Moonlight Scandals a De Vincent Novel Read Online Free

  Dedication

For yous, the reader

Contents

Embrace

Championship Page

Dedication

Writer's Note

Affiliate one

Chapter two

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter five

Affiliate 6

Chapter 7

Chapter viii

Chapter 9

Chapter x

Chapter 11

Affiliate 12

Chapter xiii

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter xix

Affiliate twenty

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Affiliate 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

The de Vincent Series

About the Author

By Jennifer 50. Armentrout

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author's Note

I love beaded curtains, just then you lot know.

Affiliate ane

Resting on her knees, Rosie Herpin drew in a deep, calming jiff as she ignored the abrupt pebbles earthworks into her peel. She leaned forward, flattening her palm against the warm, dominicus-bleached rock. Kneeling wasn't exactly comfortable in a wrap dress, merely she wasn't going to wear jeans or leggings today.

She closed her eyes, sliding her hand downward and to the right, tracing the shallow indentations painstakingly carved into the worn stone. She didn't need to come across to know she'd reached the name—his name.

Ian Samuel Herpin.

Dragging her fingers over each letter of the alphabet, she mouthed them silently, and when she finished, reaching the Due north on the last proper name, she stopped. Rosie didn't demand to keep going to know what the dates read underneath. Ian had been 20-three. And she didn't demand to open up her eyes to read the single line etched into the rock, because that line had been carved into her brain.

may he find the peace that had evaded him in life.

Rosie jerked her fingers off the rock, but she didn't open her eyes as she brought her manus to her chest, to right to a higher place her middle. She hated those words. His parents, anoint them, had chosen that, and she hadn't the heart or the mind at the time to disagree. Now she wished she had.

Peace hadn't evaded Ian. Peace had been right there, waiting for him, surrounding him. Peace merely . . . it only couldn't reach him.

That was unlike.

At least to Rosie it was.

Ten years had passed since their plans for the future—plans that had included higher degrees, the house with a cute courtyard, babies, and possibly, God willing, grandbabies they could spend their days in retirement spoiling—ended with a gun Rosie hadn't even known her hubby owned.

Ten years of replaying the time they did have together, over and over, looking for the signs that everything they had been and everything they were supposed to have become was a facade, because they were living 2 dissimilar lives. Rosie had believed that things were perfect. Yeah, they had issues similar everyone had problems, just there was nothing major going on. But for Ian? His life hadn't been perfect at all. Things had been a struggle. Not a constant one. Not something he'd faced every day. What had preyed on his thoughts and emotions had been well hidden. His depression had been a silent killer. At that place hadn't been a single person, not his family or his friends or even Rosie, who had seen information technology coming.

Not until many, many years later, after a hell of a lot of soul-searching, did Rosie come up to the shaky realization that their life hadn't been a total prevarication. She'd struggled through all the stages of grief before getting to that betoken. Some of it had been truth. Ian had loved her. She knew that was truthful. He'd loved her with everything inside him.

High school sweethearts.

That's what they'd been.

They'd married the summer after they'd graduated and both of them worked difficult to make a life, perhaps a little besides hard, and that had added to what had troubled him. He'd spent long days at the sugar refinery while Rosie attended Tulane, working toward a degree in pedagogy. They talked about those plans—a future, one that she at present knew Ian had desperately wanted more than anything.

She was 20-3, almost done with her degree, and they'd been looking for their first dwelling when Rosie got the call from the police while at her parents' bakery in the city and was told non to get home.

She'd been a month shy of graduation when Ian chosen the police and told them what he was about to do. They were just beginning the stressful procedure of applying for a mortgage when she learned that her husband of nigh v years hadn't wanted her to exist the 1 to come up home and discover him. It had been a week earlier his birthday when their walking, living, and breathing all-American dream turned into an all-American tragedy.

For so many years, she never understood why he did what he did. So many years of beingness and so damn angry and then damn guilty, feeling similar she should've seen something, could've done something. It wasn't until she went to the Academy of Alabama and enrolled in the psychology program that she began to accept in that location'd been warning signs—red flags that most people would never accept picked up on.

She learned through classes and her ain experience that low looked nothing like what people thought—similar what she had thought.

Ian smiled and lived, only he'd washed that for Rosie. He'd done that for his family and friends. He smiled, laughed, and got up each day and went to work, made plans and had lazy Sundays with her and then she wouldn't worry about him or feel bad. He didn't want her to feel the same way he felt.

And he'd kept doing that until he couldn't any longer.

Guilt finally turned to regret, and regret lessened until information technology was a kernel of emotion that would always, no thing what, be there when she actually let herself think about where they'd be, who'd they'd exist, if things had been different. And that was, well, it was life.

He'd been gone now longer than she knew him, and while each month, each year, got easier, it still killed her a little to even say his name.

Rosie didn't believe you could only move on from losing someone you truly loved, someone who was not simply your best friend merely besides your other half. You didn't get back that part of you that y'all irrevocably gave to another person. When they left, that office disappeared forever with them. But Rosie believed you could come to accept that they were no longer there and go on living and enjoying life.

