Too much time had passed. She could feel the end of the month approaching. Every night more of the moon illuminated the garden. Every day and night, she searched for the hidden prisoners she was supposed to free. She was trying to save Michael, but her maternal instincts fretted over the amount of time she’d been gone. Even with modern technology, touching his face on a laptop screen wasn’t the same as tucking him in at night herself. She missed the sloppy toddler kisses and his chubby arms clenched around her neck. She missed the scent of his towheaded curls when he was sleeping and his high-pitched giggles when Grim inadvertently tickled him with hell-spawned fur.
Her mother’s heart pulled her in the direction of her child. But she was pulled in another direction so fiercely that she ached with the necessity of refusing the call.
Adam Turov.
He was everywhere. The whole of Nightingale Vineyards was Adam. From the decades of memorabilia in the main house to the grapes plumping on the vines. From the shadowing garden pathways to the sunny bustle of workers helping him to care for his vines. From Esther’s Slavic kitchen to Elena Turov’s birdcages. From dusky roses to the rich, red beauty of his Firebird Pinot Noir. She was surrounded by Adam even when he was mysteriously absent, day after day.
She should be glad that his actual presence had been scarce for the past week and that she’d been left mostly unobserved to skulk about the entire estate trying her keys. But her true feelings were more complicated than that. When he was gone, she missed his burn. Having basked in its glow, she was...bereft. Not relieved. She was cold. The farther away he ventured, the colder she became. Last night she’d had to burrow under the covers and light a fire in the small fireplace of the cottage.
She’d found nothing while he was gone. No hints of activity that might indicate prisoners being cared for. No sign of the prison itself. But rather than focusing on her failure, this morning she could only feel relief.
Adam was back.
She could feel his magnetic presence, but she had no excuse to seek him out. None at all. She’d taken to the sunlit garden to warm her bones and wander near the house without giving in to the desire to find Adam and seek the much greater heat she craved in his arms.
The affinity had never ridden her so hard. She’d never had to resist it to such an extreme that she was left shivering.
The sun helped. She wrapped her arms around herself and willed the soft, early morning rays to soak deeply into her. She could see the sprawling roof of the main house through the trees. The estate was old and empty. It existed in a tangle of roses and ivy that counteracted the orderly rows of grapevines, but all of the green growth served only to highlight how dead the main house had become. Only Esther’s kitchen remained a place of life and laughter. The rest of the house was a tomb, a memorial for what had been.
Adam burned with Brimstone blood, but had his heart grown cold?
It didn’t matter. His emotions were none of her concern. She wasn’t here to cultivate an actual relationship. Yet she found herself less able to contemplate coldly seducing information from him now that she’d tasted his lips.
She found Adam in the doorway of the birdcage gazebo and stopped in the middle of the path. When the sunlight fell on his face it suddenly seemed as if she hadn’t seen him for years.
She should have known the affinity would bring them together even as she tried to stay away.
“My father had this gazebo made for my mother. But she didn’t spend much time here. She loved her birdcages, but this one was too big. She said it made her feel like a poor trapped bird even with the door open,” Adam said. “I like it myself. I sit here at times and then walk out whenever I please. It reminds me that I’m free in so many ways. I can step out of the cage. I can grow my grapes and talk with a beautiful woman as she walks in my garden.”
She knew his soul wasn’t free. She could see that truth in the shadows of his eyes even as he blinked in the sun. But some cruel truths didn’t have to be said. Instead, she moved again. They could ignore his bartered soul for just a little while. Nothing could have stopped her from approaching his warmth. Not when she’d suffered through colder and colder days—and nights—without it.
Adam watched her come toward him. He straightened and his expression grew more serious. His jaw hardened. His eyes shone like blue diamonds in the morning light.
“I saw smoke coming from the cottage’s chimney this morning,” he said.
She continued to move closer to the gazebo where he stood. He didn’t step down the wrought-iron stairs to meet her. But he didn’t move away. In fact, he’d wrapped one hand around the rail and she could see that it was the white-knuckled grip he’d used before. The question was: Did he hold himself back, or stop himself from walking away?
“I’ve been chilled to the bone since you went away,” Victoria said. Her voice was husky and low. There was a cadence to her words that was almost, but not quite, a song.
Adam closed his eyes and swallowed. He opened them only when she’d climbed the bottom two steps leaving only one empty between them. A wrought-iron tread of possibility. She could step up. He could step down. The choice was theirs to make. Nothing to do with a hellish civil war or an evil monk. Only him. Only her. Only a response to the separation that had left them both looking for each other this morning.
“I’m never cold, but it was very dark where I traveled and I missed your song,” Adam said.
