by Eve Silver
Seduced by A Stranger
Eve Silver
Contents
Also by Eve Silver
Praise For Seduced By A Stranger:
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part Two
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Three
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Four
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Sample Chapter: Dark Embrace
Also by Eve Silver
About the Author
Also by Eve Silver
Dark Gothic Series
(Books in this series can be read in any order)
Dark Desires
His Dark Kiss
Dark Prince
His Wicked Sins
Seduced by a Stranger
Dark Embrace
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The Sins Series
Sins of the Heart (Book 1)
Sin’s Daughter (Book 2, Novella)
Sins of the Soul (Book 3)
Sins of the Flesh (Book 4)
Body of Sin (Book 5)
* * *
Northern Waste Series
(Eve Silver writing as Eve Kenin)
Driven (Book 1)
Frozen (Book 1.5)
Hidden (Book 2)
* * *
Compact of Sorcerers Series
Demon’s Kiss (Book 1)
Demon’s Hunger (Book 2)
Trinity Blue (short story)
* * *
The Game Series (Young Adult)
Rush (Book 1)
Push (Book 2)
Crash (Book 3)
* * *
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Copyright © 2009, 2015 by Eve Silver
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.
www.evesilver.net
Seduced By A Stranger
ISBN: 9780994052841
Praise For Seduced By A Stranger:
"Silver thrusts the gothic romance into the next century with the ideal merging of chilling and dark mystery elements and heated sexual tension. Victoria Holt would be proud!"
—RT Bookreviews
* * *
“…absolutely phenomenal!”
—Kwips and Kritiques
* * *
“…atmospheric… The mystery of Gabriel’s past…was fascinating and horrifying.”
—dearauthor.com
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Part One
* * *
1
Marlow, Buckinghamshire, 1812
At the age of eleven, Catherine Weston was buried alive in a shallow, wet grave.
Two months before that, she had stood in the cemetery beside the ancient stone church, clutching her mother’s hand as the tiny coffin containing her brother’s remains was lowered into the ground. All four of her infant brothers had been buried this way. Sent to the warmth and light of Heaven, her mother said.
But now, on this miserable, gray October day, as the damp earth weighed impossibly heavy on her chest and forced her to struggle for every breath, Catherine realized her mother had lied. There was no light or warmth. There was only the cold, pungent mud and the choking terror that made her heart beat so hard she was certain it would burst.
She wondered how long it would be before someone missed her.
Too long.
She was the only child of two only children, and she had spent the first decade of her life entertaining herself while her parents grieved for their four infant sons and grew distant and tired and old before their time. Solitude was a state she knew best. So though she had been at Browning School for Girls for nearly a month, she had not formed any close friendships. No one would note her absence with any alacrity.
As she lay panting in her grave, she thought with bitter regret that her preference for solitude had come with a terrible price.
The morning had been stormy, the rain pounding, the boom of thunder loud and near. By the afternoon, the downpour abated and as soon as lessons were over, Catherine left the school and sneaked off to gather smooth, cool stones like the ones she and her mother took to her brothers’ graves and left there to mark the fact that they had come and gone. In the spring and summer, they left flowers. In the autumn and winter, stones. There was a welcome familiarity to the task.
The large pocket at the front of her pinafore was already heavy with a dozen small rocks when she bent at the edge of a low embankment to pick up one more. Without warning or sound, the earth gave way beneath her feet. One moment she stood on wet ground, the next, she slipped down to the muddy riverbank and sank in the fetid mire as a good chunk of the embankment came sliding down atop her.
And there she was. Buried as her brothers were buried, though they were dead and she was not. Not yet.
Numb, she lay there at an odd incline, her head closer to the surface than her feet. The first thought that came to her mind was that she would die here and her mother would cry a river of tears and her father would have cried if she had been a son, but since she was a daughter he would remain stoically silent. Then all thoughts were swept aside by a roaring, surging panic.
Seized by horror and fear, Catherine tried to scream, but the weight of the earth did not let her put any force in the sound, and the effort robbed her of what little breath she could summon.
The more she cried and wriggled, the deeper she sank, the muck taking on a sucking, greedy life of its own, pulling her in. Beneath her, the slime parted and oozed to make her grave more secure, cold and dark and so foul that she retched and gagged. Above her, the weight of the fallen embankment pressed down and down, growing heavier by the moment.
She was dying. She knew it and she fought and struggled with all she was because she wanted to live.
Whatever the price, she wanted to live.