There wasn't anything she was prouder of than the fact that she did just that. No i, not a single damn person could say she was weak, that she didn't grit off her ass and pick herself back up, considering you lot could never begin to understand the turbulent, always-irresolute whirlwind of utterly tearing emotions that came with losing someone yous cherished more than anything in this world to their own hand.

No one.

She got not one or two degrees, simply three of them. She went out and had fun, the crazy fun that sometimes felt like information technology was moments away from becoming the kind of fun that ended with the law showing upwards. She took what used to exist a curiosity for all things paranormal, an interest she shared with Ian, and turned information technology into a legitimate side career where she'd met some of the best people in the world. Rosie besides dated. Often. Hell, she'd just gone out with a guy at the beginning of the week she'd met while wor

king at her parents' bakery. And she never held back. Never. Life was too damn short to do that.

That she had learned the hard way.

Simply today, on the tenth anniversary of Ian'due south death, it was hard non to feel like it happened yesterday. Information technology was virtually impossible to not be cloaked in suffocating sadness.

Reaching around her neck, she tugged on the golden chain she always wore. She pulled it out from nether the collar of her clothes, crimper her fingers around the gold band. Her husband'south ring. She lifted it to her lips and kissed the warm metal.

One twenty-four hours she would put this ring away somewhere safe. She knew that, but that 1 day just hadn't come up yet.

Opening her eyes, she blinked back tears as she lowered her gaze to the bouquet of fresh flowers resting on the ground. Peonies. Her favorite, because Ian didn't have a favorite flower. They were one-half-bloomed mignon peonies, crisp white with pink centers that would eventually plough all white. Picking up the clammy stems, she inhaled the rich, rose fragrance.

Rosie needed to get going. She'd promised to help her friend Nikki movement today, and so information technology was time to caput back to her apartment, become inverse, and be a proficient friend for the solar day. She leaned—

A soft, swift curse jerked her head up. Normally, she didn't hear a ton of cursing in a cemetery. Usually things were quite quiet. A faint grin tugged at her lips. Cursing and cemeteries typically did not go paw in hand. She scanned the narrow path to her correct and didn't see anything. Leaning back, she looked to her left and establish the source.

A man knelt on one knee with his back to her as he picked upward flowers that had fallen into a puddle left by the contempo rainstorm. Even from where she sat, she could meet that whatever fragile bouquet he'd carried was ruined.

Placing a hand over her eyes, she squinted in the sunlight equally she watched the man ascension. He was dressed as if he'd come up straight from work. Nighttime trousers paired with a fitted white wearing apparel shirt. The sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, revealing tan forearms. It was tardily September and New Orleans was still circling the seventh level of hot, currently as humid every bit Satan'due south balls in the afternoon, so she figured if she was shut to dying in her black apparel, he had to be minutes away from stripping off the shirt.

However standing with his back to her, he stared down at the ruined flowers. His shoulders were tense as he turned in the other direction. His footstep was brisk equally he took the flowers over to an old oak tree festooned with Spanish moss. In that location was a small trash tin there, 1 of the very few in the entire cemetery. He tossed the flowers and so pivoted, rapidly disappearing down one of the numerous lanes.

Oh man, that sucked.

Feeling for the guy, she sprang into action. Advisedly, she pulled one-half of the stems free and and so leaned forrard, placing the remaining in the vase in front of the Herpin tomb. She picked upwards her keys and every bit she rose, she slid her purple-framed sunglasses on. Hurrying downward the worn path with patchy grass, she turned downwardly the lane she'd seen the guy become downwards. Luck was on her side, because she saw him near the pyramid tomb. He hung a right in that location, and feeling a wee bit like a stalker, she trailed backside him.

Of course, she could yell out to him and only mitt him the other half of the peonies, just shouting at a stranger in a cemetery just seemed wrong. Shouting in a cemetery at all felt like something her female parent would side-middle her over.

And no one side-eyed quite similar her mother.

The man made another turn so stepped out of her line of sight. Holding on to the flowers, she walked passed a tomb with a large cross then her steps slowed.

She found him.

He was continuing earlier a massive mausoleum, ane guarded by two beautifully erected weeping angels, and he was merely standing there, every bit all the same as those angels, his arms stiff at his sides and his hands closed. She took a step forward as her gaze drifted to the name on the mausoleum.

de Vincent.

Her eyes widened and she blurted out, "Holy baby llama."

The man twisted at the waist, and Rosie was suddenly standing within mere anxiety of the Devil.

That was what the gossip magazines called him.

That was what most of her family chosen him.

Rosie liked to refer to him as in her wildest dreams.

Everyone in New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and probably more than one-half the country knew who Devlin de Vincent was. Besides all the photos of him and his fiancée that were constantly posted in the Living and Leisure section of the newspaper, he was the eldest of 3 remaining de Vincent siblings, the heirs to the kind of fortune Rosie, along with most of the globe, couldn't even brainstorm to wrap their heads around.

