Consumed by Fire (Fire 1)

But there’d been no good home, and in truth, she hadn’t made much effort to find one. She called him Merlin, because he was so damned smart, and he seemed to take it as his role in life to be her protector. He must have had some training at some point in his puppyhood, but if he missed his earlier home he made no sign of it. He took care of her. He wouldn’t let her leave the house without him, or with her laptop and lunch still on the kitchen counter. He’d wormed his way into her life and her heart and she couldn’t imagine life without him.

His overprotectiveness wasn’t a particular problem. He was perfectly well behaved, even with someone he perceived as a threat. He never barked; he just bared his fangs and growled low in his throat and people backed off from her, from her car. Oddly enough, he seemed to know who was harmless. Children, slightly disorganized students, the dean were no imminent problem. He despised the college president, though Evangeline thought he must have picked up on her own antipathy, but what had really surprised her was his furious dislike of Pete the one time he’d visited her.

She’d asked for her research back. He’d told her he’d lost it. She’d said, “Find it.” He’d told her he’d burned it. She’d told him he lied: he’d never burn original research. He’d finally showed up at her door one day, without warning or any boxes of notes and research, and Merlin wouldn’t let him in, even though Evangeline had shushed him and calmed him. When Pete had tried to walk in, Merlin had lunged at him, and Evangeline had had to drag him into the bedroom, shut the door, and try to ignore his furious and unexpected barking.

Merlin was smarter than she was. Pete was there to confess his sins, his eyes full of crocodile tears. His new book was coming out, detailing his journeys through the walled towns of Italy, complete with her original drawings, and her name was nowhere on it.

“I’ll pay you your share of the royalties, of course,” he’d said eagerly, while she sat like a stone. “Not that these books ever make much, so it probably won’t even earn out its advance. And if it goes into a second printing I’ll make sure I put you in the acknowledgments, but you know that’s unlikely as well. I feel just awful about this, Vangie. It was a moment of weakness. I needed something for the new book—you’re at this shit backwater school, but I’m at Harvard now. Publish or perish is a serious business, and I was at my wits’ end when I remembered your papers. You’d told me you wanted to destroy them, so I didn’t think you’d care.”

“Wouldn’t care that you stole my research and put your name on it?” she’d said in a deceptively mild voice.

He’d winced. “It sounds so sleazy when you put it that way.”

She said nothing, letting him make the obvious inference. “Listen,” he went on, “I can cut you a check for five thousand dollars, just as a gesture of good will. I know it might not seem like much, but remember, I compiled all that raw research, organized it, wrote the narrative. It’s really my book.”

“With my research. What did you get for an advance?”

“That’s not a fair question. The advance was based on my name, and how well the last book did, and of course for travel and living expenses . . .” his voice trailed off.

“The travel and living expenses that came out of my pocket,” she supplied. “And your previous book didn’t do that well. What was your advance?” He still hesitated, and with Merlin barking in the background it was hard to be subtle. “I can always call your publisher and explain the situation. They’ll tell me how much they paid you.”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” he muttered.

She stared at him. That was a monumental sum for an academic treatise, but Pete would have turned it into a cocktail table book, with glossy photos and his own leonine good looks on the cover.

“And you offer me five thousand dollars of hush money? I suppose you’d have me sign something attesting to the fact that I had nothing to do with the book?”

“I said I’d put you in the acknowledgments. Come on, Vangie, you know how the world works. Be reasonable.”

She smiled sweetly and rose from her seat. “I’m going to let Merlin out now. I would suggest you be long gone before I get to the bedroom door. He’s smarter than I am, and he seems to dislike you even more than I do, which seems impossible but there it is.”

“Vangie, don’t be difficult . . .” he began, but she ignored him, reaching the bedroom door. Merlin hit the front door just seconds after Pete had closed it, and she could see Pete running for his rental car, a Lexus of course, like he had hellhounds on his heels. He would have had one after him, if she’d given in to temptation and opened the door.

