Brimstone Seduction. Barbara Hancock J.

man were casual. Exaggerated ease. He must see the confrontation he’d interrupted. He must see a woman and child threatened by a larger, stronger man, but he acted nonchalant, as if he was only out for a stroll. He must see the knife Reynard hadn’t bothered to hide away.

      Man?

      Kat’s gift wasn’t one of sirens and flashing lights. She was pulled toward daemons. It was subtle. The tingle, the thrill that shivered along her veins as the man approached was probably only shock that he would stroll past Father Reynard with barely a glance in his direction. A daemon wouldn’t dare approach them.

      Closer, she could see that the stranger’s tall form was clothed in evening apparel. The flash of white from his shirt contrasted with the inky darkness of his suit or tuxedo. But closer still, she noted his bowtie was undone at his neck and hung on either side of his collar. So easy. So debonair.

      It wasn’t until he stopped at her side that she knew she’d been fooled. He wasn’t relaxed. The tension in his body transferred itself to hers when his arm brushed her elbow. Hard. Prepared. Ready.

      He might wear formal clothes, but beneath them he was all warrior. Molded body armor would have been more appropriate to the purpose inherent in every flexed muscle and the energy he exerted to hold himself in check.

      “Who are you? What do you want?” Reynard asked.

      The blade of his knife had dipped. He preferred an audience of one for his performances. Her. And her alone. Or her sister in turn. Their mother and grandmother before that.

      “A bystander who finds himself unable to stand by,” the man said.

      For her ears alone he added, “I’m John Severne.”

      Memories of the opera house in Baton Rouge teased her mind, but she pushed them away.

      She had no time for nostalgia. Worry for her sister wound tighter until her insides were pulled like cheap strings on an instrument’s bridge, stretched to the breaking point. One clumsy finger would cause her to snap.

      Severne reached for the boy, but she stopped him. It only took one hand on his hard arm, but touching him felt braver than that. Almost as brave as opposing Reynard. His cultured Southern tones seemed as incongruent to him as his evening apparel. Beneath the polish, he was a man to be reckoned with. She couldn’t see his face...only a suggestion of angles and curves, but as he drew his arm back, she felt what it cost him. He forced patience with her interference. A thrill of cool adrenaline rushed down her spine at his stiffness, his anger. It shored up her nerve...barely. The boy trembled against her, not oblivious to the forces at work above his head.

      “You are making a mistake,” Reynard growled.

      “I would say the same to you,” Severne replied.

      Then he pulled Katherine against him. She’d been right about his tension. She could feel the planned action in his body everywhere it touched hers. Muscle. Energy. Strength. And more adrenaline rushed because she was fairly sure the warning in his words, just like his name, had been for her, not Reynard.

      He was warning her it was a mistake to resist his help.

      But she didn’t snap like the cheap strings she imagined. She held fast. Unbroken.

      “Let me take the boy,” he said for her ears alone, the flow of the Seine even more apparent in an intimate whisper than it had been in his louder speech. He had a Southern accent, but it was old-fashioned, formal and touched with a hint of Paris. Clenched teeth and a hardened jaw and the iron of his body against her offset the softness of his accent.

      He was no French-kissed delta dream.

      He was real. And the potential for danger radiated off him in heated waves.

      “Hell, no,” Kat replied.

      She finally recognized Brimstone’s fire. She’d felt it only a few times in her twenty-two years. Normally she avoided touching daemons. Pressed close to him, the simmer his body contained couldn’t be ignored. He had seemed so cool and collected in his initial approach. He wasn’t. Beneath the surface, he burned.

      Her rescuer was a daemon, and she was damned for sure because she still refused to join forces with Reynard against him.

      “We need more time to negotiate,” he said as if they sat at a boardroom table. “I can arrange that.”

      She’d seen Reynard fight before, but when the energy she’d sensed in Severne erupted, the ferocity of his clash with her lifelong tormentor took her by surprise.

      Reynard was in trouble.

      Severne used only his body—fists, feet, arms and legs—but he used them in a graceful dance of martial arts moves meant to be deadly. The tuxedo he wore was revealed inch by inch as his coat was shredded away by Reynard’s blade.

      John Severne was in trouble, too.

      When a particularly vicious slice cut the fabric away from his muscled chest to reveal a hard, sculpted body, she blinked the sight away, but not before she cringed at the dark rivers of his blood.

      After Reynard, there was always the desperate flight and the need to hide again. This time she’d flee for two. For the first time, she imagined what it must have been like for her mother to protect them from the obsessed monk. It had been a lost cause. But she had never stopped trying.

      “We have to go,” she said to the boy. The fight was the diversion they needed to get away. She pulled him up into her arms again and ran. He clung to her this time, wrapping his legs around her waist and his arms around her neck, subdued by all he’d seen.

      * * *

      The absence of her cello made her ache. It wasn’t a missing limb. It was a missing chamber of her heart. There was nothing to be done. She couldn’t go back for it. She had gone to her apartment for a few necessities, but had sought shelter in the house of a friend who was out of town rather than risk Reynard knowing her current address. She moved often. It never mattered.

      He always found her eventually.

      While the boy slept, she looked up driving directions to Baton Rouge. She couldn’t ignore her concern for Victoria any longer. They’d been out of touch too long, and Reynard’s appearance only confirmed her fear. Urgency pounded in her temples to no avail. She couldn’t fly because she had no papers for the child. He wouldn’t even give her his name. If Reynard defeated the daemon, he would hunt her down. She didn’t have much time to save the daemon boy and find her sister. She’d called Victoria’s phone again and again. The cheery voice mail greeting became more ominous with every repeat. And what of John Severne? Had he ended up with his throat slashed and Brimstone-burned back to wherever he’d come from, or did she need to fear him as well as Reynard?

      “Let me take the boy,” he’d said.

      But every fiber in her body had resisted. It was her fault Reynard had found the boy’s mother. It was her responsibility to protect him.

      The boy had refused to talk, but he’d seemed to understand everything she’d said. He’d also refused to let her out of his sight until he finally fell asleep. His dark lashes against his chubby cheeks gave him an angelic mien against his borrowed pillow. She’d smoothed his soft hair back from his forehead to kiss it, finding the extra warmth beneath his skin pleasant instead of frightening.

      After that, the loss of her cello didn’t matter.

      She’d curled her legs under her in a nearby armchair, determined to watch over the boy through the night.

      But a noise outside interrupted the tea she’d made to calm herself. It had been cooling untouched anyway. She’d been replaying every word Severne had spoken. She’d even closed her eyes to remember the song of his voice, to gauge what was the truth about the daemon—his drawl or the deadly way he’d used his whole body as a weapon. His anger or the way he’d restrained his impatience with her resistance.

      At the sound of a step on the front porch, she rose from the chair beside the boy’s