Wildfire (Fire 3)

He had no condom to get rid of. Damn it—that was the second time he’d come inside her with no protection. He doubted she was on any kind of protection, given Archer’s control over her body. He didn’t even want to think about what diseases she could have contracted from Archer, though he knew he himself was clean. That was the least of his worries—Archer MacDonald had a strong OCD streak that would make him fastidious when it came to sex. Mal just had to hope this wasn’t the wrong time of the month.

He’d always planned to get a vasectomy, but the time had never worked out. It wasn’t that he didn’t want children, but his lifestyle made it far too dangerous. How people like Peter Madsen in England and James Bishop in New Orleans managed was beyond him—if he had to worry about a wife and babies, he’d never be able to do his best work, and anything but his best could get him killed.

Whether he wanted to pull out or not, his cock was finally softening, though he suspected not for long. He still held her, not wanting to let go. He had no idea what she was thinking, what she was feeling, only that she’d had at least three orgasms, one of them so powerful it had almost knocked her flat. But beyond that he couldn’t even guess.

The stone floor was cold and hard beneath them, and he wanted to carry her back to his bed, pull the covers around them, sleep with her in his arms, but Archer had put that fucking camera in. Her room wouldn’t do either—even if the place was too dark to film, the microphones were supersensitive, and he could just picture Archer sitting in the dark, listening to them and jacking off.

She was beginning to stir, getting restless, and he knew she was going to pull away, and he wouldn’t be able to stop her, not without drawing attention to them. With strong but gentle hands he turned her in her arms, pushing her hair back off her face, and put his mouth on hers, kissing her with extraordinary sweetness. He swallowed her strangled sob, and she kissed him back, sliding her arms around him and pulling him close, so close, their sweat-slick bodies growing chill in the night air, and he wanted to say something, tell her something, but he couldn’t imagine what. So he simply kissed her, until she pulled away from him, disappearing silently into the darkness.

Chapter Sixteen

Sophie sat in her bathtub, shivering, as the hot water showered down on her. She’d left her clothes on the balcony—would Mal find them and dispose of them? Or would the cameras pick up on them when it grew light? She had her knees drawn up, and she put her head down against them, wishing she could somehow disappear. How had life managed to get twisted into such a sick fuck-all? She’d been doing fine, managing despite the situation. Married to a sadistic madman, trapped by her feigned condition, she’d been busy planning escape and revenge, her hatred keeping her going, not letting her collapse when she came so close.

And then he had arrived, and everything had gone to hell. He’d touched her, kissed her, fucked her, and when she’d spread her legs for him, she’d opened herself to a world of hurt.

This time she couldn’t blame him, or the circumstances. There was no need to convince Archer they were sleeping together—he’d already accepted that and congratulated himself on his manipulations. She could have gone to her own room—how had she ended up in his? And then it came back to her.

She’d been certain she would finally kill Archer tonight, and she hadn’t cared one way or another if she went down with him. Instead, Mal had tampered with the Beretta he’d so generously left for her, putting her in the worst danger of her life with no chance of defending herself. That was unforgiveable. It had taken so much to psych herself up into shooting Archer in cold blood, and the letdown when the gun didn’t fire had almost made her pass out. He’d stopped her, caught her, held her when she wanted to run. He’d hidden her, protected her, carried her out of there when she probably couldn’t have made it on her own. He was a monster. He had almost gotten her killed. He had saved her life.

Why hadn’t she just left him? She was the one who’d initiated the sex, not Mal. In fact, for a brief moment she’d wondered whether he even wanted her. He’d acted as if the sex in the boathouse was simply part of the job. So why was he hard when he held her?

Hell, men would take anything that was offered, wouldn’t they? So why had she offered? Was she wanting to make things more difficult?

She raised her head, letting the water sluice down over her face. She could think of one very good reason. She’d wanted to feel alive. She’d almost killed a man in cold blood, and she needed to feel human. It didn’t matter that Archer deserved to die ten times over for what he’d done, not just to her, but to so many people. That guilt that Mal had thrown in her face was inescapable—it was the only reason she could bring herself to commit cold-blooded murder.

