Wildfire (Fire 3)

He dropped down on the wooden bench, ignorin

g the peeling paint as he watched her. “You know what you do then, Mrs. MacDonald?” he said softly.

She hated that name with a fierce passion, so fierce that she couldn’t let it pass. “Call me Sophie,” she said abruptly. “And don’t tell me you come back and build another sand castle the next day, only to have it wash away again. I’m not that naïve.”

He pushed his dark glasses up onto his forehead, and she could see that sharp green gaze of his, uncomfortably intimate. “I don’t think you’re naïve at all, Sophie.” His voice caressed her name, and for a moment she wondered whether “Mrs. MacDonald” might have been preferable after all. He was a cool, distant, dangerous man, and yet somehow he was getting too close. “And I think you’re far too practical to keep building castles in the sand, or in the clouds, for that matter. I think you know as well as I do that you find a good, solid surface and build your defenses there.”

For some reason the thought of her huge bathroom, the one place where she could move and train her body back into obedience, came into her mind. “Who said anything about defenses? I thought we were talking about castles.”

“All good castles need defenses, Sophie. You should know that.”

It was almost as if he thought there were some reason she should be conversant with castles and defenses. “I never put much thought into it,” she said airily. “And I hardly need any defenses here on Isla Mordita, when I have my husband and so many people looking out for my welfare. In fact, the only unknown potential source of danger is you, Malcolm.” There, she said it, she thought, waiting for his reaction.

He dropped his glasses back down on his nose. “Whatever gets you through the night.” He leaned back, tilting his face up to the sun, and she said nothing, watching him, the long lines of his body, his dark hair falling away from a face that was almost ascetic. He was wearing jeans today, and for a moment she decided he couldn’t be British. All British men wore socks with their sandals.

His blue linen shirt was rolled up at the sleeves, and his forearms looked strong, his hands beautiful. Jesus, even his toes were beautiful. Maybe she had overestimated her own abilities. Even with the element of surprise she had some question whether she’d be able to best him or not if he were the enemy.

She needed a gun. She’d known that all along—a simple firearm for one added bit of protection when she was finally able to make her escape. She’d been an excellent shot, had been even better with a knife, but she preferred hand-to-hand combat. Years ago she could take down a man twice her size in less than a minute.

She didn’t think Malcolm Gunnison would be quite that simple to vanquish. A handgun could stop anything short of a stampeding elephant, and there were no elephants on Isla Mordita.

She tilted her own head back to look up into the bright blue sky. The soft breeze across the water made her think of freedom, and if she’d been in any less control of herself, she would have wept. She never cried, not after the first year of her imprisonment. Instead, she let the tension drain from her body as the sun beat down on her, the wind ruffling the trees all around, and she sank back, soaking up the warmth and beauty of the day. There was no guarantee that Malcolm wasn’t here to harm her, but she was relatively certain she wasn’t in danger at that particular moment. No one was watching. No one would expect anything from her. She closed her eyes and breathed in the day.

Malcolm knew the moment she relaxed, drifted into a light sleep. It surprised him—she’d been sleeping like a rock the night before when he’d gone into her room, and with all the pain meds she was on, she probably got more than her share of rest. It could have been the Vicodin that made her drift off now, but it didn’t seem a drugged sleep to him.

He opened his eyes to watch her. Her pale face was tilted back toward the sun, her eyes were closed, and he could see a fresh tracing of freckles across her cheekbones.

She was in her early thirties, seven years younger than he was. He’d heard about her when he was in Africa—not that many women worked for the Committee, and she’d showed enormous promise. They’d been grooming her for great things, but fate had intervened in the form of Archer MacDonald. He’d taken one look at a junior operative who’d simply been there to observe, and apparently the man had fallen in love. It was totally out of character for a sociopath like MacDonald, but if a man was going to fall in love, then Sophie would be the woman to tempt him, he thought lazily. It was a good thing he had no such weakness. Given Archer’s unexpected infatuation, no one in the London office could let such an opportunity pass them by, so they’d let Sophie go into the fray when she was unprepared, and disaster had followed.

He wondered what he would have thought of her had he met her back then. Probably not much—the woman was as dumb as a rock to have fallen for Archer MacDonald under any circumstances.

