Dark Fire

‘Paul is my friend,’ Flint said coolly. ‘I care about him and his happiness. And I’d hate to see him tied to a calculating little tramp when a few words could save him. That’s what friends are for, surely?’ The last question was drawled with mockery.

She didn’t intend to hit him. In fact, she didn’t even realise she had until the high sweep of his cheekbone stopped her hand with such implacable suddenness that every bone in her arm ached with the impact.

Gulping with shock and pain, she snatched her hand back, cradled it to her stomach and said in a voice she had hoped never to hear again, ‘Don’t you call me a tramp. Don’t ever call me a tramp.’

He hadn’t moved. For long, taut seconds the imprint of her hand, white in the darkness, stood out with stark, disgraceful precision.

So coldly that it congealed even her righteous indignation, he said, ‘Why not? You’re selling yourself to him. That’s what tramps do. Money for sexual services.’

‘I am not selling myself to him.’ Her voice cracked, but she rushed on, hurling the words at him, ‘And it’s not just sex, damn you, you ignorant swine, there’s more—’

‘Not much more. For you it’s security, for him love. You need his money, he wants to spend the rest of your life making you happy. And, not so incidentally, sleeping with you. If that’s the bargain it’s fair enough, I suppose. Just don’t renege on it, Aura, when he’s so far under your spell that the poor sod can’t crawl out.’

It took a vast effort to moderate her tone, to summon the cadences of bored sophistication, but Aura hoped she managed it. ‘Paul is thirty-two—old enough, don’t you think, to fall in love without needing someone to vet his choice?’

‘Paul is a romantic,’ he returned unemotionally. ‘And God knows, you’re enough to turn even the most level-headed man’s brain into mush. However, I’m not in the least romantic. I’ve seen enough women who looked like angels and behaved like the scourings of the streets to be able to ignore huge green eyes scattered with gold dust and a mouth that’s full and sulkily cushioned with promises of unattainable erotic delights. Even so, I took one look at you and found myself wondering.’

‘Wondering what?’ The moment the words trembled from her lips she knew she’d made a mistake. ‘It doesn’t m—’

But he interrupted with blasé precision. ‘Wondering whether in bed you live up to the promises you make.’

Aura froze as nausea climbed her throat. Sexy talk, the kind of sensual, seductive words that men used when they wanted to coax a woman into bed, made her shiver with an unremitting fear.

She had been barely fourteen when the husband of one of her mother’s friends had told her of his fantasies, all of them starring her, as he drove her home from the house where he lived with his wife and three children. He had seemed to think that her beauty gave him the right to tell her specifically just what he wanted to do to her, in bed and out. His words had been detailed and obscene, summoning scenarios that chilled her right through to her soul.

He had made no attempt to touch her, then or ever, but his perverted pleasure in seeing the shock and fear in her face had destroyed her innocence.

Sickened and disgusted, she had spent the next three years avoiding him, until eventually she had found the courage to threaten him with disclosure of his sexual harassment.

Since then other men had accused her of teasing, of being provocative, believing that her face was the mirror of her character, that the intensity of their desire put her under an obligation to respond.

Oh, she had learned to deal with them; she knew when a light touch was needed, when indignation and threats were necessary. But she had been scarred, her inner soul as much mutilated as whatever had slashed through Flint’s skin. And she still felt that sick helplessness when a man looked at her with that knowing speculation, when a certain thickness appeared in his voice. She hated being fodder for fantasy.

Strangely enough, in spite of Flint’s words, she didn’t feel that sinking nausea now.

One of the things she liked so much about Paul was his light touch, his wry, self-deprecating amusement. He never made her feel that he wanted too much from her, and when he looked at her it was without greed, with tenderness. She felt safe with Paul.

Since that first experience she had viewed compliments on her looks as preliminaries to demands she had no intention of satisyfing, but listening to Flint Jansen’s gravelly voice as he passionlessly catalogued her physical assets brought heat bursting through her in a drenching flood of sensation.

Appalled, mortified, she said huskily, ‘Mr—Flint, I know you’re Paul’s oldest friend, and I know you and he are very fond of each other, but you shouldn’t be talking to me like this. I’m going to make Paul very happy. Please take me home.’

‘I hope you mean that,’ he said, every menacing syllable clear and silky above the pounding of her heart, ‘because if you don’t, beautiful Aura, if you find a richer man than Paul one day and decide to shuck him off like an old coat, I’ll come looking for you. And when I find you, I’ll make you sorrier than you’ve ever thought you could be.’

