On the edge of the Romanian wilderness, one woman flees the secrets that haunt her lover....

When four London Seasons fail to find her a suitable match, Alcyone Carter does the unthinkable and treks across Europe to marry a foreign nobleman she's never met.  But on her wedding night, she discovers that her handsome, enigmatic husband is not the man he claims to be — and when a more sinister secret emerges, she escapes from his estate into the darkness rather than live a lie with a man she feels she can never know.

Ignited by his desire and his pride, Dumitru Constantinescu, Count Severinor, risks everything to follow Alcy from the depths of the Romanian forests into the decadent heart of Istanbul.  It is there that they will become unwilling pawns in a game that forces them to confront the sensual passion they've discovered — and the dire threat that could cost them their lives.

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PRAISE FOR THE VEIL OF NIGHT

"A lush, erotic historical Gothic romance with just the right dark and mysterious hero and a strong heroine who can match him." — Karen Harbaugh

"Envelops the reader in an atmosphere of mystery and sensuality." — A Romance Review

"Intelligent.  Passionate.  Filled with dark secrets and illuminating love.  This is what romance is all about!" — Robin Schone

CHAPTER ONE

Alcyone Carter was frightened.

She sat stiffly on the sway-backed mule, her hands clutching the pommel so tightly that her fingers had long ago gone from cramping to agony to final, blessed numbness. The reins she had no use for, and so they hung slack, slapping gently against her mount's neck with every steady step as it allowed itself to be drawn onward by the lead rope that stretched taut into the fog. Only that rope and the occasional, muffled clop of a hoof assured Alcy that her invisible guide was still there ahead of them, and only blind, desperate hope allowed her to believe that he could have any idea where they were going.

Around her, the world closed in, as small and featureless as the inside of an egg. Her feet were swallowed in the swirling mist, and even her hands, scarcely two feet from her face, were shrouded. The few feeble rays of sun that penetrated the thick blanket were bounced around until they became a thin, even light, flattening shadows and erasing all sense of depth.

The sound of whispered prayers in French and the rattle of rosary beads grated from behind her like the dry scratchings of an insect's legs. Celeste, her lady's maid, had been terrified of the mules even without the danger of the precipitous drop on one side of the narrow trail that had been the last thing they had seen before the fog enveloped them. Now, she was nearly hysterical.

Alcy found herself split between annoyance and envy, weary of her maid's moaning litany and yet wishing that she, too, could bury her mounting anxiety in histrionics. She felt utterly powerless, and to make matters worse, she knew she looked a fright. She had worn her riding habit for six days straight, and even Celeste's nightly efforts could not keep the delicate gray silk and brilliant gold braid from showing the stains of mud and damp, the wrinkles of too much wear between ironings. The dress had been created for civilized two-hour jaunts in a well tended park, not an endless journey through the wilderness. Alcy’s hair had fared little better in the wind and damp, and she felt its rebellion from its pins and ribbons as a personal insult.

"How much farther?" Alcy called out in German to their guide. Her voice pierced the dead fog stridently, unnaturally loud. She tried again, attempting for insouciance. "When will we arrive? You said it was the last day."

"Now, fräulein." The reply drifted through the whiteness.

Abruptly, Alcy sensed an openness around them, as if they had risen beyond the rocky slope that had sheltered them on one side as they climbed. Had they reached the mountain's crest? 

As if in answer, a breeze pushed through the sullen air, tattering the fog into long streamers that fluttered like a thousand veils. The guide became visible in the shredding mist, and Alcy watched him pull his mount to a stop. Her own mule sauntered a few more steps before halting nose-to-tail behind him.

"Why are we stopping?" she asked, shoving her unruly hair from her eyes and hating the nervous shrillness of her tone.

"Be patient," the man said impassively. He had answered every question impassively for the last six days.

Alcy had no choice, and so she sat and waited, straining through the mist for some hint of what lay before them. The breeze quickened to a wind, and through the rapidly clearing air, she traced the trail with her gaze as it sloped down until it was swallowed where the rocky upthrust gave way to the dark tangle of forest. From their vantage, she could look out over the saw-toothed tops of the trees and see the opposite side of the valley...

