Fire Brand

He drove her back to her apartment. It wasn’t until he’d walked her to her door that she remembered Mary’s engagement party.

“I forgot about Mary’s party!” she blurted out.

“Who’s Mary?” He frowned.

“A girl I’m friendly with at work. She’s just gotten engaged. There’s a party, and I’m supposed to be there.”

“Do you want to go?”

She sighed. “Not really, but I should. I’ll...”

“Come on, then. It’s early. You can still go.”

She hesitated. “With you?” she asked, her voice softer than she realized.

He stopped and looked down at her, aware of a faint shift in their turbulent relationship. “Yes,” he said quietly. “With me.”

Her breath had stopped somewhere south of her windpipe. She felt the ground going out from under her. She didn’t understand what was happening, and it was a little scary.

Bowie seemed to know that, because he smiled, relieving some of the tension.

“Will she mind if you bring an escort?” he asked.

“Oh, no, of course not. She’s wanted to meet you.” She hesitated. “If you don’t have anything else to do?” she probed delicately.

He shook his head. “I came to see you.”

She felt ridiculously pleased. She smiled shyly, unaware of the effect that smile had on her companion. “All right, then. She lives six blocks away, near the interstate ramp.”

“Then let’s go.”

He took her arm slowly, watching to see how she reacted. When she didn’t try to pull away, he let his hand slide down until it touched hers, and then his fingers caught hers and linked into them.

She felt her breath catch. It was new and exciting to hold hands with him, although she tried not to read anything into it. Bowie was just being kind, she told herself.

He drew her along with him. He liked that soft, slender hand in his. It made him feel twice as tall as he already was to hold it, but he didn’t really understand why. He and Gaby had never been friends. They were more like remote acquaintances, with Aggie their only common ground. But the more he saw of Gaby, the more she intrigued him.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?” she asked, as he put her in the car again.

He glanced at her quietly. After a minute he cranked the engine. “No. I don’t mind.”

But he didn’t say another word all the way to Mary’s house, and Gaby herself fell uncharacteristically silent. Just being near Bowie was suddenly dangerously exciting. She didn’t know why, and that was as disturbing as the new emotions that were curling around her like sensuous, seeking hands.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_5cd4a673-1d9f-534f-a567-cdcffa6c4f78)

MARY LIVED WITH her fiancé, Ted, in a very nice suburb of Phoenix. The lights were blazing in the windows and music was drifting down to the street, where Bowie magically found a parking space, without even looking. Considering the number of cars, it looked as if Ted and Mary had invited every single person they knew in the world.

“They live together already?” Bowie asked, frowning as he looked down at her when he helped her out of the passenger side.

“Just because you and I were raised with eighty-year-old attitudes doesn’t mean the rest of the world was,” she said with a rueful smile. “They’re engaged, and although it’s been a bit rocky, they’ve been together for a whole year. It’s a new world, Bowie.”

He looked down at her. “When I care enough to live with a woman, I’ll care enough to give her my name first.”

She stared into his black eyes, trying to imagine Bowie in love with a woman. He seemed completely self-contained on the surface—a man’s man with everything going for him, to whom a woman would be only an amusement. But Aggie said that he read love poems sometimes in the silence of his own room, and that he liked Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto—a romantic piece if ever there was one. He was fascinating in his complexity—a modern man with a very old-fashioned outlook on life. Aggie had raised him that way, just as Gaby’s father had raised her in the church, even though he’d dragged her from pillar to post until that tragic night they’d parted.

“What are you thinking?” he asked curiously.

“That you’re not like any man I’ve ever known,” she blurted out.

“Should I be flattered?”

“Yes, I think so,” she said honestly, her voice soft and quiet in the stillness, broken only by faint strains of music.

He found himself smiling at the admission. In all the years he’d known Gaby, she’d always backed away from anything personal. This had to be something of a milestone. Perhaps she was lonely, and the loneliness was breaking through that shell of reserve she wore. He knew the very color of loneliness. It drove him sometimes. He’d been by himself for a long time, but there had always been the need for another voice in the darkness—a hand to reach out to when the world came too close. Gaby stirred that need in him, but he hesitated to let her get close. There was something vaguely mysterious about her. It attracted him, even as it made him wary.

Without replying, he turned and guided her along the driveway with him, pretending a nonchalance he didn’t feel. He smoked his cigarette quietly. “Looks like a Florida setting, doesn’t it?” he mused, nodding toward the grove of palm trees.

She leaped at the normalcy. The tension between them was growing. “Yes. Someone told me once that there were no palm trees around here a hundred years ago. They aren’t native to Arizona—they’re supposedly imports.”

“Do tell?” He smiled down at her. “How about the rattlesnakes?”

“They’re natives,” she said dryly.

He chuckled, easing her between two parked cars, so close that her breasts brushed against his chest just briefly in a contact that made him distinctly aware of her.

The smile faded as he held her there, looking down into her puzzled eyes with an equal curiosity. His body throbbed to the beat of the music inside the house while his eyes held hers in a new, different kind of look. Without really understanding why, he moved deliberately closer for just a second, pressing her back against the car behind her, and he felt her breath catch as his body touched hers in a contact neither of them had ever sought before.

Her perfume drifted up into his nostrils. He could feel the faint tension in her posture, the drawing back as her hands came up to her waist in an almost defensive position. He wondered idly if the nervousness was caused by fear or attraction. His eyes fell to her soft mouth and he was surprised to find it trembling.

Gaby had never allowed herself this close to Bowie before, and now she understood why. His size was intimidating, but there was something more—something deep and still and frightening. He made her tremble. It was the second time in her life that she’d felt the sting of pleasure that came from a man’s warm, strong proximity. She wanted to run away and toward him at the same time, and her confusing feelings puzzled her.

For long, static seconds, neither of them moved. It took the sudden opening of the back door to break the spell.

Embarrassed, Gaby went ahead of him to be hugged and kissed by Mary, while Ted looked on with something less than joy in his expression at the guests. Mary worked in the composing room of the newspaper, while Ted was assistant sales manager. She’d known them both ever since she’d gone to work at the paper.

“This is Bowie,” she introduced the tall, handsome man beside her, hoping she didn’t look as disoriented as she felt.

Mary’s Ted wasn’t bad-looking, but there was only one Bowie. Mary stared up at him with undisguised fascination, barely aware that he shook her hand and said all the polite things.

“My goodness,” Mary exclaimed, and then caught herself and laughed. “It’s so nice to meet you, Mr. McCayde. Gaby talks about you all the time.”

“Does she?” Bowie looked at a beet-red Gaby with undisguised amusement that hid the remnants of an explosive tension.

“She threatens the other reporters with you,” Ted said with faint sarcasm, grinning wickedly at Gaby.

“I do not!” Gaby exclaimed.

“Liar.” Ted laughed. “She waves you like a flag when anybody comes too close. She’s the original ‘Miss Don’t Touch’ at the office.”