itself.
Oh, she could feel the pull of Brimstone. The table was only eight feet long. Her skin flushed in the sun, but not from its rays. Yet it was more than Brimstone that called her to Turov. He was an artist. And like calls to like.
“We have numerous parcels—vineyard blocks—they all produce a different crush. Different altitudes, different soil types, slightly different sunlight...all influences the flavor of the grapes. I’ll be thinning the shoots of the hillside block later this evening, before dinner. Those vines produce the crush we use to create the Firebird Pinot Noir. If you’d like, you can ride over with Gideon to see how it’s done,” Turov offered.
“Yes. I’d like to see you work,” Victoria said.
Be interested in the grapes and the growing process. God, do not make it about his hands or about seeing him completely honest as he labors in the sun.
She couldn’t avoid him. She had to engage in an odd dance of following him around and keeping her distance. She needed to discover his secrets without revealing her own. But now she had even more to worry about because she was pretty sure natural chemistry was as much a part of her reaction to him as the Brimstone.
She hadn’t meant her gaze to linger on him, but when he abruptly rose and broke eye contact she knew it had. He tossed his napkin on the table and approached her. Her temperature rose with every step. Maybe because of the Brimstone. Maybe not.
She held her breath when he paused beside her chair, but she released it in a shaky sigh when he reached to take her arm gently in his warm hands. He tilted and lifted until the underside of her arm was exposed. Only then did she see what had caught his attention the length of the table away.
Her arm was bruised. The monk’s hands had bitten painfully into her skin. She’d noticed a scrape on her cheek and she’d covered it with makeup, but had missed the marks on her arm, a reminder of the evil fingers that would never pinch and hurt again.
Turov had noticed.
His brow had gone heavy. His jaw hardened into a chiseled stiff line. A hint of his hidden warrior returned.
“You’re hurt,” he said. His thumb brushing her bruised skin was incredibly gentle. A whisper. Shakily, she breathed in and held it as the unexpected sensation of tenderness claimed her.
She looked up at his face. The move was a mistake. Sunlight fell full on her cheek, revealing the mark she’d tried to cover. He lifted his other hand to cup her cheek. Her eyes went wide in a sudden reaction she couldn’t prevent. Her whole body stilled. The magnet of Brimstone urged her to rise and press against him. She had to resist that pull and the added allure of his touch, his concern. Every ounce of self-control she possessed held her in place.
“I promised you safety,” he said. His accent had deepened and strengthened. He traced the scrape on her cheek with his fingers, whisper soft. But she wasn’t fooled. Battle was in his eyes. It waited to be released on anyone who deserved his wrath. She shivered. The warmth of sun and Brimstone didn’t negate the potential for ferocity she’d already seen.
“No one can promise me that. Not even you,” Victoria said.
Her reply broke the spell. He dropped his hand from her face and stepped away. Her body swayed an infinitesimal bit toward him, but she corrected herself before he’d seen. She couldn’t gauge what he’d felt. She could only feel her reaction to their connection. And her control over herself felt tenuous at best.
“You’re probably right. Safety is an illusion. And, yet, I insist it will be so. No more bruises. Your skin...some of us have scars we can never erase, but your bruises will fade and your skin will not be marked again,” Turov said.
He didn’t speak of killing the monk. She didn’t have to pretend she hadn’t seen the sword or heard the head roll away. She covered the bruise on her arm with her opposite hand.
“Please. Don’t bother with pledges. It’s nothing,” she said.
“A line in the sand is everything. It’s how a man is defined. By the limits of what he will allow or withstand. By what we can endure. The mark on your cheek is nothing to you. It’s heresy to me,” Turov said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll let you finish your meal in peace. I’m no fit companion for a civilized meal.”
He fisted his hands as if frustrated he couldn’t kill the monk again for her slight injuries. He turned and walked away, his body in tight lines beneath the tailored suit and his posture determined. She’d been hurt before. Daemon hunting was risky business even for the hunter’s bloodhound. But she couldn’t remember anyone reacting to her bruises the way Adam Turov reacted.
Victoria cooled when he left. The flush in her cheeks drained away until her face chilled. Her entire body cooled until, bereft of his Brimstone heat, she sat shivering in the morning light.
* * *
After she left the table, Victoria returned to the cottage. She changed out of her sundress into more practical celery-green pants that she cuffed above sturdy canvas sneakers. She paired the pants with a snug black T-shirt and a soft loose sweater in complementary green. She wasn’t supposed to care how she looked for Turov. Meeting him in his favorite vineyard block wasn’t a date. To prove it, she did nothing with her hair, leaving it clipped up. She planned to wander around the house and grounds during the day until it was time to meet the vineyard manager at the equipment shed Turov had pointed out to her while they ate.
Victoria expected to encounter servants and staff in the main house, but cool and quiet darkness greeted her with hushed shadows instead. Age showed in the house’s walls, where darkly stained teak wainscoting was topped by richly tinted wallpapers. Upon closer inspection, the textured papers had the faded sheen of silk or satin. Green, pale gold and burgundy tinged with scarlet were prevalent in the varying designs from room to room.
She stepped lightly. Her heartbeat felt obvious in her chest. She hadn’t been invited to tour the house. Around every corner, she expected an unpleasant reaction to her presence. The coolness of the air seemed deserted, empty of any living warmth, but it also held a hint of wood smoke scent that reminded her of Turov. This had been his home for a long time. His scent and the aura of all she touched and saw that belonged to him made her jump at every creaking floorboard and the whispers from each well-oiled door.
She wandered with no interruptions through hallways and rooms filled with framed memorabilia and photographs. Awards, newspaper articles and family photos all in black-and-white. Adam Turov wasn’t in many of them. When had he realized his longevity meant he shouldn’t be photographed?
Victoria found only a few solid hints of him. His tall, lean back and dark cap of black hair were in one photograph with a couple that was probably his parents, although they seemed like his grandparents. The man was in an old-fashioned suit with wide lapels and cuffed trousers. The woman was in a shirtwaist dress with a fabric belt. On her chest was a brooch. Vic leaned in close enough to see that the gem-encrusted pin was in the shape of a bird. They were seated at a table in the garden. She wished the photograph was in color because a large bouquet of dark roses was placed in the center of the table. She imagined they must have been lush and red. The couple looked at Adam with great affection. Not like he was a monster. They’d loved him in spite of the Brimstone.
And he had been all alone since they’d passed away?
An army of servants who seemed to wait on him without direction wasn’t the same as a family that adored him.
Added to the photographs and memorabilia was a vintage collection of birdcages of varying sizes and shapes. Some were quite elaborate, created from a twining of fine metals such as copper and brass. Others were simple and crafted of wrought iron. All of the cages were empty.
All had their doors opened wide.
From the delicate and small to the large and ornate, the cages were so prevalent that they were obviously a beloved collection and not simply a decorative theme. When she saw the myriad of cages in the main house, she remembered that there were several in the cottage as well and she promised herself she’d look closer at them when she returned to her rooms.
It was fitting, actually, for Nightingale Vineyards to have a collection of birdcages, but there seemed to be more to it than that. Especially when she leaned closer to one or two and saw the open cage doors could easily swing close and latch if someone hadn’t decided to keep them open, as if to be sure no bird was ever trapped inside.
The upper stories of the house were silent and still. Hallways branched from the main staircase in a labyrinthine confusion. Occasionally, she heard footsteps and doors open and close. She assumed Turov had many maids in his employ, but she never encountered one. The solitude suited her clandestine intrusion, but it also made her avoid silent shadows that seemed darker than they should be. The house was too big. Too empty. It seemed almost like a museum or mausoleum. Turov had lived long beyond his natural time. There was obviously a price to his longevity beyond the damnation he ultimately faced. Isolation. Loneliness. He lived in a house that must once have known love and laughter, but was now dusty with all humor long forgotten in gray photographs.
Finally, she found a room that drew her curiosity even more than the birdcages. At its heart was a large glass case—the glass waved with age—and within its protection sat a Russian tea service decorated with an elaborate design. The wallpaper throughout the house must have been chosen to complement the tea service with its antique pot and dainty cups. The motif on the porcelain featured an exotic bird with boldly colorful feathers outlined in glimmering gold. The gold also accented the handles and the rims of the cups as well as the curved spout of the pot. The whole service rested on black velvet that was faded and dusty even within its case. It hadn’t been used in a long time. She chose not to disturb it now.
But she did note that an open gilded birdcage was a part of the background design.
On a card table nearby she found a copy of a book with illustrations similar to the tea service. She picked up the volume and found it delicate from frequent use and age. Its spine was cracked. Its cover was worn. It wasn’t dusty under glass. No children lived in the house, but the book wasn’t forgotten. The title page was translated, The Firebird. The rest of the book was in Russian.
Again, she noticed an open birdcage featured on one of the pages.
She would look up the tale on her laptop when she had a chance. For now, she reluctantly put the beautiful book down after quickly skimming through the illustrations.
Victoria explored the rest of the room with more urgency. The book wasn’t abandoned. That meant the room wasn’t as abandoned as it had first appeared, although the chairs were covered with linen sheets gray with age.
Low on an otherwise empty shelf, she found a wooden box carved all over in a design of grapes. She almost glanced over it, but something in its rough, dust-embedded surface called to her. When she opened the lid, she felt more intrusive than she’d felt so far. This had been someone’s keepsake box. It wasn’t meant for her eyes or fingers. Inside, nestled on a bed of scarlet velvet gone pale and worn, she found a ring of keys much like the one Turov had given her for the rose-covered cottage. In fact, exactly like. Her key must have been taken from this set. Only now did she realize the swirled design in the key’s grip was another firebird.
Suddenly, she remembered the woman in the photograph with Turov. His mother. Firebird Pinot Noir was named in her honor. Now, Victoria saw the meaning behind the name. The Russian fairy tale must have been a treasure to her. She’d worn a firebird brooch in the photograph. The tea set had been hers and this must have been her sitting room. The dust everywhere but on the book indicated Turov visited at times to mourn or recall.
Had the birdcage collection been hers as well, and was it somehow tied to the firebird fairy tale?
Her fingers shook when she placed the keys back in the box and put the box back on the shelf. Tears pricked her eyes and shame colored her cheeks. She shouldn’t be here. She might as well have desecrated a tomb. How horrible to outlive the family you loved by decades and more to come. They might be the only people who ever understood his dark secrets. Turov’s mother had loved him as she loved Michael. And Victoria had disturbed the room where he came to sit with long-dead memories.
Briefly, she’d even considered taking the keys.
She should. If one fit her cottage door, the others would unlock other places, maybe even the secret prison she sought. But she couldn’t. Not now. It was too intrusive to contemplate.
Instead, she looked long and hard at the whole room. She adjusted the book on the card table to more closely assimilate its previous position. She couldn’t help the disturbed dust. Best to leave it as it had been found. A place for a son who’d been left behind to grieve.
* * *
The middle-aged manager introduced himself as Gideon. His friendly sun-crinkled eyes and informative banter eased her disappointment after a fruitless day. She’d seen or heard nothing to indicate a clue about where Turov might be holding crazed monks for the devil. His house was cool and shadowed and overwhelmingly empty.
Except for the firebird keys.
Of course, she hadn’t ventured into his private apartment. There were many places she wasn’t free to explore. But the whole dark house had made her feel guilty for her snooping. Especially his mother’s sitting room.
“Please, climb aboard, miss. I’ll drive you over to the hilltop,” Gideon said.
The vehicle was an ATV designed like a miniature pickup truck. It had large tires with deep tread and two rows of side-by-side seats. The small aluminum truck bed currently held a cooler and what seemed to be gardening equipment—rakes, gloves, shears and buckets.
“I’m sorry to add to your chores,” Victoria said. She was glad she’d changed out of her dress into practical clothes. Gideon’s coveralls were belted neatly but she could tell he’d put in a long day.
“I’ve overseen the thinning for years, but I don’t often get to drive such pleasant visitors through the rows. Happy to do it,” Gideon said. He grinned and Victoria couldn’t help smiling back.
“You must have known Mr. Turov for a long time?” Victoria asked as the ATV bumped along. Gideon was explaining that the cover crops grown to fight erosion between rows had been recently mowed. The rainy season was over. Drier weather and approaching summer meant moisture needed to be directed toward the grapevines instead.
“No. No one knows Mr. Turov. He’s a private man. But he’s a good man. I haven’t always been a grower. My life before I came to Nightingale Vineyards was a very different sort of life,” Gideon said as he cut the wheel so that they were bumping over different terrain. “I owe Mr. Turov a great debt. I’m honored to repay it every day in these rows. He gave me the sun. I give him my hands and my back in return.”
He spoke so warmly of Turov that Vic was taken aback. She tried to absorb what he said and what he’d left unsaid. How had Turov given him the sun?
They left the gentle roll of the main vineyard behind in order to curve up and around a rise. The sun was low on the horizon. It painted everything it touched in a gold wash of color. Other crews were finishing for the day. She could see them piling into other ATVs and tractors in the distance.
“You’ll ride back with Mr. Turov. He has his own vehicle. There he is now,” Gideon said.
She could see the tall outline of Turov’s form silhouetted by the glow of the sun.
“Most of the maintenance on the hilltop is done by hand. There isn’t room for equipment. Mr. Turov oversees much of it himself. This was his mother’s parcel. The Firebird is named after her,” Gideon explained. “From her favorite Russian tale.”
He stopped at the base of an even steeper slope. The vineyard rows extended up in diagonal alleys from the path where he parked beside another ATV long enough for her to exit. Turov didn’t come to meet them. After raising his hand to salute his foreman, he bent to continue his work. Victoria climbed from the mini truck and thanked Gideon.
“Please, take the cooler. Cook sent some refreshment. Mr. Turov never rests as he should. He’s a driven man. These grapes are his obsession,” Gideon said.
Victoria didn’t argue. She suspected Turov had much darker obsessions, ones that would shock Gideon and Cook.
“Good night and thank you,” she said. Gideon waved as he drove away.
Victoria stood for a few moments as she noticed several large windmills spinning on steel posts. There didn’t seem to be enough wind to make the red blades move. The air was rapidly cooling and still. She placed the cooler in the last remaining ATV and climbed the hill toward where Turov was working. He didn’t look her way. He continued to tend to the vines with flying fingers.
That’s what she noticed. Deft manipulation of small pruning shears had leaves raining down at his feet.
She’d seen a Japanese bonsai trimmed once at a garden show. This reminded her of that meticulous attention to detail on a grander scale. The vines seemed perfect to her. Not a stem out of place. And yet tendril by tendril across hundreds of acres would be carefully groomed to maximize and perfect this year’s harvest.
“You can see the flowerings. Those will be our grapes. I’m making sure each bunch will receive optimal filtered light. There was a rainfall and a heavy mist this morning and temperatures will fall tonight.” He paused and glanced at her, his nimble fingers stopping their work. “I saw you looking at the fans. They’ll dry the moisture to ensure it doesn’t freeze.”
“I thought they were spinning too quickly to be windmills,” Victoria said.
“Windmills would need to be taller to catch the breeze. These fans are motorized and low enough to optimally dry the vines. We’ve made it almost to the end of the rains. That’s always a relief. You probably noticed Gideon was happy. We didn’t lose any crop this year,” Turov said.
How could this man so proud of his vines be in league with daemons? Had his passion for grapes come before or after he sold his soul?
Unlike Gideon, Adam Turov wasn’t dressed in coveralls, but he wasn’t in a suit or tuxedo either. He wore a flannel button-down shirt that he’d rolled at the sleeves. If possible, his chest looked broader and his bare arms were as muscular as she’d suspected from the athletic grace of his movements. A ring of keys attached to his belt rattled as he worked. They looked solid, worn and timeless, like the man they belonged to. They were much simpler than the firebird keys she’d seen when she was exploring the house, but she suspected the two sets unlocked many of the same doors around the estate.
The keys drew her attention again and again. Her instincts were much better at espionage than she was.
