Blaze of Glory
A Reverse Harem Romance
CJ Strange
Copyright © 2018 by CJ Strange
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
More info: http://ciaranstrange.com
Cover by: CJ Strange
Published by Heartcandies Publishing
More info: http://heartcandies.com
Created with Vellum
Contents
Foreword
1. Prologue
2. Penny's Strange Stalker
3. Penny's Omen, Ver 2.0
4. Penny's Part To Play
5. Oliver's Disappointment
6. Penny's Explanation
7. Alfie's Tool
8. Oliver's Homophone
9. Penny's Good Boy
10. Oliver's Awkward Ride
11. Penny's Old Friend
12. Penny's Dilemma
13. Oliver's Unlucky Streak
14. Penny's Triangle
15. Duncan's Goddess
16. Rhys' Dark Secret
17. Penny's Old Flame
18. Penny's Second Debut
19. Oliver's "Naivety"
20. Alfie's Backstage Pass
21. Penny's Dynamite
22. Alfie's Fifth of November
23. Oliver's Grand Escape
24. Penny's Parachute
25. Penny's Worst Dream
26. Rhys' Dark Decision
About the Author
Foreword
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1 Prologue
… Illiam.
It’s been a year since I saw him last, and I still have next to no idea who he is. Creep, stalker, kidnapper, any of the above works as a temporary label. But if the wanker’s going to continue to pop out of nowhere, I want to know more. I have to.
To know your enemy is to take your first step ahead of them, my father used to say. And while Illiam may not yet have declared himself an enemy, I have a nasty feeling it’s an announcement that’s soon pending.
At the crest of the hill, my former captor waits. Staring at me, his deep, inky gaze fast adhering to mine, the scent of him heavy like fresh rains on dirt and concrete. I’m glued to the spot. His frame, backlit by the bloody glow of the sinking sun, is a silhouette of grace and power unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Something about him screams, silent but sure, that this man is not like those around him. That this man is different. Dangerous. Almost… demonic.
I realize I’ve been gawping wordlessly back at him for a good minute or so. I snap my jaw shut. I’m determined to wrest together whatever dignity I have left.
“Better late than never?” I repeat. I’m buying myself time, time I can spend settling my tone of voice. Reigning my nerves in. “If that’s the case, you could always fuck off ’til next year.”
“I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news here, Penelope, but that time of yours we have been waiting on? It has apparently officially arrived.” He extends his arms further out to me. “Come,” he says, and despite the icy shudder that drops the length of my spine I snort.
“I already told you, I don’t come on command. Oh, and on a related note, you don’t get to call me that.”
“But of course not, my dear. Where on Earth are my manners?” The smile that spreads across Illiam’s face could easily be found on the Net via a search for ‘carnivorous’. It isn’t hastening me any closer, though the muscles of my legs do twitch in response, a voice in the deep, dark of my mind urging me toward him. I shake it off.
“Miss Starling, Lady Starling,” he almost purrs, his grin widening across ivory-stone cheeks. “Why don’t we cast our currently amassed memories of one another into the Abyss, and start all over again, for simplicity’s sake?”
The twinging of my leg muscles almost nudges me forward a step.
To my horror, he seems to notice, and his grin twists into a smirk. “A little uncertain?”
“Part of me wants to trust you,” I grind out slowly, “perhaps because it would simplify things not to think of you as a stranger who once held me against my will for what turned out to be four fucking days.”
Illiam looks offended. “Held you against your will in utmost comfort.”
“Oh, my apologies for leaving that part out while you were rehearsing your whole Misery routine.”
“Stephen King?” Illiam says incredulously, raising both eyebrows. “Wasn’t he a touch before your time?”
“Didn’t you bite my neck?” I demand. If he wants to control the eye contact, then I’ll bloody well dominate the conversation. Suits me. “Or something equally as sinister and perverse?”
Illiam sighs, his lithe frame deflating. Those inky black pools drag me in deeper still, and against my better judgement I allow them.
“So what, are you a vampire?”
My question is no more than a snigger. Off-hand, with an edge of spite. But the way Illiam’s pupils dilate and his smirk fades is unnerving to say the least.
“What I am or am not brooks little relevance. Yet.” His grave face brightens suddenly, like the sun peeking between clouds on a stormy day. “But anyhu, anyhu—let us start afresh! Sir Illiam D’Este would be the title, alas not the full one—”
“H-Hope?”
The soft tenor voice from behind me is familiar. Frighteningly so. Because the only thing more horrifying than the thought of this dangerous stranger having control over me is him having control over someone I care about. Someone like Oliver.
“Ah.” Illiam clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. His eyes slide sideways to glance over my shoulder, toward my brigade mate. In a blink I’m released from their grasp. I drop like a weight from my own haze, into a reality where—if this stranger is as unpredictably psychotic as I believe him to be—Oliver may have walked into some serious trouble.