...and the castle that loomed above it. It stood at the edge of a cliff, only a little higher than the ridge crest where they rested, iron-gray and sheer-walled, its toothy crenellations smiling indifferently down on the forest below. It looked as ancient as the mountains, and as cold.

"Castle Vlarachia," the guide said. And then he nudged his mule back into a walk as Celeste's prayers crescendoed in panic.

Castle Vlarachia. It seemed impossible to Alcy that she was facing it at last, which was odd because her father's scheme had struck her as eminently sensible and achievable when he had suggested it nearly a year ago. The plan had still seemed practical and — Alcy was honest with herself — rather romantic when she exchanged a series of shy letters with the man she came to know as János as her father quietly dealt with the financial details in precisely the way she had laid out. A bridal portion was secured in her name, and the rest of her dowry was given over to the baron in a trust upon the condition of their marriage, and with that security, she had given herself over to fantasy. So when the moment came, her long trip from England to Vienna and down the Danube had possessed the glitter of dazzling, girlish dreams, unshaken by the ugly mundanities of transcontinental travel yet more genuine to her than anything in her life until that point.

But then the fog had risen from the river as the barge reached Orsova, wrapping Alcy in its insulating sense of unreality, and since the moment she had stepped onto the quay there, she had not quite been able to make herself believe that anything she experienced was truly happening. The strange entourage awaiting her had only reinforced that sensation. 

Someone will meet you at the docks, János' last letter had promised her. And someone had. What János failed to warn her was that her escort would not be a liveried coachman and footmen to take her on a brief carriage ride to a manor overlooking the town but a strange, ruffianish pair who would lead her far into the depths of the wilderness on the back of a mule with her baggage strapped onto four camels — four actual camels! — behind her. It was a shame Aunt Rachel had taken ill and had to be left with her maid and manservant in Vienna: Despite her own anxiousness, Alcy sorely missed seeing her reaction to that. The camel driver spoke no language with which she was familiar, and her guide seemed to know a mere smattering of German, which he employed only grudgingly and usually to assure her that they were close to their destination — very close.

And now she faced it.

Alcy sank into a daze of confounded thoughts and emotions as they plunged once again into forest, feeling for the first time uncertain about the wisdom of her agreement to the scheme. Reflexively, she raised a hand to her necklace, her fingers curling around the miniature that hung from it. She had spent so much time gazing at that pendant over the past four months that she could now call to mind a perfect replica of the man in its portrait. In England, she had thought the gentle, blurring glow around János' golden features to be rather dashing, but now its imprecision haunted her with grotesque possibilities. 

She pushed the image away and mentally paged through the affectionate yet distant letters he had sent her instead, trying to find reassurance in the shape of the underlying personality in his carefully respectful phrases. She was so preoccupied that her mule came to a stop before she realized they had somehow circled the cliff and arrived at the castle.

The trail had widened to a road only to be swallowed by an arching maw in the castle’s massive barbican. Directly in front of them, the gates stood shut tight as if to ward off an invading army, the oak blackened with age — and perhaps boiling pitch, too, that had splashed against the wood as it rained down upon the enemy. The vast curtain wall stretched away on either side of the gateway's towers, gray and bleak under the shroud of clouds that smothered the sky. 

Were they just going to stand there until someone inside noticed them? Alcy wondered as her guide stared in mute patience at the battered oak. Just as she was beginning to think she ought to call a greeting, the gates started to creak open. 

It was only then that Alcy remembered how frightful she must look, how pale and travel worn with her windblown hair and mud-stained skirts. I cannot go in now! She felt the first, fluttery stirrings of panic. However else she might be lacking as a lady, she knew she could at least look the part if given a chance, and all her future happiness might depend upon this initial meeting.

"Wait," she hissed to the guide. 

He showed no signs of having heard her. 

"I must refresh myself," she pressed on, a trifle more desperately. "I must change clothes, arrange my hair — "

By then it was too late. The gate had swung wide, revealing the servants who opened it — and beyond, a crowd of people who stared at her with wide eyes.