CHAPTER TWO (#u8d3f7ea4-1512-5ab3-a220-b9fd0b188ba3)

WITHOUT waiting for a reply he switched on the engine and backed the car around, then set off down the hill while Aura fought the hardest battle of her life. Never before, not even in childhood when she had been notorious for tantrums, had she been so furiously incandescent with rage, a rage all the more difficult to deal with because it was stretched like a fragile cloak over debilitating fear.

What an arrogant, brutal, cocksure, conceited bastard! Oh, she would like to ruin Flint Jansen’s life, she’d love to have him come begging to her so she could spurn him with a haughty smile. She’d turn sharply on her heel and walk away, she’d make him grovel—

Shaking with frustration and fury, horrified by her thoughts, she dragged air into painful lungs, then set her mind to looking coolly and rationally at the situation.

Eventually, after a huge expenditure of willpower, she succeeded.

In one way Flint’s attitude was rather touching. So often the only feelings men allowed themselves to express were connected with anger. Flint’s suspicions at least showed he had Paul’s interests at heart.

And, viewed objectively, someone who had been engaged twice before had to be a risk in the matrimonial stakes. If you didn’t know the circumstances, such a history did seem to show a certain lack of staying power.

Unfortunately, her eminently rational thoughts did nothing to ease the fury that simmered beneath her imposed and artificial restraint. Flint didn’t know the circumstances; he had just jumped to conclusions, so how dared he accuse her of being a tramp, of not loving Paul, of marrying him for his money?

Nothing would give her greater pleasure than to rub every word in his face, force him to acknowledge that he was wrong…

After another calming breath she tried to convince herself that all she had to do was make Paul happy. If she did that, Flint would be compelled to admit how very wrong he was. Staring blindly through the windscreen, she conjured up a vivid and highly satisfactory scenario of her and Paul’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, when Flint, proud head lowered, would have to grovel. She could see his face so clearly, see the gracious smile with which she received his abject apology…

Much later, she realised that Paul had not appeared at all in this immensely gratifying dream. The scene that sprang fullblown from the depths of her brain had only two players—her and Flint Jansen.

Neither spoke until they reached the unit. Aura made to open the door, but Flint said crisply as he turned the engine off, ‘I’ll see you inside.’

‘You don’t need to,’ she said, curt words spilling into the cold silence like little pebbles thrown into sand.

Taking no notice, he got out and came around the front of the car. For those moments, as the street-lights edged his silhouette in gold, he looked like some dark huntsman straight out of myth, lean and lithe and supernaturally big, an ominous, threatening, purposeful presence in the quiet, seedy suburban street.

Holding herself rigidly aloof, Aura slid her long legs out of the car and stood up, then preceded him down the path. A light inside revealed that her mother hadn’t gone to bed.

The last thing Aura wanted just then was for them to meet. Her emotions were too raw and antagonistic to be properly controlled, so at the door she turned and said with what she hoped was aplomb, ‘Thank you for the ride home. Goodnight.’

Unfortunately, before he had a chance to answer, the door opened.

‘Paul,’ Natalie cooed in the voice she reserved for him alone, ‘dear boy, do come in! I want to talk to you about the new flat—I was thinking that what it really needs is a new—’

‘Paul didn’t bring me home,’ Aura interrupted swiftly.

Her mother peered past her, her eyes widening. ‘Neither he did,’ she said.

Aura watched her regroup as she surveyed Flint. Over her mother’s face flashed the famous smile that had reduced so many men to abject submission.

‘Darling,’ she purred languidly, ‘don’t just stand there letting me make a fool of myself, introduce us.’

With angry resignation Aura complied, heard her mother invite Flint inside, and his immediate acceptance. It was useless glaring at Natalie, who was invulnerable to suggestion, but Aura sent a contemptuous glance at the man smiling with cynically amused admiration down at her mother.

As though it impacted physically on him he lifted his head, returning Aura’s fulminating glower with a long, considering look from narrowed eyes that challenged her to object.

To her fury and despair, Aura couldn’t meet his gaze. Turning away, she dumped her bag on the table with a short, abrupt movement.

‘How kind of you to bring Aura home, Flint. You must have a nightcap before you go,’ Natalie said sweetly, making expert play with her lashes as she ushered him into the cluttered little sitting-room. ‘Whisky, surely? You look like a whisky man. I think we’ve got some somewhere.’

His expression reminded Aura of the smile on the face of the tiger. ‘Not for me, thank you.’

Aura bit her lip. She should have been pleased at this unusual interest. Following Lionel’s death and the subsequent revelations of his shady, secret life, her mother had sunk into a dangerous apathy that developed into a fullblown nervous breakdown when she’d realised that the only assets she had left were a small annuity Lionel hadn’t been able to get his hands on. It provided barely enough money to keep her.