Seduced by a Stranger

by Eve Silver

  Press on? Retreat? What to do?

  “I want her,” he said. But it was not mere want. He needed her. Catherine. He could not leave without her. She was his.

  “We will go back,” Madeline said, then coughed long and hard into her hand. “Quickly now.”

  Good. This was what he wanted. They would go back and fetch Catherine and bring her with them, find another way to flee the burning abbey. Yes, this was good.

  He caught Madeline’s hand and they hurried on, the smoke growing thicker, the air warmer.

  They came to the portal, and Geoffrey thrust it open. Smoke billowed out toward them, a heavy yellowish-brown cloud. A sickly tongue of flame reached through the open door and curled along the ceiling.

  “Geoffrey?” Madeline’s voice was tentative, wary, her fingers curling tight with his.

  They could see nothing beyond the door, the fire that Madeline had started earlier creating a thick, greasy barrier. Of Catherine, there was no sign.

  Was she dead?

  “No!” He would not be cheated of his prize. Geoffrey surged forward, dragging Madeline with him. The smoke seemed to recede before them, sucked back through the open portal into the chamber beyond.

  “Geoffrey—” Madeline cried as a ball of fire erupted toward them. Bright. Hot.

  So hot.

  * * *

  “Catherine!” Gabriel flung open the heavy, iron-girded door and tore up the stone stairs. The metal strongbox was open on the desk, the letters and journals gone, the fire almost dead in the hearth. But Catherine was not here.

  Which meant she was somewhere in the house.

  He knew not what malady took him then, but it was a twisted, monstrous thing that robbed him of reason and broke out cold sweat on his skin.

  Catherine was in the house, and it was burning.

  With a roar, he ran down the stairs, half sliding on the smooth, worn stone, then burst through the door and ran, legs pumping, chest heaving. He could see the flames, great, grotesque flames, ravenous, swallowing anything that was not metal or stone.

  The servants were running, panicked, across the lawns. Some were organizing to bring water from the lake. Wooden buckets of water passed from hand to hand. A mosquito against a behemoth.

  A part of him was cool and calm, rational enough to recognize that he must stop and organize them and cull a few from the line to help him search. A part of him scanned their faces and matched each with a name, until he was certain none remained in the burning abbey.

  But the greater part was filled with hot, swelling terror that rivaled the flames themselves, burning him to ash, eating him alive.

  Where? Where would she be?

  Madeline’s chamber or her own were the most likely places.

  His gaze slid to that wing. It was alive, a writhing, twisting creature of orange and red and unbearable heat, belching great towers of black smoke into the darkening sky.

  On instinct, he ran full tilt for the garden door. It was the closest. His best hope. If he could only reach her. He would save her. He would drag her from the greedy fire and—

  Panting, he reached the door, grabbed for it, and cried out as the handle seared his skin. He tried a second time and a third, even tearing off his coat to wrap it about his hand, but the door would not open. Locked or melted.

  From above him came a loud, whooshing roar and the sound of glass shattering. Shards rained down on him, a hailstorm of sparks and ash and glass. He stumbled back, his gaze jerking frantically along the windows on the lower level, searching for one, just one, where fire did not dance behind the panes.

  There. At the end.

  He ran, vaulting a line of shrubs. He bent his elbow to slam it hard against the glass.

  “Gabriel!” A woman’s voice, but he could not stop. Could not wait. He had to reach her. Reach Catherine. She would burn. She would die.

  And he could not lose her. Could not face a life without her.

  He would survive anything but that.

  “Gabriel!” Again, the cry. Louder, more frantic.

  He turned and saw her, running toward him, her face streaked with soot, her hair falling about her shoulders, her dress mottled with black-rimmed holes where sparks must have landed and singed the cloth.

  The blood rushed from his head until he was dizzy and swaying, barely able to trust what his eyes beheld.

  Catherine, there before him.

  His throat too tight to speak, he surged forward and caught her against him, brutal in his handling, too far into the terrible miasma that overcame him to understand what he said or did. He only held her and buried his face in the curve of her shoulder, and led the two of them in a stumbling dance away from the fire and the danger.

  Terrible sounds surrounded them, like an animal crying out in pain.

  She caught his hair and yanked it hard enough to draw his head back and then she pressed her mouth to his and swallowed the din. Only then did he realize the sounds came from him.

  He was crying, great choking sobs that tore him in two, because he was so grateful, so damned grateful.

  “Catherine,” he rasped, and kissed her with all he was, with passion and dominion. She was his. His. And she was safe, here in his arms. He kissed her as though there was no one else there, as though he was buried inside her, as though they were not here on the vast lawn with the fire at their back, its monstrous roar filling their senses.

  He kissed her as though he was a drowning man and she was air.

  “I could not save you.” His chest rose and fell with harsh, gasping breaths. “I could not see how to save you.”

  “I found a way to save myself,” she said and kissed him, then kissed him again.

  “How?”

  “Susan Parker saved me.”

  He thought then that she was as addled as he. “Susan Parker is dead.”

