Consumed by Fire

by Anne Stuart

  The climaxes wouldn’t stop. He pulled out, too fast, and she lay face down on the mattress, letting the spasms race through her body.

  She felt his big hands slid up her legs, and when he came to her hips, he turned her onto her back, more gentle now, and she could hear the sound of his rough breathing perfectly in the night air. She was panting, struggling to regain control, when he slid into her again, in deep, and she realized with a shock he was still just as hard. She’d felt him come, and he was still hard.

  “I can’t . . .” she managed to choke out, but he pulled her legs around his hips.

  “You can,” he whispered, moving into her, slowly now, rhythmically, the initial frenzy passing. They were both slick with sweat, and she felt weak, shattered, unable to do more than wrap her arms around his waist, bury her face against his skin and hold on. She would do this for him, let him . . .

  The small climax hit her and she cried out, a shriek of surprise, certain that she’d had nothing left, and no sooner had it passed than she was afraid again. He was taking too much from her, there would be nothing left. She dug her fingernails in, pulling him closer, as she teetered on a precipice, terrified of the darkness beyond, certain she’d disappear completely.

  “Let go, Angel.” His voice was a rasp in her ear, and she heard the name with a twisted kind of joy. “Let go of it all.”

  She shook her head, beyond words, fighting it, fighting him, fighting to survive. He was stripping everything from her, she would die . . .

  “Let go, Angel,” he whispered again, and it sounded like love. “I’ll catch you.”

  With those simple words he ripped away the last of her defenses, and she was open, naked, raw, and bleeding before him. She convulsed, and he was inside her, surrounding her, there was nothing but James in the velvety darkness as he joined her in that final climax. James and Angel in a cocoon of sweat and sex and endless pleasure pushed through the crucible of pain, back into love once more, and there was nothing left. Nothing.

  She was vaguely aware of him pulling away from her, rolling onto his side beside her in the small space, and she felt abandoned. She realized with a shock that he was still wearing his jeans—he’d just shoved them down—and his shirt was half on. She was wearing her T-shirt and her bra was pushed up to her shoulders, and if she could she would have laughed.

  She couldn’t. She shuddered. The night air was suddenly cool as the sweat dried on her skin, and she started to turn, wanting nothing more than to curl up in shame, when she felt his hands on her body, unexpectedly gentle. He pulled her T-shirt over her head, found the clasp to her bra with unerring expertise, and unfastened it, tugging it free, and she was naked. He slid off the bunk, and she started to turn again, but his hand caught her, held her. A moment later he was back in the bunk, nothing but skin against skin as he pulled her into his arms. He said nothing, but simply wrapped himself around her, holding her tight against him. His heart was still thudding heavily, or maybe that was hers, and he pulled her leg over his hip to get her closer, tucking her head against his shoulder.

  Now was the time to whisper words of love, of guilt, of reassurance. Now was the time to comfort her.

  “Sleep,” was all he said as he pulled a quilt over their rapidly cooling bodies.

  She slept.

  Chapter Twelve

  Bishop let himself sleep for three hours. It was a luxury that his body accepted gratefully, and when he awoke, precisely at seven as he’d programmed himself to do, he felt better than he had in a long time. Better than he had in five years.

  She still lay curled in his arms. Not that he’d given her any choice—in his sleep he’d sensed each time when she’d tried to pull away, curl in on herself, and he hadn’t let her. He’d held her until the very last bit of resistance left her, and she clung to him as if they belonged together, needed each other to survive. Crazy, of course, but he needed that feeling. Just for a short while, he needed to indulge in that impossible fantasy, before he had to let her go again.

  He slid away from her, hard as a rock, of course, and dropped his feet silently on the narrow floor of the Winnebago. Merlin sat up, immediately alert, and Bishop opened the door, heading out into the light with the dog.

  They were parked in a remote corner of forest on the edge of the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, one of the satellite-safe zones he’d been briefed on. There was even running water, though in late summer the river wasn’t much more than a narrow stream. Merlin leaped ahead happily, signing everything as he went, while Bishop thought dark, depressing thoughts as he waited for his erection to subside enough to relieve himself in the bushes. There were times when he wished he had half of Merlin’s energy. Right now he felt . . .

  He wasn’t sure what he felt. Immense physical satisfaction, of course. How could he not? That it felt more than physical was something he wasn’t ready to consider. Besides, what good would it do? Home was the Committee, not the arms, the soul, the snappishly sharp mind and welcoming body of his erstwhile wife.

