Brimstone Seduction

Katherine’s skin had been perfectly smooth. So very soft to his touch.

He didn’t touch the tally marks. He suspected they’d scorch his fingers as badly as the scroll. If not literally, then figuratively, because of the guilt each mark represented.

She was coming. He could feel her approach, a distant tug on his senses that was both anticipation and... Her lips had been sweet, flavored by a vanilla lip balm and the champagne she’d been given after her performance. He hadn’t had to kiss her to influence her. The Brimstone in his veins gave him heightened powers of persuasion. A touch would have sufficed. He’d tasted her because he’d had to, but he hadn’t expected the taste to linger on his tongue. Most flavors were burned away before he could even enjoy them.

She threatened to soften him. He could feel the seduction of what it would be like to ease into her arms. Instead, she was the one who had to be seduced. He needed her to complete his task and end his imprisonment. The contract Thomas Severne had inked with hell must be fulfilled before Levi Severne died.

He left the bedroom to pass into a room that looked more medieval torture chamber than exercise room. He’d crafted most of the equipment himself to test his limits and push his body to become as iron as it could be though still flesh and bone. He began what would be hours of training with one thought burning in his mind.

When he was finished with Katherine D’Arcy, she would be scarred, as well. His seduction and betrayal would irreparably mark her heart.

Chapter 3 (#ulink_ac9d3735-07b4-542f-91b3-08f913be0b10)

When Kat made it to Baton Rouge after driving the rest of the night and into the next day, she couldn’t shy away from her memories any longer. The city was a blend of modern glass and steel from the present and neo-Gothic architecture from times long past. It wasn’t hard to find the opera house because it sat on Severne Row, a street time had forgotten to touch. While much of Old South Baton Rouge had been claimed by poverty and, later, revitalization, Severne Row had stayed the same for decades.

They’d been to l’Opéra Severne as children accompanying their mother on tour. Even then, the theater was infamous for being devoted to a darkly Gothic version of Gounod’s Faust, its most popular draw. Their mother had been a contralto Marthe for several nights while they’d watched in awe on velveteen seats of pale, faded scarlet.

She pulled up to the theater and parked the nondescript sedan she’d rented with a friend’s help so her name wouldn’t be on the paperwork. Later the rental company would come to claim it. Kat was an old hat at traveling quietly and lightly. She had only a couple of suitcases in the trunk.

She carried them to the side entrance, where Victorian-style signs directed employees away from the main portico. She did pause to look up at the grand porches with their arches and massive stairs. The curving style of the rails was both beautiful and intimidating, oversized to denote the palatial quality of the building they pointed to.

When she moved to the side door, it pressed inward easily, and the shadowed interior sighed a welcome to her travel-weary senses.

The scent of the place evoked sudden visceral memories: swinging her legs clad in white tights, her feet tucked into polished Mary Janes, the scratchiness of her ruffled tulle skirt with its wide satin belt far too fancy for fidgets, and Victoria humming along, lost in rapt enjoyment of their mother’s inspired performance.

She could sense again the hush, the thrill and the music swelling until it claimed her to the marrow of her bones.

That night she’d known she would never sing.

It was the polished maple that called to her, the hollow reverberations coaxed to fill an entire room—lofted cathedral ceiling and all—in spite of humble nylon and steel beginnings.

Dust. Lemon floor polish. Wax and powder. As soon as she breathed the air in the two-hundred-year-old opera house again, she knew she’d missed it. She’d been in thousands of auditoriums, theaters and even more magnificent venues.

But it was the Théâtre de l’Opéra Severne that had shown her the way in which she could hold Reynard at bay.

She’d been fascinated by the orchestra pit, but especially the stringed instruments. The sound and movement of the musicians had transfixed her, and when they had plucked at the strings, they had plucked at her soul.

Her first cello came soon after. Then lessons. Then obsession. Her calloused fingers, the muscles in her gracefully bowed back and her well-shaped arms all because of Severne’s opera house.

Had she recognized its echo in him? The interior of the whole building was as expectant as John Severne was coiled and prepared. The same ready-for-what-was-about-to-happen filled both the theater and the man.

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.