Barbara Hancock - Brimstone Seduction

“We need more time to negotiate,” he said as if they sat at a boardroom table. “I can arrange that.”

She’d seen Reynard fight before, but when the energy she’d sensed in Severne erupted, the ferocity of his clash with her lifelong tormentor took her by surprise.

Reynard was in trouble.

Severne used only his body—fists, feet, arms and legs—but he used them in a graceful dance of martial arts moves meant to be deadly. The tuxedo he wore was revealed inch by inch as his coat was shredded away by Reynard’s blade.

John Severne was in trouble, too.

When a particularly vicious slice cut the fabric away from his muscled chest to reveal a hard, sculpted body, she blinked the sight away, but not before she cringed at the dark rivers of his blood.

After Reynard, there was always the desperate flight and the need to hide again. This time she’d flee for two. For the first time, she imagined what it must have been like for her mother to protect them from the obsessed monk. It had been a lost cause. But she had never stopped trying.

“We have to go,” she said to the boy. The fight was the diversion they needed to get away. She pulled him up into her arms again and ran. He clung to her this time, wrapping his legs around her waist and his arms around her neck, subdued by all he’d seen.

* * *

The absence of her cello made her ache. It wasn’t a missing limb. It was a missing chamber of her heart. There was nothing to be done. She couldn’t go back for it. She had gone to her apartment for a few necessities, but had sought shelter in the house of a friend who was out of town rather than risk Reynard knowing her current address. She moved often. It never mattered.

He always found her eventually.

While the boy slept, she looked up driving directions to Baton Rouge. She couldn’t ignore her concern for Victoria any longer. They’d been out of touch too long, and Reynard’s appearance only confirmed her fear. Urgency pounded in her temples to no avail. She couldn’t fly because she had no papers for the child. He wouldn’t even give her his name. If Reynard defeated the daemon, he would hunt her down. She didn’t have much time to save the daemon boy and find her sister. She’d called Victoria’s phone again and again. The cheery voice mail greeting became more ominous with every repeat. And what of John Severne? Had he ended up with his throat slashed and Brimstone-burned back to wherever he’d come from, or did she need to fear him as well as Reynard?

“Let me take the boy,” he’d said.

But every fiber in her body had resisted. It was her fault Reynard had found the boy’s mother. It was her responsibility to protect him.

The boy had refused to talk, but he’d seemed to understand everything she’d said. He’d also refused to let her out of his sight until he finally fell asleep. His dark lashes against his chubby cheeks gave him an angelic mien against his borrowed pillow. She’d smoothed his soft hair back from his forehead to kiss it, finding the extra warmth beneath his skin pleasant instead of frightening.

After that, the loss of her cello didn’t matter.

She’d curled her legs under her in a nearby armchair, determined to watch over the boy through the night.

But a noise outside interrupted the tea she’d made to calm herself. It had been cooling untouched anyway. She’d been replaying every word Severne had spoken. She’d even closed her eyes to remember the song of his voice, to gauge what was the truth about the daemon—his drawl or the deadly way he’d used his whole body as a weapon. His anger or the way he’d restrained his impatience with her resistance.

At the sound of a step on the front porch, she rose from the chair beside the boy’s bed.

She didn’t know whom she most feared to see.

It was ridiculous to feel gratitude to a stranger for his help when he might have his own daemonic designs on her family. The name Severne couldn’t be a coincidence. She hadn’t heard from her sister since Victoria had gone to the Théâtre de l’Opéra Severne in Louisiana, and Kat had felt the heat from Severne’s Brimstone-tainted blood.

She’d been desperate to defy Reynard, and for the first time she had, openly and with no regret, but she’d been successful only with the stranger’s help.

The shotgun colonial had creaky floors and high-ceilinged rooms. Kat moved along the edge of the hall where the boards were more firmly nailed to diminish the sound of her feet on the floor. The peach chiffon of her soiled and torn gown swirled around her legs. She hadn’t wanted to leave the frightened boy alone long enough to change, and now she padded downstairs on bare feet, pausing only long enough to pick up a bronze statue. It was a cherubic angel.

Her friend’s decor held an irony she was too tired to appreciate.

“Did you know your ability to detect daemons works both ways? They’re drawn to you like moths to a flame,” a familiar voice said. Her memory recalled the exact inflections and the intimate way he drawled certain vowels, low as if in a register she felt more than heard. Musical. His voice was musical.

Severne.

He came through the front foyer painted by shadows and soft light.

The door had been locked, but that fact seemed distant. As if she’d expected the bolt to be nothing to him. She feared him. She feared what his intentions might be. But there was a song in his accent she couldn’t help appreciating. His voice called to something deep inside her, making her fingers itch to play.

All the lamps had been extinguished. The light from an open laptop and the streetlights outside still didn’t fully reveal the daemon’s face, but they did reveal the familiar shape of her cello case in his hand.

He came toward her with no hesitation, completely undaunted by the statue in her hand until he was only inches away...until she could feel his Brimstone heat. Again, the heat wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, in the air-conditioned chill of the unfamiliar house, she could almost lean into Severne’s heat if she allowed herself to be lulled by his song or relieved that she wouldn’t have to fight Reynard to protect the child...yet.

“Judging by body temperature, you’re mistaken about which of us is the flame in that scenario,” Kat said.

She’d never had a conversation with a daemon. It was wrong. Against everything she’d ever been told or taught. The trouble was, it was also exhilarating. Part of her was still all adrenaline from the way the night had played out. She should have been shaky and over it. Ready to hide behind Tchaikovsky and Wagner as safe excitements she could easily handle.

Instead, a part of her wanted to jump off a ledge again with this flaming parachute she’d been given and enjoy the burn all the way down.

Could he sense her exhilaration? How it barely edged out fear? Could he tell she trembled when he moved a little closer?

“I could have taken the boy away from danger,” he said, so close now that the statue pressed between them was even more useless than before. He didn’t make her put it down. He ignored it. As if he knew she wouldn’t give in to fear. As if he expected her to be braver than that.

She would have to be braver, because the real danger was Severne and her reaction to him, and there didn’t seem to be any escape from that.

“I don’t trust Father Reynard, but I don’t trust daemon manipulations, either,” Kat said. “Did you kill him?”

He paused. Hesitated as if her words had stopped him. Maybe she shouldn’t have spoken her suspicions about him and what he was...but the thought disintegrated when he lifted a hand to touch her face.

“No. He isn’t dead. Only slowed down for awhile,” Severne said. “I’m sorry.”

She let him touch her. She didn’t cringe away. As his warm fingers lightly trailed across her skin, Kat suddenly thought of the graceful but deadly way he’d dealt with Reynard in the alley. He was a daemon. It didn’t matter that he had helped her. She wouldn’t trust him. She hadn’t even fully seen him yet in a night of shadows and flickering light...