She’d watched him kill a man, pour wine and swirl a crystal glass, and now she watched him coaxing abundance from a growing thing. Would the real Adam Turov please raise his hand? Her chest tightened because it didn’t matter. She was uncomfortable lying to all three.
“Would you like to try?” he asked.
He’d paused again. Victoria took the pruning shears he offered. He watched her mimic his movements on the next section of vine. More tentative, but she’d watched what he did and he nodded when she did well.
Snip-snip-snip.
He was right beside her.
The soft wind from the fans blew his scent to her face—soap, sunshine, clean sweat and a hint of wood smoke. The hair that waved at the nape of his neck was damp.
“My mother tended this parcel. It was hers. She preferred the low yield of the hilltop. The hand manipulation. She was from a simpler time. To do a job right, you must feel it. Get your hands dirty. There’s a density to the crush from this hilltop. It’s tannic in youth, but becomes intensely smooth with age,” Turov said.
“Like velvet on the tongue,” Victoria added.
She shouldn’t have. Her voice was huskier than usual. Influenced by his nostalgia, his nearness and the Brimstone pull between them. He reached for the shears. The sun had almost fully set. They stood in the twilight. It was too dark to work now. In this light, you might cut off more than you intended.
“I asked Gideon to send a bottle so you could taste the Firebird, here, where it’s grown. There’s nothing like breathing the air that has infused it with flavor as you taste the wine itself,” Turov said. He dropped the shears in a bucket and led her back to the path.
She dusted her hands off and followed. She tried not to obsess about the keys on his belt and what they meant she had to do. Hadn’t she known even when she’d left his mother’s keys in the box? She wasn’t free to choose between right and wrong. Respecting his mother’s sitting room meant leaving Michael in danger.
He placed the bucket of tools in the back of the ATV and retrieved the bottle of wine from the cooler.
This was intimate. The wine he’d made surrounded by the vines he’d tended with his own hands. When he released the cork with fingers stained green from his work, Victoria felt a pull stronger than Brimstone. And her intentions toward the firebird keys burned her cheeks.
“Doesn’t it need to breathe?” she asked.
He reached into the cooler and handed her two glasses.
“This is perfectly aged. Its tannic levels are low. Pouring correctly into the glass is the only aeration Firebird needs,” Turov said.
He poured into the centers of the glasses, allowing the rich, red liquid to fall from a height of eight inches. She was holding her breath. She allowed it to sigh from her lips as he placed the bottle on the tailgate and reached for the glass in her right hand.
“Now. Enjoy,” he said.
She couldn’t help it. She watched him first. The swirl of the liquid in the glass. The deep inhalation as he enjoyed its bouquet. Then the pleasure that suffused his face when he sipped from the glass and savored the wine on his tongue. She allowed his enjoyment to distract her from her duplicitous intentions for the keys hidden back at the main house.
The pleasure he took in his first sip was incredibly sensual.
Her knees went weak with his obvious care and pleasure. So like he might be in bed savoring other things. She copied him with less finesse, but as she’d experienced the night before, even a novice could appreciate this spectacular pinot noir. Its fruity, velvet spice exploded on her tongue.
The Brimstone burn of his blood was a constant seduction of her senses, but she was as seduced by the vintner as she was by his daemon heat. She sipped as the darkest night settled around them. The full moon was a month away. She had only a few weeks to save Michael. Turov turned the headlights of the ATV on and they were oddly illuminated in brilliance and strangely cast shadows.
The wine didn’t mellow the burn. It softened her resistance to the Brimstone’s pull. She couldn’t deny the answering coil of heat low in her stomach that had nothing to do with rich grapes and everything to do with damnation. Her affinity for Brimstone damned her to be drawn to the one man she couldn’t afford to desire.
But the desire was so warm compared to the cold fear she’d been running on for too long. She was able to push thoughts of keys and what they might unlock from her mind too easily.
The bold Victoria she’d been before the fire stirred deep in her breast. That Victoria would have taken one wine-flavored kiss in the green-scented night. That Victoria would have taken much more from this mysterious, dangerous man. Not in spite of his darkness, but because of it.
She’d lived a dark life plagued by the Order of Samuel. Never simple. Never free. Was it any wonder she was drawn to a man who could match her shadow for shadow? A man who had still managed to root himself in the rich California soil?
As if he read her mind, Turov took her glass. Their fingers didn’t brush, but she could feel the warmth of his even without contact. Hers tingled, but she didn’t reach out. She fisted them instead. He didn’t offer her another glass of wine. He put the bottle and the glasses back into the cooler. They hadn’t touched the chocolate or cheese.
“I need to drive you back to the house. I have more business to attend to this evening. I won’t be in for dinner,” Turov said.
There was no door to open, but he stood by the side of the vehicle as she took her seat instead of crossing around to take his. He placed both hands on the roll bar frame above her head. Her body recognized his pause as he lingered. Her heartbeat sped up. Her breath quickened. The warmth of her affinity to his Brimstone caused her skin to flush. She looked up at him. In the odd light, her high color might be disguised. Could he feel her body temperature rise even as the night cooled down around them?
“Velvet on the tongue,” he said softly.
She nodded. Not to confirm her earlier thoughts on the texture of pinot noir. The slight affirmative tilt of her head was a bigger confession. Even in this light, she could see the direction of his gaze. Her lips.
Turov leaned in and she held very still. He continued to hold the roll bar above her head, but he allowed himself to move just enough to softly capture the lips he focused on. The press of his mouth was no more than a sigh against hers. He held himself back. She could sense his control. The warrior was caged, the damned man was daunted, the vintner was striving for an air of casual pleasure the other two would belie.
His lips were soft, as gentle as his hands had been when he’d touched her that morning. But the second they grazed hers once, twice, teasing tastes, his lips slightly open so his moist, wine-sweetened breath met and mingled with her sigh of reaction—that second of contact caused her entire body to tense.
Her diaphragm tightened. Her lungs expanded. Her vocal cords tingled with unsung notes. He brought something to life in her with the barely there kiss. With the slightest pressure, with the slightest contact, he awakened something so long dormant she’d thought it might be dead and gone.
Her whole body trembled as she parted her lips to meet the next brush of his and he noticed her quickening. He still held the roll bar, but even in the deepening night she could see his knuckles begin to whiten as the strength of his grip increased.
He didn’t pull back, but he didn’t touch her with anything other than his lips. He didn’t take more though he could have. He didn’t deepen the contact. A deepening would have scorched them both. When her tongue lightly touched his, offering an instinctive invitation to take more, they both stiffened as Brimstone heat flared between them with the sudden arc of electric shock.
He did ease back then. He looked down at her with shadowed eyes. The headlights illuminated the path in front of the ATV, but it cast the seats and their bodies in garishly outlined shadows now that night had fallen.
“I promised you’d be safe. This isn’t safe. Far from it,” Turov said.
His accent had thickened, as if emotion affected his ability to control it. Suddenly, she wanted those Russian inflections murmured against her ear while his body pressed against hers.
As if he read her mind, Turov let go of the roll bar and stepped back. His longevity hadn’t moldered his emotions or his passion. If anything, he was filled with a concentrated need for human contact that had been distilled from years of being isolated from normality. Victoria licked her sensitized lips, tasting the hint of perspiration he’d left there from the moist swell of his upper lip. The heat that radiated from him touched deep to her core and spread outward, but it also called forth energy within herself. All from the slightest taste, the merest touch. She could only imagine what deeper kisses and less controlled embraces would...no she couldn’t imagine. She wouldn’t allow her aroused senses to go there.
“I should go back to the house,” she said. It was as much a confession as a request. She could see the war in him. The stiffness of his broad shoulders. His clenched fists. He held himself back even though he’d let the roll bar go.
Michael’s father had swept her defenses away. This was different. This was mutual. Her sensual power rose up to meet Turov’s. Their bodies were drawn to each other.
“You should. I should,” he agreed.
And still they paused under the glittering stars that winked to life in the blue-black Sonoma sky. Her affinity and his Brimstone blood were held at bay by sheer force of will. She was grateful for the shadows. Sunshine would have revealed how badly she wanted to succumb. She wanted to touch, taste and sing in his arms. To revel in the forbidden awakening she’d unexpectedly found on a mission that was cold as ice.
Would she see an answering hunger in his eyes? To forget his daemon deal in her arms? It was best if she didn’t know.
Finally, he broke the standoff. He chose the best course for sanity and retreated to the driver’s side of the ATV. While he slid in behind the wheel, Victoria tried to calm her breathing. She willed her heartbeat to slow. She needed to take advantage of this weakness she’d found in Adam Turov. He desired her. Of that she was certain. The connection between them didn’t lie. But how could she seduce him into revealing his secrets before she was seduced herself?
Chapter 5 (#u74923b9c-4c95-5f6f-9521-7fcd7cae7a48)
Turov drove through the darkening vineyard. They were in shadow while the lights of the ATV cut a wavering swath ahead of them, illuminating the path between rows. Only the edges of young greenery were distinct in the light, the rest of the vineyard was only a thousand acres of dark twining mystery around them.
He didn’t speak again. No doubt he regretted the kiss and was focused on whatever his plans were for the night ahead. Meanwhile, Victoria burned. It wasn’t until he pulled into the pebbled drive as near to her sheltered cottage as the riotous garden allowed that she saw his hands on the wheel.
The soft garden lights revealed a white-knuckled grip.
The ATV came to a stop and she was caught in a pause created by the emotion his grip betrayed. He was a dangerous man, but she was a danger to him as well. For seconds, the potential for exploring that danger hung hotly in the cool air between them.
“Good night, Victoria,” Turov said, his accent thicker with strain.
His decision to resist prodded her to break temptation’s trance. She tumbled quickly from the vehicle to make up for her telling pause.
He pulled away almost as soon as her feet hit the ground and her answering “Good night” was lost in the crunch of rock beneath tires. He headed back toward the equipment shed where lights revealed the activity of evening after the vineyard’s busy day. The bustle there only served to make the garden path where she stood seem too deserted and quiet.
The main house loomed darker than ever now that she’d explored its age and emptiness. She was glad to walk toward the smaller cottage and the welcoming scent of roses.
But she wasn’t alone.
She hesitated between one path and another, uncertain which would lead her in the direction she needed to go, and during that hesitation she heard a furtive step. Only one. The other person in the garden had stopped mere seconds after her. They waited somewhere behind her. And waited. The quiet seemed to swell, impregnating the atmosphere with unease. A normal garden visitor would have continued to walk, would have said hello.
Victoria resumed her walk because she didn’t want to reveal her fear. She acted unconcerned. She tried to move at the same speed. She didn’t look over her shoulder. But she did pause suddenly when she came through the hedge to the cottage’s clearing. Once again, she heard what might be the shuffle of a follower who hurriedly matched her movements, pause for pause.
She slowly fished the cottage key from her pocket to excuse her stop, then she proceeded to the dimly lit stoop. If she hurried, if she didn’t fumble with the old skeleton key, if the antique latch didn’t drag, maybe she could get inside and lock the door back against whoever was behind her.
But that plan evaporated when she reached the stone stoop of the cottage. Someone had left something there in a scattered pile. She pulled her phone from her pocket and illuminated the stoop to find a profusion of pale, dried flower petals that a breeze disturbed just enough for her to recognize because she’d seen ones like them in the park in Louisiana. Someone had left a pile of crinkled cherry blossoms for her to find. These had gone to a darker pink as they’d withered and dried.
She didn’t look over her shoulder. She could feel a malicious presence there. Perhaps a presence brazen enough to have come out of the cover of the hedges to stand boldly in the clearing. If she turned, she might see another monk from the Order of Samuel sent to deliver this threatening message of flower petals.
“I haven’t forgotten why I’m here. I don’t need the reminder,” she said.
Still she didn’t turn, but she did kneel and gather up the petals because she had lied—she did need the reminder. She’d been too easily swept up in the dramatic story of Turov’s past, his family, the obsession he had for his vines—a thousand acres of roots when she’d never managed to put down a single one.
Sybil and Grim hid and protected Michael, but for how long? She could blame the affinity for the distraction from her mission, but she wouldn’t. Turov would be seductive to her, affinity or not. Now that she understood this, she could fight temptation.
Once she’d gathered the dried petals in the hem of her shirt, the step on the path resumed without subterfuge. This time her stalker moved away from her with loud crunches of gravel on the path. The loud movement seemed a mockery of her fear. She used her key, and if her life had depended on using it quickly she would have died on the stoop. Her fingers were clumsy. She clutched the flower petals in her shirt and unlocked the door at the same time so neither move went well. Dried bits of blossoms fell all around and the latch protested as she clanked and clanked the key, trying to find the sweet spot for the tricky tumblers. Finally, she made it into the cottage and closed the door. She slid the bolt home and leaned against it. But her tension didn’t ease. Because now she knew what she had to do while Turov was away for the evening.
* * *
She placed the dried cherry blossoms in a jar on the vanity in her room. She needed the constant reminder. She wasn’t on a luxurious Sonoma vacation where she was free to sympathize with her dark and dangerous host. She had a job to do. She had a son to save. Turov had beheaded the monk who had followed her from Louisiana, but there were more where he came from. The Order had an endless supply of zealots.
She might never be free, but she had to try.
For Michael.
Turov had said he had plans for the evening. Before he kissed her. And the kiss was irrelevant. She had to focus on her mission. He had left the estate. She’d picked over a dinner tray sent from the kitchen while she’d waited and watched. Finally, she saw his low, lean luxury sedan—a vintage one—pull away to be swallowed by the night highway that led to Santa Rosa.
She wasn’t here to play.
She’d already changed into black jeans and a dark gray long-sleeve T-shirt to better blend with shadows. She intended to make her way to the sitting room that held the box full of firebird keys and then get back to her cottage before anyone, especially her host, was the wiser.
The garden was ghostly, lit by a sliver of moon and ambient lanterns turned low at midnight. She tried not to wonder if her stalker still lurked behind bushes that had taken on eerie animal-like shapes in the night. There a hunched antelope leaped and beneath its belly was a man-size black hollow. Here a grotesque ape with arms raised high could easily hide a man behind its enormous back.
Straight to the sitting room. Straight back.
The door opened at her touch and her first fear—that of being locked out—faded. The only activity she discerned as she entered the back passage was in the distant kitchen where the cook cleaned and prepped for the next day.
She held thoughts of Michael close as she hurried to the stairs at the front of the house. She crept up them, unable to prevent the occasional creak. A few lamps had been left on. Their Tiffany shades disbursed the glow in jewel tones that matched the walls and the firebird tea set no one had touched for decades—green, gold, amber, burnt red.
Victoria tried not the think of love and loss when she made it to the room again. Only then did she risk her cell phone light to penetrate the gloom.
The book had been moved.
Somehow she’d known. Maybe it was a daily habit for Turov to come here and flip through its pages. Had he noticed anything amiss? Was it foolish to stage a repeat visit so soon?
It was too late to back out now. She hurriedly scanned the room to make sure an angry Russian didn’t lie in wait to capture her. Then she bent to open the box and grab the keys. She was too quick. The keys rolled together, making a noise that seemed thunderous in the quiet house. She closed the box and shoved the keys into her pocket.
A mother would understand.
She had to pass Mrs. Turov’s photograph on the way out. She was sure the woman who had watched her son burn would have understood why Victoria had to tiptoe into her memorial to take the keys. It was wrong to take them, but to save her son she would do worse before the month was over.
The estate was massive. Finding where Turov held the monks would be a needle-in-the-haystack task, but the keys were a start. Seeing Turov’s set and finding the cherry blossom warning had showed her the course she had to follow.
Though she’d only been in the house fifteen minutes, it seemed to take far longer to make her way out than it had to make her way in. A whistle down one hallway caused her to hold her breath and crouch for long moments on the first landing. A maid passed, carrying a basket of folded laundry. Victoria moved again when the woman turned the corner away from her. The stairs seem to protest her downward path even more loudly than they’d protested her upward one.
But she made it outside without running into a soul.
