macarons. He wondered if her perfume was rose. He wanted to remember her scent when he returned home alone.
She added, “About your soul?”
He sat upright. So she had heard him utter that last night. Even shivering with fear, she’d been coherent and so brave. “Yes. I…felt something when I laid my hand on you.”
“You mean when you grabbed my boob?”
“I didn’t grab it.”
Not purposely. He’d been in a rush to ensure she was all right while the vampires had closed in on him from behind. But her flirtation amused him. She wasn’t afraid of him. In fact, the woman exuded an engaging confidence. Maybe she was interested in more than a chat over tea. He certainly wouldn’t rule it out.
“You felt me up,” she said, drawing her tongue along the jagged edge of the second macaron. He didn’t know her well enough to guess if that tone had been a tease or if she was actually offended.
“It was an accident,” he offered. “I wanted to touch you, to make contact, and let you know you were not alone at such a harrowing moment.”
“Sure.” She tapped the spoon against the plate and sipped her tea. “Admit it. You got a free feel.”
“Well, sure. And what an appropriate time, when four vampires were on my ass.”
“Touché.”
Her lips pursed as she sipped, and Rook sat up straighter, easing his leg to the right to allow some room in his rapidly tightening pants. Damn, she was gorgeous. And a witch. He held great respect for witches. Even when considering his not-so-illustrious history with the breed.
You are not here to flirt but to find your soul. Ask her!
Oz had the worst timing, but like it or not, the demon had always been more forthright than Rook’s conscience.
“Do you…” he started, not sure how to ask such a thing. “I mean, the touch. It felt familiar.”
She set the teacup down and tilted her head. Her assessment of him delved a bit too deep to remain a simple flirtation. She looked into him, beyond the suit and tie and the well-groomed jaw stubble. Beyond his vain need to slick back his hair in an attempt to coax the tufts of gray behind his ears. Her look felt as much like a touch as if she’d actually laid her palm over his chest.
“I need to tell you a story,” she finally said. “About something that happened to me, oh…a hundred and ten years ago. It was around 1908, I believe. A few decades after my mother died.”
Rook sat back, wondering where this was leading but content to listen to anything this sultry vixen wanted to tell him, even a story. “1908? It was a good year, if I recall correctly. The tale end of bohemia.”
She nodded, their shared history refreshing. Rare did he meet someone who could remember the history he did—that is, someone he didn’t want to stake.
“So, there I was, in bohemia—actually, it was more the Victorian era coming toward an end. I remember the stuffy long black skirt I was wearing. Wool. Ugh. So gothic. Anyway, I was wandering the edge of the Bois de Boulogne.”
The park that hugged the modern peripherique road that surrounded the city had once been a forest—and still was—though by the nineteenth century it had already been commandeered by less upstanding citizens for midnight liaisons and occult rituals. Not that Rook would admit to knowing anything about such rituals firsthand. Some things a man liked to keep close to his vest.
“Have you lived in Paris all your life?” she asked.
“I’ve traveled France and Europe and stayed in some countries a year or two at a time, but Paris has always been my home.”
“Then you’ll know that the forest had some wild parts. And I’m not talking about the illicit parties.”
Perhaps she also kept a few dangerous liaisons close to the vest. The thought that he may have passed by Verity Von Velde while wandering in a sex-blissed haze at a midnight orgy dialed Rook’s lust up another degree.
“It was near a field,” she continued, “and I saw a fallen rowan tree. Actually, I was compelled to the tree. My soul does that to me sometimes. Makes me go places and do things I would never intend to do. It always works out swell, though.
“The trunk had split away from the stump and had fallen with old age, but the wood revealed in the split smelled fresh and alive. I was lured closer to inspect, and I ran my hands along the jagged wood and down inside where the deepest parts had been reduced to soft decay from insects.
“At the core it was solid and hard, and I felt something there.” She looked at him, her bright gemstone eyes waiting for him to respond.
“A soul?” Rook’s heartbeats thundered as he began to grasp the hope he was aware Oz had tread for ages.
She dipped her head and gazed up at him. “Is that what you believe?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I do. I also knew the soul belonged to a man. A sad man. And that it needed to be kept safe. I can recognize things like that. A person’s heritage and, well, I can generally tell if that person has fathered children or been reincarnated. I have a reincarnated soul. And you…” She twisted her lips as she studied him from tufts of grey to the perfectly knotted tie at his throat. “Yes, you’ve fathered a child.”
“Sorry to disappoint, but I have not.”
“Hmm…I’m usually never wrong. My intuitions are like my magic. Spot on.”
“There’s a first time for everything, eh?” Her blatant confidence appealed to him. “But let’s get back to your tale about this soul in a tree.”
Rook’s memory flashed to the end of the sixteenth century, that fateful night he’d stood in the open field near the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, where he had made his home with Marianne. That cruel, dark night that the devil Himself had stood before him and presented an offer Rook had not refused.
“My soul was taken from me and buried in the ground,” he blurted out. “Very near the forest.”
“Hmm, that makes sense. If it was buried, a tree could have grown up through and around it, encompassing it in the core of its structure.”
A thick violet curl fell over Verity’s shoulder, and she cupped her hands around the teacup, lifting it just below her chin to inhale the spicy aroma.
“I couldn’t walk away from it,” she said, “so I dug out the core of the tree. Took me all day because I had but a small athame with me. Maman always berated me for carrying it around. One must revere instruments of magic,” she said in a haughty tone, obviously imitating her mother.
Rook chuckled, but he wanted her to continue, so he didn’t speak.
She set down the teacup. “The chunk I took away was about the size of a baby’s head.” She formed the shape with her hands. “I took it home and carved at it for months until I felt I’d carved to the essence of it. I made it into a heart shape about this size.”
She
