Robyn Donald - Dark Fire

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.