Unfortunately, before she could even take a relieved breath of night air, she ran into a man who had sold his soul long ago.
* * *
Turov wasn’t wearing a tuxedo or a suit. His casual work clothes were gone as well. He wore black as she did, and she suspected for the same reason. Only a glimmer of eyes and teeth showed well in the garden light. Unlike the dark clothes she’d found from an ordinary wardrobe, his outfit looked made for the night. His black uniform was strategically fortified with leather quilting in vital areas such as chest, abdomen and thighs. It hugged his muscular form like a second skin.
She’d suspected he was athletically built and she’d been right, although she couldn’t have guessed how lean and hard because she’d never seen this kind of body in real life. Not even her sister’s husband, John Severne, who was obsessively fit from two hundred years of daemon hunting could possibly be this lethally made.
Victoria took in his appearance in seconds. The broad shoulders and hard arms above a trim waist and equally sculpted legs. He took in her appearance just as fast, just as well. Did her outfit scream cat burglar? Did the bulge of keys in her pocket show in the shadows?
“I thought you were going out for the night,” Victoria said. Her voice was too breathless. Adrenaline robbed her lungs of their usual power.
“I did. I finished sooner than I expected. I didn’t have to travel as far as I intended,” he said.
She risked a glance at his face, but he didn’t meet her eyes. Was that blood in his hair?
They’d been moving quickly enough that he put up his hands to catch her arms when they almost collided. Through the light material she could feel each of his fingers scorch. She looked down, surprised they didn’t glow with Brimstone embers. Then she looked up. His eyes were closed, almost as if he was in pain.
“You should be inside. It’s safer,” Turov said.
“Safer than here? In the garden? With you?” Victoria asked.
He held her, but not close enough. The wide expanse of his chest was a foot away. She wanted to press against it, to feel his Brimstone heart beat against her cheek. Only with effort did she swallow the hum rising in her throat like a morning dove that sensed the dawn.
“Yes. Definitely safer. You should keep a locked door between us,” Turov murmured, almost to himself. He relaxed his elbows. Her body immediately swayed toward him of its own volition. He allowed it. She allowed it. Long, heated seconds of her body leaning lightly against his. In forbidden time, it was an eternity. In real time, it was less than a minute. But it felt like the most intimate thing she’d ever done because he wasn’t a man that allowed any intimacy at all.
She tried to soak in his Brimstone heat, his hardness, his smoky masculine scent that was somehow also green and earthy and fresh. A song rose within her, but it was a song she couldn’t allow herself to sing.
Victoria stepped back and he let her go.
“Good night, Adam,” she said.
She retreated several steps and then she turned to the warmly lit cottage. She assumed Turov moved away as well. She didn’t look back to watch him go. She concentrated on placing one foot after another. She walked away. It was a triumph of willpower. She made it into the cottage and shut the door behind her. It was a testament to Turov’s heat that the cozy fire that greeted her seemed cold.
* * *
Adam strode to his spiral staircase and climbed to his rooms. Every step felt like a lie. Victoria beckoned. She called to him, a siren in a storm-tossed sea, and it would be just as disastrous for him as an unwary sailor if he heeded her song.
Damnation.
Adam braced himself as unbidden memories assailed him.
He’d had a taste of spring that morning so many years ago. He could recall the crisp bite of it still. It had expanded his lungs with a chill that shivered happily along his spine. Outside the Order of Samuel’s compound, the mountain had been coming alive with tender green grasses and wildflowers. He’d walked around the struggling patches of color, inspired, but also frightened by their precarious hold on new life. A killing frost or a late snow at this elevation would end their struggle.
He had identified.
How many times had he tried to run away from the Order, getting a taste of life and freedom only to have it cut short when they dragged him back to the enclave?
Malachi said he’d been taken in too late. Most novitiates were stolen from the cradle or gathered in before they could barely walk and talk. But Adam had been nine when he’d been “adopted.” He’d been stolen on a market day by a monk who’d taken advantage of the chaos and crowd to snag a healthy youth. Adam had been old enough to remember his mother and father and the lessons they had taught that had been so very different from the lessons that the Order tried to supplant them with.
He remembered one failed escape more vividly than all the rest. That morning so long ago he’d breathed the fresh air deeply into lungs that were weakened from a long, damp winter. He’d known he might fail again, but at sixteen he’d been ready to try rather than be buried alive beneath evil zealotry. Malachi hadn’t been able to beat away the memory of his mother’s face or his father’s strict but fair hand. Malachi’s lash was cruel rather than strict. And there was nothing fair about being pressed into an Order of merciless killers.
The mother’s milk of this mountain orphanage was blood.
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Barbara J. Hancock
Stranger, Seductress or His Salvation?One hundred years ago, Adam Turov, master of Nightingale Vineyards, bartered his soul for freedom from the Order of Samuel and their Rogue daemon allies. But he didn’t know true damnation until Victoria D’Arcy crossed the billionaire vintner’s threshold. . . Sworn to protect her, Adam must deny every fibre of his being to resist a voice that sounds like an angel and her potent charm.An unwilling pawn of the Order, Victoria must betray Adam to save her young son. Yet the more time she spends at his estate on her clandestine mission, the harder it becomes to deny the Brimstone heat scorching a path of desire between them…
Stranger, Seductress or His Salvation?
One hundred years ago, Adam Turov, master of Nightingale Vineyards, bartered his soul for freedom from the Order of Samuel and their Rogue daemon allies. But he didn’t know true damnation until Victoria D’Arcy crossed the billionaire vintner’s threshold... Sworn to protect her, Adam must resist with every fiber of his being a voice that sounds like an angel singing and her potent charm.
An unwilling pawn of the Order, Victoria must betray Adam to save her young son. Yet the more time she spends at his estate on her clandestine mission, the harder it becomes to deny the Brimstone heat scorching a path of desire between them...
“I heard you humming. I felt it,” Turov said. “I’ve never felt anything like it before.”
He didn’t touch her.
He didn’t have to.
The heat in his blood did.
He was damned and the Brimstone that sealed his deal with daemons sang its own song to her music-starved ears.
“It won’t happen again,” Victoria promised.
He looked into her eyes.
“I hope that’s a lie,” he said.
His gaze dropped to her open lips, but he didn’t close the distance. The heat between them flared. He seemed mesmerized. But then he straightened up and backed away before she made the fatal mistake of wanting his kiss enough to make it happen herself. His jaw hardened and the expression in his eyes cooled. She could still feel his Brimstone heat, but he was no longer controlled by it.
“Good night, Victoria.” His voice was rough. “I told you that you’d be safe here and I meant it. From every danger...”
BARBARA J. HANCOCK lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where her daily walk takes her to the edge of the wilderness and back again. When Barbara isn’t writing modern gothic romance that embraces the shadows with a unique blend of heat and heart, she can be found wrangling twin boys and spoiling her pets.
Brimstone Bride
Barbara J. Hancock
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For those that champion the silenced
and love the lost.
Contents
Cover (#u37f7eb29-c2f1-5ff4-907b-7b9f62eb19d9)
Back Cover Text (#uec0391fe-9656-54f6-992b-4852ba34152d)
Introduction (#u9d8b9469-4fbd-54b3-8304-fcb9dec851e2)
About the Author (#ua6f8ef2e-1954-535d-84f4-0401a144f21b)
Title Page (#u47fcd14a-bab9-5880-8688-32a9deb92004)
Dedication (#u28d52d3e-0b80-5a41-8d7e-3ce97da8e88d)
Chapter 1 (#uf0f303bc-606e-5263-8f88-32aab0689a0a)
Chapter 2 (#u3a9acd7a-4ac8-5b97-9a17-8dd6dab0a81e)
Chapter 3 (#uf58d61c0-9c01-5686-9c47-4ad28b065563)
Chapter 4 (#u90d26f8c-bd24-56ab-aed6-bc0f9bb7aaa0)
Chapter 5 (#u7b21c1b1-de1b-5c94-9fcb-d54c6cda91b0)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#u74923b9c-4c95-5f6f-9521-7fcd7cae7a48)
Playground sounds made the danger beside Victoria so much worse. High-pitched laughter and conversations about make-believe seemed surreal. Across the mulched expanse, her sister, Katherine D’Arcy Severne, pushed Victoria’s toddler, Michael, and her own baby, Sam, on the swings. She glanced toward Victoria and waved. Vic waved back.
Pay no attention to the madman beside me, Kat. Keep my Michael and your Sam safe.
The monk sitting beside Victoria on the park bench was in a businessman’s suit, as if he’d dropped by the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, playground during his lunch break. He crossed his legs gracefully like a civilized man. Kat probably thought he was a father watching his child play instead of an evil man come to threaten their own. Victoria had been resting in the sun when he’d approached. She’d actually smiled at him when he’d joined her on the bench.
And then he’d revealed his true purpose.
“The Order of Samuel has proven time and time again that you cannot run. You cannot hide. You will learn this lesson or your child will join us. A half daemon brother would be unusual, but I’m sure we could train him, put him to good use for Father Reynard’s cause.”
“Stay. Away. From. Michael,” Victoria said. Her voice cracked with emotion. Her baby was only two. Katherine pushed her nephew higher and he squealed.
Victoria’s throat had yet to recover from the injuries she’d sustained in the opera house fire set by Father Reynard. They’d blamed it on an obsessive fan. He’d been obsessive all right. But not a fan. He was a daemon hunter and she and Katherine had been his reluctant bloodhounds. They’d been born with an affinity for Brimstone blood that inevitably led them to the daemons Reynard hunted. Violence. Blood. Pain. No rest. No peace. He had dogged their steps for as long as they could walk.
He’d died in the fire, but apparently his cause hadn’t.
“I will leave your daemon spawn alone, only if you set my brethren free. This man is our greatest enemy. He must be stopped,” the monk in disguise said.
He held a magazine in his hands and tilted the cover so she could see the man who graced it.
Michael’s laughter floated to her ears as his doting aunt pushed him on the swing. Victoria had fallen in love with a daemon. Her affinity for the Brimstone in his blood had drawn them together, but it had been more than that. He’d been a stop to running. He’d been hope. He had died trying to protect her and Michael. The Order of Samuel said they were warriors for heaven. They lied. The members of the D’Arcy family were tools used by one faction of daemons to hunt another.
Politics.
The D’Arcy ability to draw and be drawn to daemon blood had placed them in the middle of an otherworldly civil war.
Love wasn’t allowed.
Ironic that her favorite role to play had always been Juliet. She’d traveled around the world to sing the part of a tragic romance again and again.
“What do you want me to do?” Victoria asked.
The man on the cover of the magazine was a beautiful stranger in a designer suit. Behind him, a vineyard stretched in seemingly endless verdant rows. He stood with one foot on the threshold of a historic stone building, a massive wooden door with iron hinges looking rough-hewn and craggy in sharp contrast to his polished clothes. There was a gleam to the black waves of his hair, but those waves and his sun-kissed skin seemed more in keeping with the door than his suit. Victoria had grown up in the dramatic world of the opera. She knew a costume when she saw one. The man’s civilized suit was a lie.
“You will gain his trust. You will learn his secrets. Once you discover where he keeps his prisoners, you will free them,” the monk said. “Once they are freed, they will use their combined strength to kill him. In this way, you will guarantee your son’s safety.”
Children laughed and ran and played all around them. Tears burned behind her eyes. But she forced them to dry. She waved again and this time Michael waved back, still laughing. Katherine was looking at Victoria closely now. As if she sensed something wrong. But the monk had already risen, prepared to walk away. He didn’t need her answer. He could sense her defeat in her slumped shoulders and her trembling wave of reassurance to her child.
“I’m not a spy. How will I do this?” she asked his back. He paused and halfway turned back to reply.
“He has Brimstone in his blood. He’s damned. Your affinity is the perfect weapon. His home is a fortress. You will penetrate his defenses. Seduce his secrets from him. Free our brothers. Capture him. Then, you and your family will be left in peace.”
He lied.
She would never know peace.
“Who knows? You might even enjoy yourself. You have proven you have a taste for damnation,” the monk said. His knowing laughter didn’t blend with the innocent laughter of the children around them. It jarred. It condemned. Her cheeks burned. Not because she was ashamed of loving Michael’s father, but because this man didn’t deserve to pollute what they’d shared by mentioning it. Daemons were nearly immortal beings who lived in the hell dimension. They were different but, like men, they were only damned by their actions, not by their blood. Michael’s father had been heroic in the end, sacrificing himself for his child even though he’d been a daemon.
The children on the playground seemed to sense the evil in their midst. They parted as the monk passed as if a snake slithered among them. One little girl began to cry without obvious cause and a kind woman ran to see what she could do to help.
The monk had left the magazine beside her on the bench. She picked it up. The man on the cover hadn’t looked at the camera. The photographer had caught him in a moment of reflection, with dark shadows from the vine-covered building on his face. The photograph drew her as if the Brimstone in the man’s blood could already sense her affinity. Yes. He had secrets. She could see them in his shadowed eyes.
A single tear did fall then. The monk had already walked away. His laughter drifted back to her on the humid Louisiana breeze. She had loved and lost, but she wouldn’t lose again. Only one tear fell. It rolled down her cheek to fall on the back of her hand. It glistened there, useless.
She would do what she had to do to protect her son.
She willed the unshed tears to dry as she widened her eyes and clenched her jaw. The magazine crinkled in her ferocious grip.
Her son’s vigilant protector, the hellhound Grim, wasn’t allowed to materialize in the playground, but Victoria saw a shimmer of shadows near the swings, too dark to be cast by the blossoming grove of cherry trees that surrounded the park.
The wind blew and petals fell like pale pink rain. They settled on Katherine’s dark hair and the children laughed. They raised their hands to the sky to try to catch the drifting blossoms. Near the shadow of Grim, the petals shied away in puffs of disturbed silk as the giant dog shook his sooty coat to maintain his disguise. She could imagine his movements because she knew he was there. No one else noticed. Just as no one else had heard the monk’s threats.
During the fire, Katherine’s husband, John Severne, had risked his life to give Grim to Victoria’s son. His sacrifice had saved Michael. The fearsome beast had been Severne’s companion for two hundred years. Now, he watched over her son.
But Grim wouldn’t be enough.
Victoria had to do more.
Even if it meant continuing to be a servant to madmen whose evil requests damned her as if she’d sold her soul.
As the playground full of children continued to laugh and play, fear burned hotly inside her chest, exactly as she imagined the damning fire of Brimstone might burn in daemon veins.
Chapter 2 (#u74923b9c-4c95-5f6f-9521-7fcd7cae7a48)
Few people had gotten close enough to see his scars.
Adam Turov sat with his chest facing the back of a wooden chair. He gripped the polished cherry slats with white knuckles, but he didn’t flinch as he hunched his bare back for Dr. Verenich. The Brimstone in his blood wasn’t always enough to heal the injuries he sustained hunting devils with no care for how much human blood they spilled.
“Live for a century, learn for a century,” the doctor murmured under his breath as he plied needle and thread to close the dagger slash too severe to knit itself. “I have learned to use specially constructed thread in your treatment, shef. And yet you have not learned to avoid daemon-cursed blades.”
“Without effort, you won’t pull fish from a pond,” Adam said. He could fight the doctor saying for saying. He’d learned all his Russian idioms firsthand before the Revolution.
“So, no pain, no gain?” The doctor chuckled grimly as he worked on the man he still referred to as his boss as his father had before him, even though Adam Turov had also become his friend. Gloves protected his hands from Brimstone’s burn, but every now and then they’d sizzle and hiss, and smoke would rise into the air as he pierced Adam’s skin with his needle and fireproof thread. “I’ll tell you what you have gained, my friend...” He urged Adam to turn his back toward an antique mirror with a gilded frame. It was Tsarist, of course. The Turov family had brought a king’s ransom to California during the Revolution. They survived by adapting, persevering. They had worked through the darkest hours. Sweat and blood had replaced diamonds and tiaras.
