Jane Kindred - Kindling The Darkness

He wants redemption...

She only knows damnation

Oliver Connery left a secret paramilitary group because he couldn’t stand the thought of torturing supernatural beings. Lucy Smok’s mission is to send infernal creatures back where they came from. When Lucy learns that Oliver has been harboring hellhounds, she wants to think of him as an enemy—and Oliver wants to think the same of her. But their feelings for each other are another story...

JANE KINDRED is the author of the Demons of Elysium series of m/m erotic fantasy romance, the Looking Glass Gods dark fantasy tetralogy and the gothic paranormal romance The Lost Coast. Jane spent her formative years ruining her eyes reading romance novels in the Tucson sun and watching Star Trek marathons in the dark. She now writes to the sound of San Francisco foghorns while two cats slowly but surely edge her off the side of the bed.

Also by Jane Kindred

Sisters in Sin

Waking the Serpent

Bewitching the Dragon

The Dragon’s Hunt

Seducing the Dark Prince

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk

Kindling the Darkness

Jane Kindred

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08213-6

KINDLING THE DARKNESS

© 2018 Jane Kindred

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

Version: 2020-03-02

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For the freaks who suspect we could never love

anyone…and just need someone to save us from

ourselves. (With thanks to Aimee Mann,

who expressed it so eloquently.)

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Extract

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

A timeless monument to spiritual devotion—and a 1950s architectural marvel that somehow managed not to insult the majesty of the burnished sandstone buttes into which it was wedged but to grace them—Sedona’s Chapel of the Holy Cross wasn’t where you might expect the gates of hell to open. But open they did, for a few brief moments on one gorgeous midnight last spring. On Lucy Smok’s twenty-fifth birthday, to be exact. Funny thing, though, about opening the gates of hell to let something in: stuff got out. And it was Lucy’s responsibility to round up the wayward “stuff” that escaped and put it back in. Cleaning up after Lucien. As usual.

Not that it was really his fault this time. It was their father who’d traded her twin’s soul to the devil. And when Edgar Smok died, the bill had come due. Lucien’s transformation into an infernal being had opened the gates until his descent to rule the nether realm closed them. In that brief interim, the path between the nether realm and this one had been a two-way street.

Dozens of hell beasts were now running amok.

The one she’d tracked this evening—or rather, early this morning—wore a female skin suit: a haggard-looking twentysomething waitress at a greasy spoon, dishwater-blond hair slipping out of a limp ponytail and into her eyes as she took Lucy’s order. She was such a cliché that she had to be infernal.

Lucy had tracked the fugitive with a little help from the thousand-year-old Viking who happened to be dating Lucien’s sister-in-law. Leo Ström was the chieftain of the Wild Hunt, and the instincts of the Hunt wraiths under his command functioned like a metaphysical GPS, homing in on any vicious killers in the area. As much as Lucy hated the idea of them, connections among the not-quite-human came in handy for her present mission. And Theia Dawn, Lucien’s wife, had an entire family of not-quite-human connections. The Carlisle sisters, who claimed the demoness Lilith as their ancestor, seemed to attract it.

Lucy had other means of finding infernal fugitives, of course. As the CFO of Smok International and its subsidiaries, Smok Biotech and Smok Consulting—as well as its acting CEO in Lucien’s absence—she had access to the world’s most sophisticated database for tracking and logging unnatural creatures. But the fugitives from hell weren’t in any database, and those that hadn’t made themselves obvious through their sheer audacity in attacking humans right out of the gate, so to speak, were extremely good at blending in with the human population and keeping a low profile.

The stop at the coffeehouse had been serendipitous. After losing the trail, Lucy had taken a break to refuel, and the little downstairs café was the only thing open this early in the morning. She hadn’t been sure until the waitress brought her order. A telltale flick of the woman’s tongue at the corner of her mouth accompanying a rapid eye blink had given her away as a reptilian demon. Anyone else would have missed it. The demon saw Lucy’s recognition in the same instant, eyes widening with alarm.