Dark Fire

She watched him walk across the footpath and in through the door of the elegant block of apartments where they were going to live until they had children.

Aura bit her lip. She had always thought Paul big, but beside Flint Jansen he was somehow diminished.

With a suddenness that took her by surprise Flint set the car in motion. Aura turned her head to look straight ahead, battered by a ridiculous sense of bereavement, almost of panic.

She searched for some light, innocuous, sophisticated comment. Her mind remained obstinately blank.

The man beside her, driving with skill and control if slightly too much speed, didn’t speak either. Aura kept her glance away from his hands on the wheel, but even the thought of them turned her insides to unstable quicksilver. A shattering corollary was the image that flashed into her mind, of those lean tanned hands against the pale translucence of her skin.

Aura stared very hard at the houses on the side of the road. Lights gleamed in windows, on gateposts, highlighted gardens that bore the signs of expensive, skilful attention. Although it was winter, flowers lifted innocent blooms to the shining disc of the moon, early jonquils, daisies, the aristocratic cornucopias of arum lilies. To the left a wall of volcanic stones fenced off a park where the delicate pointed leaves of olive trees moved slightly, their silver reverses shimmering in a swift, soon-dead breeze. Beyond them rose the sharp outlines of a hill.

Aura said sharply, ‘This isn’t the way.’

‘I thought we’d go up One Tree Hill and look at the city lights,’ Flint said in his cool, imperturable voice.

Aura’s head whipped around. Against the glow of the street-lights his profile was a rigorously autocratic silhouette of high forehead and dominating nose, the clear statement of his mouth, a chin and jaw chiselled into lines of power and force.

Speaking evenly, she said, ‘Thanks very much, but I’d rather go straight home.’

A blaze of lights from the showgrounds disclosed his half smile, revealed for a stark moment the narrow, deadly line of the scar. He looked calculating and unreachable. ‘That’s a pity,’ he said calmly. ‘I won’t keep you long.’

Aura felt the first inchoate stirrings of fear. ‘I’m actually rather tired,’ she confessed, keeping up the pretence of reluctantly refusing a small treat, trying to smooth a gloss of civilisation over a situation that frightened her needlessly, to hide her uncalled-for alarm and anger with poise and control. ‘Organising a wedding is far more exhausting than I’d expected it to be.’

His unamused smile held a distinctly carnivorous gleam.

Oh, lord, she thought frantically, keep things in perspective, Aura, and don’t let your imagination run away with you. The man is a barbarian, but he won’t hurt you. After all, he’s Paul’s best friend.

‘I’m sure it is,’ he said, ‘especially at such short notice, but a few minutes spent looking down on the most beautiful city in the world won’t hurt you. Who knows, it could even recharge your batteries.’

‘It might be dangerous up there,’ she said quickly, although she had never heard of anything unpleasant happening on top of One Tree Hill.

His laughter was brief and unamused. ‘I don’t think so.’

She didn’t think so, either. For other people, possibly, but not the ruthlessly competent Flint Jansen.

Opening her mouth to object further, she cast a fulminating glance at that inexorable profile then closed it again. He was a man who made up his mind and didn’t let anyone change it.

The exact reverse of her mother, Aura thought acidly, trying to fight back the fear that curled with sinister menace through her. Natalie’s mind was like a straw caught in a summer wind, whirled this way and that by each small eddy, held only on one course, that of her own self-interest.

Flint Jansen was bedrock, immovable, dominating, impervious, a threat to any woman’s peace of mind. Even a woman in love with another man.

Aura pretended to look about her as they wound up the sides of the terraced volcano and along the narrow ridges. For centuries the Maori settlers of New Zealand had grown kumara in the fertile volcanic soil of the little craters below, but the rows of sweet potato were long gone and now sheep cropped English grasses there.

At the top the car park was empty. Nobody looked down over the spangled carpet of city lights, no one gazed up at the obelisk past the lone pine tree, past the statue of the Maori warrior, past the grave of the pioneer who had given this green oasis to the people of Auckland, nobody gazed with her into the black infinity that ached in Aura’s heart, the unimaginable reaches of space.

Switching off the engine, Flint turned to look at her. The consuming heat of his scrutiny seared her skin, yet banished immediately the haunted isolation, the insignificance she felt whenever she looked at the night sky.

Tension crawled between her shoulder-blades, tightened every sinew in her body, clogged her breath and her pulse, made her eyes dilate and her skin creep. When he spoke she recoiled in nervous shock.

‘I assume,’ he drawled, ‘that you know what you’re doing.’

She ran the tip of her tongue along dry lips. ‘I assume so, too. In what particular thing?’

‘Marrying Paul.’

It had to be that, of course. So why did she feel as though they were talking about two different subjects? She was letting him get to her. Calmly, and with a confidence that sounded genuine, she said, ‘Oh, yes, I know exactly what I’m doing.’

‘I do hope so, pretty lady. For everyone’s sake. Because if you do to him what you’ve done to two others and jilt him, you’re in trouble. Paul may be too besotted to deal with you properly, but I’m not.’

For a moment Aura couldn’t speak. Then she returned haughtily, ‘I presume you’ve been snooping through my life.’

‘Yes.’ He sounded as though her naïvete amused him.

Aura felt sick, but she managed to keep her voice steady, almost objective. ‘Mr Jansen—’

His smile was cold and mirthless. ‘You’ve been calling me Flint all evening. Reverting to my surname now is not going to put any distance between us.’

She said aridly, ‘Flint then. I won’t hurt Paul in any way, if that’s what you’re afraid of. I’m going to make him very happy. This time it’s real.’

‘I suppose each of the other poor fools you were engaged to thought it was real, too.’ He paused, and when she didn’t reply, added, ‘And presumably that you’d make them very happy.’

The obvious sexual innuendo made her feel sick. She stared sightlessly ahead. ‘Paul knows about them,’ she said.

‘So it’s none of my business?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Not even when he finds out—as he’s bound to do—that you’re not in love with him?’

Aura said angrily, ‘I love him very much.’

He laughed softly, an immense cynicism colouring his tone. ‘Oh, I have to admire the languishing glances, the smiles and the gentle touches. But they didn’t look like love to me, and if Paul wasn’t so enamoured that he can’t think straight he’d know that what you feel for him is not the sort of love that leads to a happy marriage.’

‘You’d know all about it, I suppose.’ Struggling for control, she caught her breath. ‘I love him,’ she repeated at last, but the conviction in her voice was eaten away by a sense of futility. One quick glance at Flint’s unyielding profile and she knew that whatever she said, she couldn’t convince this man.

‘Just as you’d love your older brother, with respect and admiration and even a bit of gratitude,’ he agreed dispassionately. ‘But that’s not what marrige is all about, beautiful, seductive, sexy Aura. It’s also about lying in a bed with him, making love, giving yourself to him, accepting his body, his sexuality with complete trust and enthusiasm.’

Her small gasp echoed in the darkened car. She searched for some reply, but her mind was held prisoner by the bleak and studied impersonality of his tone.

After a moment he continued, ‘When Paul looks at you it’s with love, but I don’t see much more in you than satisfaction at having got what you want: a complacent and easygoing husband.’

Stonily, Aura said, ‘I want to go home.’

‘I’m sure you do.’ He sounded amused, almost lazily so, and satisfied, as though her reaction was just what he had expected. ‘But you’re going to stay here until I’ve finished.’

‘What gives you the right to talk like this to me?’

The words tumbled out, hot with feeling, shamingly defiant, giving away far more than was wise. Aura tried desperately to curb the wild temper that used to get her into so much trouble before she found ways to restrain it.