“Fucking men,” she’d said to Merlin. “Next time one comes around, remind me how much I hate the whole breed.”

Merlin had looked up at her with his wise eyes, and she rubbed his head. “You’re a very smart dog, you know that? From now on I’m going to let you tell me who’s worth spending time with.” He’d ducked his big head beneath her caress, making that whining little sound of pleasure. In the last two years he hadn’t let a presentable male anywhere near her.

Merlin seemed to love camping and life on the road just as much as Evangeline did. Every night he would disappear for a half an hour or so, and it took her a while to realize he was patrolling the perimeter, even if they’d been in the same place for weeks. “You must have been a police dog,” she told him, feeding him a slice of bacon. “Or part of a military canine unit. You are one damned fine guard dog.”

He’d taken the praise and the bacon as his due, flopping down beside her, his big warm body pressed up against her leg, his work finished for the night; and she’d wondered what she’d ever done without him.

This sabbatical had been everything she’d dreamed of, with the slight hassle of dragging the damned Airstream everywhere she went the only downside. But she’d even gotten good at that, able to back it into a proper spot with only two or three attempts, and she loved it. It was small—a dinette at the back with all her research material spread over it, a bed at the front, a tiny kitchenette, and even a toilet with a shower. She loved her compact, solitary, happy life wandering around the Canadian wilderness where she had no cell phone coverage and no Internet. That part could be a pain when it came to research, but she worked her way around it, finding Internet cafes or campgrounds with Wi-Fi, and most of the time she found she could live perfectly well without it.

The path to success in research of any kind was to specialize, and if you managed to find something that sparked public imagination so much the better, as that dickwad Pete Williamson knew. In the increasingly stressed, urbanized world, the fantasy of remote frontier living with the luxuries of the Titanic and no danger of drowning was powerful. She’d had to pick and choose among the grant offers, and she’d let go of Pete’s perfidy.

She’d had to. Not long after Pete’s book had came out, he’d been mugged, beaten to an inch of his life, his perfect looks ruined; and his career had tanked when other instances of academic plagiarism had cropped up. Karma was a bitch, just like she was, and she could let go of it. She didn’t even need to waste her time thinking about him.

“I’m not ready for this to be over, boy,” she said to Merlin as she sat in the truck. “I don’t want to go back home.” It wasn’t that her work and time were done. She had another six weeks on her sabbatical, and

there were two sites in Montana, as well as one in northern Minnesota, that she had yet to study. But crossing the border between Alberta and Montana meant accepting the fact that her time was coming to an end, and sooner rather than later she’d be back in the classroom.

She liked to teach, she truly did. She liked the small, shabby Victorian house she’d bought and fixed up almost as much as she loved her tiny vintage Airstream with its silver bullet contours. But Wisconsin didn’t feel like home. Nothing did, and the nights when she woke up sweating and shaking she knew she’d been dreaming of James Bishop, even though her conscious mind refused to acknowledge it.

She sighed, shoving her hair away from her face. She kept it short nowadays, and it had a ridiculous tendency to curl, making her look like a pixie, but at least it was out of her way and fit under her beloved Grumpy ball cap.

She yanked the cap back on, shoving her hair beneath it. It was a midafternoon in August, and the border crossing, while it was a small one, would be busy. She hated crossing borders—they always wanted to poke through Annabelle, her private name for the trailer, mess with her papers, hassle her about Merlin, observe her dirty laundry, and question her for hours. Merlin was always a perfect gentleman about it all, and she suspected he recognized a uniform as a sign of authority. As for her, she’d learned to pee before she got to the crossings, because God knew they wouldn’t let her near a bathroom until they were convinced she wasn’t carrying something dangerous in her vagina.

Nothing was going in her vagina but her battery-powered BFF, and chances were they’d come across that too if they searched intently. She was counting on this smaller crossing to be more laid-back, but there were no guarantees.