Reflected in the mirror, Adam Turov didn’t look a day over thirty, even after a life-threatening battle with evil monks from the Order of Samuel and their Rogue daemon allies. On a good day, in fine clothes, he would seem even younger. Too young to successfully run the oldest winery in Sonoma, California.
“Wings. Over all these years, you’ve developed a macabre pair of wings,” the doctor said.
Adam could see them. The scarifications the doctor pointed out by gesturing in the air above them. The tracery of scars swept down his back on both sides like folded wings. The irony caused a grim smile to curve his lips. There. That expression was older. Much more in keeping with his actual age.
“A dark angel indeed, Doctor,” he said.
He could remember the initial beatings with a lash that had begun the “wings.” And later, every hack and slash. Every stitch. Every battle. He could remember the face of every monk he’d delivered to hell. None of the monks in his memory were the one that most haunted him. Not yet. Father Malachi had wielded the lash with enthusiasm. The younger the novitiate, the better. The Order purported to be the last line of defense between hell and Earth, but they lied. In truth, the faction of Rogue daemons that wanted to overthrow Lucifer’s Army and wage war on heaven had corrupted them. The Order of Samuel wasn’t holy. They were as damned as he was.
He liked to think he escorted them to their just ends, one monk at a time. He might never reclaim the soul he’d sold, but he could face his own damnation one day if he delivered every single monk to hell before him.
“No, not an angel. You are more like the legendary firebird caught in a greedy prince’s golden cage,” the doctor said. “You will insist on attending the party, I’m sure. Movement will cause great pain. That was a deep wound. You should rest. Heal.”
The doctor was already wiping Brimstone blood and ash from Adam’s lean, muscled back in preparation for the evening suit that waited across the foot of his bed. It was a disguise. He used the expensive, tailored clothes and the carefully cultivated sophistication of a vintner to hide his true warrior’s nature.
But he’d been hiding it for so long that his disguise came naturally to him now. He ran the Nightingale Vineyards as easily as he battled evil monks.
“I prefer the nightingale to the firebird, Doctor. The firebird was my mother’s favorite. I named our best pinot noir in her honor. There’s nothing golden about me. I’m far too dark for that comparison,” Adam said.
“Ah, but you’re forgetting how the prince was cursed by the firebird for his greed. Capturing the firebird was a mistake. It proved deadly. A dark enough tale, indeed,” the doctor said.
“Nothing heals more than movement,” Adam said, dismissing the fanciful talk. He rolled his shoulders to illustrate. The doctor hissed, but Adam ignored the agony that flared outward from his damaged skin. “We must keep moving forward.”
He’d been damaged for a long time. Agony was a familiar friend.
He’d been nine when the Order had stolen him from his family. He’d been infinitely older when he’d escaped. In experience if not in years.
“Victoria D’Arcy is arriving tonight. That’s why I completed a sweep. To clear the area so I could focus on her,” Adam said.
The doctor busied himself, cleaning his instruments and packing his case while Adam dressed. His bag resembled a traditional black leather satchel, but it held the instruments necessary to be the private physician to a powerful man who’d sold his soul a hundred years ago. Dr. Verenich was the second-generation descendant of a physician who had followed the Turov family to America.
“You must protect her?” the doctor asked.
“Those are my orders. I haven’t decided if I’ll be able to follow them,” Adam said. She’d been hunted by the Order of Samuel. They were her enemy, but she was their pawn. She wasn’t coming to the Turov estate as his friend. Adam had been kidnapped, beaten, tortured, programmed to become a daemon slayer so that he could be used by Rogue daemons to overthrow Lucifer. But it had been a Loyalist daemon that had saved him. And it was the new Loyalist king that he now served.
A daemon that claimed Victoria D’Arcy as his stepchild.
He’d been warned by the daemon king that the Order of Samuel was sending Victoria to infiltrate Nightingale Vineyards and uncover his secrets.
The woman he welcomed tonight might well be the most dangerous threat he’d ever faced. He was supposed to help her even as she planned to betray him.
* * *
She was afraid. Fear always made her angry. She rebelled against it. How many times had she stood on an opera house stage bathed in light and draped in a character’s costume—completely armored in powder, wig and an imaginary persona—to sing out in protest against her plight? She had fallen in love with a daemon. She’d gone against the Order of Samuel. She had survived. The father of her baby hadn’t. The Order had killed him. She’d barely lived. For their baby.
Everything had changed when Michael was born. She was no longer a rebel. She was a mother. Now she had to be cautious for two.
Tonight, as she hurried toward Nightingale Vineyards, more than her voice was lost. It was as if her very heart had been ripped from her chest and it beat elsewhere. Slowly, steadily, but threatened; each beat might be its last if she didn’t do as she was told. The new leader of the Order of Samuel, Father Malachi, held her strings and she was a puppet who could dance only to evil’s song.
She’d flown into California in a plain summer suit of black linen. The gray shell sweater underneath the blazer stretched loosely to brush the top of her thighs. As she was only five foot three, it didn’t have to stretch far. She’d pulled an oversize black fedora low over her eyes. Only her heels and handbag betrayed any personality. She’d grabbed them too hurriedly to think of disguise. Red. A holdover from a much bolder Victoria. That flamboyant woman seemed a lifetime ago.
Katherine had handled the other packing. She’d sent Victoria’s bags ahead to the vineyard’s estate house. Victoria hadn’t told Kat about the danger Michael was in. It was only a matter of time before Katherine discovered her nephew was being stalked by the Order of Samuel. By then, Victoria hoped to have accomplished what she’d been sent to do.
Anything to save her son.
Katherine thought she wanted to visit the vineyards as a retreat to rest and recuperate. Her voice hadn’t been the same since the opera house fire that had almost claimed her life. Doctors said she would recover. That she only needed time. Yet it seemed ages since she’d been able to sing.
She admitted to no one that it seemed ages since she’d wanted to sing.
She’d left her toddling son with his daemon nanny, Sybil, and his hellhound, Grim. Surely, they could protect him even better than her until she could arrange their freedom. One more task for the Order.
But wasn’t it always one more, one more, one more?
She stepped into a coffee shop for an espresso after her flight. While she ordered, she noticed a thick-browed man in a nearby queue. He hadn’t been on her plane, but he had been at the Shreveport airport. She was certain she’d seen him there. He wore a simple suit with a boxy cut and he was bald, stocky, his face smooth and plain, but he didn’t move like a casual traveler.
Maybe he was an off duty soldier.
Maybe he was a ninja in disguise.
But Victoria suspected an even more nefarious origin.
She sipped her small, rich coffee. She even managed a smile for the barista who had boldly scrawled bella on her cup instead of Vic. His dark eyes flashed above a bright smile, but he didn’t distract her from the suspicious-looking man who now placed his order at the register beside her.
She didn’t catch the man’s name. She didn’t have to. Now that he was closer, she could see the movement of his muscles beneath his suit jacket. Its loose cut couldn’t hide his extreme physicality.
Suddenly, the man looked up and met her gaze. He took his coffee from the barista, ignoring the tip jar with its yellow smiley face sticker. She glanced away. Why should she give him an intimate glimpse of her fear?
He had to be a monk from the Order of Samuel. His smirk and the black gleam of his large pupils seemed too knowing. The monks were following her to make sure she complied.
Victoria abandoned her steaming cup in the waste bin, no longer needing the caffeine. She was wide-awake. The whole shop full of weary travelers must see her heart beating in her chest. The Order didn’t have to follow or threaten her further to make sure the job got done.
One threat toward Michael was enough.
Yet the look in the monk’s eyes did quicken her steps. She hurried outside to the waiting row of taxis, and took the dark gaze with her. His eyes had held no sympathy, only the fire of fanaticism. That hateful glow had haunted her life. She refused to let it haunt Michael’s as well.
* * *
The Turov mansion was a California Craftsman castle with hints of Imperial St. Petersburg in its columns and arches. The cab approached down a long, winding drive. Rather than the expected cedar shakes, the house was constructed of rough gray brick, its roof gleaming slate instead of Spanish tile. Several turrets were capped in domes of copper that glimmered gold in the sunset. The material was echoed in hammered metal on the mansion’s gutters and window frames. She had time to appreciate the gleam as the car neared the entrance where the driveway ended in a circular loop. There was something that touched her about its design. It was art, not merely architecture. There was personality evident in every curve, passion in every turret.
But the hundreds of shadowed windows seemed to warn that the walls might shelter a difficult personality and a dark passion.
When she saw the main house, her first thought was forever. She’d traveled the world. She’d walked on ancient cobblestones. She’d sung on stages much older than she was. Nightingale Vineyards hadn’t been here forever, but it seemed to proclaim that it would be. Maybe she was attributing Russian determination to its every brick, every line, because she knew its owner’s heritage. It was natural to assume the house was a reflection of the man.
Since the house intimidated as much as it piqued her curiosity, she looked away.
The inhabited portion of the estate was surrounded by landscaped gardens that eventually gave way to rolling hills of endless cultivated greenery. The grapevines stretched as far as Victoria could see. The magazine hadn’t captured the truth of the expanse. The setting sun bathed the vines in a warm russet haze.
The scent of roses enveloped her when she stepped from the car. Loamy earth, green vines and roses. She breathed deeply, reluctantly soothed. She’d paid the driver before she exited the vehicle. There were no bags beyond the purse she carried herself. The cab drove away and the night deepened as she paused. The garden beckoned, but the house waited, with only the windows on the ground level aglow. She would have to go in. She had to do what she’d come to do.
All around her, the vineyard grew. She swore she could almost feel the pervasive, steady creep of its tendrils. So alive. It was early in the growing season, but soon grapes would be plumping in heavy bunches. What was it like to choose a place, set down roots and thrive? No running. No hiding. It was all so beautiful and real. She could never give this to Michael, but she longed for it. The permanence.
For a while, she was alone beneath a sky gone violet and beginning to wink with waking stars.
And then she wasn’t.
She tried to ignore the sudden pull of Brimstone, holding herself in place because if she didn’t she would immediately move to its source. And its source was her enemy in spite of his allure.
Adam Turov.
It had to be.
“I can do this,” Victoria whispered under her breath, the hoarse sound of her voice still a surprise, though the fire had been over two years ago. She shouldered her handbag and moved toward the portico over the front entrance.
“There’s no turning back once you step through that door,” a voice said from the shadows.
The glow from the windows did little to illuminate her welcoming committee. He didn’t require illumination. She knew who and what he was before he came closer. As he approached, she instinctively inched away and looked over her shoulder.
The Order of Samuel had used her affinity to hunt daemons. She’d been a reluctant bloodhound since she was a young girl. She still was. It hadn’t ended. The man at the airport was stalking her. He might be out of sight, but he wasn’t out of mind. She reminded herself that this time she was here willingly. Her job was to uncover Turov’s secrets and help the Order shut him down.
For Michael.
She forced herself to halt her retreat.
Adam Turov stepped into the light near the front door and he surprised her. He seemed nearer to her age than she’d expected. But she knew he wasn’t. He was much, much older. Fear fluttered in her stomach and she tightened her impressively toned diaphragm against it. She was a welcome guest. A harmless opera singer looking for a restful vacation. She needed to act like he was her host, not her prey.
Her throat might not be up to par, but her core was as iron as ever. For Michael.
“Mr. Turov. It’s nice to meet you,” she said. She recognized him from the magazine she’d been shown. But that didn’t matter—she could feel the Brimstone in his blood. He had already found her because that Brimstone drew him to her like a moth to a flame. The thought was heady as well as frightening. He was tall, sinfully attractive and powerful. Her temperature had risen. His would run hotter than 98.6. Her cheeks flushed. The earthy spring air was cool against her skin. It was the Brimstone, but it was also the man and her deception. Her job had always been to create beautiful, dramatic fabrications onstage, but she wasn’t comfortable with lies offstage.
“Welcome to Sonoma. Are you ready to leave work and worry behind? I’ll show you to the cottage where you’ll be staying. You can freshen up and join us for a drink,” Turov said.
“Do you always personally greet your guests?” she asked.
He didn’t confirm his identity. He probably knew he didn’t need to. He was famous. One of the most eligible bachelors in California. Of course she would recognize the Turov eyes, nose and chin that had graced his father and his grandfather before him. He couldn’t know she was privy to his deal with the devil. He was the only Turov left and had been for over fifty years. Brimstone fueled his longevity. But it had come at great price. What kind of man would sell his soul for wealth and acclaim? Never mind the permanent feel of the estate around her and the rich earth beneath her feet. It would all be ashes eventually. The devil’s due.
“No. Not always,” he said. Only that. No explanation. Her flush deepened as he looked closely at her, one brow slightly raised.
The damned master of Nightingale Vineyards offered her his arm and she lightly accepted it. Little did he know her work—the most important performance of her life—had only just begun. Her heart pounded as they walked around a manicured lawn to a rose-covered arbor that created a dark tunnel. There was discreet outdoor lighting to show them the path. But would he need it if he’d walked this way for decades?
Her son had Brimstone blood. This was different. Turov was no daemon. He was a human who had sold his soul. His was not an innocent, natural burn. He was dangerous in spite of his tailored suit and his cultured accent.
Who was the prey in his garden? She was afraid the tables had been turned already.
“You’ve lost your voice?” he asked as they walked through rose-scented shadows.
“I’ve strained it. There was a fire a couple of years ago. I breathed in extreme heat and smoke. The effects have lingered. I can talk, but I can’t sing. Not in my former way. I might never be able to sing professionally again,” she said.
“That’s a shame. I’m sorry. Never is such a long time and I’d love to hear you sing. Perhaps our pinot noir will soothe your throat,” he said.
She was used to taking on roles, but she wasn’t a spy. She might as well have “fraud” written on her forehead in scarlet. Her affinity was supposed to help her, but she was afraid it did the opposite. She couldn’t be as tactical and distant as she should be. Her senses were completely taken over by the heat in his blood. His arm was solid and strong under her fingers. His warmth radiated outward to counteract the night air. It was as if she walked with a flame. Her feet faltered. Her throat reflexively opened. For the first time in a very long time she felt a song well up in her chest.
“For you,” Turov said. They exited the arbor tunnel into a private courtyard ringed by high hedges. At first she mistook the cottage as a part of the hedge, but it was actually a stone building completely covered in lush vines of dark red roses. They tumbled and curved and twined, a profusion of color as the night came on, a riot of greenery and blossom.
“Oh,” she breathed out. She risked no other syllable. Her chest was full. Her lips trembled. She wanted to sing. It was the Brimstone. Katherine had shared the truth about their affinity and how their gift for music responded to daemon blood. They’d used music to drown out the magnetic pull, but in special cases the music seemed to resonate with the power of Brimstone. She had to keep up her guard. She couldn’t afford to allow this man to inspire her to song. Not if the song would bind them together. He was bound for the hell of the Order of Samuel’s clutches. That was all.
The cottage would have been a perfect retreat if that was what she’d truly come to California to find, but the song bubbling up in her made it a dangerous place.
“Your bags are inside. I know you’re tired, but join us once you’re refreshed,” Turov said. “I can’t claim it will actually heal your throat, but the wine is excellent. It will help you relax after your flight.”
“Thank you. I’ll join you soon,” Victoria said. Her voice was a classic film star’s dusky tones. Accidentally throaty and seductive. This was the first time she’d heard it that way since the fire. Always before it had seemed scratchy and ugly.
He opened the door of the cottage and then stepped back to hand her the key. It was a skeleton key made warm by his touch. Her fingers closed around it. She didn’t mean to fist them tightly, but tension betrayed her. He seemed to note her discomfort and watched her gather her composure. His gaze on her throat, moving as she swallowed, felt intimate—and intimacy with him would be dangerous. His many years of life left him too experienced and perceptive. If he got too close, she wouldn’t be able to keep her secrets. Yet she was here to get close. Close enough to fulfill a dark task.