  He’d been too rough with her and he knew it, but he’d been holding his hunger, his absolute starvation for her, at bay for so long that when he finally cut loose from his restraints, he was like an animal, one that she met fully, not pulling back. He still wanted to kick himself. He would have been gentle with her, would have forced his body back under his rigid control, but she’d dug her nails into his skin and took everything he gave her and more.

  He should have been gentler, eased her back into it, but he’d forgotten the almost incendiary passion that flamed between them, and it had torn his resolve into pieces. He might have hurt her—he couldn’t be sure—but he was reasonably certain he could have stopped if she’d wanted him to, needed him to.

  Shit, he thought, suddenly morose. Merlin was enjoying himself, sniffing everything, reveling in being off duty for a time, but when he glanced back at Bishop, it was as if he’d sensed his master’s conflicted emotions. He shouldn’t be having emotions. And he wasn’t Merlin’s master anymore. The dog he’d raised and trained had switched allegiance far more thoroughly than Bishop had ever imagined he might. He’d sent Merlin on a job, and the dog had fallen in love.

  “Oh, Christ, Merlin,” he said, his voice thick with shock. “You’re as bad as I am. That woman is practically lethal.”

  Merlin immediately sat now that he was being addressed, and he looked at Bishop questioningly. “Yeah, I know,” Bishop said. “We’re both in trouble. I can get myself out of it easily enough”—at least he hoped so—“but I think you’re in it for the long haul.”

  Merlin cocked his head, not looking troubled by this revelation. “Lucky bastard,” Bishop muttered, stretching in the morning light.

  He rinsed off in the icy water of the stream, then opened one of the outside storage compartments on the Winnebego to catalogue the supplies. There was enough fire power to fight a small war, a duffle bag with clothes, and a crate of the food he’d requested. Neither of them had eaten much—well, not counting that massive meal Evangeline had devoured at the diner—and they couldn’t afford to skip meals. Maybe he’d climb back into the revamped Winnebago to find that the astonishing sex that always erupted between them had made her sweetly domestic and docile.

  He doubted it. He’d kept close tabs on her for the last five years, watched her as she changed, known that he’d done it to her. Losing her naïveté had probably been inevitable, but it hadn’t needed to be so extreme. She’d lost that incredible, slightly wary sweetness, and he missed it. Now she was snarky, and sarcastic, and it made him hot as hell. He’d been charmed by the semi-innocent young professor roaming Italy on her own. The new woman she’d become was even more irresistible.

  He yanked on clean clothes—jeans and a deliberately stupid T-shirt—and stretched out on the grass. He’d give her a little time—they could afford that much. They were on the border of New Mexico and Colorado, and they�
��d be heading across the vast expanse of Texas. It was Tuesday, and he needed to be in New Orleans by Thursday. Ryder had been given the task of finding the perfect setting for the new American branch of the Committee, and he’d found the right spot. The new arm of the Committee would be just as covert, and who was funding it or the original branch in London was anybody’s guess. As far as Bishop could tell it was probably a conglomerate of millionaires and western countries with the kinds of national budgets that could hide the Committee’s expenditures. Ryder couldn’t sign papers without him, and the real estate people were getting itchy; even though Bishop had suggested Ryder simply shoot the broker, they’d both known it was nothing more than a black joke. The sooner they got everything in place, the sooner they could put a stop to His Eminence and his hideous business, and Bishop wasn’t in the mood to wait.

  It was about twelve hundred miles between where they were and New Orleans. He could drive it straight, no problem, and the reconfigured engine on the Winnebago, not to mention the secondary gas tank, would make it fast and painless.

  But an ancient Winnebago driving anything past sixty would look suspicious. Besides, once they reached New Orleans he had to let her go. Once Ryder assured him she was safe.

  He still wasn’t sure what his best move was. Just because Clement was dead didn’t mean he was—they were—safe. The hierarchy of the far-reaching Corsini family had a long memory, and while Dimitri Corsini had been only a senior adviser and accountant, the rest of the organization had reacted to his execution with rage. His death had sent their complicated accounting system into chaos, and he’d been family. The Corsinis didn’t deal with that sort of thing very well. They wanted Bishop, believed he was the executioner, and he had no interest in telling them otherwise. He could have garroted Corsini just as easily as Claudia had, albeit with lingering Catholic guilt about committing such a sin on holy ground, but he wouldn’t have taken pleasure in it as Claudia had.