The guide entered, and her mule followed obediently behind. A broad, sere ward stretched out between the curtain wall and a massive square keep that stood proud of the warren of low gray additions sprawling from it in all directions. The space was filled with men, women, and children, and some automatic, distant part of Alcy's mind began to franticly add them up, losing its place only after it had passed two hundred.

Alcy sat ramrod-straight on her mule, trying to project the cool, calm air of a born lady when she had never felt more like a tradesman's dressed-up daughter, her heart pounding wildly in her chest. For some reason, she had not thought of the local peasants and servants beyond the vague idea that there must be some — and if she had, she never would have imagined she would have to confront them all like this, at the moment of her arrival, nor that they would survey her so weighingly. If she'd considered the locals at all, she would have envisioned them clothed in wholesome English calico dresses and decently tailored wool coats and trousers. But the men wore strange, scoop-necked waistcoats with oriental decorations under baggy overcoats, and the women's costumes struck her Leeds-bred eyes as tremendously exotic. Arches of white linen framed the women's faces, and wide aprons of the same material covered their dresses, both brightly embroidered in angular patterns that seemed almost barbaric. Alcy imagined 
she saw in their faces traces of the horse nomads that had swept through the region centuries ago — that they truly were the children of the Huns as many of the Hungarians claimed to be.

Before Alcy even consciously registered the pull, her gaze was dragged away from the gathered peasants to a lone man who stood to one side, apart from the crowd. The sense of separateness that surrounded him was far more profound than could be credited to such sublunary matters as physical distance from the others or a difference in dress. It was rooted in who he was, what he was — and Alcy knew him to be the castle's lord.

He wore a coat cut in the height of French fashion, though from four or five years past, with matching trousers and a wine-red waistcoat. The tailoring was exquisite, cut to display a powerful frame, broad shoulders narrowing to lean hips, the muscles of his wide-planted legs apparent even through the cloth of his trousers. His body sent an instinctive reaction through her before she had even made out any details of his face, a reaction she had felt before when suddenly meeting eyes with a surprisingly handsome man, but this time it was compounded by the knowledge that there would soon be far more between them than idle glances. For Baron Benedek János was soon to be her husband.

Forcing her eyes upward as her guide pulled them to a stop, Alcy discovered that the man was inexplicably bareheaded, his chin shaven and hair worn long over his collar like a romantic poet from a generation past. For an instant, he seemed like the young Apollo of his miniature, with his face turned into a wind that ruffled his pale hair. But then he turned to look at her, and she realized that his locks were not golden at all but silver, shot through with streaks of the darkest sable and surrounding an unlined visage that could be any age between twenty and fifty, his features strong yet more smooth than rugged and his eyes possessing a slight slant of the East that, with his hair, gave him an otherworldly cast.

Alcy suddenly knew why the women of the old ballads always allowed themselves to be carried away by their faerie lovers. The man's gaze narrowed as it swept across her, and she felt her skin prickle with heat in its wake, the sensation waking an alarming sense of brazenness within her.

Celeste, who had gone silent, suddenly began to pray again in earnest, and out of the corner of her eye, Alcy saw her cross herself as if the man were a demon come to steal her soul. Steal it? I'd like to see the woman who could deny him if he asked.

The baron — she could not call this man by the Christian name she had been using freely in her letters for the last four months — strode toward them then, and Alcy sat frozen, watching him in dry-mouthed fascination as her body sang in awareness of every step. He moved with a kind of reined-in energy that she had never encountered before, riveting in its promise of excitement. His eyes were a cold, pale blue under the dark slashes of his brows, but they danced with a sense of self that she might even be tempted to call charisma, as trite as such a word seemed. She could not begin to sort through the thoughts that flickered within their depths as he approached, so quickly did they come and go, but it was clear he made no attempt to hide them. He was a man not accustomed to concealing his feelings, whatever they were — one who had never had the need. Alcy envied him suddenly and sharply.

Baron Benedek stopped at the side of her horse and grasped her stirrup, and she realized that he meant for her to dismount. Alcy swung stiffly down from the saddle, her stomach fluttering with nervousness and involuntary attraction.

