Dark Fire

By the time the evening wound towards its close Aura was heartily glad. Every nerve in her body was chafed into painful sensitivity, her head ached dully and bed had never seemed so desirable.

By then she knew she would never like Flint Jansen, and found herself hoping savagely that his job kept him well away from them. The less she saw of the beastly man, the better. Fortunately the feeling was mutual, so she wasn’t likely to be plagued with too much of his presence after she and Paul were married.

She expected to be taken straight home, but as Flint held open the car door for her with an aloof, studied smile Paul asked, ‘Do you mind if we go back to the apartment first, darling? I’m expecting a call from London, and I’d like to be there when it comes.’

‘Yes, of course.’

Halfway there she yawned. Instantly Paul said, ‘Poor sweet, you’re exhausted, and no wonder. Look, why don’t I get off at home, then Flint can drive you the rest of the way? That way you’ll be tucked up in bed at a reasonable hour.’

‘Oh, no, there’s—’

Aura’s swift, horrified, thoughtless answer was interrupted by Flint’s amused voice from the back seat. ‘Sounds like a good idea to me,’ he said lazily. ‘Where does Aura live?’

Bristling, but recognising that protests would only make her antagonism more obvious, Aura gave him her address.

‘Really?’

The hardly hidden speculation in his tone made her prickle. ‘Yes,’ she said stiffly.

‘I know how to get there.’

The hidden insolence in his words scorched her skin with a sudden betraying flush. Aura’s tense fingers clasped the beaded work of her fringed Victorian bag. She most emphatically did not want to be cooped up with Flint for the twenty minutes or so it would take to get her home. However, as there was no alternative she was going to have to cope as well as she could.

‘Goodnight, sweetheart. Try not to push yourself too hard tomorrow,’ Paul said when the transfer of drivers had been effected. He bent down and kissed her gently. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow night.’

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.

‘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

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.

For the first time in her life, Aura had found herself needed by her mother. At first she hadn’t understood how ill Natalie was, but when she’d come home from a much-wanted job interview to find her unconscious from an overdose of sleeping pills and tranquillisers, she had realised that for the time being she was going to have to give up her ambitions to make a career in marketing.

Even then, she had hoped that she would have time to finish designing a market research programme she had begun at university. Unfortunately, Natalie had needed her constant attention, and as the tap of the computer’s keys seemed to drive her to a frenzy, Aura had given up on it for the time being.

It had been a miserable six months. The only thing that had sustained Aura was meeting Paul. It had helped Natalie, too. She was slowly returning to her normal spirits.

Witness, Aura thought grimly, her swift reaction to Flint Jansen.

It was difficult to see what was going on behind the clear, hard glitter of Flint’s eyes, but Aura was prepared to bet that it was appreciation. The clear skin and sultry green eyes Natalie had bequeathed to her daughter were almost unmarred by the years. Tiny lines of petulance and self-indulgence were beginning to etch into the ivory skin, drag the full, lush mouth down at the corners. Even so, Natalie was exquisitely beautiful.

‘No?’ she said now, with a knowing, flirtatious smile. ‘Well, then, a cup of coffee, and while it’s being made you must sit down and tell me how you come to be driving Aura home.’

‘Paul had to wait for a phone call from Britain,’ Aura interposed curtly, not caring whether he thought her rude, ‘so Flint very kindly offered to take his place.’

‘Only for the drive back,’ Flint said in a voice as smooth and bland as cream.

Flakes of colour heated Aura’s cheeks. ‘Naturally,’ she retorted too quickly.

‘I’m staying with Paul until the wedding,’ Flint told Natalie, ‘so if you want me to take a message to him, I’ll do it gladly.’

Aura’s brows drew together as she stared significantly at her mother, willing her to be silent. But Natalie had learned that the best way to get what she wanted was to use a mixture of cajolery and sexuality on the most powerful man within sight, and it was too late for her to study new tactics.

‘No, no,’ she said, smiling at Flint as though he was the most fascinating man she had ever met, ‘it’s just the new flat. I couldn’t work out what I didn’t like about it, and only a few minutes ago when I was sitting looking at this hideous affair here I realised that it was the carpet. Too middle class and tacky. We’ll have to get it changed, but don’t you worry about it, I’ll discuss it with Paul when I see him next. Now, do sit down and tell me all about yourself. Aura, aren’t you going to make us some coffee, darling?’