Brimstone Bride

by Barbara J. Hancock

  “I’ve regretted my deal with the devil many times, but not once since I met you. I’m thankful for every ember of Brimstone in my blood. I’m jealous of those who have more,” Adam said.

  “We can’t be together,” Victoria said, though their fingers had become fiercely entwined.

  “No, Vic. That isn’t true. There can never be an apart for us no matter the machinations of king or council,” Adam said.

  It seemed a vow. Her heart pounded with his promise. She recognized a tragedy in the making because she’d grown up creating tragedies for the stage.

  Suddenly, before she could argue, he tugged the hand he held with surprising strength while he still reclined on the bed. Victoria fell against him and gasped as her silk-covered skin came into contact with his bare, muscular chest. He was hard and hot and no longer pale. A flush suffused his bared skin and she felt an answering rush of response when she recognized his rising color as a response to her...her nearness, her presence, her touch.

  He still held the hand he’d pulled to bring her against him, but her other hand was free to splay against his chest. She gasped at his heat, at his lean, sculptured perfection. He was hard and toned beneath his sophisticated suits because he was a warrior.

  She watched his eyes close in response to her on his skin.

  “I asked you to stay for your safety, but I guarantee nothing if you touch me. You might be safer in the cottage after all,” Adam warned. She could feel him holding himself very still as if he gave her the chance to flee.

  “But you’re weakened from your battle with the daemon. I’m not afraid,” Victoria said. She caressed his superheated skin and spoke lightly, teasingly tracing his pectoral muscle with the pads of her fingers.

  He released her other hand and quickly raised his palms to gently but firmly cup her flushed face. He held her steady and still so that their eyes would meet. She noted the varying shades of blue in his irises that gave them the vivid intensity she’d grown to crave.

  “Stoicism is all I’ve had for decades. It’s sustained me through loss and loneliness, but I burn beneath it all. I burn for you, Victoria. Be. Afraid. You’re playing with Brimstone’s fire and I can’t promise to keep you safe from what you might kindle to life in me,” Adam said.

  “So you’re saying I should run. That’s what I do. It’s what I’ve always done. To survive. But running isn’t living,” Victoria whispered.

  She leaned closer and closer to his face as she spoke and he allowed it. He gentled his hold. He relaxed his elbows. His hands cupped her face, but they didn’t hold her away.

  “The problem is I like it here. Right here with you. I don’t want to run. I want to feel. I want to sing. I don’t want to shut myself back in a cage,” Victoria said.

  Then she pressed her lips to his. He jerked and gasped in response, but there was nowhere for him to go. His head was cradled on his pillow, holding him in place for her soft explorations. She tasted his mouth from one corner to the other as his breath quickened, and he seemed to wait and watch to see what she would do next.

  She pulled back to meet his blue gaze fully and then leaned forward again. She teased her tongue out to slip between his open lips. That’s when his pause ended. His tongue met hers. He groaned and his hands slid from her face to her body, smoothing down her back to her waist then to her hips to urge her closer. He gathered her up against him and she went eagerly while their kiss deepened with gasps and dueling tongues.

  She ended up straddled across his body, her silk dress rumpled and splayed until the most intimate heat of her was pressed to his bare abdomen. That sudden contact made her stop. Her entire body went rigid as every nerve ending was shocked by his superhot skin blazing against her core. Only the slightest hint of crimson lace between her legs kept them apart. She arched her back, pressing against him while he cupped her bottom. She rocked against his hard body. She could feel his erection beneath his singed trousers, rising up, proud and demanding against her heat.

  “You’re lucky I’m weak, solovey. I would have no patience to wait for your song. You would get no pleasure from how hard and fast I would claim you otherwise,” Adam warned.

  Victoria hummed as she moved against him, but before she could confess that hard and fast sounded very pleasurable his strong hands stilled her movements. Her dress was around her waist. Her body burned hotter than Brimstone. But he held her in place.

  “Solovey?” she asked, her voice nearly as rough and low as his.

  “Nightingale. My nightingale. I will make you sing. Only me. No one else. I want to hear you sing my name,” Adam said.

  He rolled her to the side and kissed her as she cried out in protest at the sudden separation. He whispered against her mouth and it was an erotic groan. “Let me open your cage. My solovey. Sing for me.”

  His hands pulled the folds of her silken dress from her body, carefully unwrapping the soft material from where it was wound until her lace-clad breasts and panties were revealed. She could see the appreciation for what he’d displayed in the glitter of his hooded eyes and still he didn’t rush.

  She hummed again and he twisted open the center clasp of her bra so the lace fell away.

  “You are the song, solovey. You are the song,” Adam murmured against her skin. He’d dipped his head and now he opened his hot mouth to suckle her bared breasts. First one and then the other. He bathed her with the heat of his mouth until her nipples were tender and distended, sending arcs of pleasure between her legs. She reached to bury her hands in the thick, damp waves of his hair, needing to hold on.

  Her whole body was humming now—it was a secret heated song between them. One she should deny, but couldn’t. She couldn’t close the cage door against him. Not now. Maybe never again.