“I am afraid, little man,” Illiam utters, “that Hope is going to be preoccupied with some grown-up matters for the next few moments here. Be a dear and wait patiently for her, would you?”
I fully expect Oliver to obey. And yet, I’m not entirely shocked when I hear him say, “Hope, who is that? What’s going on?”
“OP,” I squeeze out, past teeth that grit tighter upon seeing Illiam’s inky eyes capture my friend’s the way they caught mine. “Go back to camp. I’ll only be a bit—”
The sudden slap of Illiam’s hands clapping together jars me out of completing my command.
“No,” he pipes up, eerily chipper as he shakes his head back and forth. “No, no, this shall not do. I need a word with you, missy, and it absolutely must be in private.” His eyes are locked with Oliver’s over my shoulder. “I’m fully aware how important it is for you to pick and choose what secrets you actually divulge to your boyfriends, and which you keep to yourself.”
“Wh-what?”
“Don’t mind anything he says, OP,” I quickly snarl. The slight tremble to Oliver’s voice reminds me of the fog Illiam’s gaze drags you under, and I’ll be damned if I’m letting him play with my friend like that.
I take a single upward step in the stranger’s direction.
“All right. You’re the one with something to prove here, mate,” is my curt reply. “Trust to earn, wounds to heal, and all that.” His eyes continue to evade mine; I can feel my frustration radically sharpening my tone.
“So, start talking.”
Illiam is quiet for a long, long while. Despite the hustle and bustle of the forming camp of refugees below us, the hilltop is eerily silent. He and Oliver remain locked in their soundless staring contest as I whip my head between them.
“Illiam?” I press, a touch more frantic.
Simultaneously, he and Oliver break eye contact. The former returns his eyes to me. I’m too engrossed in the depths of their negative matter to properly react to the latter stumbling back a few paces.
“Fear not, little hero!” he asserts all too brightly. It doesn’t match the grimness of his smile. “I would never forget about you. You’re one of my favorites. But this conversation, as previously stated, must happen in the utmost of privacy.”
There are few things in this world that I find both terrifying and tantalizing at the same time. I have a growing sense of dread Illiam is one of them.
His ivory lips curl like a stone etching, peeling away to more prominently display the pointed spires of his fangs. It would be jarring, were it not for the other supernatural occurrence—the wispy, sable smoke billowing out from either end of those lips.
The effect is immediate. One by one, my limbs and senses detach from my brain. The familiar scent and sound of a fire crackling, and the soft damp of the overgrown grass against my bare legs. It all begins to dissolve as the dark consumes all of the light around me, starving me of sight.
Illiam’s voice is the last thing that registers before the inky blackness swallows me whole.
Your time, Lady Starling, has officially arrived…
2 Penny's Strange Stalker
A flash of fangs. A flicker of firelight. The bleary, watercolor smear of alternating shades of black and blue.
My senses return to me a lot faster than they did the last time I was in what I can only presume is Sir Illiam D’Este’s abode. Or one of them. I’m upright and mid-step, as if not even a second has passed in the time it’s taken to transport me to wherever I am now.
Across the rich yet antiquated lounge, Illiam continues to smirk at me. A rapid snap of my head confirms that Oliver is no longer with us.
It’s a realization that both panics and relieves me.
“All right,” I slowly mouth, feeling out the hardwood beneath my feet as the world around me becomes more solid. As the cool, dewdrop scent of him fills me again like a winter’s breeze. “On which plane of existence did you believe kidnapping me yet again was any way to make a good second impression?”
“Ironically, planes of existence are exactly what I brought you here to discuss,” purrs Illiam without moving an inch. Then he relaxes, the tension in his body uncoiling in a manner that causes me to jump out of my skin as his entire demeanor changes.
“Ah, see? This!” he exclaims, buoyant and overly joyous. “This is why we were meant to be together, my dear. We are thinking on entirely the same level.”
“I’m not going to get sidetracked with all your weird, topic-changing malarkey, Illiam.” His eyes attempt to capture mine anew. I squirm free each time, fighting to keep my voice level and firm as he sizes me up. “Tell me whatever it is you need to and let me go. Unless you’re planning on keeping me here for a number of days again?”
Illiam chuckles. The sound is like ice sliding across crisp leather, whatever that means. It’s the metaphor my mind immediately jumped to when it heard the hot, sexy, sinister sound.
“You are quite abrupt, aren’t you, my dear?”
“I’m not your dear; tell me what you need to and let me go,” I repeat, deadpan.
“Abrupt, righteous, fearless. Just like your father.”
I growl. I can’t help it; my dad is the Achilles’ heel I haven’t found armor for just yet.
“Yeah, you mentioned one Stephen Starling the last time I saw you. I didn’t give you the reaction you wanted then, and I ain’t planning on giving it to you now.” My hands are balled into fists at my sides, and I’ve already located six items in my immediate vicinity (not including the lug nuts in my shorts pocket) that can easily be commandeered as makeshift weapons if need be. “Last year. A few days earlier though, weren’t it?”