“You’re safe here, Victoria. I read about the fire. How an obsessive fan caused it. Nightingale is a special place. Sacrosanct. We are older and wiser than most retreats. For a long time, I’ve insisted on privacy. I maintain this hideaway at great cost,” Turov said. “Please accept my assurance that no one can harm you while you are here with me.”
In the gloaming, it was too dark to read his eyes. But she recognized a greater danger in that moment than she’d previously acknowledged. She needed retreat. She longed for protection. And the last person she could expect to provide it was the man she planned to betray. His Brimstone blood coaxed her to sing, but it was his offer of protection that weakened her defenses.
“Forgive me if I don’t relax. It isn’t you. It’s me,” Victoria said.
“Yes. I see that. You hold yourself contained. Unusual for an artist,” Turov said.
She hadn’t stepped over the threshold yet. She regretted the pause as soon as his hand reached to tilt the brim of her hat up. Only a millimeter. Only the very tip of his fingers brushed the felt. But her expression felt suddenly exposed to his searching eyes. He lowered his hand. She held her breath. He leaned. Slightly. She might have imagined a lowering of his shadowed face toward hers. She backed up just in case, away from his heat, away from his discerning gaze.
“Join us,” he urged again. “It’s a small party. You’ll be a welcome addition.”
She nodded as she walked into the cottage he’d given her for her stay. The scent of roses would likely always remind her of this adrenaline-fueled retreat. For a few crazy seconds she had thought he was going to kiss her, and she’d recognized the pinch of disappointment in her chest with the realization that she couldn’t have allowed it even if he’d tried.
Chapter 3 (#u74923b9c-4c95-5f6f-9521-7fcd7cae7a48)
Her sister had packed four bags for her. Katherine had spared no effort. It seemed as if Victoria’s entire wardrobe was in the cases as well as some of her sister’s. She shied away from her usual vibrant choices. Instead, she chose a black cocktail dress—a simple silk sheath with a chiffon overlay, complete with satin collar and cuffs. The sheath itself was formfitting and fell to midthigh, while the overlay was longer, with filmy panels that fell to her knees and floated softly around her legs when she walked.
The outfit said she was an opera singer going for a sexy librarian vibe. It also screamed not a spy. Poor Michael. He might be better off if she could do this in a costume and sing the part.
Adam Turov had told her she was safe, but he must sense she was more than she seemed. Even though he had gone back to the main house, there wasn’t enough distance between them to keep the affinity from pulling her toward him. He would be drawn to her too.
That knowledge was frightening...for many reasons.
Michael’s father had been gone for two years.
She’d survived, but she hadn’t thrived.
She’d been a patient, a mother and a sister, but she hadn’t felt like a woman in a long time. She could blame the Brimstone, the affinity, the adrenaline, or she could admit Turov was incredibly alluring without all that. His slight Slavic accent was both sophisticated and somehow rough. She thought he’d rather dispense with polite sophistication and speak bluntly. The mysterious roughness made her long to hear what he had to say. They could never have truth between them, but the idea seduced her.
She couldn’t allow that longing to thrive, so she took extra care with her party persona.
She freshened her makeup, brushed her hair and slipped on a favorite pair of shoes. She hardly noticed the faint light of a waning crescent moon or any movement in the garden as she left the cottage to follow the path to the mansion. She wanted to go to the party in spite of all the reasons she shouldn’t. It was the first party she’d wanted to attend in a long time.
* * *
She’d been dressed in gray and black, but her hair and lipstick had been closer to the truth of who she really was. He’d been mesmerized by the mass of curls under her hat, bright even in shadows. And her lips in soft light had been flush and full and painted boldly. They hadn’t matched the fear in her eyes. More than ever, he wanted to personally hand-deliver Father Malachi to the fires of hell and throw him in the flames. The Order of Samuel specialized in traumatizing innocents, yet they called themselves holy men. It was obvious they haunted Victoria D’Arcy. She was a bold woman shadowed by fear.
When he saw her enter the rooms he’d had arranged for her reception, his glass paused halfway to his mouth. The hat was gone. And her shapeless traveling clothes were gone too. She’d chosen bright crimson heels and she’d refreshed her lips in the same shade. Her hair was a richer, deeper auburn and more subtle in comparison. Against the black of her dress and her pale porcelain skin, those pops of color stunned. The myriad shades of red in her hair seemed almost iridescent in the shifting light.
It wasn’t only him. She entered quietly, but many faces turned her way. She had stage presence. No actual stage necessary. The whole room subtly shifted within moments of her becoming a part of it. It was no longer a miscellaneous gathering. It was a party with an anonymous star at its heart. She wasn’t a celebrity. She’d been away from the opera world too long and even before that her career had been held in check by daemon politics. She simply shone and everyone in the room unconsciously arranged themselves to bask in the glow.
This was the woman the Order of Samuel sent to bring him down.
He lifted his glass. He took a long swallow of Firebird Pinot Noir. He didn’t savor. He gulped. Because he’d rather fight an army of monks programmed to destroy than this one intriguing woman.
* * *
He watched her. She could feel his attention while she spoke to other guests. There were wealthy travelers, politicians, a celebrity chef, an aging rock star and a billionaire philanthropist—it was a posh gathering for an opera singer that had never been free to seek fame. They were here for Turov. He was sharing his guests with her. But he wasn’t being hospitable. She reminded herself that he used his sophisticated persona as a disguise for his covert activities. By and by, she was swept his way. Time and tide and Brimstone. When she took the warmed crystal stem from his fingers, she realized she’d abstained from accepting a glass of wine until she could receive her glass from his hand.
She sipped. And the room fell away. The aroma was delicate black cherry accented with a spicy hint of cinnamon. The flavor was of fruit and earth. But it was the texture that slayed. It was liquid silk on her tongue, soft and velvety. She savored. She swallowed. The rich, full-bodied vintage did soothe her throat and her spirits.
She wasn’t an expert on wine, but she savored this one with her eyes closed, well aware that it was one of the finest she’d ever enjoyed. When she lifted her lids, she met the deep blue of Turov’s eyes. He watched her drink as if her reaction to his wine mattered more than fire and Brimstone. She lifted her glass for a second sip, to savor and swallow again while he watched. His gaze tracked the movement of her lips and tongue and her throat. His intensity made her flush more than the pleasure of the wine or the effects of the alcohol on an empty stomach.
“You like it,” he said.
Though they danced a dangerous dance of deception, she was stripped to raw honesty by the expression on his handsome face. This. The tasting of the wine between them was not part of her mission or their mutual disguises. Her reaction must be honest and real. His art deserved no less.
“It’s beautiful. Pure pleasure on my tongue. I want to sing—and that is high praise. I haven’t wanted to sing for a long time,” Victoria confessed. This time when she swallowed, she also swallowed emotion. The lovely black cherry flavor lingered as a reminder of her honesty. She hadn’t told anyone the truth about her lack of desire to sing. Not even Katherine.
“You honor my family,” Turov replied.
His voice was rougher. Not as polished. In this moment, his disguise slipped. His face was both harder and more vulnerable. The set of his jaw was a tight line, but one made of marble that could be chipped if she wished it.
This man was the man she’d been sent to harm.
She swayed on her feet as if she’d forgotten to eat before a major dress rehearsal under hot lights. Turov snapped out of his trance. He took her glass and set it on a nearby table, urging her to patio doors that were already thrown wide. They walked through together with his warm hand on her back. Solicitous? Was he the host vulnerable to her enjoyment of his wine? Or nefarious? Was he the damned man who had sold his soul for success? There was no way to tell. Victoria could only step out in the cool air and breathe deeply of rich earth and growing things.
They walked out onto the broad expanse of a decorative-tiled veranda, framed by stone columns and a black slate rail. She leaned against it for support, but also to look out at the vineyards that stretched far into the night. Better to look there than to face her host. How could she read him when she was too afraid of what she might see? She needed to turn him over to the Order. To free their brethren. If he wasn’t a greedy man who had sold his soul for success, who and what was he? She couldn’t afford to care and yet she was intrigued by him. It was as simple as that.
“The Turov family has grown grapes here since they fled the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century,” Turov said. He had come to stand beside her. His profile was strong and proud. Anyone unaware of the Brimstone in his blood would assume he spoke of history rather than from personal experience.
“And you’ve built on what they established,” Victoria said, playing along.
“In Russia, there’s a saying. ‘You live. You learn.’ I have found this to be true,” Turov said.
It was a confession, but one that was revealing only if you knew his Brimstone secret.
He had refined Nightingale Vineyards’s pinot noir since 1918. He. Personally. He had overseen the process of living and learning for one hundred years.
Michael’s father had been much older, but he’d been a daemon, not a man. Standing beside Adam Turov was different. He wasn’t an immortal creature. He was a human whose life had been extended by selling his soul. How? Why? It didn’t matter. It would be wiser to see him as corrupt and leave it at that. She didn’t need to understand him. She needed only to betray him.
“Sometimes I feel as if I’ve missed a few lessons along the way,” Victoria said. “Opera is all-consuming. Life is more complicated. Reality is harder to navigate.”
“You’ll rest here. You’ll recover. There’s something about being surrounded by growing things. It rejuvenates. Even a jaded soul like mine,” Turov said. “Complications fall away. Simplicity reigns.”
She looked at him then. The house blazed with light behind him. The soft haze from a sliver of moonlight came from the cloudless sky. People laughed. A piano played classical jazz while glasses clinked and indistinct conversation whispered all around. She was most vulnerable when she was seduced into thinking it might be possible for her to relax. Always, after, she regretted her weakness. Her greatest enemy wasn’t someone trying to sell her safety and protection. Her greatest enemy was her wanting what they were selling with all her heart.
Nowhere was ever safe. Any haven was a lie. Her life would always be too complicated to set down roots.
“I look forward to relaxing,” she said. She’d played this role a thousand times. The ingénue. Young and naïve. It was impossible to tell what he thought of her performance.
A figure revealed itself, moving in the shadows of the grounds in between the house and the vineyard. From grass to walkway to grass again, the figure crept.
The transformation in Turov was absolute. In a nanosecond, he went from cultured host with a hint of the Carpathians in his voice to a no-nonsense ruler whose California kingdom had been breached.
“Go to your cottage and lock the door. Don’t let anyone in except me,” he ordered.
He easily vaulted over the rail, dropping a story below onto the manicured grass. The party continued behind her while Turov ran across the lawn. The atmosphere was no longer seductively normal. Now, she strained at noises and squinted at shadows.
Before Michael was born, she probably would have obeyed such an order. She was no spy. She was no warrior. Before the fire, she could sing. That was all. And now even that was in question. Instead of going back to her cottage, Victoria moved quickly to the stone staircase that led down to the lawn. She couldn’t afford to be the woman she’d been before she’d become a mother. She’d longed for love. She’d longed for life.
She still longed for those things, but now she wanted them for her baby instead of herself.
She’d recognized the stocky figure of the monk who was following her. She needed to stop Turov before he confronted the careless man, or her mission would be over before it had begun.
* * *
What could be more innocent than strolling through the garden, softly humming under the stars? Her heart pounded. Her steps were hurried and clumsy. She’d chosen her shoes for the party, not for a walk on the loose pebbles of a dimly lit path.
Still, she hummed.
She needed to draw Turov away from the monk.
The tune was scratchy and unused. A few bars from Romeo et Juliet. “Je veux vivre.” “Juliet’s Waltz.” Her hum was rough and unmelodic to her trained ears. She didn’t even know if it would work. She could only try. And pretend her effort was only about distracting Turov from the monk stalking her. The tightness in her chest and the heat of her flushed cheeks against the night air mocked that lie.
She had to keep Turov from finding out why she was here and inadvertently uncovering her ties to the Order of Samuel. She couldn’t allow him to confront or capture her evil stalker.
But she also had to know.
Would her music act as a conduit between her affinity and the power in his Brimstone blood in the same way that Katherine’s cello had called to John Severne?
From the moment when she’d first heard his voice tonight, she had to know.
She’d loved Michael, but his power as a full-blood daemon had completely overshadowed any she might possess. Their relationship had been fast and entirely based upon his fire. She’d been eclipsed and consumed by his daemon light.
And then that light was gone.
She walked and hummed in the darkness because she suspected there was a different sort of light to be found.
To be reclaimed.
Her own.
The night was silent as the soft noise of the party faded behind her. It was foolhardy to go too far into the darkness without telling anyone where she had gone. She wasn’t dressed for a hike. In addition to the handicap of the heels, her dress was thin and the air was chilled. This wasn’t the stage. If something failed, there wouldn’t be a props manager to fix it. If she forgot her lines, there was no prompter to help her. She’d had no rehearsal to prepare for confronting an evil monk alone in a deserted garden...or a damned man for that matter. What if she encountered Turov on the starlit path with no one else around?
The idea frightened her, but not only that—there was also a hint of awakening in her quickened heartbeat and her rusty hum. Its tingle felt like an adventure waiting to happen.
A hard figure crashed into her and a cry replaced her hoarse hum, cut short prematurely by a cruel hand over her mouth. She was held in the hateful grip of the monk who had followed her to Sonoma. She recognized his stocky build and bare head in the moonlight.
“I have a message for you, D’Arcy. From Father Malachi. You met him in Louisiana. I bet you didn’t realize you were talking to the best and brightest of us all. Father Malachi has chosen me to deliver another warning. We are always. We are watching. Do not distract or delay. Free our brothers before Lucifer’s Army comes with the waxing of the moon. You have one month. Or your son will pay the price.” His spittle-fueled voice dampened her ear. She was crushed breathless by his powerful arms. His words and the physical abuse of his bruising hold made her recall the madness she’d seen in his eyes.
“Release her and die,” Turov ordered from the shadows.
Gone was any hint of sophistication.
This was his truth.
He stepped into the soft glow of garden lanterns and starlight. The seriousness of his face was revealed.
Hard.
Fierce.
His jaw was no longer marble, but iron.
Adam Turov reached behind his shoulder and with a metallic rasp he drew a small sword that glinted, sharp and deadly with purpose.
“Remember what I have said,” the monk growled. He flung her away and Victoria fell, but even the sharp sting of gravel against the side of her face didn’t distract from the monk’s surprised scream. It gurgled in his throat and was cut off as his stocky body fell heavily, dead and headless. She heard a light, sickening thump as his decapitated head hit the ground and rolled to rest several feet away. She’d lived a much more violent life than your usual run-of-the-mill opera singer. Would a normal woman have recognized the sounds in the dark?
“I said release her and die. Not or,” Turov clarified softly, as if the dead man might question his semantics.
Victoria shifted to look toward Turov without being obvious. He wiped the blade he’d used on the monk with a pristine white handkerchief, rolling the silky cloth to cover the blood before placing it back in his pocket. Then he sheathed the blade at his back beneath his jacket. When he had finished the practiced moves of cleanup, his sophisticated costume was in place again. He straightened his cuffs and rolled his shoulders before he reached to help her to her feet. The monk didn’t move at all.
“Is he...?” Victoria said, although she knew the answer. The monk was dead.
“He gave up the right to your consideration when he hurt you,” Turov said. “My people will take it from here.”
The Order of Samuel was violent and ugly and murderers, all. And the man she was supposed to best had just dispatched one without a blink of effort.
Turov took her hand and led her back toward the house. She didn’t resist. Suddenly, her bold humming seemed reckless. This was a man with Brimstone in his blood. She couldn’t afford to play games with the affinity that even now made her tremble near him. That awakening in her earlier hadn’t been about anticipating an adventure. It had been a warning.
Adam Turov had killed the monk to protect her. But what would happen to her when he discovered she was on the Order of Samuel’s side against him?
* * *
A little over an hour ago she had left the cottage for a party. Now she returned with blood on her shoes. She didn’t notice the blood until they were inside, and even then not until Turov knelt to take her shoes from numb feet.
“I’m sorry. I’ll replace them,” he said. “I didn’t mean to spoil your shoes.” He tilted one shapely pump this way and that, as if appreciating its curves in spite of the blood. “From several years ago, I think, but I’ll manage.”