No, it was an execution, she reminded herself. One that was long overdue. She pushed herself up to stand in the shower, taking the soap and scrubbing herself ruthlessly, washing between her legs, trying to wash him away. She was still sensitive there, and the more she washed, the more she thought of Mal, so she gave up and staggered out of the tub, wrapping a towel around her.

There was a bench in front of the mirror, an inconvenient intrusion for someone who really had to get around in a wheelchair, but at the moment she was grateful, and she sank down on it, staring at her reflection in the mirror. She didn’t recognize herself. Her brown eyes were huge, her mouth swollen, her entire reflection looking . . .

Looking well-fucked. And she had been—there was no denying it. Mal knew what to do with a woman’s body—she didn’t think she’d ever come so much or so quickly. That it made things that much more complicated didn’t seem to bother Mal at all. It bothered the hell out of her.

But then, Mal hadn’t been celibate for the last two years. He’d probably traveled all over the world, a fuck buddy in every port, while she’d been moldering in her bed. It wasn’t that surprising that her emotional reaction practically equaled her physical reaction. It might even trump it. After all, physically it had felt nothing but good, so fucking good, and nothing she did could make her convince herself otherwise. Emotionally it had felt like suicide, like complete surrender, like death.

She looked at her stony face. She could see the bite mark that Mal had left on her neck from last time quite clearly. She had red patches from the roughness of his beard. No matter how fierce an image she was trying to project, there was still a slightly hazy, out-of-focus look to her. She’d never seen that look on her own face before, not even when she’d first been with Archer, but she knew it. It was the look of a woman in love.

She almost threw something at the mirror when that absurd thought came into her mind. She didn’t even believe in love anymore, except for a few rare, special couples. It must simply be the look of satisfying sex—she could deny almost anything else but not that.

Staring at herself wasn’t going to change anything. She brushed her teeth, then pushed back from the low-slung sink. She needed to sleep. Tomorrow she would have to face Malcolm Gunnison, tomorrow she would have to look at Archer and think about putting a bullet in his brain. Accept the reality of it—because

sooner or later it was going to happen.

Her wheelchair was folded up behind the bathroom door. She climbed into it, switched off the light and rolled out into the darkened room. She needed to sleep, to block out all the mental and physical images that were assaulting her. She’d been doing that for that last few years—dismissing the mess she was in. Tonight it wasn’t going to be that easy.

It was a good thing Mal slept lightly. He’d just drifted off when he heard the sound on the stairs, and his hearing was acute enough to know it wasn’t Sophie making another crazy attempt to kill Archer, but Archer himself mounting the stairs. Tension ratcheted through him, but he lay very still in the bed, waiting. If Archer went to Sophie’s door, Mal was going to stop him, by any means necessary. He’d already made it clear that Sophie was his exclusive property for as long as he was on the island, but Archer hadn’t liked it, and he wasn’t a man to agree to anything he didn’t want to. Archer would have picked up on the tension and raw sexuality that pulsed between his wife and his guest, and it would be hard for a psychopath like Archer to resist tasting some of it himself, but Mal wasn’t letting it happen. He’d kill him if he had to.

Which was insane—he’d just stopped Sophie from doing that very thing. The mission mattered a hell of a lot more than one treacherous former agent.

Except that it hadn’t been entirely her fault. She’d been dropped off in the deep end when she had barely learned to dog-paddle, and she’d faced a barracuda. All the excuses in the world didn’t matter. He couldn’t throw away an important mission like this one for personal reasons.

But he wasn’t going to let Archer touch Sophie again.

To his mingled annoyance and relief his own door opened, and he felt Archer approach him. He hoped to God Archer wasn’t going to make a pass at him. He was usually willing to take one for the team—sex was a tool, and it didn’t much matter to him who he had to fuck in the line of business. He wasn’t so sure he could carry it off with Archer.

Fortunately that didn’t seem to be what Archer wanted from him. “Hey, Mal,” he said in a stage whisper, leaning over him. Would Sophie be able to hear him? What would she think? She’d probably just distrust him all the more, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

He opened his eyes, blinking as if roused from a deep sleep, and pushed himself up in the bed. “What’s up?” he said sleepily.

“Shhh. We don’t want to wake Sophie up. I’ve decided it’s time to get out of Dodge.”