Darkness Divine by P C Cast & Gena Showalter & Maggie Shayne & Rhyannon Byrd

Author:P C Cast & Gena Showalter & Maggie Shayne & Rhyannon Byrd [Cast, P C & Showalter, Gena & Shayne, Maggie & Byrd, Rhyannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780778304067
Goodreads: 8124132
Publisher: Mira
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

His lips brushed across hers, and every nerve in her body came to life at the sweet, brief contact. But then the carriage came to a halt, and he drew away. “Come. We are here.”

“Where?”

“Lafayette Cemetery. You were here today, but you didn’t see what you came to see. I thought you might stumble upon it. Led, perhaps, by sheer instinct. But, no. Perhaps you were not ready.”

She remembered the dizzy, sick feeling that had swamped her when she’d visited this place before. He got to his feet and climbed out of the carriage, reaching back in for her. He took her hand, helped her down. She felt oddly out of place in her jeans and simple blouse. She felt as if she should be wearing a bustled gown with a matching hat. He led her through the opening in the wall that surrounded the cemetery. Every tomb was a small crypt. No one was buried here, she had read, because the water table was simply too high. Instead the graves were above ground, tiny cement tombs with peaked roofs, ornate with carved angels or crosses, names arching across the tops. Rows of them, like miniature villages. Villages of the dead. He led her between the rows, toward the very depths of the place, the center, and there he showed her a tall narrow crypt. The name across the top was “Lemieux.”

Underneath were two other names. Marcus and Marie.

Tessa stared up at him, blinking, feeling a bit of the same dizziness she had felt here before. “The artist and the prostitute?”

“Then you know something of them already.”

She felt a death chill, standing there staring at a cement crypt that held the remains of a woman who could have been her twin. “I picked up the book. The one you wanted me to pick up. I read about them.”

“The book only tells you part of the story.”

“But you’re going to tell me the rest?”

He nodded. “Marcus was an artist. His father was a French noble who was driven out of his country in shame, and came to live here because it reminded him of home. But he lived in constant fear of being shamed again.”

She looked at her tour guide, into his eyes. “What shamed him in France?”

“He was cuckolded. His wife ran away with a commoner. It was the talk of Paris at the time. Quite the scandal. He was a proud man, too proud to live that way, so he came here, where he was treated almost as royalty.”

“And then his son fell in love with a prostitute.”

“The father forbade it, of course. Still, Marcus was a stubborn man. And he loved her deeply. Painted her often. He would sit for hours just staring at her image, when he couldn’t be with her. Some said he was obsessed, others that she had bewitched him.”

“He was in love,” Tessa whispered.

“Madly in love. They were secretly wed. Marcus had only to collect his things, slip away with a horse and a carriage, and pick her up.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.