  “I know, and I am sorry for it. I shall be sorry for the rest of my days. But she saved me.”

  “How?”

  “The first night I came to Cairncroft, I asked for a key to my room. She had trouble deciding which key fit my door and which was the master key for any room in this wing. She gave me the wrong one. I had it in my pocket. It set me free. All I had to do was unlock Madeline’s door.”

  The explanation came out in a tumbling rush. Her words made no sense to him and he did not care. She was here in his arms, and she was alive.

  “I thought I had lost you. I thought you were gone,” he said. “I thought—”

  Then he only kissed her again because she knew what he had thought.

  She eased away and drew a deep breath, cradling his face in her hands. The reflection of the raging flames turned her skin to gold and her hair to copper. His birthright burned, and he didn’t care.

  In all his wretched life, he had never dared dream that he might find love. That he might find peace from the demons of his past. How was he to know they would come twined together, one and the same?

  She spoke then in the tone he recalled from the very first time he heard her voice, her enunciation clean and crisp, her dusky pink lips forming consonants and vowels with perfect elocution. Her voice was a beacon in his darkness. It had been from the first. “Lost me? What sort of wife would I be if I deserted you in your time of need?” she asked.

  “What sort of… wife, indeed,” he murmured.

  “Gabriel St. Aubyn, will you marry me?”

  He laughed. With Cairncroft burning at his back, he laughed. “Tell me you love me,” he said.

  “I love you.”

  “Then, yes, Catherine Weston, I will marry you.”

  Leaning close, he kissed her, and she clung to him and kissed him back and he could taste smoke and ash and love on her lips. He thought it the sweetest flavor he had ever known.

  Epilogue

  Gabriel sat across from the window, the draperies pulled back to reveal distant mountains. The Alps. He and Catherine had been traveling for nearly a year now, yet he felt more than ever before in his
life that he had a home.

  His fingers closed around the letter from Sebastian that had arrived that morning. His cousin had offered to stay and oversee the rebuilding of Cairncroft after that terrible night. Gabriel had accepted his offer. He could not bear to be there. Perhaps never again.

  The servants had all escaped the fire. None were hurt. He was grateful for that. But his twin had not been so fortunate, nor had his cousin Madeline. They had succumbed to the smoke, their charred bodies found clinging to each other in the remnants of the tunnels. He had yet to fully accept how he felt about that—both grief and relief, and a bit of guilt for both.

  Sunlight streamed through the panes to paint a swath across Catherine’s bowed form. She was on her knees, head bowed, the dark curtain of her hair falling forward to hide her face. Her feet were wrapped in two pairs of his stockings. She said they kept her warmer than her own.

  The rest of her was wrapped in his shirt. He could not see how that kept her warm at all, for it gaped and allowed him wondrous glimpses of skin. Now, a bare shoulder, then a rosy-tipped breast, then the sweet curve of her collarbone as she dipped and bent and moved her hands.

  A cold wind swirled through the open window, and Gabriel sipped his coffee, thinking that this weather was coffee weather. The chill in the air made the flavor better, richer, more wondrous on his tongue.

  She had done this, awakened in him the understanding of the difference between simply drinking his coffee, and enjoying it.

  Catherine made a sound of dismay as the wind caught the edge of the map she had smoothed out before her on the floor. She lunged for the corner and slapped her palm flat, offering him a truly magnificent view of her round, unclad backside, the tail of his shirt sliding over porcelain-pale skin.

  His fingers twitched.

  She turned her head and looked at him, her eyes coffee dark, framed in thick brown lashes, very long, very straight. And he thought she saw through him, clear to his tarnished soul.

  No, not thought it. Knew it.

  And she loved him despite what she saw.

  She smiled at him, and his breath caught.

  “Catherine?”

  “Mmm?” She crawled across the floor toward him, prowling on all fours, sinuous and graceful.

  “I love you, Catherine St. Aubyn.”

  “Yes. You do.”

  Lifting her head, she tossed a heavy curl off her forehead and smiled up at him. She crawled up his body, pausing to press a kiss to his chest, then climbing to his lips.

  Opening her mouth on his, she kissed him and then rocked back on her heels as he made to draw her close.

  She wrinkled her nose and laughed. “You taste like coffee.”

  He loved the sound of her voice, cool and cultured and controlled. Except when he made love to her. Then she was anything but controlled.

  Offering her the cup, he said, “Have a sip. Then we’ll both taste like coffee. A perfect match.”

  “We are already that.” But she leaned in, took a sip as he tipped the cup to her lips. She held it a moment without swallowing, then lowered her head to his lap and took him in her mouth.

  He hissed and rocked his hips toward her, the warmth of her mouth and the coffee just shy of too hot, thrilling and luscious and more than decadent. She teased him until he had no desire to be teased any more, and with a chest-deep growl he rolled her beneath him on the thick carpet and made love to her there in the bright strip of sunlight that fell across them both.

  Another thing he had learned: to appreciate both sunshine and cloud.