Her struggles grew weaker, her movements sluggish, and after a time, she simply lay there, taking shallow little breaths, trapped like a fly in honey.
Luck and happenstance had determined that her right hand was squashed in the space directly before her face, raised in a futile gesture of protection, held fast in the posture she had taken as she tumbled. Willing herself to hold still and quiet, she wriggled only her fingers, pushing aside the earth before her face, creating a pocket that allowed her to breathe. Then she moved her whole hand at the wrist, sweeping dirt from before her mouth and nose and eyes until finally a tiny opening let the gray of the sky peep through.
The sight of the sky, so welcome and sweet, overwhelmed her.
A seedling of hope unfurled.
She took a moment then to breathe, just breathe. Or perhaps she took an hour. There was no way to know.
More wriggling and waving of her hand, more inching of her forearm side to side, and the hole grew large enough that she thrust her hand and part of her forearm out of the ground like a dirt-covered branch sticking up to
ward the heavens.
With careful movements she pushed the earth aside as best she could, large clumps falling on her face, into her eyes and mouth. But the hole grew larger, and it was that she held on to, the sight of the ever-expanding edges of the opening and the hope that she could dig her way free.
A sound reached her, faint and distant, a squelching noise like footsteps in mud. It grew louder, then stopped, then started again. Catherine thrust her hand through the hole once more, waggling it to and fro and calling out in a hoarse, dry croak to make what paltry ruckus she could until she was forced to seal her lips against the earth that sprinkled on her face, loosened by her movements.
The footsteps stopped entirely, and Catherine’s heart stopped right along with them. Then louder, faster, they pounded toward her. From nowhere a face appeared in place of the patch of gray sky, pale cheeks and dull skin, scraggly yellow ringlets and wide blue eyes.
Catherine blinked against the soil that clung to her lids, and after a moment of hazy desperation, she recognized the face above her. Madeline. The strange, quiet girl from Browning who kept to herself, the girl the others whispered about. She was a little older than Catherine, perhaps three years or four, but her odd nature made her seem younger.
Madeline stood a distance away, her position causing her face to be neatly framed by the margins of the hole. Leaning in a bit, she peered deeper into Catherine’s grave, her brow furrowed. Then she reared back as though struck and made a startled sound. “Catherine?”
“Help,” Catherine wheezed, the single word all she could summon.
She heard sounds of swishing cloth, and a faint dull thud, and she realized that Madeline had gotten down on her belly and inched forward to push aside the wet earth at the edges of the hole. A cascade of soil tumbled onto Catherine’s face.
“No!” she cried, desperately afraid that these attempts at aid would only serve to bury her completely. They needed adults and more than just Madeline’s two hands to dig her free. “Get help!”
Tipping her head to the side, Madeline did nothing, and Catherine ran her dry tongue over dryer lips and struggled to find the breath to explain. But there was no need. Madeline offered an awkward nod.
“I shall return,” she said, then squirmed back, straightened, and finally, disappeared.
Catherine longed to call her back. Do not leave me. I beg of you, do not leave me alone in my grave. But she knew there was no other way, and Madeline was already gone.
It was a very long while—her despair and terror making time tick away all the more slowly—before Catherine heard the sounds of pounding feet and the shouts of the headmistress and others, and it was even longer until they dug away all the dirt and pulled her free.
She felt arms wrap around her and her body lifted. She cried, racking, dry sobs that faded to nothing, and she was only dimly aware of being bathed and clothed in a nightrail that smelled of soap, and then tucked in her bed. The headmistress made her drink something that was warm and smelled like cloves and milk and her father’s brandy.
Much later, she woke from an uneasy doze, her throat raw and dry. There was almost no light, and for a fraught instant she thought she was dead. Buried. Then she became aware of the sliver of moonlight that drew a thin line on the floor and the smooth softness of the sheets that covered her, and she realized that she lay in her bed at Browning.
Sounds became recognizable. The beating of her own heart, made loud and strong by her fear. The wind whistling through chinks in the wall. The rattle of the windowpanes. And the huff of steady, soft breathing.
She turned her head. Someone stood at her bedside, cloaked in shadow.
Madeline.
The girl stared at her, eyes glittering with the reflection of what paltry light bled through the darkness. She glided closer, reached out, and laid her palm flat across Catherine’s chest, above her heart.
“Tell me,” she whispered urgently. “What does it feel like to die?”
Catherine struggled to form a reply. She had not died. She lived. She lived. And she was so grateful for that.