She backed away as he left the room to throw the shoes away like some bizarrely opposite Prince Charming. And, yet, he did have charm. Out in the dark, under the stars, with blood dripping from the blade he’d used to save her, he’d been charming as hell.
“You followed me into the garden even though I told you to come back to the cottage. Why?” Turov asked when he returned. He didn’t stop inside the door. He continued with purposeful steps all the way to her. When she backed up at his continued advance, he followed until she bumped up against a bookcase. The scent of aged leather bindings filled the air to pair with Turov’s Brimstone heat.
She wasn’t afraid. Not of him. She was afraid because she refused to be a damsel in distress. No matter how distressing her life became.
“You may not be able to sing, but I heard you humming. I felt it,” he said. “I’ve never felt anything like it before.”
He didn’t touch her.
He didn’t have to.
The heat in his blood did.
The Brimstone that sealed his deal with daemons sang its own song to her music-starved ears. He’d made the choice to barter his soul. He wasn’t a knight in shining armor. Too bad for her that she seemed to prefer much darker heroes.
“It won’t happen again,” she promised.
He leaned down to catch her whispered words. She was sure the breath that propelled them from her lips bathed his. He was close enough to taste with only a tilt or a sigh. She held very still. Apart. Contained. While her former nature urged her to boldly tilt, sigh, move to join him.
She ignored the urge to sing. She refused the desire to touch her mouth to his.
He looked into her eyes. His were brilliant blue, so bright to have seen so much, so clear to have just killed in her name. Where was his damnation hidden? Where was his shame? He looked undaunted and strong and so damn noble it made her ache.
“I hope that’s a lie,” he said. His gaze dropped to her open lips, but he didn’t close the distance. The warmth between them flared until she tasted salty perspiration on her upper lip when she moistened it with her tongue.
His eyes moved to watch the pink flick of her tongue tip. For a second, he seemed almost as if he would dip to claim it. He seemed mesmerized. But he straightened up and backed away before she made the fatal mistake of wanting his kiss enough to make it happen herself.
He blinked. The move was gloriously slow, as if he really had been in a trance and had needed to force himself to lower his lids. When he opened them again, his jaw had hardened and the expression in his eyes had cooled. She could still feel his Brimstone heat, but he was no longer controlled by it.
“Good night, Victoria. I told you that you’d be safe here and I meant it. From every danger,” he said.
* * *
He was shaking with it—anger, desire, the willpower it took to not pick her up and carry her away from the life she’d been forced to lead. His men were already discreetly cleaning up the mess he’d left them in the garden. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to kill one of his “brothers.” The Order was twisted, obsessive, and they never stopped. There were times when it had been kill or be killed, although his primary mission was to capture them and turn them over to the justice of Lucifer’s court. One of the reasons his body quaked from adrenaline overload this time was that capture had ceased to be an option as soon as the evil monk had hurt Victoria.
He was supposed to be a sophisticated vintner with her. No more. No less. But she stoked the fire in his blood until his disguise went up in smoke.
He checked on his men. They had standing instructions. When he saw all was in hand, he turned away to seek sanctuary in his own rooms. What the guests would make of his and Victoria’s early disappearance from the party wasn’t his concern. He needed to wash away the blood and forget the look of fear in her eyes.
She’d pretended not to fully understand what had happened, but a darker knowledge had been in her hazel gaze when she’d trained it on his face.
A spiral iron staircase provided an outside entrance to his private retreat in the house. It was almost hidden by his mother’s roses. She’d loved the climbing vine varieties and he’d continued to have them tended after she was gone. They’d become a profusion of tangles near the staircase where he’d instructed the gardeners to allow them to grow unchecked. In this back corner of the house, he had a bed, bath and study that were completely separated from guest bedrooms. Guests were rarely invited to stay longer than a night. He didn’t run a bed-and-breakfast. He only allowed visitors at all in order to provide an alibi for his actual activities beyond wine making.
As he climbed the familiar treads of the staircase, it wasn’t the Brimstone in his blood that made him see red. His memory called up the image of the petite opera singer in the grip of a madman trained to be merciless. His anger came from the same sense he’d always had of a wrong that needed to be righted—magnified by fury at an innocent’s pain.
Victoria was caught up in a war that wasn’t her making. Just as he’d been as a child.
Adam shed his ruined clothes and left them for a housekeeper he could count on for stoic discretion. She’d seen worse. All his people had. The small sword he wore in a specially made sheath that fit close to his body between his shoulder blades he placed in a hidden compartment in the top of his mahogany dresser. He would clean it later after he’d cleaned himself.
He couldn’t afford empathy for Victoria, this sense of connection to her that shook him to his cursed core.
He told himself this even as he recalled the tense moment when he’d almost given in to the temptation to taste her lips.
Steam filled the bathroom when the cool water hit his Brimstone-warmed skin. Clouds of it rolled and swirled, disturbed by his movements as he scrubbed his hair and his hands. Beneath the soap, he felt his scars as he washed. A familiar reminder of what he’d been through and what he still needed to accomplish with the long life the Brimstone had given him.
Father Malachi was his objective. Finding him, capturing him, delivering him to Lucifer’s court. It wasn’t revenge. It was justice. Not only for the abuse he’d suffered at the obsessive monk’s hands—all in the name of “training”—but also to keep him from harming other children.
This dance with Victoria added another element of challenge to his mission. If she knew he was aware of why she’d come to Nightingale Vineyards, she might become even more determined and reckless to find and free his prisoners before Lucifer’s Army came to claim them. The Loyalists came when the moon was full each month. On that night, he held a party to provide cover for the prisoner delivery. The full moon galas were much larger than the occasional dinner parties held at other times. The gala was a coveted invitation, never more so than in June. To commemorate his mother’s birthday each year, he brought in an orchestra, dancing and a Firebird theme. He needed to keep Victoria in the dark until then, or longer if possible.
And while he kept her in the dark he needed to keep himself under control.
The water became superheated to the point of pain as it ran down his skin. Paired with the stitched wound on his back, the discomfort distracted him from the lush, full red lips he saw every time he closed his eyes. They’d been slightly open, welcoming, even though she’d seen him at his most ferocious.
He’d been trained to be a ruthless killer. Though he’d turned those skills on the men who had made him, he was pretty sure that didn’t negate the fact that they’d created a monster.
It had been dark in the garden and she’d been thrown to the ground with her face in the grass, but she’d seen the blood on her shoes.
And a monster had no right to kiss a woman with the voice of an angel, even if she’d temporarily forgotten how to sing.
Chapter 4 (#u74923b9c-4c95-5f6f-9521-7fcd7cae7a48)
Dressing for breakfast with a man who had decapitated an evil monk for you was more challenging than you might think. Adam Turov had secrets the regular world wasn’t privy to. He’d showed her his true nature for several violent seconds. Now, she either had to pretend she’d been disoriented enough to not fully realize what she’d seen, or she had to risk more honest discussion.
Honesty wasn’t possible between them. Not as long as Michael was in danger.
She’d had wine on an empty stomach after a long trip. She’d been accosted in the garden and her host had helped her. She wouldn’t mention the sword. She wouldn’t mention the blood on her shoes. It would only work if he wanted to maintain his disguise enough to play along.
So, she dressed in a light dress with a soft cashmere sweater and sandals. Very holiday. Much innocent.
She matched her outfit to the embossed invitation that had arrived with a fragrant coffee tray at her cottage door that morning. Semicasual, but elegant and nothing that said, “I saw a man lose his head in the garden last night.”
Her sundress was translucent georgette in white with fine satin polka dots sprinkled in black across the skirt. The dots lessened in number until they disappeared completely at her cap sleeves and the cut flared out softly from a pinched waist and tight bodice. She gathered up her hair in a soft chignon with a clip that allowed wayward tendrils to brush her cheeks.
She couldn’t help it if her expression didn’t match the swingy skirt that swirled against her pale legs as she walked out to meet her host. She couldn’t help that her eyes looked wide and dark, much greener than the usual soft hazel that had to be lined with kohl to show brightly enough onstage.
She followed the directions of the invitation to a—thankfully—different part of the grounds, where a table had been set among the wildly abundant roses. Her low-heeled sandals crunched on the path. The silky rose petals were soft and dewy against her fingers when she reached to brush the blooms as she walked by.
Victoria had to present herself at the table as a regular guest even as she decided how best to explore the estate in secret. So far she’d seen no other evidence of Turov’s activities involving the Order of Samuel. None beyond his aiding her against the monk last night.
She had to pretend she hadn’t seen him in the pale moonlight with a bloody sword or that afterward he hadn’t courteously offered to replace her shoes. How else could she proceed? She knew who and what he was. He might have suspicions about her. But she had to pretend innocence over toast and orange juice.
Luckily, Adam Turov had been living a double life long enough to cover for them both.
He sat at the table sipping his juice from a cut crystal glass. His suit was tailored tight to his broad, lean chest. His black hair was as dark and gleaming as the shine of his jacket’s gabardine. He was freshly shaven. Not a wave of his hair was out of place. His blue eyes glittered mildly in the sun as she joined him.
“Just us?” Victoria asked. She took the only other seat at the table. It was on the opposite end from Turov, giving her a reprieve from his Brimstone heat.
“Yes. No one else is staying with us at this time,” her host said. He used a silver knife to spread butter on a toast point as he spoke. Its blunt blade winked in the sun. The larger sword he’d used last night was a secret best kept in the moonlight.
In the sun, Turov was the picture of sophisticated ease.
Victoria blinked and reached for the pristine linen napkin on her plate. Its swan shape dissolved in her fingers.
“I have a meeting that will tie me up until this afternoon, but I hope to give you a tour at some point during your stay,” Turov said.
“Thank you,” Victoria replied.
Swords and winery tours. She doubted the tour he offered would give her the access she needed to find the monks he’d captured and set them free.
Father Malachi had said that they would use their combined strength to kill Adam Turov once they were freed.
The table was a long rectangle of polished glass with hammered copper legs, but she was still closer to Turov than she should be. She looked away from his direct gaze, uncomfortable with the truths that they weren’t free to discuss that were revealed with eye contact. She noticed movement in the vineyard. Dozens of workers in coveralls were obvious among the greenery. She could see their hands busily tending the vines. Occasionally, they would call out to each other, but mostly they focused on the work of their hands.
“Are they pruning the grapevines today?” she asked.
“It’s time for shoot thinning. Every spring we refocus the energy of the plant. Some of the leaves are removed and most of the buds to encourage uniform flowering. They’ll leave windows in the canopy to allow filtered light to hit the cluster of grapes as it grows. We take great care to ensure proper color development,” Turov explained.
His whole demeanor changed when he talked about his vines. Gone was the sophisticated businessman. But the warrior didn’t take his place. Instead, he was all vintner, an artist who worked with nature to sculpt an exquisite harvest.
“I had no idea the process was so complex,” Victoria said. Her mouth had gone dry. No Brimstone heat necessary. His honest passion for his work was seduction itself.
Oh, she could feel the pull of Brimstone. The table was only eight feet long. Her skin flushed in the sun, but not from its rays. Yet it was more than Brimstone that called her to Turov. He was an artist. And like calls to like.
“We have numerous parcels—vineyard blocks—they all produce a different crush. Different altitudes, different soil types, slightly different sunlight...all influences the flavor of the grapes. I’ll be thinning the shoots of the hillside block later this evening, before dinner. Those vines produce the crush we use to create the Firebird Pinot Noir. If you’d like, you can ride over with Gideon to see how it’s done,” Turov offered.
“Yes. I’d like to see you work,” Victoria said.
Be interested in the grapes and the growing process. God, do not make it about his hands or about seeing him completely honest as he labors in the sun.
She couldn’t avoid him. She had to engage in an odd dance of following him around and keeping her distance. She needed to discover his secrets without revealing her own. But now she had even more to worry about because she was pretty sure natural chemistry was as much a part of her reaction to him as the Brimstone.
She hadn’t meant her gaze to linger on him, but when he abruptly rose and broke eye contact she knew it had. He tossed his napkin on the table and approached her. Her temperature rose with every step. Maybe because of the Brimstone. Maybe not.
She held her breath when he paused beside her chair, but she released it in a shaky sigh when he reached to take her arm gently in his warm hands. He tilted and lifted until the underside of her arm was exposed. Only then did she see what had caught his attention the length of the table away.
Her arm was bruised. The monk’s hands had bitten painfully into her skin. She’d noticed a scrape on her cheek and she’d covered it with makeup, but had missed the marks on her arm, a reminder of the evil fingers that would never pinch and hurt again.
Turov had noticed.
His brow had gone heavy. His jaw hardened into a chiseled stiff line. A hint of his hidden warrior returned.
“You’re hurt,” he said. His thumb brushing her bruised skin was incredibly gentle. A whisper. Shakily, she breathed in and held it as the unexpected sensation of tenderness claimed her.
She looked up at his face. The move was a mistake. Sunlight fell full on her cheek, revealing the mark she’d tried to cover. He lifted his other hand to cup her cheek. Her eyes went wide in a sudden reaction she couldn’t prevent. Her whole body stilled. The magnet of Brimstone urged her to rise and press against him. She had to resist that pull and the added allure of his touch, his concern. Every ounce of self-control she possessed held her in place.
“I promised you safety,” he said. His accent had deepened and strengthened. He traced the scrape on her cheek with his fingers, whisper soft. But she wasn’t fooled. Battle was in his eyes. It waited to be released on anyone who deserved his wrath. She shivered. The warmth of sun and Brimstone didn’t negate the potential for ferocity she’d already seen.
“No one can promise me that. Not even you,” Victoria said.
Her reply broke the spell. He dropped his hand from her face and stepped away. Her body swayed an infinitesimal bit toward him, but she corrected herself before he’d seen. She couldn’t gauge what he’d felt. She could only feel her reaction to their connection. And her control over herself felt tenuous at best.
“You’re probably right. Safety is an illusion. And, yet, I insist it will be so. No more bruises. Your skin...some of us have scars we can never erase, but your bruises will fade and your skin will not be marked again,” Turov said.
He didn’t speak of killing the monk. She didn’t have to pretend she hadn’t seen the sword or heard the head roll away. She covered the bruise on her arm with her opposite hand.
“Please. Don’t bother with pledges. It’s nothing,” she said.
“A line in the sand is everything. It’s how a man is defined. By the limits of what he will allow or withstand. By what we can endure. The mark on your cheek is nothing to you. It’s heresy to me,” Turov said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll let you finish your meal in peace. I’m no fit companion for a civilized meal.”
He fisted his hands as if frustrated he couldn’t kill the monk again for her slight injuries. He turned and walked away, his body in tight lines beneath the tailored suit and his posture determined. She’d been hurt before. Daemon hunting was risky business even for the hunter’s bloodhound. But she couldn’t remember anyone reacting to her bruises the way Adam Turov reacted.
Victoria cooled when he left. The flush in her cheeks drained away until her face chilled. Her entire body cooled until, bereft of his Brimstone heat, she sat shivering in the morning light.
* * *
After she left the table, Victoria returned to the cottage. She changed out of her sundress into more practical celery-green pants that she cuffed above sturdy canvas sneakers. She paired the pants with a snug black T-shirt and a soft loose sweater in complementary green. She wasn’t supposed to care how she looked for Turov. Meeting him in his favorite vineyard block wasn’t a date. To prove it, she did nothing with her hair, leaving it clipped up. She planned to wander around the house and grounds during the day until it was time to meet the vineyard manager at the equipment shed Turov had pointed out to her while they ate.
Victoria expected to encounter servants and staff in the main house, but cool and quiet darkness greeted her with hushed shadows instead. Age showed in the house’s walls, where darkly stained teak wainscoting was topped by richly tinted wallpapers. Upon closer inspection, the textured papers had the faded sheen of silk or satin. Green, pale gold and burgundy tinged with scarlet were prevalent in the varying designs from room to room.