  Later, much later, when they lay entwined and sated, he asked, “Where do we go next, Catherine? Italy? Spain?” He paused, willing to do even this if it would please her. “Cairncroft?”

  “I think not,” she said.

  “Somewhere else,” he said. “I will buy you a cottage, a townhouse a mansion. Name the place and we will call it home.”

  She glanced at the map she had been poring over earlier. The wind had caught it and blown it into the corner. Then she looked back at him and rested her open palm on his cheek, her eyes shimmering with all the love in her soul.

  “Home, Gabriel?” She pressed her lips to his. “I am with you. That is all the home I shall ever need. You. Only you. You are my home.”

  * * *

  -THE END-

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  Keep reading for a preview of Dark Embrace!

  Sample Chapter: Dark Embrace

  Dear Reader,

  * * *

  Dark Embrace is a full length novel based on the novella “Kiss of the Vampire” originally released in the anthology Nature of the Beast. I have expanded the original novella to flesh out the characters, plot, setting, and conflicts. I loved this story when I wrote it as a novella, but the length constraint meant that I had to be spare and brief. I’m thrilled to bring this story to you in its fuller form.

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  Happy Reading!

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  Eve

  London, November 3, 1839

  Dying moments of darkness and shadow fought to stave off the first creeping fingers of the dawn as Sarah Lowell walked the familiar route through the edge of St. Giles, north of Seven Dials. Her boots rang on the wet cobbles as she ducked through the dim alleys and twisting lanes, past wretched houses and tenements, and rows of windows, patched and broken. Wariness was her sole companion.

  A part of her was attuned to the street before her, the gloomy, faintly sinister doorways, the courtyards that broke from the thoroughfare. And a part of her was ever aware of the road behind, dim and draped in shadows and menace.

  She was alone…or was she? The scrape of a boot sounded from somewhere behind her.

  Would that it was the cold that made her shiver. But, no. It was unease that did the deed.

  In recent weeks, her twice-daily trek along these streets and laneways had become something other than routine. More times than not she felt as though unseen eyes watched her from the gloom, footsteps dogging her every move. Someone had followed her then. Someone followed her now.

  Beneath her cloak, she closed her fist about her cudgel. She never left her room in the lodging house in Coptic Street without the short, sturdy stick. With good reason.

  St. Giles was not a place for a woman alone. But, unfortunately, poverty did not allow for over-particular standards. She had little choice in where she lived but she could—and did—choose to protect herself. She had neither the means, nor the inclination, to own a pistol, and she had considered—and discarded—the possibility of defending herself with a knife.

  So the cudgel it was, and she prayed she never found herself in a circumstance where she would be required to use it on another human being.

  Should those prayers go unheeded, she suspected that surprise would be one thing in her favor. With her small frame, wide hazel eyes, and straight dark hair, she appeared young and delicate. Any attacker would likely not expect the defense she would mount. Her father had always said she was sturdy in both body and spirit. She wished it had not taken his death and the desperate turn of her life to prove his assertions true.

  She had spent years by her father’s side, honing her muscles lifting and turning patients who could not do so for themselves. More recently, she had spent months under her landlady’s tutelage, pummeling a sac stuffed with old rags in order to learn how to wield the cudgel.

  A muffled sound to her left made her spin and peer down the alley next to the darkened chandler’s shop. Her heart gave a lurch in her breast, and she dragged her weapon free of her cloak.

  With a loud belch, a man stumbled toward her then veered away to lean, panting, ag
ainst the wall. Muttering and cursing with a drunken slur, he fumbled at the flap of his breeches. Then came the sound of a stream of liquid hitting the wall.

  Turning away, Sarah walked on, slipping her weapon beneath her cloak once more and willing her racing pulse to settle.

  The feeling of being watched, being stalked, oozed across her skin like a slug. She glanced back over her shoulder, but there was only the empty street and hollowed doorways behind her.

  And the sounds of footsteps.

  Swirling fog and mizzling rain settled on her like a shroud, clinging to her hair and skin and clothes, a cold, damp sheen. She quickened her pace and hurried on.

  Her destination was Portugal Street and the old St. Clement Danes workhouse that now housed King’s College Hospital where she worked as a day nurse. There was talk of a new building but a new building required funding and there was none to be had. So for now, there were some hundred and twenty beds in the old workhouse, split into several overcrowded wards that offered care to the sick poor.

  No one of wealth and means would step foot in King’s College. By choice, the rich were cared for in their own homes, and because of it, they were more likely to survive. Her father had often been called on such visits, and Sarah had accompanied him to assist. But the poor could not afford such luxury—a doctor to attend their bedside, medicines to cure disease or ease their pain—and so they came to King’s College, and often enough they died.

  “They would die regardless,” her father had pointed out many times. “At least the hospital offers some hope, however small.” He had been implacable in that belief.

  Sarah had agreed with him then and still felt that way now because she worked every day among the sick poor and she could not bear to think that all her efforts were for naught, that there was no hope for them, or her.