  The heat between them flowed in a glowing aura between their bodies. She spread her legs to enjoy it, but his hand was even hotter as he brushed the last lace covering her away. Only then did she notice the steam rising from him where the doctor had moistened his skin and hair with wet towels. She watched the impossible white proof of their desire rise up into the air and dissipate around them, but then his finger found a slick entrance and her eyes closed as her hips rocked against the intimate penetration.

  “Yes,” he urged her humming response. “Sing for me. This is how I’ve longed to see you. Free with me.”

  With her eyes closed, she focused more fully on his mouth when he spoke against her breasts. When his lips then moved with whispery intent down, down to press beneath her navel and trail wet kisses to where his hand had claimed her, she sang out his name in higher notes than she’d hit since before the opera house fire.

  He murmured his appreciation against the quivering folds of her most intimate flesh and then he pleasured her gently with a questing tongue. He lapped the bud of her clitoris as she cried out. And her song dissolved into delirious noises of release.

  He hadn’t claimed her with the erection she could still feel against her when he moved to hold her, but he had claimed her in ways she couldn’t fully understand. He had denied himself to give to her. Even after he’d heard her claim Malachi’s protection. She wrapped her arms around him and he allowed her to hold him with her palms against his “wings.” The scarifications were deep ridges in his flesh, but they weren’t ugly. He was wholly beautiful. In spite of his scars. In spite of his Brimstone blood. In spite of his loyalties, which worked against her.

  He was already breathing the deep inhalations and exhalations of sleep. He’d slayed her with a heavenly orgasm after he killed a daemon to save her. He’d called her his nightingale. Solovey. Would she ever truly answer to another name? She traced his sleeping face in the darkened room. When his blue eyes were closed the whole world took on a darker hue. And that was bad.

  The color had faded from his face again. His flush was gone. He looked paler than before. She should have
made him rest, but it had been impossible to resist his persuasion when her affinity and his blood called to each other.

  No. This wasn’t safer than the cottage. Not at all. She should gather herself together and leave his rooms. She knew she still had to betray him, even though she thought she might be falling in love.

  Her dress was a crumpled wreck, but she managed to put it on. Hopefully no one would see her slink from Turov’s rooms back to the cottage clearing. She found her clutch with its precious contents thrown on the floor at the foot of the bed. She’d been more concerned with Adam’s well-being than with her mission. She needed to go back to the cottage in order to see the dried cherry blossom reminder on her vanity. She needed to distance herself from the sleeping man on the bed.

  He moaned in his sleep when she walked away. She paused, but only for a moment. Then she hardened her heart and climbed back into the cage the Order had made for her. No. More. Singing. Michael needed her to be stronger than she’d been before. She had to resist Adam Turov for her son’s sake. He might be hidden now, but she knew from personal experience that a D’Arcy couldn’t hide from the Order of Samuel for long.

  Chapter 11

  Dawn lightened the horizon when Victoria slipped out of the main house and into the garden. Roses were heavy with dew, all their bright blooms darkened and drooping as they bowed their heads to pray for the sun.

  She hurried to the cottage to change out of her conspicuous rumpled dress. The jar of dried cherry blossoms seemed to chastise her as she showered quickly and pulled on cropped pants, a T-shirt and sneakers. She twisted her damp hair up in a messy bun and grabbed a hooded sweater.

  She had no idea how long Adam would sleep. She needed to take advantage of the early morning to explore and try the firebird keys in every lock she could find. The estate had been built during a time when barns, springhouses, cellars and sheds were staples. Those outbuildings still dotted the landscape of Nightingale Vineyards the way follies would have a less utilitarian property. Most of the buildings seemed abandoned now. Her instincts told her the more apparently abandoned, the better.

  For instance, it wouldn’t be possible to hide prisoners in the much-used utility shed where ATVs and tractors came and went with such frequency clandestine activity would be impossible.

  The wine cave she’d discovered last night beckoned, but it was on the other side of the estate. The only way she could reach it quickly would be by ATV. It wouldn’t be possible to borrow one of those during the day without notice. She would have to plan a trip to explore the cave later when she had more time and the added cloak of night to hide her intentions.

  Victoria decided to try the pilfered keys at every building she could reach on foot while Adam was still sleeping, but she wanted to begin at the most likely. She’d already glimpsed a large gardening barn overgrown with ivy vines. The windows were completely covered and only indentions, not glass, showed where they had once been. She hurried there first, jogging down the path as if she’d gotten up before the sun to simply exercise. Once she was parallel with the building, she veered off the pebble path and sidled up to the vine-covered wall. She felt her way along the ivy until she found the entrance where an old iron handle protruded from the greenery. A rooster crowed in the distance and made her jump. She paused for only a second to calm her heart back down from her throat and then burrowed into the vines to find the keyhole beneath the iron handle.

  Once she’d found where to try the keys, she dug them from her pocket. After several tries, she found a key that fit, but it took several more minutes of struggle and force to move the old tumblers that had frozen in place from lack of use.

  Not promising.

  If anyone was using the building, the door would have been easier to open.