She stepped lightly. Her heartbeat felt obvious in her chest. She hadn’t been invited to tour the house. Around every corner, she expected an unpleasant reaction to her presence. The coolness of the air seemed deserted, empty of any living warmth, but it also held a hint of wood smoke scent that reminded her of Turov. This had been his home for a long time. His scent and the aura of all she touched and saw that belonged to him made her jump at every creaking floorboard and the whispers from each well-oiled door.
She wandered with no interruptions through hallways and rooms filled with framed memorabilia and photographs. Awards, newspaper articles and family photos all in black-and-white. Adam Turov wasn’t in many of them. When had he realized his longevity meant he shouldn’t be photographed?
Victoria found only a few solid hints of him. His tall, lean back and dark cap of black hair were in one photograph with a couple that was probably his parents, although they seemed like his grandparents. The man was in an old-fashioned suit with wide lapels and cuffed trousers. The woman was in a shirtwaist dress with a fabric belt. On her chest was a brooch. Vic leaned in close enough to see that the gem-encrusted pin was in the shape of a bird. They were seated at a table in the garden. She wished the photograph was in color because a large bouquet of dark roses was placed in the center of the table. She imagined they must have been lush and red. The couple looked at Adam with great affection. Not like he was a monster. They’d loved him in spite of the Brimstone.
And he had been all alone since they’d passed away?
An army of servants who seemed to wait on him without direction wasn’t the same as a family that adored him.
Added to the photographs and memorabilia was a vintage collection of birdcages of varying sizes and shapes. Some were quite elaborate, created from a twining of fine metals such as copper and brass. Others were simple and crafted of wrought iron. All of the cages were empty.
All had their doors opened wide.
From the delicate and small to the large and ornate, the cages were so prevalent that they were obviously a beloved collection and not simply a decorative theme. When she saw the myriad of cages in the main house, she remembered that there were several in the cottage as well and she promised herself she’d look closer at them when she returned to her rooms.
It was fitting, actually, for Nightingale Vineyards to have a collection of birdcages, but there seemed to be more to it than that. Especially when she leaned closer to one or two and saw the open cage doors could easily swing close and latch if someone hadn’t decided to keep them open, as if to be sure no bird was ever trapped inside.
The upper stories of the house were silent and still. Hallways branched from the main staircase in a labyrinthine confusion. Occasionally, she heard footsteps and doors open and close. She assumed Turov had many maids in his employ, but she never encountered one. The solitude suited her clandestine intrusion, but it also made her avoid silent shadows that seemed darker than they should be. The house was too big. Too empty. It seemed almost like a museum or mausoleum. Turov had lived long beyond his natural time. There was obviously a price to his longevity beyond the damnation he ultimately faced. Isolation. Loneliness. He lived in a house that must once have known love and laughter, but was now dusty with all humor long forgotten in gray photographs.
Finally, she found a room that drew her curiosity even more than the birdcages. At its heart was a large glass case—the glass waved with age—and within its protection sat a Russian tea service decorated with an elaborate design. The wallpaper throughout the house must have been chosen to complement the tea service with its antique pot and dainty cups. The motif on the porcelain featured an exotic bird with boldly colorful feathers outlined in glimmering gold. The gold also accented the handles and the rims of the cups as well as the curved spout of the pot. The whole service rested on black velvet that was faded and dusty even within its case. It hadn’t been used in a long time. She chose not to disturb it now.
But she did note that an open gilded birdcage was a part of the background design.
On a card table nearby she found a copy of a book with illustrations similar to the tea service. She picked up the volume and found it delicate from frequent use and age. Its spine was cracked. Its cover was worn. It wasn’t dusty under glass. No children lived in the house, but the book wasn’t forgotten. The title page was translated, The Firebird. The rest of the book was in Russian.
Again, she noticed an open birdcage featured on one of the pages.
She would look up the tale on her laptop when she had a chance. For now, she reluctantly put the beautiful book down after quickly skimming through the illustrations.
Victoria explored the rest of the room with more urgency. The book wasn’t abandoned. That meant the room wasn’t as abandoned as it had first appeared, although the chairs were covered with linen sheets gray with age.
Low on an otherwise empty shelf, she found a wooden box carved all over in a design of grapes. She almost glanced over it, but something in its rough, dust-embedded surface called to her. When she opened the lid, she felt more intrusive than she’d felt so far. This had been someone’s keepsake box. It wasn’t meant for her eyes or fingers. Inside, nestled on a bed of scarlet velvet gone pale and worn, she found a ring of keys much like the one Turov had given her for the rose-covered cottage. In fact, exactly like. Her key must have been taken from this set. Only now did she realize the swirled design in the key’s grip was another firebird.
Suddenly, she remembered the woman in the photograph with Turov. His mother. Firebird Pinot Noir was named in her honor. Now, Victoria saw the meaning behind the name. The Russian fairy tale must have been a treasure to her. She’d worn a firebird brooch in the photograph. The tea set had been hers and this must have been her sitting room. The dust everywhere but on the book indicated Turov visited at times to mourn or recall.
Had the birdcage collection been hers as well, and was it somehow tied to the firebird fairy tale?
Her fingers shook when she placed the keys back in the box and put the box back on the shelf. Tears pricked her eyes and shame colored her cheeks. She shouldn’t be here. She might as well have desecrated a tomb. How horrible to outlive the family you loved by decades and more to come. They might be the only people who ever understood his dark secrets. Turov’s mother had loved him as she loved Michael. And Victoria had disturbed the room where he came to sit with long-dead memories.
Briefly, she’d even considered taking the keys.
She should. If one fit her cottage door, the others would unlock other places, maybe even the secret prison she sought. But she couldn’t. Not now. It was too intrusive to contemplate.
Instead, she looked long and hard at the whole room. She adjusted the book on the card table to more closely assimilate its previous position. She couldn’t help the disturbed dust. Best to leave it as it had been found. A place for a son who’d been left behind to grieve.
* * *
The middle-aged manager introduced himself as Gideon. His friendly sun-crinkled eyes and informative banter eased her disappointment after a fruitless day. She’d seen or heard nothing to indicate a clue about where Turov might be holding crazed monks for the devil. His house was cool and shadowed and overwhelmingly empty.
Except for the firebird keys.
Of course, she hadn’t ventured into his private apartment. There were many places she wasn’t free to explore. But the whole dark house had made her feel guilty for her snooping. Especially his mother’s sitting room.
“Please, climb aboard, miss. I’ll drive you over to the hilltop,” Gideon said.
The vehicle was an ATV designed like a miniature pickup truck. It had large tires with deep tread and two rows of side-by-side seats. The small aluminum truck bed currently held a cooler and what seemed to be gardening equipment—rakes, gloves, shears and buckets.
“I’m sorry to add to your chores,” Victoria said. She was glad she’d changed out of her dress into practical clothes. Gideon’s coveralls were belted neatly but she could tell he’d put in a long day.
“I’ve overseen the thinning for years, but I don’t often get to drive such pleasant visitors through the rows. Happy to do it,” Gideon said. He grinned and Victoria couldn’t help smiling back.
“You must have known Mr. Turov for a long time?” Victoria asked as the ATV bumped along. Gideon was explaining that the cover crops grown to fight erosion between rows had been recently mowed. The rainy season was over. Drier weather and approaching summer meant moisture needed to be directed toward the grapevines instead.
“No. No one knows Mr. Turov. He’s a private man. But he’s a good man. I haven’t always been a grower. My life before I came to Nightingale Vineyards was a very different sort of life,” Gideon said as he cut the wheel so that they were bumping over different terrain. “I owe Mr. Turov a great debt. I’m honored to repay it every day in these rows. He gave me the sun. I give him my hands and my back in return.”
He spoke so warmly of Turov that Vic was taken aback. She tried to absorb what he said and what he’d left unsaid. How had Turov given him the sun?
They left the gentle roll of the main vineyard behind in order to curve up and around a rise. The sun was low on the horizon. It painted everything it touched in a gold wash of color. Other crews were finishing for the day. She could see them piling into other ATVs and tractors in the distance.
“You’ll ride back with Mr. Turov. He has his own vehicle. There he is now,” Gideon said.
She could see the tall outline of Turov’s form silhouetted by the glow of the sun.
“Most of the maintenance on the hilltop is done by hand. There isn’t room for equipment. Mr. Turov oversees much of it himself. This was his mother’s parcel. The Firebird is named after her,” Gideon explained. “From her favorite Russian tale.”
He stopped at the base of an even steeper slope. The vineyard rows extended up in diagonal alleys from the path where he parked beside another ATV long enough for her to exit. Turov didn’t come to meet them. After raising his hand to salute his foreman, he bent to continue his work. Victoria climbed from the mini truck and thanked Gideon.
“Please, take the cooler. Cook sent some refreshment. Mr. Turov never rests as he should. He’s a driven man. These grapes are his obsession,” Gideon said.
Victoria didn’t argue. She suspected Turov had much darker obsessions, ones that would shock Gideon and Cook.
“Good night and thank you,” she said. Gideon waved as he drove away.
Victoria stood for a few moments as she noticed several large windmills spinning on steel posts. There didn’t seem to be enough wind to make the red blades move. The air was rapidly cooling and still. She placed the cooler in the last remaining ATV and climbed the hill toward where Turov was working. He didn’t look her way. He continued to tend to the vines with flying fingers.
That’s what she noticed. Deft manipulation of small pruning shears had leaves raining down at his feet.
She’d seen a Japanese bonsai trimmed once at a garden show. This reminded her of that meticulous attention to detail on a grander scale. The vines seemed perfect to her. Not a stem out of place. And yet tendril by tendril across hundreds of acres would be carefully groomed to maximize and perfect this year’s harvest.
“You can see the flowerings. Those will be our grapes. I’m making sure each bunch will receive optimal filtered light. There was a rainfall and a heavy mist this morning and temperatures will fall tonight.” He paused and glanced at her, his nimble fingers stopping their work. “I saw you looking at the fans. They’ll dry the moisture to ensure it doesn’t freeze.”
“I thought they were spinning too quickly to be windmills,” Victoria said.
“Windmills would need to be taller to catch the breeze. These fans are motorized and low enough to optimally dry the vines. We’ve made it almost to the end of the rains. That’s always a relief. You probably noticed Gideon was happy. We didn’t lose any crop this year,” Turov said.
How could this man so proud of his vines be in league with daemons? Had his passion for grapes come before or after he sold his soul?
Unlike Gideon, Adam Turov wasn’t dressed in coveralls, but he wasn’t in a suit or tuxedo either. He wore a flannel button-down shirt that he’d rolled at the sleeves. If possible, his chest looked broader and his bare arms were as muscular as she’d suspected from the athletic grace of his movements. A ring of keys attached to his belt rattled as he worked. They looked solid, worn and timeless, like the man they belonged to. They were much simpler than the firebird keys she’d seen when she was exploring the house, but she suspected the two sets unlocked many of the same doors around the estate.
The keys drew her attention again and again. Her instincts were much better at espionage than she was.
She’d watched him kill a man, pour wine and swirl a crystal glass, and now she watched him coaxing abundance from a growing thing. Would the real Adam Turov please raise his hand? Her chest tightened because it didn’t matter. She was uncomfortable lying to all three.
“Would you like to try?” he asked.
He’d paused again. Victoria took the pruning shears he offered. He watched her mimic his movements on the next section of vine. More tentative, but she’d watched what he did and he nodded when she did well.
Snip-snip-snip.
He was right beside her.
The soft wind from the fans blew his scent to her face—soap, sunshine, clean sweat and a hint of wood smoke. The hair that waved at the nape of his neck was damp.
“My mother tended this parcel. It was hers. She preferred the low yield of the hilltop. The hand manipulation. She was from a simpler time. To do a job right, you must feel it. Get your hands dirty. There’s a density to the crush from this hilltop. It’s tannic in youth, but becomes intensely smooth with age,” Turov said.
“Like velvet on the tongue,” Victoria added.
She shouldn’t have. Her voice was huskier than usual. Influenced by his nostalgia, his nearness and the Brimstone pull between them. He reached for the shears. The sun had almost fully set. They stood in the twilight. It was too dark to work now. In this light, you might cut off more than you intended.
“I asked Gideon to send a bottle so you could taste the Firebird, here, where it’s grown. There’s nothing like breathing the air that has infused it with flavor as you taste the wine itself,” Turov said. He dropped the shears in a bucket and led her back to the path.
She dusted her hands off and followed. She tried not to obsess about the keys on his belt and what they meant she had to do. Hadn’t she known even when she’d left his mother’s keys in the box? She wasn’t free to choose between right and wrong. Respecting his mother’s sitting room meant leaving Michael in danger.
He placed the bucket of tools in the back of the ATV and retrieved the bottle of wine from the cooler.
This was intimate. The wine he’d made surrounded by the vines he’d tended with his own hands. When he released the cork with fingers stained green from his work, Victoria felt a pull stronger than Brimstone. And her intentions toward the firebird keys burned her cheeks.
“Doesn’t it need to breathe?” she asked.
He reached into the cooler and handed her two glasses.
“This is perfectly aged. Its tannic levels are low. Pouring correctly into the glass is the only aeration Firebird needs,” Turov said.
He poured into the centers of the glasses, allowing the rich, red liquid to fall from a height of eight inches. She was holding her breath. She allowed it to sigh from her lips as he placed the bottle on the tailgate and reached for the glass in her right hand.
“Now. Enjoy,” he said.
She couldn’t help it. She watched him first. The swirl of the liquid in the glass. The deep inhalation as he enjoyed its bouquet. Then the pleasure that suffused his face when he sipped from the glass and savored the wine on his tongue. She allowed his enjoyment to distract her from her duplicitous intentions for the keys hidden back at the main house.
The pleasure he took in his first sip was incredibly sensual.
Her knees went weak with his obvious care and pleasure. So like he might be in bed savoring other things. She copied him with less finesse, but as she’d experienced the night before, even a novice could appreciate this spectacular pinot noir. Its fruity, velvet spice exploded on her tongue.
The Brimstone burn of his blood was a constant seduction of her senses, but she was as seduced by the vintner as she was by his daemon heat. She sipped as the darkest night settled around them. The full moon was a month away. She had only a few weeks to save Michael. Turov turned the headlights of the ATV on and they were oddly illuminated in brilliance and strangely cast shadows.
The wine didn’t mellow the burn. It softened her resistance to the Brimstone’s pull. She couldn’t deny the answering coil of heat low in her stomach that had nothing to do with rich grapes and everything to do with damnation. Her affinity for Brimstone damned her to be drawn to the one man she couldn’t afford to desire.
But the desire was so warm compared to the cold fear she’d been running on for too long. She was able to push thoughts of keys and what they might unlock from her mind too easily.
The bold Victoria she’d been before the fire stirred deep in her breast. That Victoria would have taken one wine-flavored kiss in the green-scented night. That Victoria would have taken much more from this mysterious, dangerous man. Not in spite of his darkness, but because of it.
She’d lived a dark life plagued by the Order of Samuel. Never simple. Never free. Was it any wonder she was drawn to a man who could match her shadow for shadow? A man who had still managed to root himself in the rich California soil?
As if he read her mind, Turov took her glass. Their fingers didn’t brush, but she could feel the warmth of his even without contact. Hers tingled, but she didn’t reach out. She fisted them instead. He didn’t offer her another glass of wine. He put the bottle and the glasses back into the cooler. They hadn’t touched the chocolate or cheese.
“I need to drive you back to the house. I have more business to attend to this evening. I won’t be in for dinner,” Turov said.
There was no door to open, but he stood by the side of the vehicle as she took her seat instead of crossing around to take his. He placed both hands on the roll bar frame above her head. Her body recognized his pause as he lingered. Her heartbeat sped up. Her breath quickened. The warmth of her affinity to his Brimstone caused her skin to flush. She looked up at him. In the odd light, her high color might be disguised. Could he feel her body temperature rise even as the night cooled down around them?
“Velvet on the tongue,” he said softly.
She nodded. Not to confirm her earlier thoughts on the texture of pinot noir. The slight affirmative tilt of her head was a bigger confession. Even in this light, she could see the direction of his gaze. Her lips.
