The Book Lover

By Emma V Leech

A Paranormal Romance Novella.

In an age when witches are burnt …

With his enemies closing in, Blaise, a powerful wizard uses dark magic to hide within the pages of a notebook.
He compels all who touch the book to write their darkest and most powerful emotions. Growing stronger with each entry Blaise is just pages away from a new life. The last entry will take the life of the writer and set Blaise free. But the book is lost and left to gather dust as Blaise's strength fades away.

 

Centuries have passed when lovely young bookbinder, Sidonie, finds the book in a bric-a-brac shop.

Drawn by something she doesn't understand Sidonie uses her skills - and her knives - to rebind the book, torturing the man trapped inside the pages.
Pouring love and devotion into repairing the book, with each step she feels increasingly attached to and disturbed by it, as though it is watching her every move.
When a handsome man appears in her house with his skin covered in writing, the attraction is instant, but Sidonie does not understand the danger she is in.
Compelled to write in the book herself, Sidonie must choose her words with care.

This is a stand-alone novella with no cliffhanger. 63 pages. Approx 19k words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emma V Leech
• Release date: May 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201246488

Book preview

The Book Lover

"But words are things, and a small drop of ink,

Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces

That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;

’Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses

Instead of speech, may form a lasting link

Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces

Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this,

Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his."

―George Gordon Byron, Don Juan

Chapter 1

A close up of a device Description automatically generated

THE SOFT, SMOOTH LEATHER of a small book, worn with age and caresses, caught her eye.

It fit in her hand as Sidonie turned it, touching the cover with reverence. The ancient kid skin felt strange, a living thing almost, warm beneath her fingertips. Sidonie’s breath caught in her throat. She frowned at the book, perplexed, and then shuddered.

It was damp in the brocante, cold and gloomy, heavy with the scent of age and dusty memories. Her skin prickled, awareness creeping over her flesh like a chill. Glancing up, she looked around at the empty space to see if she was being watched.

Bulky, dark wood furniture clustered in one corner of the shop. No longer fashionable or fitting for open plan and clean lines, the heavy objects loomed, huddled together, sullen as teenagers at a bus stop, but there was no one here but her.

Rubbing the back of her neck, she almost put the book down again. It wasn’t what she was looking for. It was old, certainly, and in desperate need of repair. The cover was torn and battered, damaged beyond repair and ... she couldn’t even read it. The words were Occitan, she thought, but the handwriting was hard to read at all. A diary then or a journal of sorts, except many of the entries were written in a different hand.

She hovered, ready to drop it back into the plastic crate with a discarded pile of tattered paperbacks with curling corners and cheap, yellowing pages. Decisive for once, she curled her fingers around the book, a surge of possessiveness overcoming any further objections.

The proprietor smiled at her as she paid, disinterested in the meagre sale but polite by habit.

Shivering in the doorway as an icy drop of rain slid beneath her collar, Sidonie slipped the book into her bag and ran out into the sharp, grey February morning. The rain fell like revenge, soaking everyone and making them fretful and fractious as feet slid on the slick cobbles of the medieval streets, and the wind snatched at umbrellas.

Already chilled from the hour she had spent in the draughty brocante, Sidonie ducked into the nearest café. She sighed with relief as the blissful warmth wrapped around her, perfumed with coffee and liqueur and laden with the chatter of everyone escaping the elements. She found a space at the end of a table where two old men were deep in conversation, a baguette a piece laid in front of them, crossed like swords between coffees and short, fat-bellied glasses of cognac. On a whim she ordered the same though she rarely drank.

The cognac was a burn in her stomach, warmth suffusing her veins until her cheeks glowed. Tension from the cold slipped away, and she sighed, reaching into her bag for the book. It was an ugly little thing in truth, though she felt it had been beautiful once. Simple but well-made. Dark green leather, plain blue headbands and the faded trace of gilding flourished the edges of the pages. No gold tooling or design on the cover or spine though, no title to announce the book’s intent.

A puzzle then.

The warmth of the room and the Cognac lulled her, a languorous feeling suffusing her limbs, and she leaned back against the faux leather banquette, closing her eyes. The book was still in her hands and she stroked the cover, an absent touch as her mind drifted like the smoke from a customer taking a furtive last drag before coming inside with a gust of icy, damp air.

Back and forth her thumb moved over the smooth leather. Back and forth.

She sighed.

It was soothing, somehow. Her thoughts drifted further, back to past lovers - she missed them. No, not them, but the company, the companionship ... the sex. There had been no heartbroken romances, no fireworks, no despair, just a series of half-hearted attempts that failed to amount to anything but a break to boredom and loneliness. 

Back and forth her thumb swept.

She imagined a lover like one she had read in a book, his skin warm and soft, hard muscle beneath firm flesh. In her mind her hands traced over his chest, over that smooth, warm skin.

She sighed and heard an answering groan, so heavy with desire and wanting that her blood blazed like fuel beneath a lit match. She gasped and opened her eyes with a start, looking around her with a blush staining her cheeks. No one was looking at her, but she felt the sting of humiliation just the same and paid for her drinks with hurried, fumbling fingers that dropped coins, and grabbed for the door handle as she pushed back out into the cold.

THE TOUCH HAD WOKEN a mind adrift, not dead, yet barely alive.

He had waited.

He had waited ... so long.

He had been so close to his goal, so close to escaping his self-imposed prison and then ... nothing.

Warmth and the soft caress of skin had penetrated his consciousness with slow, smooth strokes, awakening a hunger to live, to breathe, to be ... again.

IT MADE HER FEEL A little like a surgeon, knife in hand, peeling off a skin, denuding the fragile spine, taking the book back to marks scratched on paper, ancient ink capturing thoughts and feelings, crossing the pages like veins, frail and exposed.

Pulling the old sewing apart with a firm, meticulous hand, she was like