Stranger, Seductress or His Salvation?
One hundred years ago, Adam Turov, master of Nightingale Vineyards, bartered his soul for freedom from the Order of Samuel and their Rogue daemon allies. But he didn’t know true damnation until Victoria D’Arcy crossed the billionaire vintner’s threshold... Sworn to protect her, Adam must resist with every fiber of his being a voice that sounds like an angel singing and her potent charm.
An unwilling pawn of the Order, Victoria must betray Adam to save her young son. Yet the more time she spends at his estate on her clandestine mission, the harder it becomes to deny the Brimstone heat scorching a path of desire between them...
“I heard you humming. I felt it,” Turov said. “I’ve never felt anything like it before.”
He didn’t touch her.
He didn’t have to.
The heat in his blood did.
He was damned and the Brimstone that sealed his deal with daemons sang its own song to her music-starved ears.
“It won’t happen again,” Victoria promised.
He looked into her eyes.
“I hope that’s a lie,” he said.
His gaze dropped to her open lips, but he didn’t close the distance. The heat between them flared. He seemed mesmerized. But then he straightened up and backed away before she made the fatal mistake of wanting his kiss enough to make it happen herself. His jaw hardened and the expression in his eyes cooled. She could still feel his Brimstone heat, but he was no longer controlled by it.
“Good night, Victoria.” His voice was rough. “I told you that you’d be safe here and I meant it. From every danger...”
Barbara J. Hancock lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where her daily walk takes her to the edge of the wilderness and back again. When Barbara isn’t writing modern gothic romance that embraces the shadows with a unique blend of heat and heart, she can be found wrangling twin boys and spoiling her pets.
Also by Barbara J. Hancock
Harlequin Nocturne
Brimstone Seduction
Brimstone Bride
Harlequin E Shivers
Darkening Around Me
Silent Is the House
The Girl in Blue
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BRIMSTONE
BRIDE
Barbara J. Hancock
Dear Reader,
The historic wine caves of Napa and Sonoma, California, inspired the caves beneath Nightingale Vineyards in Brimstone Bride. As a romance author, it’s natural for me to be fascinated by wedding venues! I could think of no other location as lush and mysteriously suited for my hero, a winery billionaire with more than his share of secrets. Adam Turov made a deal with the devil to escape captivity and save his family from the Russian Revolution. But a hundred years later it’s a woman with the voice of an angel who will save him...if she can only reclaim her ability to sing.
Along with the thousands of acres of thriving vines, Nightingale Vineyards is home to the roses planted by Turov’s mother before she died. The deep crimson petals call to something hidden deep in Victoria D’Arcy’s heart. She’s loved and lost, but it’s the lost soul of her host that causes her to gather her courage to risk loving again.
The Gothic tangle of the roses meets the verdant persistence of the vines in a story that could only have been complemented by the deepest, darkest pinot noir. And the deepest, darkest passions of those who savor it together, forever.
Barbara J. Hancock
For those that champion the silenced and love the lost.
Contents
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
Epilogue
Excerpt from Twilight Crossing by Susan Krinard
Chapter 1
Playground sounds made the danger beside Victoria so much worse. High-pitched laughter and conversations about make-believe seemed surreal. Across the mulched expanse, her sister, Katherine D’Arcy Severne, pushed Victoria’s toddler, Michael, and her own baby, Sam, on the swings. She glanced toward Victoria and waved. Vic waved back.
Pay no attention to the madman beside me, Kat. Keep my Michael and your Sam safe.
The monk sitting beside Victoria on the park bench was in a businessman’s suit, as if he’d dropped by the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, playground during his lunch break. He crossed his legs gracefully like a civilized man. Kat probably thought he was a father watching his child play instead of an evil man come to threaten their own. Victoria had been resting in the sun when he’d approached. She’d actually smiled at him when he’d joined her on the bench.
And then he’d revealed his true purpose.
“The Order of Samuel has proven time and time again that you cannot run. You cannot hide. You will learn this lesson or your child will join us. A half daemon brother would be unusual, but I’m sure we could train him, put him to good use for Father Reynard’s cause.”
“Stay. Away. From. Michael,” Victoria said. Her voice cracked with emotion. Her baby was only two. Katherine pushed her nephew higher and he squealed.
Victoria’s throat had yet to recover from the injuries she’d sustained in the opera house fire set by Father Reynard. They’d blamed it on an obsessive fan. He’d been obsessive all right. But not a fan. He was a daemon hunter and she and Katherine had been his reluctant bloodhounds. They’d been born with an affinity for Brimstone blood that inevitably led them to the daemons Reynard hunted. Violence. Blood. Pain. No rest. No peace. He had dogged their steps for as long as they could walk.
He’d died in the fire, but apparently his cause hadn’t.
