Brimstone Seduction

The daemon, she corrected herself. Lest she forget. The residual heat that still made her movements languid and slow—it mocked her.

Kat walked through the side mezzanine with her cello case, though she’d left her suitcases in a pile by the door at the usher’s urging. Now the same usher led her through the building to Severne’s offices.

Compared to the humid outdoors of Baton Rouge—more moistened by the Mississippi River than cooled by it—the interior of the opera house was shadowed and cool. The atmosphere was close down the columned corridor with almost too many details to make out in the scant light of midafternoon, when no candles were lit and few lamps glowed. She could see the rough texture of carvings on the wainscoting, but she couldn’t pause to make out exactly what the carvings were about. It was only her imagination that made it appear as if hundreds of faces rendered in the wood turned to follow her movements as she walked by.

She was escorted. It was formal and old-fashioned, but she didn’t want to be rude to the eager-to-please uniformed young man. Whether he strived to please her or his employer, she couldn’t be sure. But she thought the latter because there was an urgency to his steps slightly more colored by fear than a young woman in a sundress would inspire.

As she followed, his mood was contagious. She thought maybe her old tulle and satin would have been more appropriate for a job interview in this vintage setting than the light cotton dress she’d worn for travel between one hot Southern city and another even hotter. She recalled with perfect clarity John Severne’s hard, deadly form beneath his shredded evening attire, and as she did, she also recalled the velvet tease of his tongue.

Her arms and legs might be gauche and exposed, but she’d already been more intimate with the daemon than she’d been with another man. It was impossible to forge relationships when your lifestyle was one of running, constantly running. She couldn’t trust intimacy. She avoided it at all costs. Oh, she’d had hurried kisses in moments when her guard had fallen, but she’d never allowed herself to fall fully, to indulge fully in desires to touch and taste.

And now was probably not the best time to wonder why a daemon had been able to breach her usual defenses.

The usher opened the double doors of what she supposed to be John Severne’s office. With a flourish and a bow, he stepped aside. Her wedge sandals on the Persian carpet didn’t fit into this sudden 1863 in which she found herself.

She wanted to play her cello. She could make music that would fit, music that would fill, no matter the time or place or her attire.

“The boy is fine,” Severne said. He walked into the office from another room. The desk, the polished cabinetry and gleaming glass, the dark cherry floor covered in luxurious woven rugs no doubt created decades ago in the Middle East—none of it prepared her for this John Severne.

She’d thought his evening clothes had given a false impression of sophisticated ease. She’d been more right than she could have known. She’d felt the hardness of his form, his energy and his heat. She’d sensed his preparedness.

Now she saw what she’d only sensed before.

He wore a pair of low-slung shorts; all else was bared to the lamplight and her stunned gaze. She’d been to gyms. She’d seen people ripped for appearance or for health. This was so obviously not that.

Severne walked into the room wiping his chest and arms and the back of his neck with a snow-white towel. He came around a beautiful desk that would have looked at home in a French palace, and Kat instinctively placed her cello case on the floor in front of her. She didn’t hide behind it...exactly, but she blushed when Severne saw the move for what it was. Defense. His gaze flicked from her face to the case and back again. Green eyes. Deep, dark green that had looked black when she’d seen him before at night.

“I want to see him,” Kat replied, looking at John Severne during the day for the first time.

He was still shadowed. There were few windows to let in outside light. Those that existed were heavily draped in black and red satin. But she could still see him better than before. What she saw confirmed what she’d already supposed. He was no polished gentleman. Almost nude, his hard, muscular body was too seriously honed to be called athletic.

How had she ever supposed him to be human?

She wasn’t a sculptor, but if she had been, she would have wept because Michelangelo was dead and a master should memorialize John Severne’s body. Yet the leanness of him, the lack of one ounce of spare flesh, was as painful as it was beautiful.

He took not one second of ease.

His tension was absolute.

She knew this about him as surely as she knew how to coax the perfect note from a string.

His pale skin, so harshly honed, was marked by more than exercise. There were faded scars across his chest, abdomen and back. She tried not to trace them with her eyes. Whatever suffering he endured—or courted—wasn’t hers to see. The black slashes of numerous tattoos down one arm from his shoulder to his elbow were almost as sacrosanct as the scars. Something private. She tried to look away, but the marks gleamed darkly like his hair and his eyes.

