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  AWAKEN THE DEVIL

  by

  AJ CHASE

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  Copyright © 2015 by AJ Chase

  Cover design by Yocola Designs

  Gemma Halliday Publishing

  http://www.gemmahallidaypublishing.com

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Thirteen years ago, England

  The oppressive darkness heightened all of Chandler Bentley's other senses. The room stank of death and his own desperation.

  Silence was the only thing he could hear, as jarring as a scream in its way. Silence and his labored breathing. It wasn't a far stretch to believe he was the last person in the world. Of course he knew that wasn't true. In the nursery his six-year-old daughter, Anne, was sleeping. Her nurse would be in with her.

  That brought to mind all the other servants in the house. No, he certainly wasn't alone in the world. He wasn't even alone in the room. There was always his wife, Helena.

  If he moved just the right way the moonlight would illuminate one pale hand hanging off the edge of the bed they were supposed to share but rarely did. Of course, he could not hear the breathing of his beautiful wife because she was dead.

  Murdered.

  A dark puddle had formed on the floor next to the bed. Every few seconds another drop of blood would fall with a nauseating splash.

  He sat down in the chair by the bed, his favorite in the house, and stared into the darkness. He wanted to remember every detail of this place that had been his prison for seven years. Helena had screamed, and someone would have heard those screams. Soon enough someone would ring the authorities, and he would move on to another kind of prison—the kind that would hold him in with metal bars rather than a gold ring and empty promises.

  * * *

  Now, Manhattan NYC

  "Numbers one-fifty-one to one-sixty, please follow me."

  Fielding French's head jerked up at the forceful words from the mouth of the dance mistress, a skeletal middle-aged woman in an unflattering purple leotard. The buzz of the enormous crowd grew for a moment while people filed out. Close to hyperventilating, Fielding watched them leave. She glanced down at her hand and saw she'd crushed the yellow paper pinned to her leotard. Flustered, she smoothed it as well as she could and ran her gaze over the other dancers. There were literally hundreds of people moving in and out of the room.

  She had to get a hold of herself. But after the emotional roller coaster of the last forty-eight hours, she was probably lucky to just be still standing. Grief and weariness vied with fear for the predominant emotion in her head. She hadn't slept for more than a few minutes at a stretch in days, she was jet-lagged after the long overseas trip, and her internal clock was still set on UK time. The plane had landed early Saturday morning, leaving her time to spend with Mac before this unwelcome Monday morning audition. The room they were holding in was the largest of its kind she'd ever seen, and along its wall of windows were glass double doors leading straight to the outside. It would be so easy to just walk out and never look back…

  But she couldn't. Because she had promised Mac. Her vision faded around the edges, and for a second she was back in that Long Island hospice room just this morning, clutching her uncle's hand against the crisp white sheets, unshed tears choking her. Crying wouldn't have helped anyone. Chin up, that was Mac's way.

  Mac French was a mountain of a man—a newspaper giant who had cut swathes across America and England with daring exposés and the kind of hard-hitting journalism that Fielding had disdained although she loved the man.

  The kind of journalism he had asked her to do.

  With Mac a shrunken version of himself from three kinds of cancer and a rapidly failing heart, she'd made him a promise, though the words hadn't come easily past the thickness in her throat. Now there she was, just hours after landing on American soil, trying out for the line in Chandler Bentley's newest show, Pirates.

  The door into the theater opened again. "Numbers one-sixty-one to one-seventy, please follow me," Purple Leotard called out.

  Fielding pulled in a deep breath and headed for the door. The one into the theater. Under any other circumstances, Fielding would have been happy to be there. She adored theaters, and the Paramount Theater was one of the nicer ones she'd worked in. She loved the way the way they smelled like dust and wood, and the hollow metallic sound taps made when they hit the stage. She reveled in the almost tangible presence of audiences long since gone, like a million ghosts just there to say hello.

  It had been one of Dale's, her ex-fiancé, biggest complaints—when he'd still been voicing them rather than jumping into bed with the first available easy lay—that he could never inspire as much passion in Fielding as Gilbert and Sullivan did. He might have been right, but at least Gilbert and Sullivan had been true to her all these years, which was more than could be said for Dale.

  The dance mistress led Fielding and nine others to a large, mirrored room with blinding overhead lights. After so long without sleep, Fielding's eyes were gritty and burning, overly sensitive.

  People who weren't auditioning filed in and out of the room. Members of Bentley's staff, dance instructors, assistants, maybe the man himself.

  She couldn't stop her hands from shaking, so she fisted them. She probably should have eaten sometime today, but her stomach would have objected. She'd been too busy anyway, dealing with the hospice, the paper work, the dread, and shock. Dealing with Mac, who would willingly have died alone if not for the fact he needed her.

