Brimstone Bride

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.

Brimstone Bride

Barbara J. Hancock

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For those that champion the silenced

and love the lost.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

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

Extract

Copyright

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 attending 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.

“Those are my orders. I haven’t decided if I’ll be able to follow them,” Adam said. She’d been hunted by the Order of Samuel. They were her enemy, but she was their pawn. She wasn’t coming to the Turov estate as his friend. Adam had been kidnapped, beaten, tortured, programmed to become a daemon slayer so that he could be used by Rogue daemons to overthrow Lucifer. But it had been a Loyalist daemon that had saved him. And it was the new Loyalist king that he now served.

A daemon that claimed Victoria D’Arcy as his stepchild.

He’d been warned by the daemon king that the Order of Samuel was sending Victoria to infiltrate Nightingale Vineyards and uncover his secrets.

The woman he welcomed tonight might well be the most dangerous threat he’d ever faced. He was supposed to help her even as she planned to betray him.

* * *

She was afraid. Fear always made her angry. She rebelled against it. How many times had she stood on an opera house stage bathed in light and draped in a character’s costume—completely armored in powder, wig and an imaginary persona—to sing out in protest against her plight? She had fallen in love with a daemon. She’d gone against the Order of Samuel. She had survived. The father of her baby hadn’t. The Order had killed him. She’d barely lived. For their baby.

Everything had changed when Michael was born. She was no longer a rebel. She was a mother. Now she had to be cautious for two.

Tonight, as she hurried toward Nightingale Vineyards, more than her voice was lost. It was as if her very heart had been ripped from her chest and it beat elsewhere. Slowly, steadily, but threatened; each beat might be its last if she didn’t do as she was told. The new leader of the Order of Samuel, Father Malachi, held her strings and she was a puppet who could dance only to evil’s song.

She’d flown into California in a plain summer suit of black linen. The gray shell sweater underneath the blazer stretched loosely to brush the top of her thighs. As she was only five foot three, it didn’t have to stretch far. She’d pulled an oversize black fedora low over her eyes. Only her heels and handbag betrayed any personality. She’d grabbed them too hurriedly to think of disguise. Red. A holdover from a much bolder Victoria. That flamboyant woman seemed a lifetime ago.

Katherine had handled the other packing. She’d sent Victoria’s bags ahead to the vineyard’s estate house. Victoria hadn’t told Kat about the danger Michael was in. It was only a matter of time before Katherine discovered her nephew was being stalked by the Order of Samuel. By then, Victoria hoped to have accomplished what she’d been sent to do.

Anything to save her son.

Katherine thought she wanted to visit the vineyards as a retreat to rest and recuperate. Her voice hadn’t been the same since the opera house fire that had almost claimed her life. Doctors said she would recover. That she only needed time. Yet it seemed ages since she’d been able to sing.

She admitted to no one that it seemed ages since she’d wanted to sing.

She’d left her toddling son with his daemon nanny, Sybil, and his hellhound, Grim. Surely, they could protect him even better than her until she could arrange their freedom. One more task for the Order.

But wasn’t it always one more, one more, one more?

She stepped into a coffee shop for an espresso after her flight. While she ordered, she noticed a thick-browed man in a nearby queue. He hadn’t been on her plane, but he had been at the Shreveport airport. She was certain she’d seen him there. He wore a simple suit with a boxy cut and he was bald, stocky, his face smooth and plain, but he didn’t move like a casual traveler.

Maybe he was an off duty soldier.

Maybe he was a ninja in disguise.

But Victoria suspected an even more nefarious origin.

She sipped her small, rich coffee. She even managed a smile for the barista who had boldly scrawled bella on her cup instead of Vic. His dark eyes flashed above a bright smile, but he didn’t distract her from the suspicious-looking man who now placed his order at the register beside her.

She didn’t catch the man’s name. She didn’t have to. Now that he was closer, she could see the movement of his muscles beneath his suit jacket. Its loose cut couldn’t hide his extreme physicality.

Suddenly, the man looked up and met her gaze. He took his coffee from the barista, ignoring the tip jar with its yellow smiley face sticker. She glanced away. Why should she give him an intimate glimpse of her fear?

He had to be a monk from the Order of Samuel. His smirk and the black gleam of his large pupils seemed too knowing. The monks were following her to make sure she complied.

Victoria abandoned her steaming cup in the waste bin, no longer needing the caffeine. She was wide-awake. The whole shop full of weary travelers must see her heart beating in her chest. The Order didn’t have to follow or threaten her further to make sure the job got done.

One threat toward Michael was enough.

Yet the look in the monk’s eyes did quicken her steps. She hurried outside to the waiting row of taxis, and took the dark gaze with her. His eyes had held no sympathy, only the fire of fanaticism. That hateful glow had haunted her life. She refused to let it haunt Michael’s as well.

* * *

The Turov mansion was a California Craftsman castle with hints of Imperial St. Petersburg in its columns and arches. The cab approached down a long, winding drive. Rather than the expected cedar shakes, the house was constructed of rough gray brick, its roof gleaming slate instead of Spanish tile. Several turrets were capped in domes of copper that glimmered gold in the sunset. The material was echoed in hammered metal on the mansion’s gutters and window frames. She had time to appreciate the gleam as the car neared the entrance where the driveway ended in a circular loop. There was something that touched her about its design. It was art, not merely architecture. There was personality evident in every curve, passion in every turret.

But the hundreds of shadowed windows seemed to warn that the walls might shelter a difficult personality and a dark passion.

When she saw the main house, her first thought was forever. She’d traveled the world. She’d walked on ancient cobblestones. She’d sung on stages much older than she was. Nightingale Vineyards hadn’t been here forever, but it seemed to proclaim that it would be. Maybe she was attributing Russian determination to its every brick, every line, because she knew its owner’s heritage. It was natural to assume the house was a reflection of the man.

Since the house intimidated as much as it piqued her curiosity, she looked away.

The inhabited portion of the estate was surrounded by landscaped gardens that eventually gave way to rolling hills of endless cultivated greenery. The grapevines stretched as far as Victoria could see. The magazine hadn’t captured the truth of the expanse. The setting sun bathed the vines in a warm russet haze.