Adam was the one who took the last step. She had raised her face toward him, but she hadn’t been able to risk the last tread. He risked it for them both. She closed her eyes against the nearness of his Brimstone fire as if it flared bright enough for her to see. It wasn’t visual, but her body could feel the aura of heat around him grow stronger. She could feel when they were close enough for his heated aura to encompass her. He reached to wrap his arms around her back.
Her eyes were still closed, but she wasn’t surprised when his warm hand touched her face. He traced the outline of her cheek and jaw and then, as she thought the soft tickle would kill her, he allowed the pads of his fingers to trail over the outline of her lips. She drew in a breath and released it in a shaky sigh. Her nipples peaked. A rush of adrenaline flowed to her legs then drained so that her knees were left weak and trembling.
“I’m fascinated by your mouth. But I know it isn’t where your song starts. I know it starts lower,” Adam murmured. His fingers left her lips to move down to her throat where he gently cupped them near her voice box. The move from a different man would have felt threatening, but his hand was light around her throat. His palm was hot and soothing against the skin that hid her damaged vocal cords. The doctors said she’d breathed fire trying to save her son. Sometimes she dreamed about a dragon flying from the burning opera house with Michael on its back. She didn’t open her eyes. She focused all of her senses on Adam’s touch. It wasn’t Brimstone that made her throb intimately when his hand left her throat to trail down to her chest. It was his touch and the slight tremble of contained desire she could feel in his fingers as he moved his hand to her diaphragm, as if he traced the path her song would take if it ever decided to fly.
“I can feel it in you. The music. The melody. Its grace fuels your every sigh,” Adam said.
He’d moved his face down to hers and he spoke against the lobe of her ear. She shivered in response to his Brimstone-heated breath. She wanted to feel it everywhere. When he moved his hand to nudge her T-shirt up so that he could spread his fingers against her bare stomach, her respiration went shallow and quick. She could no longer remember being cold. She was molten inside and the flow of lava seemed to have settled in the V between her legs.
She startled as his lips touched hers, and her eyelids fluttered open enough to see Adam’s eyes close in a savoring swoon. Hers drifted closed again and she opened her mouth in welcome as his tongue teased against hers. She wrapped her arms around his neck to keep from falling. She buried her hands in his hair. They kissed and she forgot all about keys and Malachi. Her chills were erased. Her loneliness and worry forgotten. Their bodies didn’t care that they weren’t allowed to explore their connection. The affinity and the Brimstone, once loosed, were nearly impossible to restrain.
Adam’s body burned. She pressed against him as close as their clothes and position allowed. It wasn’t close enough. He groaned deep in his throat. She hummed in response. Her skin began to tingle wherever it touched his. She was more than willing to hold him until she burst into flame rather than let him go.
His hand moved from her stomach to trace the zipper of her jeans all the way to the juncture of her thighs. She cried out into his mouth when he found the heat he’d kindled and pressed it firmly beneath the palm of his hand.
It was an ATV rumbling along the garden pathway that broke them apart. They stood, each trying to regain their equilibrium as the gardener passed. He waved at them and Adam raised his hand in reply. Victoria stumbled down the steps to put distance between her and the damned man she craved. Her affinity ached. Her unsung song left a cold knot in her chest.
“I wanted to ask you to dinner. Only that,” Adam said. He pushed one hand up into his hair and smoothed it back from his forehead. She stared at the droplets of sweat that glistened on his upper lip. She resisted the urge to step back into his arms and lick them up.
“Only dinner,” Victoria said. She pressed her hands against her stomach and breathed in deep as if she was centering herself to step onto the stage.
“You’ll join me?” Adam asked, sounding surprised. He stepped down the stairs, but walked a couple of paces away as if he didn’t trust himself to stand near her.
She had no choice but to join him. He was back on the estate and she needed to increase her efforts to find his secret prisoners. But that justification didn’t fool her affinity. It sensitized all of her nerve endings so that every touch they’d just shared replayed again and again with arcs of feeling that shook her to the core.
“Yes. I’ll join you,” Victoria said. She lifted her chin to face him. His gaze tracked over her from her eyes to her flushed cheeks and swollen lips to her chest that still rose and fell more deeply than it should. “For dinner. Only that.”
He was far more experienced at control than she was. He no longer breathed too deeply. The Brimstone blush on his skin had already faded. The perspiration on his lip had dried. Only the swollen curve of the lower lip she’d nibbled indicated that they’d shared a passionate kiss moments before.
“Until then,” Adam said. He was back to the sophisticated host who would seem completely untouchable to someone who hadn’t tasted his fire.
Unfortunately, she had and those tastes only made her burn for more.