  She'd made the call this morning, too. The one to Chandler Bentley that had sent her scurrying across town to this audition. Her best friend and a fellow employee of Mac's, Josh, had scared up Bentley's hotel room number from somewhere. Josh was able to get information no private party should ever be able to get. Fielding had never questioned his techniques or sources because, frankly, she wasn't sure she wanted to know. She'd taken the number from Josh and thanked him for his skills, however invasive or illegal they might be.

  She'd dialed up Chandler Bentley, hoping he'd agree to see her. The memory alone was enough to make her hands tremble more. She slid them into the pockets of her hooded sweatshirt. She'd expected a secretary or a wife to answer the phone, but the velvety baritone that picked up the other end turned out to be Bentley himself. Operating on instinct alone, she'd skipped her name and simply asked for an interview. She wasn't even through the question before he cut her off. His crisp, lyrical accent articulated each word like little bullets.

  He'd given a sharp curse and then threatened, "I swear to you that if I knew your name you would never work again. Given enough time, I will discover where you're calling from, and when I do, both you and your editor will regret it." He'd hung up then, slamming the receiver down so hard th
e crack stung her ear.

  Somehow, in all of that, breakfast hadn't been a priority.

  She was so tightly wound that glimpsing someone moving toward her in the mirror made her jump. It was worse when the woman spoke.

  "I don't know you, do I?"

  The pulse in Fielding's throat tripped. The dancer looked barely old enough to be out on her own. Her strong country twang and oversized blue eyes did nothing to make her seem more adult.

  "I don't think so." Fielding turned her body slightly away to discourage conversation.

  "I'm Daphne Buhler, by the way," the country girl went on, clearly not daunted by Fielding's non-verbal no trespassing sign.

  "Fielding French." Her mind was too scattered to find a way to shake the girl without alienating her. Not a good idea when she needed to keep a low profile.

  "I haven't seen you around here before, have I?"

  "I've been working in London for the last several years."

  The choice had been made on a whim, three days after her failed wedding. Two years had passed with so little to mark them. Except a progression of shows, the latest just ended a week before. She'd meant to come back sometime, though that time wasn't clear or planned. It was just an indefinite. She should have come home sooner. She should have been with Mac.

  "London?" Against all laws of nature Fielding could comprehend, Daphne's eyes seemed to get even bigger. "I would die to try for the Royal Shakespeare, but I'm just too afraid of rejection. Did you work for Bentley there?"

  It was the perfect in. "No, I've never even seen him. Is he here now?" She asked, feigning nonchalance she didn't feel.

  Daphne's smile came easily, and her teeth were very straight and white with a charming overbite. "I wish I knew. I've never seen him either. I don't think anyone has, who hasn't worked with him directly. I swear, he must live in a cave. Look, I gotta run to the ladies' room. Auditions make me have to pee. Could you keep an eye on my things?"

  "Go ahead. It will be here when you get back."

  As soon as she was gone, Fielding searched the crowd for someone who might be Chandler Bentley. She settled for a moment on a man who had "wealthy and negligent" stamped on his forehead, but then dismissed him easily. He was far too young. Josh, a researcher for Mac's hip off-beat paper, the Greenwich Village Surveyor, was still working up a complete bio, but she had Bentley's birth date, which placed him squarely at forty-three.

  In the farthest corner, she spotted a man, partially hidden by the ebb and flow of the crowd, his focus completely on the dancers. His posture was rigid, with arms crossed across his chest and a look on his face that could never be mistaken as friendly. He exuded power and authority even at a casual glance.

  He was tall, over six feet, and fit. In his black ribbed shirt and black drawstring athletic pants, it wasn't difficult to see that he had the body of a dancer, hard and lean. He was wearing flat-bottomed black tap shoes and no jewelry aside from a simple, but clearly expensive, platinum watch.

  He was maybe thirty feet away and with the ever-moving crowd, it was hard to make out every nuance of his appearance. She could tell, however, that he was blond and his face had that slightly gaunt quality so common among the English.

  Suddenly, his eyes jerked up toward the front of the room. Even though she couldn't be sure that he was actually looking at her, a prickle of horror and awareness crept along her scalp.

  He took a few steps forward. He was looking at her, no question.

  He was coming closer, and, though her mouth had gone dry and she had no idea what she was going to say to him if he addressed her, she couldn't break away from his stare. This close, she could see that his eyes were deep-set and, with his sharply arched eyebrows, had a certain quality that made him look just as she'd always pictured a Shakespearean lord would. With a goatee, he would have been the personification of the saying, "The prince of darkness is a gentleman."

  His eyes were hazel, fringed by long lashes and ringed by dark circles. They were cornered by the deep crow's feet she'd seen on even very young men who had dimples. If ever he smiled, she knew that he would have them, too. His nose was long and thin, every bit the picture of aristocracy.