  She pushed the door inward anyway, forcing the tendrils of vine to stretch and break with the full weight of her body. The interior of the building was musty and obviously undisturbed. A long potting table was the only inhabitant along with the refuse from years of dead leaves and cobwebs. The webs fluttered gray and forgotten in the sudden fresh air.

  Some broken pots and a few rusty tools were all that she found besides a scurrying mouse that caused her to jump as it ran away.

  “My sleuthing skills need work,” Victoria muttered to the mouse.

  She wrenched the protesting door back into place and relocked it with additional minutes of effort. She couldn’t do much about the torn vines, but she tried to arrange them so that her poking around wouldn’t be discovered.

  Victoria proceeded around the winding paths of the garden to a much smaller building. This one was a door set into a triangular protrusion from the ground. Nearby was a plot of earth reclaimed by grass, but she thought it had once been a vegetable garden. Slight depressions in the earth still ran in neat horizontal rows. A root cellar would have been a common feature at the turn of the century, even after refrigeration was beginning to take over.

  It wasn’t a great leap of logic to imagine that Adam’s mother might have enjoyed growing more than grapes with her own two hands.

  The tiny shed that covered the mouth of the cellar had its own curtain of vines, but not as heavy as the potting shed. There was some indication that the door had been opened. She could see where the door had scuffed the dirt beneath it somewhat recently.

  The air around had begun to warm. The sun rose and the dew dried. She didn’t have much time, but the disturbed earth at the base of the door and the sparse vines spurred her on.

  She hurriedly tried key after key. Other birds had followed the rooster with wakefulness. Their tweets and twitters were tentative, but a full morning chorus would soon come. Finally she found the right key and the tumblers clicked, much easier to manipulate than the previous ones. She still had to jiggle the key, but though the lock was old and finicky it wasn’t frozen in place.

  She jerked when the latch gave way with a loud, echoing clank. The door opened outward and fell to the side when she pulled. The echo had told her she was right about the cellar before the open door revealed a stone stairway that led into a dark, dank hole in the ground. The stairs were framed by packed earthen walls.

  It was only a root cellar. The kind of place gardeners stored vegetables before refrigeration made a cool hole in the ground obsolete. It would be nothing to use her cell phone’s flashlight and pop down the stairs to look around. Still, Victoria’s foot paused on the first green-tinged step. Not because the growth of green mold or algae tainted the air or made the stone slick, but because something inside her had sent a shiver of warning down her spine.

  She couldn’t blame the chill on the morning air or the cool darkness radiating up to kiss her face with damp.

  In spite of her sweater, she had goose bumps on her arms and when she forced herself forward, she could have sworn her first breath on the stairs showed in a slight, white puff from her lips.

  But that was impossible. She was only anxious. Afraid of the dark and getting caught and what she might find. She was a singer, not a spy. A determined mother well out of her depth.

  The light from her phone wavered in her cold fingers, but its unsteady beam revealed only more dirt as she descended deeper into the ground. The stairs were cut much deeper than she’d expected. It felt like she was on a journey to the center of the Earth, but finally she reached the polished earth floor and the large storage room that had been carved cavern-like into the ground. The room was shored up by oak beams.

  How solid did oak stay after a hundred years?

  Victoria shone her light on the beams, feeling like a she was in a mine shaft that might collapse at any moment. She clenched her teeth against the trembling caused as much by nerves as temperature.

  She shone the beam of her light around. The cellar didn’t seem to have another way out. It was a hole in the ground, lined with mostly empty bins and shelves where potat
oes and onions and canned food might once have been. All that was left were a few glass jars with murky contents. She didn’t explore those too closely.

  The disturbed door hadn’t led her to anything useful.

  Victoria turned and made her way back to the stairs. She forced herself not to hurry even though the dank and dark felt threatening and spidery.

  “Don’t go. Not yet. We have much to discuss and I’d like to keep our meeting...discreet,” a voice came from the darkness behind her, even though she’d seen the room empty seconds before. Victoria’s foot froze on the first step that would lead back up into the light. She could see the square of daylight above her, far above her, beckoning but out of reach.

  She couldn’t move. Motes of dust from decades of moldering vegetables hung in the air suspended in front of her face.

  “I haven’t agreed to any bargain with you, daemon. Let me go,” Victoria managed to say through nearly petrified lips. She recognized the pause of a daemon deal forming in the air around her. The universe ground to a halt when a promise was made that couldn’t be broken.

  “I am Ezekiel. The daemon your mother loved. I know you’ll agree to talk with me, daughter, thus the deal is beginning to form,” the daemon said.

  Her affinity could detect him now. The burn of his Brimstone blood was painful in the confined space beneath the insulating earth. She couldn’t help the whimper of protest that escaped, but she did manage to bite back against the others that rose in her throat. She shook from the effort, burning and hurting and still frozen in place.

  “I’m sorry. I needed you to know I speak the truth about who I am. But I’ll spare you from the heat of my blood now,” the daemon said.

  Suddenly, the pure fire of Brimstone was gone and she was left frigid in its loss. Even though she couldn’t climb the stairs, her body could quake in the sudden cold and it did. Her teeth chattered. Her breath came from her lips in a fog.