Too bad he found her attractive, with her dark eyebrows beneath the tousle of unshaped, tawny hair. He’d like to pretend it wasn’t so, but he was always honest with himself, and he knew there was something about her that drew him. He had absolutely no idea what it was. He could barely see most of her body beneath those long flowing things she wore, and to put it crudely, only half of it worked. He was broad-minded, but that was an unlikely turn-on. Whenever she was around Archer, her intellect seemed to drop, and the rest of the time she seemed faintly crabby, particularly with Mal. That in itself was also interesting—while he hadn’t bothered to hit her with his well-practiced charm, she had no reason for her hostility. Unless she suspected he might be a danger to her darling Archer, but that option seemed unlikely, given her lack of mental acuity.

She was probably nothing more than she seemed on the surface: a fretful, spoiled wife who’d outlived her usefulness and had spent the past few years trapped on an island with nowhere to go.

Maybe.

But you didn’t survive long in the life they’d chosen if you went with the obvious, and he was taking nothing at face value. She’d been smart enough to have gotten through the rigorous Committee training. Before that she’d worked for the CIA and the State Department, and she’d graduated from Sarah Lawrence summa cum laude. Her dossier had been thorough—including the death of her diplomat parents in a plane crash when she was thirteen, her upbringing with her rigidly conservative aunt. Little wonder she’d gone into government work; less obvious was why she turned to the Committee. It wasn’t the place for conservatives who followed rules.

After three years of marriage, two of them bedridden and as a virtual prisoner, wasn’t she likely to have seen through Archer’s amiable exterior? Or had being so dependent made her cling to him? He glanced down at her motionless legs beneath the flowing skirt. Nothing at face value, he reminded himself.

He heard the sound from a distance, someone moving down the path to the small clearing, the footsteps practically inaudible, the rustle of the shrubbery no more than the sound of the breeze. Archer was trying to sneak up on them, and with anyone else he might have gotten away with it. He underestimated Malcolm, which was fine with him, and Mal didn’t move from his spot on the bench, seemingly oblivious. Archer wanted to surprise them, not kill them, but Mal moved his hand to the front pocket of his jeans, to the outline of the zip knife he kept there. Whether he could throw it faster than Archer could fire was uncertain, but he was counting on Archer’s motives being relatively innocuous, at least for now.

Archer was almost there when Malcolm saw Sophie’s eyelids flicker for the briefest instant. So even in her sleep she had heard him, he thought. She was stretched in her chair, every muscle relaxed in feigned sleep, but if Archer opened fire he had little doubt her old training would take hold and she’d dive for the sand. Not that it would save her—she would be an easy target if and when Archer was ready to get rid of her. But that wasn’t going to be today.

“I thought I’d find you here!” Archer announced as he appeared at the end of the pathway. Mal looked up at him from behind his mirrored sunglasses, not even pretending to be surprised. It was Sophie’s behavio

r that interested him. The moment Archer spoke she jumped, as if startled into wakefulness. She didn’t overdo it—just the slightest jerk, and she turned her head back and greeted him with a sleepy smile. This—his first bit of proof that Archer’s wife wasn’t the docile victim she appeared to be.

“You surprised us,” she said in a slightly husky voice that was entirely fake. She’d known perfectly well he was coming. This was getting interesting.

Archer towered over her, leaning down to give her a kiss on her pale mouth, and Mal watched her body rise toward his, instinctively moving into the kiss. Or that was what she wanted it to look like. He was beginning to question all his assumptions about the former Committee member.

When Archer moved back she looked up at her husband adoringly, her rich brown eyes warm with love, but he’d already dismissed her, turning his back on her to look at Malcolm. “You’ve made quite a hit with my wife,” Archer said cheerfully. “As far as I know she’s never let anyone bring her down here to her special place. Even I’ve been off-limits.”

“I didn’t know you even knew where it was,” Sophie said softly.

“Of course I did, baby,” Archer said smugly. “I know everything that goes on at Isla Mordita, especially when it concerns my sweet wife.” He glanced up at the gathering clouds. “I think you two picked the wrong time for your walk—we’re about to get one of our usual late-morning rain showers. Malcolm, come back with me and we’ll play a game of pool. I’ll send Joe down to fetch Sophie.”