Turov leaned in and she held very still. He continued to hold the roll bar above her head, but he allowed himself to move just enough to softly capture the lips he focused on. The press of his mouth was no more than a sigh against hers. He held himself back. She could sense his control. The warrior was caged, the damned man was daunted, the vintner was striving for an air of casual pleasure the other two would belie.
His lips were soft, as gentle as his hands had been when he’d touched her that morning. But the second they grazed hers once, twice, teasing tastes, his lips slightly open so his moist, wine-sweetened breath met and mingled with her sigh of reaction—that second of contact caused her entire body to tense.
Her diaphragm tightened. Her lungs expanded. Her vocal cords tingled with unsung notes. He brought something to life in her with the barely there kiss. With the slightest pressure, with the slightest contact, he awakened something so long dormant she’d thought it might be dead and gone.
Her whole body trembled as she parted her lips to meet the next brush of his and he noticed her quickening. He still held the roll bar, but even in the deepening night she could see his knuckles begin to whiten as the strength of his grip increased.
He didn’t pull back, but he didn’t touch her with anything other than his lips. He didn’t take more though he could have. He didn’t deepen the contact. A deepening would have scorched them both. When her tongue lightly touched his, offering an instinctive invitation to take more, they both stiffened as Brimstone heat flared between them with the sudden arc of electric shock.
He did ease back then. He looked down at her with shadowed eyes. The headlights illuminated the path in front of the ATV, but it cast the seats and their bodies in garishly outlined shadows now that night had fallen.
“I promised you’d be safe. This isn’t safe. Far from it,” Turov said.
His accent had thickened, as if emotion affected his ability to control it. Suddenly, she wanted those Russian inflections murmured against her ear while his body pressed against hers.
As if he read her mind, Turov let go of the roll bar and stepped back. His longevity hadn’t moldered his emotions or his passion. If anything, he was filled with a concentrated need for human contact that had been distilled from years of being isolated from normality. Victoria licked her sensitized lips, tasting the hint of perspiration he’d left there from the moist swell of his upper lip. The heat that radiated from him touched deep to her core and spread outward, but it also called forth energy within herself. All from the slightest taste, the merest touch. She could only imagine what deeper kisses and less controlled embraces would...no she couldn’t imagine. She wouldn’t allow her aroused senses to go there.
“I should go back to the house,” she said. It was as much a confession as a request. She could see the war in him. The stiffness of his broad shoulders. His clenched fists. He held himself back even though he’d let the roll bar go.
Michael’s father had swept her defenses away. This was different. This was mutual. Her sensual power rose up to meet Turov’s. Their bodies were drawn to each other.
“You should. I should,” he agreed.
And still they paused under the glittering stars that winked to life in the blue-black Sonoma sky. Her affinity and his Brimstone blood were held at bay by sheer force of will. She was grateful for the shadows. Sunshine would have revealed how badly she wanted to succumb. She wanted to touch, taste and sing in his arms. To revel in the forbidden awakening she’d unexpectedly found on a mission that was cold as ice.
Would she see an answering hunger in his eyes? To forget his daemon deal in her arms? It was best if she didn’t know.
Finally, he broke the standoff. He chose the best course for sanity and retreated to the driver’s side of the ATV. While he slid in behind the wheel, Victoria tried to calm her breathing. She willed her heartbeat to slow. She needed to take advantage of this weakness she’d found in Adam Turov. He desired her. Of that she was certain. The connection between them didn’t lie. But how could she seduce him into revealing his secrets before she was seduced herself?
Chapter 5 (#u74923b9c-4c95-5f6f-9521-7fcd7cae7a48)
Turov drove through the darkening vineyard. They were in shadow while the lights of the ATV cut a wavering swath ahead of them, illuminating the path between rows. Only the edges of young greenery were distinct in the light, the rest of the vineyard was only a thousand acres of dark twining mystery around them.
He didn’t speak again. No doubt he regretted the kiss and was focused on whatever his plans were for the night ahead. Meanwhile, Victoria burned. It wasn’t until he pulled into the pebbled drive as near to her sheltered cottage as the riotous garden allowed that she saw his hands on the wheel.
The soft garden lights revealed a white-knuckled grip.
The ATV came to a stop and she was caught in a pause created by the emotion his grip betrayed. He was a dangerous man, but she was a danger to him as well. For seconds, the potential for exploring that danger hung hotly in the cool air between them.
“Good night, Victoria,” Turov said, his accent thicker with strain.
His decision to resist prodded her to break temptation’s trance. She tumbled quickly from the vehicle to make up for her telling pause.
He pulled away almost as soon as her feet hit the ground and her answering “Good night” was lost in the crunch of rock beneath tires. He headed back toward the equipment shed where lights revealed the activity of evening after the vineyard’s busy day. The bustle there only served to make the garden path where she stood seem too deserted and quiet.
The main house loomed darker than ever now that she’d explored its age and emptiness. She was glad to walk toward the smaller cottage and the welcoming scent of roses.
But she wasn’t alone.
She hesitated between one path and another, uncertain which would lead her in the direction she needed to go, and during that hesitation she heard a furtive step. Only one. The other person in the garden had stopped mere seconds after her. They waited somewhere behind her. And waited. The quiet seemed to swell, impregnating the atmosphere with unease. A normal garden visitor would have continued to walk, would have said hello.
Victoria resumed her walk because she didn’t want to reveal her fear. She acted unconcerned. She tried to move at the same speed. She didn’t look over her shoulder. But she did pause suddenly when she came through the hedge to the cottage’s clearing. Once again, she heard what might be the shuffle of a follower who hurriedly matched her movements, pause for pause.
She slowly fished the cottage key from her pocket to excuse her stop, then she proceeded to the dimly lit stoop. If she hurried, if she didn’t fumble with the old skeleton key, if the antique latch didn’t drag, maybe she could get inside and lock the door back against whoever was behind her.
But that plan evaporated when she reached the stone stoop of the cottage. Someone had left something there in a scattered pile. She pulled her phone from her pocket and illuminated the stoop to find a profusion of pale, dried flower petals that a breeze disturbed just enough for her to recognize because she’d seen ones like them in the park in Louisiana. Someone had left a pile of crinkled cherry blossoms for her to find. These had gone to a darker pink as they’d withered and dried.
She didn’t look over her shoulder. She could feel a malicious presence there. Perhaps a presence brazen enough to have come out of the cover of the hedges to stand boldly in the clearing. If she turned, she might see another monk from the Order of Samuel sent to deliver this threatening message of flower petals.
“I haven’t forgotten why I’m here. I don’t need the reminder,” she said.
Still she didn’t turn, but she did kneel and gather up the petals because she had lied—she did need the reminder. She’d been too easily swept up in the dramatic story of Turov’s past, his family, the obsession he had for his vines—a thousand acres of roots when she’d never managed to put down a single one.
Sybil and Grim hid and protected Michael, but for how long? She could blame the affinity for the distraction from her mission, but she wouldn’t. Turov would be seductive to her, affinity or not. Now that she understood this, she could fight temptation.
Once she’d gathered the dried petals in the hem of her shirt, the step on the path resumed without subterfuge. This time her stalker moved away from her with loud crunches of gravel on the path. The loud movement seemed a mockery of her fear. She used her key, and if her life had depended on using it quickly she would have died on the stoop. Her fingers were clumsy. She clutched the flower petals in her shirt and unlocked the door at the same time so neither move went well. Dried bits of blossoms fell all around and the latch protested as she clanked and clanked the key, trying to find the sweet spot for the tricky tumblers. Finally, she made it into the cottage and closed the door. She slid the bolt home and leaned against it. But her tension didn’t ease. Because now she knew what she had to do while Turov was away for the evening.
* * *
She placed the dried cherry blossoms in a jar on the vanity in her room. She needed the constant reminder. She wasn’t on a luxurious Sonoma vacation where she was free to sympathize with her dark and dangerous host. She had a job to do. She had a son to save. Turov had beheaded the monk who had followed her from Louisiana, but there were more where he came from. The Order had an endless supply of zealots.
She might never be free, but she had to try.
For Michael.
Turov had said he had plans for the evening. Before he kissed her. And the kiss was irrelevant. She had to focus on her mission. He had left the estate. She’d picked over a dinner tray sent from the kitchen while she’d waited and watched. Finally, she saw his low, lean luxury sedan—a vintage one—pull away to be swallowed by the night highway that led to Santa Rosa.
She wasn’t here to play.
She’d already changed into black jeans and a dark gray long-sleeve T-shirt to better blend with shadows. She intended to make her way to the sitting room that held the box full of firebird keys and then get back to her cottage before anyone, especially her host, was the wiser.
The garden was ghostly, lit by a sliver of moon and ambient lanterns turned low at midnight. She tried not to wonder if her stalker still lurked behind bushes that had taken on eerie animal-like shapes in the night. There a hunched antelope leaped and beneath its belly was a man-size black hollow. Here a grotesque ape with arms raised high could easily hide a man behind its enormous back.
Straight to the sitting room. Straight back.
The door opened at her touch and her first fear—that of being locked out—faded. The only activity she discerned as she entered the back passage was in the distant kitchen where the cook cleaned and prepped for the next day.
She held thoughts of Michael close as she hurried to the stairs at the front of the house. She crept up them, unable to prevent the occasional creak. A few lamps had been left on. Their Tiffany shades disbursed the glow in jewel tones that matched the walls and the firebird tea set no one had touched for decades—green, gold, amber, burnt red.
Victoria tried not the think of love and loss when she made it to the room again. Only then did she risk her cell phone light to penetrate the gloom.
The book had been moved.
Somehow she’d known. Maybe it was a daily habit for Turov to come here and flip through its pages. Had he noticed anything amiss? Was it foolish to stage a repeat visit so soon?
It was too late to back out now. She hurriedly scanned the room to make sure an angry Russian didn’t lie in wait to capture her. Then she bent to open the box and grab the keys. She was too quick. The keys rolled together, making a noise that seemed thunderous in the quiet house. She closed the box and shoved the keys into her pocket.
A mother would understand.
She had to pass Mrs. Turov’s photograph on the way out. She was sure the woman who had watched her son burn would have understood why Victoria had to tiptoe into her memorial to take the keys. It was wrong to take them, but to save her son she would do worse before the month was over.
The estate was massive. Finding where Turov held the monks would be a needle-in-the-haystack task, but the keys were a start. Seeing Turov’s set and finding the cherry blossom warning had showed her the course she had to follow.
Though she’d only been in the house fifteen minutes, it seemed to take far longer to make her way out than it had to make her way in. A whistle down one hallway caused her to hold her breath and crouch for long moments on the first landing. A maid passed, carrying a basket of folded laundry. Victoria moved again when the woman turned the corner away from her. The stairs seem to protest her downward path even more loudly than they’d protested her upward one.
But she made it outside without running into a soul.
Unfortunately, before she could even take a relieved breath of night air, she ran into a man who had sold his soul long ago.
* * *
Turov wasn’t wearing a tuxedo or a suit. His casual work clothes were gone as well. He wore black as she did, and she suspected for the same reason. Only a glimmer of eyes and teeth showed well in the garden light. Unlike the dark clothes she’d found from an ordinary wardrobe, his outfit looked made for the night. His black uniform was strategically fortified with leather quilting in vital areas such as chest, abdomen and thighs. It hugged his muscular form like a second skin.
She’d suspected he was athletically built and she’d been right, although she couldn’t have guessed how lean and hard because she’d never seen this kind of body in real life. Not even her sister’s husband, John Severne, who was obsessively fit from two hundred years of daemon hunting could possibly be this lethally made.
Victoria took in his appearance in seconds. The broad shoulders and hard arms above a trim waist and equally sculpted legs. He took in her appearance just as fast, just as well. Did her outfit scream cat burglar? Did the bulge of keys in her pocket show in the shadows?
“I thought you were going out for the night,” Victoria said. Her voice was too breathless. Adrenaline robbed her lungs of their usual power.
“I did. I finished sooner than I expected. I didn’t have to travel as far as I intended,” he said.
She risked a glance at his face, but he didn’t meet her eyes. Was that blood in his hair?
They’d been moving quickly enough that he put up his hands to catch her arms when they almost collided. Through the light material she could feel each of his fingers scorch. She looked down, surprised they didn’t glow with Brimstone embers. Then she looked up. His eyes were closed, almost as if he was in pain.
“You should be inside. It’s safer,” Turov said.
“Safer than here? In the garden? With you?” Victoria asked.
He held her, but not close enough. The wide expanse of his chest was a foot away. She wanted to press against it, to feel his Brimstone heart beat against her cheek. Only with effort did she swallow the hum rising in her throat like a morning dove that sensed the dawn.
“Yes. Definitely safer. You should keep a locked door between us,” Turov murmured, almost to himself. He relaxed his elbows. Her body immediately swayed toward him of its own volition. He allowed it. She allowed it. Long, heated seconds of her body leaning lightly against his. In forbidden time, it was an eternity. In real time, it was less than a minute. But it felt like the most intimate thing she’d ever done because he wasn’t a man that allowed any intimacy at all.
She tried to soak in his Brimstone heat, his hardness, his smoky masculine scent that was somehow also green and earthy and fresh. A song rose within her, but it was a song she couldn’t allow herself to sing.
Victoria stepped back and he let her go.
“Good night, Adam,” she said.
She retreated several steps and then she turned to the warmly lit cottage. She assumed Turov moved away as well. She didn’t look back to watch him go. She concentrated on placing one foot after another. She walked away. It was a triumph of willpower. She made it into the cottage and shut the door behind her. It was a testament to Turov’s heat that the cozy fire that greeted her seemed cold.
* * *
Adam strode to his spiral staircase and climbed to his rooms. Every step felt like a lie. Victoria beckoned. She called to him, a siren in a storm-tossed sea, and it would be just as disastrous for him as an unwary sailor if he heeded her song.
Damnation.
Adam braced himself as unbidden memories assailed him.
He’d had a taste of spring that morning so many years ago. He could recall the crisp bite of it still. It had expanded his lungs with a chill that shivered happily along his spine. Outside the Order of Samuel’s compound, the mountain had been coming alive with tender green grasses and wildflowers. He’d walked around the struggling patches of color, inspired, but also frightened by their precarious hold on new life. A killing frost or a late snow at this elevation would end their struggle.
He had identified.
How many times had he tried to run away from the Order, getting a taste of life and freedom only to have it cut short when they dragged him back to the enclave?
Malachi said he’d been taken in too late. Most novitiates were stolen from the cradle or gathered in before they could barely walk and talk. But Adam had been nine when he’d been “adopted.” He’d been stolen on a market day by a monk who’d taken advantage of the chaos and crowd to snag a healthy youth. Adam had been old enough to remember his mother and father and the lessons they had taught that had been so very different from the lessons that the Order tried to supplant them with.
He remembered one failed escape more vividly than all the rest. That morning so long ago he’d breathed the fresh air deeply into lungs that were weakened from a long, damp winter. He’d known he might fail again, but at sixteen he’d been ready to try rather than be buried alive beneath evil zealotry. Malachi hadn’t been able to beat away the memory of his mother’s face or his father’s strict but fair hand. Malachi’s lash was cruel rather than strict. And there was nothing fair about being pressed into an Order of merciless killers.
The mother’s milk of this mountain orphanage was blood.
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Barbara Hancock
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Stranger, Seductress or His Salvation?One hundred years ago, Adam Turov, master of Nightingale Vineyards, bartered his soul for freedom from the Order of Samuel and their Rogue daemon allies. But he didn’t know true damnation until Victoria D’Arcy crossed the billionaire vintner’s threshold. . . Sworn to protect her, Adam must deny every fibre of his being to resist a voice that sounds like an angel and her potent charm.An unwilling pawn of the Order, Victoria must betray Adam to save her young son. Yet the more time she spends at his estate on her clandestine mission, the harder it becomes to deny the Brimstone heat scorching a path of desire between them…