The baron caught her elbow before her feet touched the hard-packed earth, and she felt a small, twisting pleasure deep in her center even though the thickness of his glove and her sleeve still separated them. His action might have been to steady her, but he used the motion to place her arm around his and pin it neatly to his side.

Alcy had the insane impression that he thought she might flee and was preemptively preventing any chance at escape. She mentally reviewed the miles of tangled trails they had traversed over the past six days. Flee to where? How? And what would make him think that she might want to? The thoughts had a fine edge of hysteria.

His teasing eyes belying the gravity of his expression, the baron spoke quickly in some language that Alcy could not understand. She blinked and stared at him dumbly, letting the silence stretch out until she felt obliged to give some sort of reply or risk the appearance of rudeness. She cleared her throat, feeling heat creep up her cheeks as she remembered the many demurely tender letters she had sent him since their engagement had been formalized. Now, in his presence, those missives seemed impossibly naïve, from another life, and she could not think of where to begin.

"Herr Benedek, I presume?" she asked tentatively in the schoolbook Standard German her governess had taught her.

The baron's eyes narrowed, and Alcy feared she read a hint of contempt in their glittering depths. "In this part of the world, a noble is addressed by his full title," he replied in the same language. "A baron is never just 'lord.'"

Shamed at her mistake, Alcy swallowed hard against her roiling stomach. She had learned that Hungarians used their family names before their Christian; why had she not thought to research their titles as well? "Baron Benedek, then?"

"As you say." The words were without inflection. He looked her up and down again, possessively, assessingly, and she stiffened under his scrutiny as she felt her cheeks heat even more, though now their warmth had nothing to do with embarrassment. "Welcome to the castle, Miss Carter. I am sure you are curious about your new home. I will arrange for a tour of the premises later, but right now we are wanted in the chapel. The priest has been waiting for some time." He flashed her a toothy smile before beginning to walk toward the nearest wing of the structure that sprawled from the hub of the keep.

"The priest?" she blurted, stumbling after him to keep from being dragged. He couldn't mean for them to be married now. She had only just met the man. She must recover from her journey and spend time getting to know him better, and even then there were so many preparations to be made — people to invite, wedding entertainments to arrange, and her first parties to plan for the neighboring nobility and gentry, not to mention the travel arrangements for their trip to the glitter and whirl of the imperial court in Vienna. It didn't even make sense that she would want such a thing. After all, he must want to get to know her, and before the wedding could even be countenanced, she must convert to the Roman faith. 

Wait — that was it! The priest must be ready for her Confirmation. But she was certain that she must first be catechized or something — surely there was more to it than could be done in a single afternoon.

"Why should we delay our happy union a moment longer than we must?" Baron Benedek said as if he could imagine no difficulty with the prospect.

He did mean their wedding! Alcy's mouth opened, but no sound came out.

The baron continued blithely, "After all, mine is a bachelor household, and it would be most improper for you to stay the night if we were not yet wed." He gave her a raking look. “Speaking of impropriety, what has become of your chaperone?”

“Aunt Rachel’s gout became unbearable, and she was forced to remain in Vienna with her cousin while I continued on alone.” Alcy attempted to sound appropriately meek, but his words made her resentful, for he should be the one defending unorthodox behavior, not her. “I have my lady’s maid as company instead. Surely, since we are betrothed, her presence is sufficient.”

Just then, they passed through wide double doors in the end of the wing, entering a vast Romanesque hall. She was given no time to take it in, though, for the baron did not even slacken his pace in response to her hesitation, and she had to run a couple of steps to come even with him again.

“All the more reason for us to wed immediately,” he said.

"But we can't do that!" Alcy snapped. The man gave her a sideways, patiently inquiring look, and she felt her face flame scarlet and fumbled for something less blatantly contradictory to say. "I must at least put on my wedding dress," she blurted. The protest was nonsensical, and she blushed even harder as she realized what she had said, but it was the first coherent, nonaccusatory phrase she managed to pull from the welter of confused objections that tumbled through her mind.

"You may wear it for our marriage portrait," the baron assured her in the voice of an adult pacifying a child. 

Alcy stifled a surge of simultaneous irritation and chagrin — irritation at his tone and chagrin at how shallow and vain she must have sounded to him. She took a steadying breath and seized upon a less frivolous impediment. "But I am still an Anglican. I must convert before we can legally be wed."