What a pocket-sized world.

That was all she could retrieve as she stared at him. Her friend Nikki worked for the de Vincents. Well, she worked temporarily for them and currently had something going on with the middle brother. That whole state of affairs was an accented mess at the moment, and Gabriel de Vincent was currently on the Boyfriends Who Needed to Get Their Shit Together list.

Merely the de Vincents' notorious fame or her friend's on-again, off-again relationship with Gabe weren't the only reasons why she knew more than about them than the average bear.

It was because of their home—their land.

The de Vincent estate was one of the most haunted locations in the entire state of Louisiana. Rosie knew this because she had been a flake obsessed with all the legends surrounding the land and the family unit, one that included a curse. Yes. The family unit and the country were supposedly cursed. How absurd was that? Okay, probably not cool to those involved, just Rosie was fascinated by the whole thing.

From the research Rosie had done eons ago, it all stemmed from the country itself. New Orleans had been plagued with many virulent outbreaks in the late 18 hundreds and the early nineteen hundreds. Smallpox. Spanish influenza. Yellow fever. Fifty-fifty the bubonic plague. Thousands of people died and many more were quarantined. Often, the dead and the dying were sent to the aforementioned place, left to rot abroad. The land that the de Vincent domicile sat on was one of the areas popularly used throughout many of the outbreaks. Even once the house was originally built, lands near the belongings were still used in the after outbreaks. All that sickness and death, mixed with heartbreak and hopelessness, were going to go out some bad vibes backside.

And boy did the de Vincent land take some bad vibes.

The house itself had caught fire multiple times. The fires could easily be explained, but all the strange deaths? There was the stuff her friend Nikki had told her. Then there was the de Vincent curse, and fifty-fifty more crazy?

Ley lines.

Ley lines were basically straight lines of energy that traveled all over the globe and were believed to accept spiritual connections. The very line that extended from Stonehenge, moved across the Atlantic, and passed through cities like New York, Washington, D.C., New Orleans. And, according to her inquiry, straight through the de Vincent belongings.

Rosie would practise bad, terrible things to become within that house and investigate.

But that was unlikely to ever happen. When Rosie had mentioned information technology to Nikki, she was shot down faster than her running after freshly baked beignets.

She'd never met a de Vincent before and definitely non the Devlin de Vincent, simply she'd seen enough pictures of him to know that Devlin just . . . well, he just did it for her.

That indefinable thing that got her hormones revving like a 1967 Impala. Broad-shouldered and narrow at the waist, the man was alpine, well over six feet. His nighttime hair was coiffed and styled brusque. He had the kind of face up that was universally handsome. Loftier, broad cheekbones and a straight, aquiline nose paired with a set of full lips that came with a perfect Cupid's bow. He had a foursquare, hard jaw and a chin with a slight cleft in it.

The human was stunning, yet there was something cold well-nigh him, nearly detached and a bit cruel well-nigh how he was pieced together. To anyone else, that might've dampened his attractiveness, only to Rosie? That only fabricated him all the more beautiful.

Oh God, Rosie remembered something in that moment. How could she accept forgotten?

She wasn't sure, but his father had died recently. Lawrence de Vincent had died the same mode the de Vincents' mother had—the same mode Ian had.

By his own hand.

Lawrence de Vincent hadn't used a gun, though. He'd hung himself. Or that was what the gossip section of the paper claimed.

Her middle all but broke for him, for all the brothers in that moment. To accept experienced what they did not once but twice? Practiced God. . . .

Devlin hadn't turned fully in her direction, only he was staring at her and she was staring at him, and this was so not how she expected her trip to the cemetery to go.

"Can I aid you?" he asked, and goodness, his voice was as deep as an body of water.

"I saw you back there, when your flowers vicious into the puddle," she said, inching closer to him. "I have actress. I idea you could utilise them."

The sunlight glanced off his cheekbones as he tilted his head to the side. He didn't respond.

So, she extended her arms, holding out the peonies. "Would you like them?"

Devlin still didn't respond.

She sucked her bottom lip in betwixt her teeth and decided if she was in for a penny, she was in for a pound. Stepping effectually the stone curb, she walked up to Devlin. My discussion, the human being was alpine, and she had to tip her head dorsum to see his gaze.

Those eyes.

Thick, heavy sooty lashes framed eyes the color of the gulf, a stunning blue-greenish.

His eyes didn't meet hers. No, he appeared to be . . . staring at her mouth.

A affluent of warmth cascaded over her. He has a fiancée. Or at least she thought he did. That's what she told herself, about three different times, as she stopped worrying her lower lip and tried to converse again with him.

"Peonies are my favorite," she explained, considering why non? "The ones that have a scent, that is. Non all of them do, did you know that?"

His head straightened and he finally lifted his gaze to hers. She almost wished he hadn't, because she had never seen such intense, serious eyes before. Optics that didn't hint at sense of humour. A gaze that was definitely troubled.

Moonlight Scandals a De Vincent Novel Read Online Free

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