Dark Fire

‘He must be exhausted! Perhaps we should have skipped tonight, and just met at the party tomorrow night.’

‘He’s tough enough to cope.’ Paul smiled indulgently. ‘It’s inborn. I remember when he first arrived in primary school he was given a rugged time—kids can be little heathens, can’t they?—and we’ve been friends ever since.’

Aura already knew that Flint Jansen and Paul had gone to the same expensive boarding school. She was surprised to hear the rest, however. From the few allusions that Paul had made to his best friend, she’d visualised him as being born able to deal with anything the world threw at him, an iron baby who’d progressed inexorably into an iron child, then hardened more as he grew into an iron man.

‘Why did he have such a bad time at school?’

Paul’s shoulders lifted. ‘Family scandal. His father decamped with a vast amount of other people’s money—turned out he’d been spending it on a rather notorious woman who was his mistress. There was a luridly salacious fuss in the newspapers, ending in a court case and even more gaudy revelations. Some of the people his father had defrauded had kids at school. The whole thing got out of hand a bit. Mind you, Flint gave as good as he got, but it was an unhappy couple of years for him.’

‘How old was he?’

‘Only eight. Old enough to know what was going on, too young to be able to protect himself from older boys who tormented him. Although he tried.’ He laughed reminiscently. ‘Lord, he must have fought every kid in the school who even looked sideways at him. He didn’t care what size they were, and a fair few of them he beat, too.’

Only too well Aura knew what it was like to find no haven from a tormenter. Unwillingly, a pang of fellow feeling softened her attitude. She, too, had been eight when her father had deserted his wife and child to go as a missionary doctor to Africa. Even now, fifteen years later, she felt a shadow of that old grief and bewilderment.

Sighing silently, she told herself that a friend of Paul’s had to have a gentler side. At least she and Flint would have something in common: their mutual affection for the man who was to be her husband.

But her first sight of the formidable Flint Jansen changed her mind completely. There was not a hint of softness in him. At least three inches taller than Paul, he had to be six foot four, and, with a thin scar curling in a sinister fashion from his left cheekbone to the arrogant jut of his jaw, his image seared into her brain, leaving a dark, indelible imprint.

A discord of emotions jostled her, confusing her into silence; only gradually did she realise that the most predominant was a turbulent, piercing recognition.

Which was ridiculous, because she had never seen this man before, not even in a grainy photograph in a newspaper. If she had, she’d have known him; he was not a man easily forgotten. Beneath the black material of his dinner jacket his shoulders were broad and powerful. A crisp white shirt contrasted with skin the bronze of an ancient artefact. Those wide shoulders and long, heavily muscled legs beneath smoothly tailored trousers combined with a lithe grace of movement to make him instantly, lethally impressive.

Dark brown hair, conventionally cut, waved sleekly beneath lights that spun a dangerous red halo around his head. He had a starkly featured buccaneer’s face, hard and unhandsome, yet it was Flint everyone was watching from beneath their lashes, not her good-looking Paul.

The man was awesomely conspicuous, the power of his personality underlined by a barely curbed, impatient energy that crackled like lightning across the richly furnished room.

Whatever he might have been like at the age of eight, Aura thought dazedly as Paul, beaming and endearingly pompous with pride, introduced them, Flint Jansen certainly didn’t need sympathy now; he was more than capable of dealing with anything life threw at him. Except that this man didn’t deal with anything; he conquered. Flint Jansen made his own terms, and forced the world to accept them.

Smiling stiffly, Aura extended her hand, felt it enveloped by long, strong fingers. It took an effort of will to persuade her unwilling lashes up, and when she did her gaze was captured by golden eyes as clear and startling as a tiger’s, with a predator’s uncompromising assumption of power and authority, eyes fixed on her face in a gaze that stripped away the superficial mask of her beauty to spotlight the woman who hid behind it. A premonition ran with swift, icy steps through her body and mind.

‘Aura,’ Flint said in a deep, subtly raw voice that played across her nerve ends with sensual precision. ‘Paul’s told me several times that you are beautiful, but I thought it was just the maunderings of a man in love. Now I know he understated the case.’

Long past the age when praise for her beauty gave her more than a mild pleasure, Aura winced under a stab of stupid disappointment.

It seemed, she thought ironically, that in spite of that unrestrained magnetism, the fierce, lawless penetration of his glance, Flint Jansen was no more perceptive than other men. The physical accident of her features, the legacy of her ancestors, fooled him as it did most others into believing that her beauty was all she was.

Hoping her maverick chagrin didn’t show, she smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said aloofly.

His hand was firm and warm and hard, and for a moment the conventional grip felt like some kind of claim, a staking of ownership, a challenge. It took all her self-command not to flinch and pull away.