"Do not worry," the man said as they entered a narrow, shadowy corridor. "The priest will deal with that first. It will only be a matter of a few minutes." He gave her a sideways look, and once again the directness of those blue eyes stirred a shivering warmth deep inside her. "Surely four months is an engagement long enough for anyone's propriety. In England, it would be far in excess of the norm, would it not?"

"Yes," honesty made Alcy agree, but she could not keep back the words that followed, implacably logical and thoroughly argumentative. "And yet this is hardly a usual English marriage, for we don't even know one another."

"Do months of correspondence mean so little to you, my little bird?" he asked. The endearment was straight from his letters, a play on the meaning of her name, but now the phrase had a sardonic twist.

"No. No, of course not," Alcy said, straightening her shoulders even as she grew more confused about exactly what this man meant and what he intended. She felt as if she were engaged in some sort of battle with him, though for what, she couldn't say. She also felt, helplessly, as if he were cheating, changing meanings and twisting customs to suit himself, and yet she knew no acceptable way to call him on it.

"Good," the baron said with satisfaction, and Alcy knew she was beaten.

They turned down another near-lightless corridor, and Baron Benedek switched languages as he spoke again. This time, Alcy recognized the patterns of the Hungarian boatmen's speech.

"I do not speak Magyar," she protested in German.

Baron Benedek made a noise halfway between a grunt of confirmation and a snort and changed languages again — and this time, she could decipher the words.

"Can you understand this, then?" he had asked as he guided her down another passageway.

"Only with difficulty," she replied in Attic Greek, markedly different from the modern vernacular he used.

He nodded. "And Russian?" he asked in that language, of which she scarcely knew twenty words.

"Nyet." Was he testing her? Alcy wondered. To what end? And what answer did he want to hear? Belatedly, she considered that the baron might not care for a wife who knew more than the obligatory French, the German they had exchanged letters in, and perhaps a smattering of Latin, but it was too late now to pretend ignorance.

"French?" he asked, switching as if he'd read her mind.

"But of course."

He changed to another language, and then another and another, and Alcy merely shook her head helplessly as she did not recognize a word of any of them. The baron stopped without warning, and Alcy looked away from him, startled, to discover that the corridor reached a dead end at a dark, polished door in front of them.

"The chapel," Baron Benedek explained, in German again. He looked at her for a long moment, but the shadows of the unlit passageway were too deep for Alcy to read his expression. Still, his close attention was enough to send an edgy warmth buzzing through her, the sensation both heady and dangerous. 

"I understand that it is customary for an Englishman to kiss his intended after she accepts his marriage proposal," he said, with a dangerously playful note in his voice that seemed somehow out of tune with the deliciously dark intent in his eyes. "There has been somewhat of a delay in our particular case, but I believe that it is a custom worth respecting."

For half a second, Alcy just stared at him, uncomprehending. Then he loosed his hold on her arm, slipped one arm around her back and the other behind her head, and pulled her toward him. Only then did she realize that he actually meant to kiss her — truly kiss her. 

She tried to jerk back automatically, but he held her too tightly. Why resist? she asked herself abruptly. There was surely nothing improper in it, as they were minutes from being wed, and yet as he drew her near, such a hot confusion of sensation overcame her that she could not quite believe that it wasn't wicked, after all.

Their bodies met, the baron drawing her firmly against his hard stomach and chest so that her skirts were crushed against him, and his head began to descend. Light-headedly, she watched his face grow nearer, nearer, as her breath quickened and her heart raced. And then — his mouth found hers.

Polite, some distant part of her mind labeled that gentle contact, but it did not stay so for long. A rush of fire surged though her at that first brushing pressure, and she felt both heavy and weightless at once, her knees bending as she leaned against him, letting her head tilt back in invitation.

Which he took.

His gentle kiss hardened suddenly, and her lips parted eagerly at his tongue's urging. His touch inside her mouth was slick and firm, shockingly intimate, and the fire inside her roared up, flushing her skin with heat and making her head spin. When he finally pulled away, she wasn't ready, and she stumbled back, gasping for breath and blinking at him in the dimness that somehow seemed suddenly far too bright.