  He took another step closer. His lips compressed into a hard line. Fielding's stomach roiled, and she pressed her hand against it as though the action would settle it. She could not deny, as much as she instinctively wanted to, that the disturbance was more fascination than fear.

  He was close enough now that she could have spoken to him without shouting. Goosebumps rose on her arms. Any reaction so immediate and powerful was not to be trusted, but that didn't negate the attraction she felt.

  Without really meaning to, she stepped back, putting some space between them. As though ten feet constituted intimacy, she moved away from the force of his consuming gaze, away from the obvious and inexplicable anger in his expression. And straight into Daphne Buhler, returned from the bathroom. Murmuring an apology, she turned again to the man, but he was gone. Melted into the crowd like he had never been anything more than a figment of her imagination, the random fantasy of her repressed libido, which had lain dormant for years without complaint.

  "I think that was him," Daphne said breathlessly.

  "Him who?" Fielding's attention had wandered back to the place where she had first seen him. Had he been her imagination?

  "Chandler Bentley, of course. Who else?"

  Chandler Bentley, the man whose innocence Mac had begged her to prove with every bit of the energy left in his withering body. Fielding, for her part, wasn't as married to Bentley's innocence in anything as Mac was. Bentley exuded an aura of having done something sinful. When she'd pressed for a reason Mac had muttered, "I owe him. I just owe him."

  As a professional dancer, she had been peripherally aware of Bentley for years. He was the ultra-reclusive British producer and choreographer whose stunning musicals had netted him millions of dollars and an incredible twenty Tonys that he had never shown up to claim.

  On the plus side, Fielding actually admired Bentley's work. She had been in two of his shows over the years, long after he himself had moved on to greener pastures and venues for new Tonys he clearly didn't want. While she had never worked with him herself, she had met plenty of people who had. He was a cruel perfectionist according to all accounts. Fielding had never met another dancer who'd worked with him and didn't fear him.

  And somehow, despite his reputation for harsh judgment and his hatred of reporters, she was supposed to get Bentley to talk to her. And somehow she had to make it work better than that disastrous phone call.

  "Don't get near him, Fielding. Don't let him touch you." His bird-like hand reaching out from the hospital bed, squeezing her arm with surprising strength, Mac's demand had seemed like an odd request at the time. Now that she had seen Chandler Bentley, it made more sense.

  Chandler Bentley. Who else, indeed? She so didn't need this. Daphne launched into a creative list of things she knew about Bentley as Fielding made for the sidelines where she couldn't have seen the sexy stranger if she tried. Fielding ignored her and made a showy pretense of digging through her bag while she collected her savagely scattered thoughts. Was she ready to do this? Even for Mac?

  This was not a weak spirit like Dale who would always head straight for the path of least resistance. With the stubborn jut of his jaw and the angry tightness of his mouth, she knew Bentley was not to be underestimated. She could feel the force of his will just by looking in his eyes. The image was still burned in her brain. He would have no qualms about eating her alive if he so much as suspected that she was here to write an exposé on his innocence. Not that she knew why she was proving him innocent, since Mac hadn't told her.

  She weighed the pros and cons while she rifled through her bag. Mac's life was nearing its end. He had asked this one thing of her in return for a lifetime of love. She was an actress as well as a dancer. She could do this. There was no reason why Chandler Bentley would ever have to know who she was unt
il everything was over but the lawsuits he was bound to press. She pulled her hand triumphantly from the bag with a tube of ChapStick.

  The skeleton finally returned and turned them over to one of the other dance instructors. The new man ran through the tap routine with the brisk efficiency of a drill sergeant and all the warmth of a dead whale. The result of such force and aggression was slightly dampened by his badly affected Russian accent. And his pink leg warmers.

  Fielding followed along with the moves, tap-ball-change, wings, without really thinking. She was an expert tap dancer, and the routine hardly called for her attention. She easily made the cut.

  The group was moved back to the holding room to wait for the next section. Fielding nursed a bottle of water and stared at the slowly ticking clock, wondering when reality had stopped and this bizarre world she'd suddenly sunk into had started. Finally, the dance mistress returned and gave them to the ballet instructor. She glided through the pas de bourrée and the long Chassé without any difficulty. She wasn't surprised to make that cut as well.

  She did what she could and hoped for the best when it came to the modern dance, which had never been her forte. But in the end she was among the group that was led to another room to learn a routine from the actual show.

  As they were directed out to the stage for their turn to present the routine, her palms were wet with sweat. They emerged into the brightness of the stage lights. Beyond the blinding white of the overhead beams the auditorium was dark. It would have been impossible to see the audience even if its members were all seated in the first row.

  Her normal audition nerves were overshadowed by larger concerns. If she didn't make this final cut she was out of luck. After that disaster of a phone call, she had no idea how else to get an introduction to Bentley. Of course, if the intimidating man she'd seen earlier was indeed the man in question, she wasn't sure she wanted to encounter him again.