Barbara Hancock - Brimstone Seduction

He crossed the room until they were side by side, but it wasn’t until he walked away that she realized his nearness had distracted her from the calla lily he’d dropped into her open cello case. Its deep purple bloom looked almost black in the dim light.

Never trust a daemon.

But the lily wasn’t a gift. It was only a payment for her song.

Her playing hadn’t displeased him. He had liked it. More than that, he’d been affected by it.

He’d paid for her performance because the music had touched him.

Kat sat again before her trembling legs could give out beneath her. The cello she gripped in one hand wasn’t nearly as comforting as it usually was. Her best defense hadn’t only failed against this particular daemon. It had become something else between them...a seductive promise. He didn’t want her to play for him again because her song breached his defenses. Her inhalations still came quicker than they should. Her skin was heated though the fire had left the room. She shivered in the sudden chill. This was a mistake. But it was one she had to make. For the boy. For her sister.

She had to brave John Severne in order to find her sister even if her music was no shield against him.

Quietly she slowed her breathing and calmed her heart. She vowed never to play for him alone again and to guard against her fascination with the daemon master of l’Opéra Severne.

Because the calla lily hadn’t only been payment for her song. It had been a last-minute substitute. Her lips tingled. He’d been as hungry as she was for another kiss.

Chapter 4

Her bags were taken to a room off the corridors that surrounded the opera hall itself. They wound in concentric circles with the apartments set like the spokes in a giant wheel. It was dizzying, the walls a kaleidoscope of rich cherry wainscoting filled with elaborate carvings like the first hall she’d traversed to reach Severne’s offices.

Her passage was lit by flickering sconces that made her wonder if the almost subliminal hiss her ears detected was air conditioning or gas to fuel primitive lamps. The dancing light made the carvings gambol around her in tumbling shadows. But it was her playing for John Severne that had upset her equilibrium. The music echoed mockingly in her ears. Too. Too hungry. Too evocative. Too needy of his reaction. Any reaction. The uncertain light made her path waver, but she wouldn’t have been firmly grounded even if there had been bright runway lights.

He was hard. Both physically and mentally. To touch him with her music, even for a second, had been too heady for her own good. He wasn’t a man. He was a monster. He was a being all human souls had been taught to fear for centuries. But as the night deepened, the flutter in her stomach didn’t feel like fear. Not exactly.

Her room was beside her sister’s. Supposedly Victoria’s room had remained untouched. When Kat tiptoed hesitantly in, not wanting to disturb the dust and silence, the room taunted her. It wasn’t empty. Seeing the normal, everyday mess her sister was prone to create—silk slippers tossed to the side, smudged tissues on the vanity table, the pale ivory stockings from her costume rinsed out and long since dry on the bathroom rack—tightened Kat’s lungs until each stale breath hurt. The air tasted bitter on her tongue.

If Victoria had been free to sing and build a reputation under her own name, she would have been a much bigger star than a regional theater would hope to hire, but Vic loved to perform. It didn’t matter how or where. She could almost feel her sister’s anticipation for performance in the air.

Gone.

She’d known it. But seeing it was too final, too real. She sniffed the faint, weeks-old hint of Victoria’s perfume, and tears prickled.

She stopped in the center of the room and willed them away, widening her eyes. She was not going to hide behind tears. She was here for a reason, and grief wouldn’t help her sister now. Katherine waited until her eyes were so dry they hurt. Then she forced an inventory of every detail.

What had happened?

There was no evidence of violence. All was painfully normal and undisturbed. Victoria could walk in at any second complaining about the lack of honey for her tea. But as the seconds ticked by, Katherine knew waiting for her sister’s familiar tread was in vain.

Gone.

On the bed, nestled on Victoria’s pillow, was a pair of opera glasses. They were the only item in the room that seemed out of place. Kat walked to her sister’s bed and picked up the binoculars. The opera glasses were white porcelain with gilded edges. The handle she used to flip them over and hold them up to her eyes had a grip on the end of a brass extension that matched the porcelain around the lenses.

The lenses were meant to bring the action onstage closer to the viewer’s perceptions. They distorted her view of the room.

She lowered the opera glasses and opened her hand on the grip, where she could feel a brass plate. It was engraved with a letter and a number corresponding to the box and seat from which it came. Each seat in every private box at l’Opéra Severne had a slot in the right armrest where the opera glasses rested when not in use.

It wasn’t normal for one of the company to have taken a pair back to her room.

Suddenly, fatigue was a more solid barrier to press through than emotion. She’d been driving for hours. With her travel-fogged brain, she would surely miss important clues if she tried to ransack the room tonight.

Other than removing the opera glasses that were an intrusion of the room’s hushed normalcy, she couldn’t go through Victoria’s things yet. She couldn’t snoop in the closet or the drawers. The room waited for her sister’s return. She would let it wait one more night. It wasn’t rational, but she had a sudden fear that if she disturbed the room’s silent vigil, her sister would never come home.

* * *

Her room was as perfect as Vic’s was messy. And much more ornate. Decorated in French rococo style, the whole space was full of white and gilded furnishings and etched glass. Butterflies, thorny vines and rose petals decorated the mirrors in white, only to spring to vibrant, noisy shades of color on the walls in one large continuous design. Plush creams and pale pink with splashes of scarlet and lush green were echoed in the heavy damask bed coverings and carpets on the floor.

She told herself she’d return the opera glasses to their rightful place in the private box high above the auditorium when she had the time. For now, she placed them in the drawer of her bedside table.

She was startled again and again as her movements were reflected in the glass wall panels in jagged interrupted pieces because of the etchings. She showed up as a disjointed leg or arm, a flushed cheek, or a quick glimpse of shadowed eyes. Her equilibrium might never right itself in this place. She couldn’t find her footing, mentally or physically. Every thought, every move needed to be carefully calculated. Which meant the evening was going to be a test. Severne threw her balance off even without the aid of strange surroundings.

Finally she was unpacked and changed for dinner.

She’d brought no tulle and satin this time, but she did wear pearls with a pink shell of shimmering crushed silk and a long ivory pencil skirt with matching heels. The boy might be afraid to see her. He might instinctively fear the woman responsible for his mother’s death. Dressing for dinner might be inadequate preparation to face him, but it was the least she could do in this aged atmosphere.

She unclipped her hair and let it fall in heavy curls around her shoulders, hiding the pallor of her cheeks behind chestnut waves.

It was stalling and she knew it, but curiosity was a good excuse to pause in the quiet hallway and step closer to examine the wainscoting. In the dimly lit corridor of l’Opéra Severne, the elaborate carved murals were a jumble of faces and forms. From the grotesque to the sublime, on the walls beautiful angelic figures embraced mystical beasts and monsters, all entwined. The artist had been both mad and brilliant. So lifelike were the figures, Kat blinked against the feeling that they peered into her face as she tilted it closer to examine them.