Alcy thought, belatedly, that she might have shocked and repelled her future husband, but when she met his gaze, his expression held more pleasure than even surprise. He raised a hand to her face, brushing the back of his gloved knuckles softly down her cheek.

"It seems that we have both gotten more than we expected," he said softly, cryptically, his voice roughened in a way that made Alcy shiver. He gave her a critical look. “Take off your hat and shoes.” 

Alcy gaped at his request — demand, really — but despite his arched brow, there was no sign that he was making a joke at her expense. “Why ought I do that, sir?” she managed.

There was a knowing edge to his smile. “I see into your wicked mind, Miss Carter, but I assure you that I have only the most honorable intentions. It is necessary for the conversion ceremony.”

She hesitated for a moment but could think of no reasoable objection. She loosened the ribbon on her bonnet and dropped it onto the floor. Carefully, she hitched up the hem of her skirt just enough to reach the top of her ankle-high boots. She made a valiant attempt to unfasten the row of tiny buttons with her gloved fingers without toppling over or exposing more of her leg than was necessary, but the layers of petticoats kept sliding down around her hands, and she wobbled dangerously as she battled them and the stiff leather.

“Allow me.”

Alcy looked up into Baron Benedek’s slanting, ice-blue eyes. There was a dangerous glint in them, somewhere between humor and seduction. 

“Oh, no,” she protested automatically, her face heating. “I couldn’t allow you to do that.”

“And why not?” he asked in a tone that made her heart race and her stomach plummet. “It isn’t like I won’t be removing far more than your shoes tonight.”

That flabbergasted her long enough that he dropped to one knee and firmly grasped her ankle before she could summon the proper “My dear sir!” in remonstrance. By then, she was left with no alternative but to fight him or allow him to assist her, and common sense told her which would be wiser. She clamped her lips tight around a tart rejoinder and straightened stoically, telling herself that she would tolerate such treatment if she must in the name of peace. 

Except it seemed much less like toleration than a guilty sort of enjoyment, for despite the baron’s businesslike movements, Alcy could not help but be aware of the intimacy of a man’s touch where no man had ever touched her before, the cerebral realization stirring a distinctly physical reaction in her. The gentle pressure of his hand cradling the back of her ankle sent a buzz through her, tiny but too sharp to be ignored. He pulled off first one boot and then the other, and she almost yelped when, instead of rising, he slid his hands up her calf.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, tensed to jerk away.

“Your stockings must be removed as well,” he said calmly. He loosened the garter ribbons that tied behind her knee and gave her a look of counterfeit innocence that made her go suddenly breathless.

“I can do it quite well myself, thank you very much,” Alcy said. She had meant to snap, but the man rattled her, and the words came out without any conviction. Was he trying to seduce her, mock her, threaten her? She couldn’t tell what his intent was — in fact, she couldn’t even say for certain at that moment which of the three he was most successful in. Even as she protested, he rolled the fine silk of her stockings over her calf, his palms skating over the bare flesh of her leg as it was exposed. She steeled herself against the shiver that threatened to betray her.

Alcy knew he must now be far beyond the bounds of propriety in any Christian society. She forced herself to step out of his grasp as soon as he pulled her stocking free even though one traitorous part of her wanted nothing more than to luxuriate in the wicked sensations his touch stirred in her. Suppressing that urge, she bent to remove the second stocking herself as quickly as possible. Baron Benedek simply stood and leaned back against the corridor wall, his hands crossed over his chest in a manner she couldn’t help but think was smug. Pulling together the tattered remnants of her composure, she managed to say witheringly, “I hope you are quite finished now. If you think I will allow you to strip me naked here, you are very much mistaken.”

He pushed away from the wall as she straightened and gave him a look that she hoped was full of the greatest severity and disapproval.

He merely chuckled. “I had not planned to, but what an interesting idea. A shame we have no time for such diversions; the priest will grow impatient if we tarry much longer."

And then, without waiting for a response, he captured her arm in the crook of his elbow and opened the dark and gleaming door to the chapel.

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