House of Damocles
An All Hallows' Harem Story
by Gemma Snow
Genre: Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance
FROM POPULAR ROMANCE AUTHOR GEMMA SNOW
An All Hallows’ Harem story
They'll be there to catch her. All she has to do is take the leap.
Driven by grief, nostalgia, and a desperate need to feel again after the loss of her husband, Charlotte follows a whim and an old playbill to a traveling faire in the Scottish countryside. The festival has a sort of ancient feel, much more authentic than any she’s visited before.
And that’s not the only thing that stands out to Charlotte.
They’re called the House of Damocles, and their acrobatic performance draws Charlotte to the men in a dark and visceral way.
At least, she thinks they’re men.
Dom. Elijah. Gabriel. Bell.
But if being in their presence actually makes Charlotte want to pick up her paintbrush again, she’s not one to look too closely at golden eyes and burning touches. And if it turns out they have a sort of unusual arrangement with the women they share, well that doesn’t scare her so much.
What does scare her is the way these men call to something ancient and demanding within her, the dark shadows and haunts that linger at the edges of their stories, and the ache she feels deep in her belly at the very thought of leaving them behind.
Charlotte’s been running for a long time. The men have been running for so much longer. Perhaps it is in slowing down and opening their hearts to one another that they all finally find the love and acceptance they’ve been searching for. They just need to survive ancient enemies, possible discovery, and their own wounded hearts first. Love is, after all, a leap of faith.
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Warning: Language
C h a p t e r O n e
Time.
That was what all her grandmother’s friends had gently whispered in the drawing room at Everly Manor the day of the service—the first service, fourteen months ago.
Time to heal. Time to grieve. Time to find a way to navigate the new reality of her life, like she wasn’t being pummeled by the waves down the path that turned to black in the winter nights. One. Two. One. Two. With never enough space for breath.
Time was supposed to ease the burden, the heavy weight that had settled somewhere between her shoulders and her gut. Or so all the well-wishers and greeting cards and self-help books had promised.
It had, in a way, Lottie was forced to admit. Because the time had finally come for her to move the last of Peter’s boxes up to the attic. The time had finally come when she could.
Cardboard under her fingers—nothing spectacular about that. Contents smelling of sandalwood and old paper. Peter had been an academic from the moment he was born until the moment he’d shuffled off his mortal coil, and he would be forever entangled with the scent of vellum and snail-shell ink in her memories.
She preferred those memories to the more recent ones, though one could hardly call twelve months and six days recent. It was only that nothing of import had happened since, and so in the grand scheme of important things, they were recent to her.
Rattling. Her therapist, Eliza—whom Lottie had only ever seen through a screen, since Earlsferry wasn’t exactly the bustling metropolis of Edinburgh an hour and a quarter to the south, and because Lottie’s world had grown so much smaller in the last year—had suggested grounding techniques in moments of extreme duress.
Feel, scent, sound.
Lottie had no intention of licking the old textbooks in the ‘last box,’ as she’d come to call it in her own mind, and she’d looked inside enough times since packing it up that she could see the contents with her eyes closed. A pair of Peter’s reading glasses, since life lived in dim libraries had spent his sight early on, his familiar pencil case—the one she couldn’t bring herself to open, nor yet to give away—an old paperweight in the shape of the Tower of London, chipped at one corner. It was a strange and unwelcome reminder that a person’s life could, ultimately, be boiled down to the contents of a box.
A box that was now going up into the attic.
Because Lottie couldn’t look at it one more day, couldn’t see that stupid box in the corner of the bedroom she’d shared with Peter for the three years since they’d moved back to Scotland, without wanting to fling that fucking paperweight right through the goddamned window.
I’m moving rooms.
It wasn’t like Everly Manor didn’t have enough space. Grandma Rose had been the eleventh generation to live in the ancestral home, and Lottie’s parents would have been the twelfth if they hadn’t picked up and moved to Massachusetts for her father’s residency when she had been six. Now Lottie was the thirteenth generation, and the only one to have the entire sprawling space to herself. There was absolutely nothing in the world keeping her from moving rooms if she wanted, and nothing keeping her from taking the last box of Peter’s belongings up to the attic.
She picked her favorite pillow and knitted throw off the bed and walked down the hall to the room that sat beside Grandma Rose’s old bedroom. It had been her room once upon a time, back when she and her parents would visit for the summers. The familiar shade of pinkish light cut across the floor from the stained-glass roses on the bay windows that overlooked the garden. Grandma Rose had come from a long line of plant lovers, and Lottie had once believed in fairytales.
The room was empty of furniture, with floors clean from the regular housekeeping service that had ensured her basic survival the last year, but bare. In one corner sat an old wicker bookshelf, bearing perfectly straight rows of the childhood books she’d spent those lazy summers reading.
Lottie walked over to the bay window. As a child, the space had seemed so much larger, but she was grown now, both in the number on her birthday cake and with the weight in her heart. She wasn’t yet thirty—which was like saying that Devil’s Night wasn’t yet Halloween—but she held the hurt of a much older woman in her soul and in the lines drawn from lonely nights crying in an empty house.
Not. Anymore.
She placed the pillow and folded blanket down under the window. She could worry about the bed later, but even the symbolic gesture felt…good. One year was long enough to sit in the dark alone. Perhaps her grandma’s friends had been right when they murmured those unending platitudes about time. Perhaps the time really had come for her to breathe again. And it all started with moving the last box into the attic.
Gemma Snow loves high heat, high adventures and high expectations for her heroes! Her stories are set in the past and present, from the glittering streets of Paris to cowboy-rich Triple Diamond Ranch in Wolf Creek, Montana.
In her free time, she loves to travel, and spent several months living in a fourteenth-century castle in the Netherlands. When not exploring the world, she likes dreaming up stories, eating spicy food, driving fast cars and talking to strangers. She recently moved to Nashville with a cute redheaded cat and a cute redheaded boy.
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