“He’s having his lessons right now. I thought a semblance of normalcy would help him adjust. He seems bright. He’s definitely had schooling in spite of his unusual circumstances. But he’ll join us for dinner. Later tonight,” Severne said. “I’m glad you accepted my invitation.”

The fine-cut lines of his lips stood out, or was it only the memory of the taste of them that made them seem noticeable to her?

She could feel his Brimstone heat even at this distance. It prickled her skin as if she was in the same room with a roaring fire.

How could she have stayed away?

With the boy involved, it wasn’t a choice to her at all. But deeper parts of her had to acknowledge the pull of John Severne had influenced her decision to come to Baton Rouge as much, or more, than the child.

He stood across from her, but he wasn’t even pretending to be relaxed. Not like before. His energy was there for her to see, barely contained. As if he might take her in his arms again if she said or did the wrong thing. Or the right thing. Depending on how you looked at it.

The thought made her stand frozen, a rabbit who sensed a predator and feared to twitch a whisker in case the movement would lead it into a leap for the fox’s mouth rather than standing idle and waiting to be devoured.

“What about Victoria? Where is my sister?” Kat asked.

“I travel often,” Severne began. “Various business interests require my diligent attention. I wasn’t here when your sister disappeared, but I’m told she was—is—a brilliant Marguerite. The first performance of the season is two weeks away, and...”

“She’s gone,” Kat said, as any hope that Reynard might have been wrong evaporated.

“I came to you in Savannah and invited you here because there’s no evidence of foul play. She was performing under an assumed name, as I understand she often does. She told us she has a stalker. My manager was more than happy to accommodate her wishes to engage her stellar talent under an alias. I’m assuming I met this stalker last night? He seemed completely ignorant of her whereabouts. The only hope of finding your sister is in the clues she might have left among her life and friends here at l’Opéra Severne. If you follow in her footsteps...” Severne suggested. “I’m afraid there’s a distance between me and my employees that prevents me from discovering more about her disappearance.”

He was a daemon. He couldn’t be trusted. And yet she was so conditioned to fear Reynard that this seemed better. Not safer, but better. He’d asked her here because Victoria had disappeared. There was more to it than that. There had to be. But walking away wasn’t an option. Not when the last place her sister had been seen was this opera house.

“I might vanish without a trace, as well,” Kat said.

“No. That won’t happen. I’m here now,” Severne said. “I won’t be called away again. You’ll have my undivided attention.”

As if his mere presence would keep her safe. He was a daemon. Not a bodyguard. He might look like he could take on an army of Reynards, but it would be a mistake to trust him. Why should he stand at her back and protect her from the Order of Samuel and other daemons while she tried to ascertain what had happened to Victoria? He couldn’t have perfectly altruistic motives. He was a daemon. They weren’t known for noble intentions.

“Play for me. Let me see what I’ve done in offering you a seat without an audition,” Severne challenged her.

His bare muscular body stood out in stark relief against the polished antiques of his office. On the desk, several deep purple calla lilies sat in a crystal vase. Like Severne, the lilies stood out. A hint of passion, life, color...but their petals were stiff and perfect like Severne’s physique.

Kat hesitated. She should walk away. Where better to leave a daemon child than with a daemon? But the memory of the boy’s angelic face and the hope of finding clues to her sister’s whereabouts held her in place.

And pride.

There was no denying the frisson of need that rose up in her when he said “Play for me” in his deep voice, smoothed by a creole accent less influenced by modern inflections probably because it had been influenced by Parisian émigrés decades ago. Daemons weren’t immortal, but they lived a very long time. If she played for him, she would be playing for someone who had heard celebrated masters play.

Now he reined in his energy to appear more casual. He moved closer. She could detect a hint of smoky sandalwood, sweat and a lightly concentrated scent that was the heated air of the opera house itself settled on Severne’s hair and skin. The sensual impact of that recognition made her knees turn soft.

She loved the theater scent. To breathe it on him messed with her equilibrium.

He couldn’t be trusted. He smelled like heaven, but his veins flowed with the fires of hell.

“Play for me, Katherine,” he repeated, and this time her eyelids closed against the compelling drawl in his words.

“I’ll play for Victoria,” Kat said to cool whatever charge there was between them.

Severne sat on a straight, tall-backed chair as if it was a throne. He’d placed the towel around his neck, and it hung there like a gentleman’s scarf. He waited for her to sit on a chair arranged across from him and open her case. She took out her cello and her bow. The familiar motions were a meditation even under Severne’s watchful eye.

