Harlequin Nocturne October 2016 Box Set by Kelli Ireland

Author:Kelli Ireland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781488024757
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2016-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

He could hear the siren song that sounded when her heart beat, when she inhaled and exhaled. But that wasn’t what called him to her. It was the subtle scent of her, beneath soap, blended with a hint of verbena perfume. Like cotton warmed by the sun, but cooled by the breeze on a spring day, there was a freshness, a goodness to her, untouched by Brimstone.

Untainted.

And she thought he was a daemon.

He settled the boy with the costume matron, Sybil, who had been at l’Opéra Severne almost as long as he had. She’d always appeared as an older woman with that particular blend of sternness and maternal habits that made everyone defer to her in case she should decide to box their ears or swat their behinds. She looked no older than she’d looked the day he’d been ushered into her care when he was about the age of the boy he’d brought from Savannah.

Katherine D’Arcy was wrong.

No surprise that his Brimstone-tainted blood had fooled her. He wasn’t a daemon, but his grandfather had inked a deal with the devil in Severne blood. The Brimstone had come after, scorching their veins with its invasive mark.

He was only an heir to damnation, but Katherine D’Arcy was associated with the Order of Samuel, and in such a woman’s eyes there could be little difference.

Once he’d settled the boy with Sybil, he made his way back to the suite of rooms that made up his apartment several stories below and behind the grand opera stage for which the house was famous. The seemingly endless levels of basement beneath the opera shouldn’t have existed in a city that itself was beneath the flood plain of the mighty Mississippi, but nothing followed natural law here.

The opera house was a universe unto itself, influenced by its damned denizens and masters.

Its gilded mahogany columns and highly polished boards held ground against elaborately carved wainscoting more baroque than anything else you’d find in the river city. The carvings seemed to gambol and change as you passed, often reflecting your own experiences and thoughts back to you as if some long ago sculptor had chiseled out premonitory dreams in a laudanum haze. And all the shadows were draped in heavy layers of black-and-crimson satin and velvet curtains, which in spite of being impeccably maintained always ended up seeming shabby chic in the candlelight.

Time, distance, reality were softened inside l’Opéra, but the softness didn’t mute the cruelty of an eternity in the luxurious chains of candlelit opulence you couldn’t escape.

His rooms were more austere, but still overly filled with the detritus of centuries. His prison was made even more claustrophobic by books and art and textiles from too many years and fears to count.

Resisting the oppression of time had helped to harden him as much as his constant training had.

Only his bedroom reflected his true taste for simplicity. In it, the only furnishings were a large black cypress bed and a matching trunk bound with cracked leather straps and a heavy iron padlock.

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