Wildfire (Fire 3)

“Stop thinking about it,” he said as he poured the boiling water into the French press. “You aren’t going to be able to get the better of me no matter how hard you try. Any devious, underhanded trick you can think of is something I’ve thought of already. I’m as ruthless as they come, and I’ve been honing my skills while you’ve been reading War and Peace and sitting on your backside.”

“Sitting on my backside wasn’t exactly my choice in the matter,” she shot back.

He gave her a smile that was absolutely seraphic. “Poor little cripple,” he said in a slightly raised voice. “Is that what your husband calls you?”

She shuddered. “Stop reminding me.”

“Of what? The wheelchair? Or your husband?”

She just looked at him. The wheelchair wasn’t real—the husband was. She didn’t even like to think of Archer that way—he was the enemy, the one she had to destroy before he destroyed her.

But Mal was the enemy as well, a different kind of enemy. She’d been infatuated with Archer, charmed out of her once-formidable intellect, so in love, if she could call it that, that her brains had melted and her instincts had deserted her, at least in the beginning.

Mal was a different matter altogether. He wasn’t trying to charm her—his enmity was up front and clear. She couldn’t trust him any farther than she could throw him, and she’d learned the night before that she couldn’t throw him at all. But she was becoming just as obsessed with him, in a different way. She could see something, feel something beneath that implacable exterior, something that drew her more powerfully than anything she could remember. It was nothing like what she’d felt for Archer, but she didn’t trust herself any more than she trusted Mal. Whatever it was that called to her was probably nothing but her imagination, trying to justify her normal, sexual reaction to an undeniably hot male. Whether she liked it or not, she knew that her body reacted to his. To his words as well—taunting, tempting.

He moved over to her, holding out a cup of coffee, and she stared at it in surprise. He hadn’t grabbed one of the hand-thrown pottery mugs—instead he’d taken an antique Limoges cup and saucer from the set she’d bought on eBay when she was first married. It had been obscenely expensive, and so delicate and beautiful that she’d loved it. She’d assumed that Archer had smashed every piece in a fit of pique, but he must have forgotten all about it.

There was one dark sugar cube on the saucer and a tiny silver spoon. She’d bought those spoons when she’d been in her early twenties, when she’d first moved to England. How the hell did he know she liked a small cube of turbinado sugar with really strong coffee?

She looked up at him without taking it, shaken. “How do you know so much?” she said in a hushed voice.

For a moment he said nothing, his eyes slowly running over her, from top to bottom, and it felt like a physical touch. Then he shrugged. “It’s a combination of instinct and guesswork. I also picked what I would have chosen.”

She glanced behind him, to the second cup on the wooden work top, the same china, the same tiny spoon. He’d added milk to his already, and the coffee was a dark, creamy color. “Why didn’t you give me milk?” Her voice was uncomfortably breathless.

“You’re lactose intolerant.”

She wanted to give up in that moment. She had no idea how he knew, and she didn’t care. In her entire life no one had ever remembered, no matter how many times she told them, that she couldn’t touch milk. And now this man said it casually, as if it were simply a given.

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; She reached out and took the cup, her hand brushing his, but she kept hers steady, with not even a shimmer marring the serene surface of the inky black coffee. Persephone and Hades, she thought. She was about to eat six pomegranate seeds and be doomed to spend half her days with the Prince of Darkness. She dropped the cube of sugar into the brew and stirred it, the sound of the silver tapping against the fine bone china the only sound in the room.

“We’re going to have to work together, you know,” Malcolm said, moving back to collect his own coffee, the moment vanishing. “You may as well learn to trust me.”

“Not in this lifetime.”

He laughed, actually laughed, at her terse words. “You will,” he said. “In the meantime, is there someplace nearby we can go that’s out of range?”

She managed a noncommittal shrug, taking a sip of the coffee and then closing her eyes to savor it. This had to be the best cup of coffee she’d had in her entire life. A man who could make coffee like this couldn’t be all bad. She said nothing, taking her time with it, stretching out the sensuous pleasure of it. He was leaning against the kitchen workbench, watching her as he drank his own, and it was a strange sort of communion, a silent time shared between the two of them. Like some stupid commercial, she thought in disgust, but she couldn’t fight the betraying warmth that was low in her belly. When she reluctantly finished the last drop, she met his eyes, and the cup rattled in her hand.

She couldn’t read his expression—there was something hidden, indecipherable in his green eyes. She pulled herself together. The enemy, she reminded herself. “And just what were you thinking?”

“Not about how I want to kill you,” he said lightly, taking the cup from her and moving to the sink. To her surprise he washed everything, quickly and efficiently, and put things back where he found them. He turned back, and that hidden expression was gone. “Let’s go.” He scooped her up in his arms, leaving the wheelchair behind, and she wanted to scream in annoyance.

“Don’t,” she said in a tight voice as he carried her out the back door into the sun-warmed courtyard.

“Don’t what? We’re going to look for a private place to talk, and your chair isn’t an all-terrain vehicle. If you don’t like me touching you, you’re going to have to put up with it. Just pretend I’m Joe.”

“That’s a little difficult,” she muttered, then wanted to bite her tongue.

But he said nothing, moving down the carefully landscaped walkways. The small bungalows that housed the staff were on the right—he headed toward the left, down a narrower path. “You know there are cameras out here,” she said.

“No shit. But the bugs are like those in the kitchen—they can function only when things are relatively quiet, and this island is filled with noise, from the birds to the wind to the sound of the waves. If they used regular bugs, everything would sound like a whooshing noise, and Archer isn’t as cutting edge as he’d like to be. The Committee in New Orleans has developed the most amazing listening devices, ones that can be trained to pick up a specific voice even in a roomful of people. You have to have a sample of the voice first, but they’re very effective.”

For a moment she was distracted—she’d always had a techie streak that had gotten little liberation recently. “How did they do that?”

“If you get back to New Orleans, I’ll have them show you,” he said, moving farther into the shrubbery.