Illiam’s eyes are still seeking out mine. I can feel their burn. It’s like a tease, a taunt, a Pandora’s box that begs to be opened. I choose to focus on it as a game, one I have too much pride to lose.
“So, enlighten me, exactly why were you late?” I ask, staring intently at the grain of the dark wooden boards under my boots. “Figured you’d actually be polite enough to wait until I was done with my prior engagements before dropping in and abducting me?”
The pretty, pallid shadow of a stranger chuckles. Leather and ice, over bare naked skin. It takes every ounce of willpower not to peek up at him.
“You should keep your eyes on those you believe to be predatory, little bird,” he says, a patronizing lilt the thread that binds his words together. “Who knows what awful sorts of terror and torment I could be preparing for you whilst you admire my antique flooring.”
… bollocks. He’s right. But I want to outlast him in this game. Apparently, Illiam can run complete circles around me physically and metaphysically. Pure, steel grit may be all I have left.
“What do you want, Illiam?”
A long pause follows. He enjoys pauses, I’ve discovered. Especially the pregnant ones. The scent of burning embers in the fireplace to my left is reminiscent of my brigade, at this point—of my lads. Of safety and security. Of home. It offers me something close to a warm sanctuary as I wait out the odd stranger’s cold, calculating silence.
“Lady Starling,” he says at a measured gait, “while your fiery nature may lead you into judging me as some sort of monster or villain, my previous claim still stands. I come to you as a friend, not a foe. And I come to you with a dire message.”
I scoff. It’s a half-decent way to shrug off speechlessness for a second or two. “A threat?”
“Mmm-hmm-hmm.” Illiam seems thoughtful. “More of a warning.”
“One could argue ‘warning’ is just a synonym for ‘threat’.”
“One could.” Illiam pauses, and when he speaks again I can hear the grin in his voice. “I would say it’s entirely down to the delivery.”
I snort a short, sharp laugh. “And your delivery would be?”
I instantly wish I hadn’t asked. One day, I may learn that lesson with him. This time, the smoke doesn’t emanate from him, but seeps up from the grooves in the floorboards themselves and surrounds us. Cool, heavy, and scented like rain and rosewater—which is both soothing and strange at the same time.
The fog tugs at my mind, and I finally relinquish my dignity, yanking my head up in search of his hypnotic eyes through the stratum of thick, inky clouds. Even as they begin to pull me down, down, down into my own subconscious.
Prey, once again, in the cruel caress of a predator.
3 Penny's Omen, Ver 2.0
This pyre… it was lit by Alfie.
It must have been. I can sense it; I don’t know how, or why, but I know these flames were birthed somewhere deep within the soul of my childhood friend. There’s something about the way they move, dance, flicker, as if calling to me. As if alluring me.
But, as their dry searing wind whips agains me, I can tell that they’re wrong. Their usual tricky playfulness is more menacing somehow. The flames themselves seem darker, somehow, if that’s even possible. Thicker. Hotter. Harsher.
I can’t think of a single time Alfie’s fire has actually burned me. From what he’s acclaimed—bragged—he has a mastery over it, from the moment it leaves his fingertips to the instant he snaps them to an end. According to him, his own brand of fire and heat is practically part of him.
If that’s the case, he must’ve had one hell of a nasty migraine or the like when he birthed this blaze into reality.
It ain’t real, insists my sanity, from somewhere at the back of my brain. It’s Illiam—no one else. It’s not real.
But it feels real.
Enough so that I have to actually work to convince myself that, if Illiam’s cold fog can transport me from one place to another—or even lull me to sleep as it did last Hallowe’en—it’s not a far reach to assume he may also be capable of using it to create illusions.
Heck, for all I know, I’m not even conscious anymore. It’s difficult to tell the difference between sleep and awake when Illiam is involved.
The raging heat of the firestorm is closing in all around me. I can’t see the epicenter, and I have no idea what’s controlling it. If anything even is. As it surrounds me, suffocates me with its searing smoke, the tiniest noise pierces the din. It’s hard to tell, but it almost sounds like…
Is that a cat?
Desperately shielding my eyes, I squint down toward my feet. It may be the shadows cast by the flickering light, or it may just be my mind twisting the smoke itself into shapes, but I can definitely make out the likeness of a small, furry creature beside me.
It stares at me for barely a second before opening its mouth and meowing again. Even over the roar of the blaze, that familiar squeak is undeniable.
Is that… Rhys’ cat? Is that Tesla!?
She chirps again, before stepping forward into the torrenting wall of flame. I flinch, but to my shock, it parts for her, creating an elemental corridor the likes of which take me back to old Hebrew legends we were taught at school. Long before we closed our borders to the rest of the globe and our Religious Education classes became much more singular in their topics of study.
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