“I will leave your daemon spawn alone, only if you set my brethren free. This man is our greatest enemy. He must be stopped,” the monk in disguise said.
He held a magazine in his hands and tilted the cover so she could see the man who graced it.
Michael’s laughter floated to her ears as his doting aunt pushed him on the swing. Victoria had fallen in love with a daemon. Her affinity for the Brimstone in his blood had drawn them together, but it had been more than that. He’d been a stop to running. He’d been hope. He had died trying to protect her and Michael. The Order of Samuel said they were warriors for heaven. They lied. The members of the D’Arcy family were tools used by one faction of daemons to hunt another.
Politics.
The D’Arcy ability to draw and be drawn to daemon blood had placed them in the middle of an otherworldly civil war.
Love wasn’t allowed.
Ironic that her favorite role to play had always been Juliet. She’d traveled around the world to sing the part of a tragic romance again and again.
“What do you want me to do?” Victoria asked.
The man on the
cover of the magazine was a beautiful stranger in a designer suit. Behind him, a vineyard stretched in seemingly endless verdant rows. He stood with one foot on the threshold of a historic stone building, a massive wooden door with iron hinges looking rough-hewn and craggy in sharp contrast to his polished clothes. There was a gleam to the black waves of his hair, but those waves and his sun-kissed skin seemed more in keeping with the door than his suit. Victoria had grown up in the dramatic world of the opera. She knew a costume when she saw one. The man’s civilized suit was a lie.
“You will gain his trust. You will learn his secrets. Once you discover where he keeps his prisoners, you will free them,” the monk said. “Once they are freed, they will use their combined strength to kill him. In this way, you will guarantee your son’s safety.”
Children laughed and ran and played all around them. Tears burned behind her eyes. But she forced them to dry. She waved again and this time Michael waved back, still laughing. Katherine was looking at Victoria closely now. As if she sensed something wrong. But the monk had already risen, prepared to walk away. He didn’t need her answer. He could sense her defeat in her slumped shoulders and her trembling wave of reassurance to her child.
“I’m not a spy. How will I do this?” she asked his back. He paused and halfway turned back to reply.
“He has Brimstone in his blood. He’s damned. Your affinity is the perfect weapon. His home is a fortress. You will penetrate his defenses. Seduce his secrets from him. Free our brothers. Capture him. Then, you and your family will be left in peace.”
He lied.
She would never know peace.
“Who knows? You might even enjoy yourself. You have proven you have a taste for damnation,” the monk said. His knowing laughter didn’t blend with the innocent laughter of the children around them. It jarred. It condemned. Her cheeks burned. Not because she was ashamed of loving Michael’s father, but because this man didn’t deserve to pollute what they’d shared by mentioning it. Daemons were nearly immortal beings who lived in the hell dimension. They were different but, like men, they were only damned by their actions, not by their blood. Michael’s father had been heroic in the end, sacrificing himself for his child even though he’d been a daemon.
The children on the playground seemed to sense the evil in their midst. They parted as the monk passed as if a snake slithered among them. One little girl began to cry without obvious cause and a kind woman ran to see what she could do to help.
The monk had left the magazine beside her on the bench. She picked it up. The man on the cover hadn’t looked at the camera. The photographer had caught him in a moment of reflection, with dark shadows from the vine-covered building on his face. The photograph drew her as if the Brimstone in the man’s blood could already sense her affinity. Yes. He had secrets. She could see them in his shadowed eyes.
A single tear did fall then. The monk had already walked away. His laughter drifted back to her on the humid Louisiana breeze. She had loved and lost, but she wouldn’t lose again. Only one tear fell. It rolled down her cheek to fall on the back of her hand. It glistened there, useless.
She would do what she had to do to protect her son.
She willed the unshed tears to dry as she widened her eyes and clenched her jaw. The magazine crinkled in her ferocious grip.
Her son’s vigilant protector, the hellhound Grim, wasn’t allowed to materialize in the playground, but Victoria saw a shimmer of shadows near the swings, too dark to be cast by the blossoming grove of cherry trees that surrounded the park.
The wind blew and petals fell like pale pink rain. They settled on Katherine’s dark hair and the children laughed. They raised their hands to the sky to try to catch the drifting blossoms. Near the shadow of Grim, the petals shied away in puffs of disturbed silk as the giant dog shook his sooty coat to maintain his disguise. She could imagine his movements because she knew he was there. No one else noticed. Just as no one else had heard the monk’s threats.
During the fire, Katherine’s husband, John Severne, had risked his life to give Grim to Victoria’s son. His sacrifice had saved Michael. The fearsome beast had been Severne’s companion for two hundred years. Now, he watched over her son.
But Grim wouldn’t be enough.
Victoria had to do more.
Even if it meant continuing to be a servant to madmen whose evil requests damned her as if she’d sold her soul.