And then it was over. Their hands relaxed, dropped; Flint turned with a comment that made Paul laugh, and Aura was left wondering whether the shivers that tightened her skin were simply attributable to a cold winter’s night and the fact that she, with typical vanity, was wearing no more than the barest essentials beneath her green silk dress.

Of course they were.

Yet as they walked towards the table she felt Flint’s probing regard, and once again that eerie sense of dislocation cut her adrift from her usual composure.

Casting a quick upward glance at Paul’s pleasant, handsome face, she wondered what on earth her kind, reliable, trustworthy fiancé had in common with this arrogant, intolerant man; it must be one of the mysterious masculine friendships that women couldn’t fathom.

Apart from their schooldays, the only attributes they seemed to share were intelligence and ambition. Perhaps they were enough to sustain a friendship.

Paul was rapidly heading for the top of his profession, and people spoke of Flint Jansen as being right in line for position as the next chief executive officer of Robertson’s, the big conglomerate he worked for. Paul, a partner in a big City law office, knew a lot about the City, and had told her that the present CEO trusted him implicitly.

Aura understood why. Her first look had convinced her that Flint possessed enough concentrated, effortless authority to take over any organisation, even one as big as Robertson’s, and run it with the decision and uncompromising strength that such an enterprise needed.

By the time they arrived at their table tension was jagging through her, snarling up her thought processes, pulling her skin taut. She retained enough presence of mind to smile at various acquaintances, but her whole attention was focused on the man who walked behind her. Although she couldn’t see him, she knew when he nodded a couple of times at people who greeted him with transparent interest.

Smiling her thanks at the waiter, Aura allowed him to seat her. As the two men sat down, the little buzz of conversation that had greeted their progress across the room died back to the normal low hum.

Aura drew in a deep breath, purposefully commanding her thudding pulses to slow down, using her considerable willpower to control her wildly unsuitable reactions. Unfortunately, she wasn’t given much time to re-erect the barriers of her self-possession.

The formalities of ordering their meals barely over, Flint asked her with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, ‘What do you do, Aura? For a living, I mean?’

Talk about throwing down the gauntlet! Clearly, like most of Paul’s friends, like his mother, Flint believed that Aura looked at the man she was going to marry with greed rather than love in her heart.

For a fleeting second she wished she had a high-powered, important job to throw in his teeth.

But she hadn’t, and it was no use playing for sympathy. Flint Jansen was too hard, too dynamic, too much master of his own destiny to understand the clinging bonds that entangled her.

It wasn’t her fault she had no job. In spite of opposition and ridicule she had worked damned hard for her double degree, and if circumstances had been kinder she would already be on the first rungs of her chosen career. Nevertheless, Flint’s expression revealed that she wouldn’t get anywhere by pleading for understanding.

So with nothing but limpid innocence in her face and voice she looked directly into eyes as clear and sharp as golden crystals, and said, ‘Nothing.’

He lifted uncompromising black brows. ‘Not a career woman, then.’

There was no scorn in his words, nothing more apparent than mild interest, but the invisible hairs on Aura’s skin were pulled upright by a sudden tension.

Cheerfully, yet with a hint of warning in his tone, Paul interposed, ‘I know dynamic, forceful, professional women are your cup of tea, Flint, but Aura was brought up the old-fashioned way, so don’t you get that note in your voice when you’re talking to her. Until the end of last year she was at university. Unfortunately, she also has—responsibilities.’

He and Aura exchanged a glance. Paul not only understood her situation with her mother, he approved of her handling of it.

‘Resposibilities?’ Flint was smiling, but thick, straight lashes covered the tiger eyes so that it was impossible to see what emotions hid behind that rugged façade.

‘A mother,’ Aura said lightly, ‘and if you think I’ve been brought up the old-fashioned way, wait till you meet Natalie. She’s straight out of the ark.’ She primmed her mouth. ‘She had a very sheltered upbringing. Her father believed that women were constitutionally incapable of understanding matters more complicated than the set of a sleeve, so he didn’t bother to have her taught anything beyond womanly accomplishments like playing the piano and running a dinner party with flair and poise. Consequently she’s as sweetly unconcerned about practicalities as a babe in arms.’

‘It sounds a considerable responsibility,’ Flint agreed in his slightly grating voice. ‘Will she be living with you after you—after the wedding?’

At the look of sheer horror that spread over Paul’s face, Aura bubbled into laughter. ‘No,’ she said demurely.

Recovering his equanimity, Paul told him, ‘She’ll be living quite close to us, so we’ll be able to keep an eye on her.’

‘I see.’ Flint sounded remote and more than a little bored.

Aura asked, ‘What are you doing in Indonesia, Mr Jansen?’

‘Flint,’ he said, smiling with an assured, disturbing magnetism that made every other man in the big, luxurious room fade into the wallpaper. ‘I was tidying up a mess.’

‘Oh?’