Dark Fire

Dark Fire

Robyn Donald

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

EPILOGUE

COPYRIGHT

CHAPTER ONE

WHEN Paul came to pick her up, Aura Forsythe’s heart swelled with pride.

He looked so good, the black and white of his evening clothes setting off his fair hair and skin. But she didn’t love him for his blond handsomeness. Aura knew, none better, that good looks and regular features had little to do with the person beneath the fleshy veneer.

It had been his smile that first caught her attention, and his air of calm, confident good humour. However, very soon after meeting Paul McAlpine she had realised that he was utterly, completely reliable. It made him irresistible.

Over the past three months she’d come to understand him very well, this man she was to marry in a fortnight’s time. Bathed in the warmth of his love, her turbulent search for some measure of peace in her life was transformed into serenity. She had never been so happy.

‘We’re meeting Flint at the restaurant,’ he said as he opened the door of his expensive car for her. ‘He wants to shower and change, but he’ll probably be at Quaglino’s before we are.’ Flint Jansen was to be best man at their wedding in two weeks’ time.

‘Where does he live?’

‘In Remuera, but he’s staying with me.’

‘Oh. Why?’

‘His place is being redecorated. Wet paint everywhere, so he’s going to stay with me for at least a week, and possibly until the wedding.’

He lifted her hand to kiss the slender fingers. Aura’s full mouth curved into a smile.

‘You look very pretty tonight,’ Paul murmured as he released her.

‘Thank you. I like this dress.’

Although compliments still made her uneasy, experience had trained her to handle them with poise. And compliments from Paul were no threat.

The dress was one she had had for some years, but the rich, muted green silk played up hair the colour of good burgundy wine and ivory skin, darkened and emphasised her huge green eyes.

‘So the fabled Flint Jansen is here. It seems odd that I haven’t met your best friend yet,’ she said, deliberately steadying her voice as she changed the subject with automatic skill.

Paul laughed softly. ‘He was saying the same thing. I told him that if he insists on staying in Indonesia for months at a time he must expect things to happen while he’s gone.’

Suddenly a car roared across the intersection in front of them. Paul reacted swiftly and without alarm, but Aura was flung forward on to the seatbelt.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked sharply.

She flashed him a reassuring smile. The way he looked after her, as though she were a precious piece of porcelain, made her feel safe and cherished.

‘Yes, I’m fine. You’ve got very fast reactions.’

His mouth turned up at the corner. ‘Not so fast as Flint’s. He’s like greased lightning. We went hunting in the Uraweras once and he stopped me from going over a cliff.’ He paused, then finished enviously, ‘Man, did he move! Faster than a king cobra and stronger than a horse. I’m no lightweight, but he hauled me back out of the air as though I were made of balsa wood.’

‘He sounds very macho.’ Her voice was cool and non-committal.

Paul laughed. ‘It’s not the way I’d describe him. Macho has a ring of fundamental insecurity to it, whereas Flint is honest right through. And completely self-sufficient.’

‘Honesty,’ Aura said cynically, ‘can be a much overrated quality.’

Paul’s smile was tender and tolerant. ‘Don’t try to shock me, darling, I know your little tricks. Although I must admit Flint’s complete self-assurance does antagonise people—mostly people who envy it!’

‘Well, we all envy the things we haven’t got,’ Aura agreed, thinking of the many qualities she yearned for.

‘How would you know? You’ve got everything.’

Aura’s snort was followed by a smile. ‘I’m glad you think so. You and he don’t seem to have much in common.’

‘We don’t, but Flint’s the best friend I’ve ever had. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly—if at all—he’s about as yielding as granite bedrock, and he has the sort of ominous patience that makes a cat hunting a mouse look testy. But I like him, and I think you will too. He’ll certainly be impressed by you. He has an eye for a beautiful woman.’

I’ll just bet he has, Aura thought wearily. A cold foreboding sandpapered her nerves. She didn’t want to meet Flint Jansen; she already knew she wasn’t going to like him.

‘He hasn’t had much sleep these last few days,’ Paul went on. ‘He’s been tidying up a very hush-hush situation in Indonesia and he strode off the plane looking like something piratical and fierce from the South China Sea.’

‘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?’

‘Don’t ask,’ Paul advised kindly, directing a purely masculine look at the man opposite. ‘He won’t tell you anyway. Flint’s work is highly confidential.’

Thoroughly irritated by the unspoken male conspiracy, Aura fluttered her lashes and cooed, ‘How fascinating. Is it dangerous, too?’

‘Sometimes,’ Flint said, the intriguing, gravelly texture in his voice intensifying. ‘Does danger excite you, Aura?’

From beneath half-closed eyelids he was watching the way the light shimmered across her hair. Uneasily she shook her head; an unknown sensation stirred in the pit of her stomach. Perhaps, instead of letting her hair float around her shoudlers in a gleaming burgundy cloud, she should have confined it into a formal pleat.

‘No, far from it,’ she said, trying to make her tone easy and inconsequential. ‘I’m a complete coward.’

‘Aura,’ Paul said, touching her hand for a second, ‘is not into risk.’

As she turned her head to give him a quick, tender smile, she caught in the corner of her eye the ironic movement of Flint’s lips.

‘Yet you’re getting married,’ he said speculatively. ‘I’ve always thought that to be the greatest risk in the world, giving another person such power in your life. Unless, of course, the other person is too besotted to be any threat.’