Just then, the headmistress came with a candle, the flame dancing and bright against the blackness. Mesmerized, Catherine stared at the orange glow, so beautiful, so warm, and she wondered how to answer her friend, her savior.
What does it feel like to die?
2
Cairncroft Abbey, 1813
The boy made his way through the woods, purposeful and quick, his breath showing white before his lips, for the morning was unseasonably chilly. He knew exactly where he headed, and when he reached the place, he wrapped his strong young arms around the thick trunk and shimmied up, the bark rough beneath his hands. The nest before him held three young birds. They were not newly hatched, but rather almost ready for flight. The sight of them made him smile.
Three. He found their number auspicious.
With care, he eased the nest from the crook of the heavy branch, balancing it with one hand as he clambered back down the tree, using his thighs and his one free hand to guide his descent.
Though the day was winter-cold, the sun shone overhead, peeking through branches and leaves, bright and hot. Like a fire. He liked fires, the sight of the flames, leaping and dancing, the heat, the powerful and unpredictable nature. The destruction left in its wake. In the autumn, he had found a quiet place in the wood and brought a fagot to light the dry sticks. With wonder and awe, he had watched as the flames roared and spread so fast that even had he wished to stop them, he would not have been able.
If his parents knew he was the one who had started the fire that took half the south woods, they had never said. Even if they suspected it, he knew they could not be certain. He was a very good liar, able to hide the truth from almost anyone, except perhaps his cousin Sebastian, who seemed to know things that no one else ever did. But Sebastian did not live with them anymore, and that was for the best.
With the nest carefully held in one hand, and the other arm stretched high where he curled his fingers round an overhead branch, the boy pointed his toes, seeking the ground. At last, they touched and he lowered himself, checking the nest with a sigh of relief. The birds chirped wildly as he turned and walked at a brisk pace deeper into the woods.
The foliage grew thicker, blocking the sun, leaving him in cold, dark shadow. It was quiet, save for the clamor of the baby birds. There was no one here. Only him.
Setting the nest on an old, desiccated log, he hunkered down beside it to eye level, staring at the tiny creatures. Their short, high-pitched cries tumbled one against the next.
They were orphaned things. He had poked at the bodies of two adult birds where they had lain near the base of the tree. The nestlings were alone, as his cousin Madeline was alone.
Only … she was not truly alone, though her parents were dead now as the nestlings’ were.
Madeline had family here. She had returned to the abbey, and now there were three, instead of only two as they had been before. He was still not quite certain how he felt about that. Madeline was a strange, quiet thing who glided noiselessly in his shadow, adoring and desperate for any attention he bestowed. At times, he enjoyed that, though he did find it odd, for she was the elder and he the younger by a full three years. Mostly he found her more irritating than anything else.
“Are you afraid?” the boy whispered, reaching out and almost touching one of the birds, only to stop short and draw his hand back as the tiny creature opened its beak and made a piteous sound.
He rose and glanced about. There were twigs aplenty littering the forest floor, and old, brown leaves that smelled like moist rot, piled in a thick, carpeting layer. Picking up a stick, he used it to poke around a bit, until the end clacked against something solid—a rock tucked tight against the log.
Prying loose the rock, then rooting beneath to search for bugs, he caught a fat worm and brought it to the nest. For a moment, he gazed between the single worm and the three open beaks. Then he smiled. Squeezing the squirming, wrig
gling flesh, he dug deep with his nails and carefully tore the worm into three parts. A shiver of delight wriggled up his spine. He fed a bit into each seeking beak.
“Are you afraid?” he whispered again, reaching down to close his hand around one small, feathered body and lift the bird from its nest.
He stroked his index finger along its head. The creature’s heart fluttered violently and it struggled in his grasp. It turned its head toward him, eyes glossy and black, and he wondered if it knew.
Could it sense his intent?
Smiling, he stroked its head once more. A sensation of unutterable power surged, and with a giddy laugh he twisted the nestling’s head clear around.
Bright and sharp, the snap echoed through the woods. Or perhaps his joy in the act only served to amplify the sound.
There was no more fluttering heart, no more frightened twitching. There was nothing. Only the still-warm body in his hand. And he owned that body. It was his.
The pleasure that bathed him, warm and liquid, nearly sent him to his knees.
He took a slow, deep breath, savoring the moment, enjoying the nuances of scent and touch and sound. He wanted to remember this frozen instant, this feeling. His first time. In the cold, dark forest, he was the master, the king. He was powerful, all-powerful. He claimed this creature’s very life.