This was her best defense against the fascination building in her for this daemon she couldn’t avoid. She’d always used music to fight the pull that drew her to daemon blood. Maybe it would help her against the pull she felt for lips and lean muscled heat, for the musical history he’d lived through.

But she couldn’t dismiss the fascination of centuries or the ears of a connoisseur.

When she sat, when she played, it couldn’t be for Vic...not with Severne in the room.

From the first note, she could feel her affinity vibrating the air between them as if the strings of her cello also invisibly existed between her body and the inhumanly hard body across from her. Whatever drove him to discipline his body, inch by inch, sinew and tendon and skin as taut and smooth as untouched steel, didn’t stop him from feeling her song.

She chose Victoria’s favorite concerto. The first she’d learned all those years ago. A simple Beethoven piece that was nonetheless lightly intricate when played by an expert. She meant to keep it light and airy, but it deepened with Severne as its audience.

The music wasn’t a barrier between them. It was a conduit for the electric connection that was already there.

She closed her eyes and remembered the flash of his bare chest when he’d fought Reynard and the heat of his arms around her when he’d cradled her and carried her to bed. Betrayed, but with a tenderness that didn’t seem possible from such a hard creature.

She played every note perfectly...for him. She infused every movement of her bow with emotion...for him. Years ago, she’d decided the instrument had called her to play at l’Opéra Severne, and now she played it as it had never been played. The striated maple and polished spruce were more a part of her than they had ever been, and the music twined between her and Severne’s Brimstone blood only a few feet away.

While she played, the water around the calla lily stems rippled, though the perfect petals remained calm.

She didn’t.

Her skin flushed.

Her thighs tensed.

Her breathing and heartbeat increased.

This was no audition. It might be a test for him or for her, but it was no audition.

Music had always been her protection. Now instead of sheltering her, the sound rose up and filled the room, swelling out to envelop a creature who obviously held himself apart as if she would embrace him and seek to soften his iron edge.

In spite of his obvious discipline, Severne was touched. She could feel his response. Could see his chest expand and contract.

She wouldn’t believe it. She couldn’t. His tenderness had to be a lie. The truth was in the muscle and tendon there for her to see and the fire in his blood she could feel.

She told herself that this was a bargain. He would offer her a place and she could search for her sister while being close to the daemon child if she played well enough to pass muster. But she didn’t want simply to perform well. Always before, when Reynard found her, she fled, she hid. Not this time. This time boldness had led her here to help the boy, to find her sister.

And to John Severne.

Something was different in her. She could feel the blood rushing in her veins as if she’d come alive for the first time.

She wanted to touch him.

Though her hands were on the neck of her cello and the bow, it was Severne she tried to reach. His cheeks above his perfect, angular jaw darkened with some emotion she couldn’t name. His eyelids lowered to half-mast over his deep green eyes. His hard chest rose and fell as if he needed oxygen to cope with what her music made him feel. His response was heady. More so than a theater full of patrons. Her life was about hiding. Subsuming herself in the music of her cello so she couldn’t be found. But, here, now, she played to be felt, seen, heard, and her music was a call for the intimacy she’d always avoided.

“Enough,” he ordered, and her hands faltered. The bow dropped from the strings and her fingers stilled. But her body continued to tremble. She wasn’t used to reaching out. She moistened her lips. It was as if they’d been in a heated embrace and he’d been the one to break it off and push her away. “Enough,” he repeated, and he stood abruptly.

Katherine stood in response. Again, it was more adrenaline that came to her rescue than courage. She wouldn’t slump defeated in her chair. The rush she experienced in his presence wouldn’t allow it. Her best defense had failed because of that rush. She lifted her chin. She held her cello to the side so she wouldn’t seem to cower behind it again.

Severne’s gaze froze her in place in spite of the heat she could feel from the Brimstone. He looked angry. She had played for him just as he’d asked, but he looked like he might want to throw her out of the opera house.

Never mind the boy.

Never mind Victoria.

She couldn’t let that happen.

“I’m not leaving,” Kat said.

Severne met her wide-eyed stare. He didn’t soften. He didn’t ask her to leave or to play again.

“A bargain, then. You’ll stay. You’ll...play. But only in the orchestra pit with the other musicians or for personal rehearsals. Not for me. And I’ll help you find your sister,” he said.

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.