Kiss Me Deadly: Tales of a Paranormal Romance

He made a distracted mental note to dismiss the coachman at the new year. Then, swatting away the plumes of dust stirred up by the horses, he limped along the flagstones trailing up to the château.

Chauncey gave the massive fortress an appreciative once-over. No earthly temptation could look as inviting as it did at that moment. But he couldn’t relax just yet. He had no desire to spend the night haunted by the knowledge that in just over twenty-four hours, it would all begin again. The horrible, maddening sensation—the control of his body peeling away and falling into the hands of the angel. No, before sleep, he needed to think carefully through all the information he’d gathered on this latest trip to Angers.

* * *

Washed, bandaged, and freshly clothed, Chauncey eased into the chair stationed behind his desk in the library, and tipped his head back, closing his eyes, drinking in the sensation of stillness. He motioned blindly for Boswell, who stood at the door, to bring him up a bottle from the cellar.

“A particular year, Your Grace?”

“1565.” For irony’s sake. Chauncey kneaded both fists into his eyes. He had spent two hundred years wishing he could walk backward through time to that year and alter the final hours of that night. He could recall the finest details. The drill of rain, cold and relentless. The smell of mildew, pine, and ice. The wet slate headstones protruding like crooked teeth from the ground. The angel. The frightening loss he’d felt as he’d realized he couldn’t command his own feet to run. The invisible hot poker jabbing every corner of his body. Even his own rational mind had turned on him, letting him believe the pain was real, never guessing it was simply one of the angel’s mind tricks.

Your oath of fealty, the angel had said. Swear it.

Chauncey did not want to remember what happened next. He let out a groan. He’d been a fool. He hadn’t understood the significance of what he’d been ordered to give. The angel had deceived him, tortured him, blinded him, taken away his will to speak for himself. Chauncey had given his oath to end a phantom pain. A few spoken words that had proved to be his undoing. Lord, I become your man.

He flung his arm across the desktop, sending ink bottles and a glass paperweight crashing to the floor. “Damn him!”

There was a disturbance in the shadows along the far wall.

Chauncey’s body went taut. “Who’s there?” he demanded, hoarse with rage.

He expected a sputtered apology from one of the servants, but instead a polished and feminine voice spoke.

“Back in town, Chauncey? And you hadn’t thought to pay me a visit?”

Chauncey breathed deeply through his nose and squared his shoulders. He tried to place the voice, thinking he should know it, but at present it escaped him. “You should have spoken up,” he said more composedly. “I would have had Boswell bring an extra glass with the wine.”

“I didn’t come here for a drink.”

Then what? he thought. “How did you get inside? Boswell?” But he couldn’t believe the butler would leave a strange woman inside Chauncey’s personal library unaccompanied. Not if he valued his employment.

“My key.”

Well, hell.

He dragged his hands down his face and attempted to sit again, but a sharp pain in his leg cut the movement short. “I never got that back, did I?” he said at last, finding it unfortunate that of all the things his memory could have failed him on tonight, Elyce wasn’t one of them.

They’d met in a hotel de passe; she was a dancer, the most exotic and venomous creature he’d ever seen. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, which led him to believe she was a runaway. He’d wrapped his cloak around her and escorted her back to his home with less than a dozen words of introduction between them. She’d stayed at the château ... what? Eight weeks? Their affair had ended abruptly.

Elyce had revisited him often in the weeks following their breakup, demanding payment for something (a gown she insisted she’d left that he’d never returned, reimbursement for the carriages that had moved her belongings from the château, and eventually, just because), and he’d indulged her, secretly finding pleasure in her titillating company. Finally she’d disappeared altogether, and he’d seen nothing of her in two years.

Until now.

She picked up the glass paperweight off the floor and studied it with a bored expression. “I need money.”

He snorted in amusement. Always right to the point—particularly that point.

She slid him a look. “I want twice as much as last time.”

Now he laughed outright. “Twice? By God, what do you do with it all?”

“When should I expect it?”

Chauncey cringed as he stepped around the desk to blow out one of the lamps, which was inflicting a headache. “If you’d been this demanding when we were together, I might have respected you more.” She’d always been demanding; he was saying it now to take the upper hand in their banter. In a certain twisted way that he didn’t care to analyze, he enjoyed sparring with her. She was pushy, self-serving, and manipulative, but above all, entertaining.

She was a mirror of himself.

“Give me the money, and I’ll be on my way,” she said, running her finger along the top of a gilded frame and inspecting the dust. She was the picture of ease, all right, but she couldn’t look him in the eye.

Chauncey walked to the fireplace mantle and leaned into it; a favorite position of his for deep contemplation, though now he was propped against it for support. He tried to hide that fact. The last thing he needed was to fuel the curiosity burning in her eyes. He didn’t care to be reminded of the humiliating circumstances that had put his body in its present shape.

An image of chasing a carriage down the boulevards of Angers flashed up from his memory. He’d bounded onto the back of the carriage in an effort not to lose Jolie Abrams, the young woman he’d been following all night, but had lost his footing when his cloak became tangled in the wheels. He’d been dragged behind the carriage a good distance, and when he’d finally rolled free, he’d been half trampled by an oncoming horse.

Elyce cleared her voice. “Chauncey?” It sounded more like an impatient order than a polite reminder that she was waiting.

But Chauncey hadn’t fully shaken the memory. He’d spent a full week in Angers, searching out the seedier parts of the city where the angel was known to play cards in gambling houses or box in the streets—a modern alternative to dueling that was spreading across the whole of Europe. There was good money in it—if you could win. Chauncey had no doubt that the angel, with his arsenal of mind tricks, could.

It was while spying on the angel at one of these matches that Chauncey first laid eyes on Jolie Abrams. She might have been disguised in peasants’ clothes, her dark brown hair unpinned and loose, her pouty mouth laughing and downing cheap ale, but Chauncey wasn’t fooled. This woman had attended the ballet, the opera. Underneath the shabby clothes, her skin was clean and perfumed. She was a nobleman’s daughter. In the middle of his amused inspection of her, he saw it. A secret glance between her and the angel. The look of lovers.

His first impulse had been to kill her directly. Anything the angel valued, Chauncey longed to dash to pieces. But for reasons he wasn’t altogether sure of, he’d followed her. Watched her. He hadn’t headed back to the château until he’d lost her in the carriage. The entire trip home, he’d reshaped this startling revelation. The angel valued something physical. Something Chauncey could get his hands on.

How could he use this to his advantage?

“Do you mean to keep me waiting all night?” Elyce folded her arms and drew herself up a little taller. She lifted an eyebrow, or maybe both; half her face was turned away from the light and hidden in shadow.

Chauncey merely looked at her, willing her to shut up so he could think. What if ... what if he locked Jolie Abrams away in the château? The idea took him by surprise. He was a duc, the Lord of Langeais, a gentleman. He’d as soon plow his own fields than take a lady hostage. And yet there the idea was, rolling forward. The château had a myriad of towers, convoluted corridors, and ... dungeons. Let the angel try and find her. Chauncey sneered.

As a child, his stepfather had warned him of the fate of those who wandered beneath the château without a guide, and Chauncey had thought the tales the scare tactic of a man who relied on fear to discipline.