As the playground full of children continued to laugh and play, fear burned hotly inside her chest, exactly as she imagined the damning fire of Brimstone might burn in daemon veins.
Chapter 2
Few people had gotten close enough to see his scars.
Adam Turov sat with his chest facing the back of a wooden chair. He gripped the polished cherry slats with white knuckles, but he didn’t flinch as he hunched his bare back for Dr. Verenich. The Brimstone in his blood wasn’t always enough to heal the injuries he sustained hunting devils with no care for how much human blood they spilled.
“Live for a century, learn for a century,” the doctor murmured under his breath as he plied needle and thread to close the dagger slash too severe to knit itself. “I have learned to use specially constructed thread in your treatment, shef. And yet you have not learned to avoid daemon-cursed blades.”
“Without effort, you won’t pull fish from a pond,” Adam said. He could fight the doctor saying for saying. He’d learned all his Russian idioms firsthand before the Revolution.
“So, no pain, no gain?” The doctor chuckled grimly as he worked on the man he still referred to as his boss as his father had before him, even though Adam Turov had also become his friend. Gloves protected his hands from Brimstone’s burn, but every now and then they’d sizzle and hiss, and smoke would rise into the air as he pierced Adam’s skin with his needle and fireproof thread. “I’ll tell you what you have gained, my friend...” He urged Adam to turn his back toward an antique mirror with a gilded frame. It was Tsarist, of course. The Turov family had brought a king’s ransom to California during the Revolution. They survived by adapting, persevering. They had worked through the darkest hours. Sweat and blood had replaced diamonds and tiaras.
Reflected in the mirror, Adam Turov didn’t look a day over thirty, even after a life-threatening battle with evil monks from the Order of Samuel and their Rogue daemon allies. On a good day, in fine clothes, he would seem even younger. Too young to successfully run the oldest winery in Sonoma, California.
“Wings. Over all these years, you’ve developed a macabre pair of wings,” the doctor said.
Adam could see them. The scarifications the doctor pointed out by gesturing in the air above them. The tracery of scars swept down his back on both sides like folded wings. The irony caused a grim smile to curve his lips. There. That expression was older. Much more in keeping with his actual age.
“A dark angel indeed, Doctor,” he said.
He could remember the initial beatings with a lash that had begun the “wings.” And later, every hack and slash. Every stitch. Every battle. He could remember the face of every monk he’d delivered to hell. None of the monks in his memory were the one that most haunted him. Not yet. Father Malachi had wielded the lash with enthusiasm. The younger the novitiate, the better. The Order purported to be the last line of defense between hell and Earth, but they lied. In truth, the faction of Rogue daemons that wanted to overthrow Lucifer’s Army and wage war on heaven had corrupted them. The Order of Samuel wasn’t holy. They were as damned as he was.
He liked to think he escorted them to their just ends, one monk at a time. He might never reclaim the soul he’d sold, but he could face his own damnation one day if he delivered every single monk to hell before him.
“No, not an angel. You are more like the legendary firebird caught in a greedy prince’s golden cage,” the doctor said. “You will insist on attendi
ng the party, I’m sure. Movement will cause great pain. That was a deep wound. You should rest. Heal.”
The doctor was already wiping Brimstone blood and ash from Adam’s lean, muscled back in preparation for the evening suit that waited across the foot of his bed. It was a disguise. He used the expensive, tailored clothes and the carefully cultivated sophistication of a vintner to hide his true warrior’s nature.
But he’d been hiding it for so long that his disguise came naturally to him now. He ran the Nightingale Vineyards as easily as he battled evil monks.
“I prefer the nightingale to the firebird, Doctor. The firebird was my mother’s favorite. I named our best pinot noir in her honor. There’s nothing golden about me. I’m far too dark for that comparison,” Adam said.
“Ah, but you’re forgetting how the prince was cursed by the firebird for his greed. Capturing the firebird was a mistake. It proved deadly. A dark enough tale, indeed,” the doctor said.
“Nothing heals more than movement,” Adam said, dismissing the fanciful talk. He rolled his shoulders to illustrate. The doctor hissed, but Adam ignored the agony that flared outward from his damaged skin. “We must keep moving forward.”
He’d been damaged for a long time. Agony was a familiar friend.
He’d been nine when the Order had stolen him from his family. He’d been infinitely older when he’d escaped. In experience if not in years.
“Victoria D’Arcy is arriving tonight. That’s why I completed a sweep. To clear the area so I could focus on her,” Adam said.
The doctor busied himself, cleaning his instruments and packing his case while Adam dressed. His bag resembled a traditional black leather satchel, but it held the instruments necessary to be the private physician to a powerful man who’d sold his soul a hundred years ago. Dr. Verenich was the second-generation descendant of a physician who had followed the Turov family to America.
“You must protect her?” the doctor asked.
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