‘Ah, you’ve guessed my secret,’ Paul retorted, his blue eyes warmly caressing as they rested on Aura’s face.

Without reason, Aura was hit by a wave of profound disquiet. Her gaze clung a moment to Paul’s, then slid sideways as the wine waiter appeared.

When the small business of handing the drinks out was over, Paul began talking of a political scandal that had erupted a couple of weeks before. Hiding an absurd relief, Aura listened to the deep male voices, sipping her wine a little faster than usual because something was keeping her on edge.

No, not something; someone, and he was sitting next to her. If she lowered her eyes she could see Flint’s long fingers on the round tabletop, his bronze skin a shocking contrast to the white, starched damask cloth. He had a beautiful hand, lean and masculine and strong.

He had to spend a lot of time in hot sunlight to acquire a tan like that, she thought vaguely. Of course, he had just returned from the tropics, but, even so, he was far darker skinned than either her or Paul. It was one of the reasons those glittering golden eyes were so spectacular, set as they were in black lashes beneath straight black brows.

The hum of conversation receded, became overlaid by the sudden throbbing of her heart in her eardrums. From beneath her lashes Aura’s gaze followed his hand as he lifted his wine glass and sipped some of the pale straw-coloured liquid. When he’d greeted her the rough hardness of calluses against her softer palm had made her catch her breath, and set up a strange, hot melting at the base of her spine. It had receded somewhat, but now it was starting all over again.

She didn’t know what was happening to her, although instinct warned her it was dangerous. With a determined attempt to ignore it, she joined in the conversation.

To share a meal with someone who disapproved profoundly of her was nothing new; hatred she could deal with.

But Flint Jansen despised her. He had taken one look at her, and for a frightening second contempt had flickered like cold flames in the depths of his eyes. The moment her eyes had focused on that harshly commanding face, an intuition as old as her first female ancestor had warned her that he was no friend of hers, that he never would be. For some reason they were fated to be enemies.

And Paul hadn’t noticed.

She looked up at him, half listening as he expounded some interesting point of law to the other man. Apart from her cousin Alick, Paul was the most intelligent man she had ever known, yet he thought they were getting along well.

Flint’s textured voice dragged her glance sideways. He was smiling, and even as she tried to jerk her eyes free his gaze snared hers.

For the length of a heartbeat green eyes and gold clashed. His mouth curved in the smiling snarl of a tiger playing with something small and not worthy of it.

A question from Paul shattered the tension, his beloved tones both an intrusion and a shield. As Flint answered, Aura breathed deeply.

Stop it, her brain screamed. But she had no idea what it was. Her reaction was totally new to her; it seemed that a new person had moved in to inhabit her body, a bewildering renegade, a woman she didn’t know.

She had to calm down, reimpose some sort of control over her wayward responses.

Something Paul said brought a smile to Flint’s face, revealing strong white teeth that did more uncomfortable things to the pit of Aura’s stomach. Snatching at her slipping self-possession, she concentrated fiercely on the words, not the man; on the occasion, not her reactions.

He had excellent manners. He was entertaining in a dry, wittily cynical fashion. When Aura spoke he listened attentively with nothing more obvious than lazy appreciation in his hooded eyes, yet she felt the track of his eyes like little whips across the clear ivory of her skin. And she sensed his contempt.

Oh, he was clever, he hid it well; he was a man whose feelings were caged by a ferocious will. But Aura had spent too many years noting hidden, subliminal signals to be fooled. This was not the casual disdain of a man faced by a woman out to feather her nest. Flint Jansen’s anger burned with a white-hot intensity that made him more than dangerous. And all that savage emotion was directed at her.

It bewildered her and upset her, but the most astonishing thing was that in some obscure way it was exciting. She looked across the table to the shadowed, clever face slashed by the scar, a countenance almost primitive in its force and power, and a feral shudder ran down her spine, set off warning signals all through her, flashpoints of heat and light leaping from cell to cell.

Shaken, at the mercy of forbidden and equivocal sensations, she managed to disguise her response with a sparkling glow of laughter and bright conversation, while Paul watched her with pride and the tiniest hint of possessive smugness. Amazingly, the secret, seething undercurrent of ambiguous emotions appeared to swirl around him without touching him.

She didn’t begrudge him his pride; all men, she knew, wanted to stand well in the eyes of their fellows. It was at once one of their strengths, and rather endearingly childish.

‘Paul tells me we’re having a party tomorrow night,’ Flint said coolly while they waited for dessert.

Natalie had insisted that as mother of the bride she owed friends and relatives a drinks party. Behind Aura’s back she had wheedled Aura’s cousin, Alick Forsythe, into paying for it, and because she refused to entertain in the small unit she and Aura lived in now it was being held at Paul’s apartment.

Aura nodded, hoping her irritation didn’t show. ‘Yes.’ She sent Flint a sideways glance.

His eyes darkened into tawny slits, and for one pulsing second he watched her as though she’d started to strip for him. Then his lashes concealed eyes cold and brilliant as the fire in the heart of a diamond.

Aura’s mouth dried. ‘You’ll meet my mother and my bridesmaid, and an assortment of other people. It should be fun.’

‘I’m sure it will be.’

Aura resented his bland tone, but more the sardonic quirk of his lips that accompanied it. Although she had fought against the whole idea of this wretched party, now that it was inevitable she was prepared to do what she could to make it a success.