  He would be in danger until the Corsinis’ ugly trade was smashed, and they were close, so close. The Committee still didn’t know if the corruption stopped with His Eminence or went higher, but once they’d taken care of business, things should ease off a bit.

  The problem was Evangeline. Claudia was no longer trustworthy, so his original legal attachment to Evangeline would do little to protect her. At least Claudia was in Japan, trying to push her way in on Taka’s mission, and he could be counted on to keep her busy. By the time he dissolved the marriage, Evangeline would have faded back into the woodwork.

  Severing any connection with Evangeline would go a long way toward destroying her value as a hostage to anyone who wanted to get to him. He should have seen that coming sooner, done something about it, but since he never went near her, apart from her bigamous wedding day, he would have thought no one would realize he had that one connection. It was almost impossible to hack into the Committee’s tangled power structure, but, just in case, he’d had several of his friends take turns keeping an eye on Evangeline. That way no one person could be traced if someone was lucky enough to get past all the firewalls and security.

  Committee operatives needed to be free from entanglements—otherwise they were too vulnerable. Not that people hadn’t worked around it: Peter Madsen, the head of the original British-based organization, was the first leader who had not only a wife but two children. They were kept safe through a combination of surveillance, discreet guards, and Madsen’s reputation. It would take a madman to attempt to get to Genevieve Madsen or his precocious daughter Izzy—and his five-year-old son was almost more terrifying than Madsen himself.

  Most operatives left the business when they made the mistake of caring about someone too much. Some worked on a contingency basis, like Bastien Toussaint, some had disappeared into the ether, like their previous boss, Isobel Lambert and her true love, Serafin the Butcher, aka Thomas Killian, the former CIA agent. And some carried on as always. The Japanese contingent, Reno and Taka, had the backing of the Yakuza as well as the Committee, and they were untouchable, but Finn MacGowan, after three years as a prisoner in the Andes, had settled down into relative domesticity. Falling in love was a definite problem in the Committee—lone wolves like Claudia and Ryder were much more effective.

  Not, of course, that falling in love had anything to do with him or his current mess of a situation. He’d been thrown together with Evangeline when he’d expected never to see her again, and the reverberations could be felt all the way to London and beyond. He had to get her back, secure in her backwater college, with the assurance that no one would connect her to him, no one would touch her.

  He wasn’t sure how he was going to manage that, but Ryder would help. The two of them had their hands full—not only did they have to track down and terminate the Corsinis’ New Orleans operation, but also they had to set up the framework of the Committee in the United States. Having London serve as the hub was getting more and more complicated, and it only made sense to branch out into the US. If there was a situation going on, a group that was causing trouble, planning some atrocity, it was almost always connected with his country, and Bishop had fought long and hard for a US branch. All they had to do first was to track down the man behind this particular horror scene and kill him.

  He leaned back, looking at the bright blue sky. Merlin had finished with his territorial concerns and flopped down beside him, at exactly the right position for Bishop to rub his head. A flash of regret went through him at the thought of Merlin disappearing from his life forever, but then, he’d already been gone for more than eighteen months. Just because he hadn’t gotten rid of his bowl and his dog bed didn’t mean that he thought he was coming back. He wanted Merlin with Evangeline. As long as one of them was with her she was safe, and he knew he wasn’t going to be anywhere around.

  Fuck, he thought savagely. He wasn’t going to bitch about the unfairness of life—he’d chosen this, he was still choosing this, and there was always a price you had to pay for the decisions you made.

  He pushed himself off the grass, getting to his feet, and Merlin followed, moving to the door of the Winnebago to stand guard. Bishop needed to walk off his edginess. They weren’t going to set off until early afternoon, and in the meantime he needed to keep his distance from Evangeline. Last night, or was it this morning, had been too intense, and he needed to keep focused on the job at hand. He looked at Merlin, who was sitting patiently by the steps up into the RV.

  “Come on, boy,” he said.

  Merlin didn’t move.

  Bishop stared at him in surprise. Merlin was too good a dog to disobey a direct order. “Merlin, come!” he said, making his voice stern.

  Merlin whined slightly, but he didn’t move. Bishop shook his head. He wasn’t going to sink that low, he wasn’t. But Merlin wasn’t moving, and there was no need to guard Evangeline right now. Merlin had no intention of leaving her.

  He had no choice, though it galled him to do it. “Come on, Merlin. Walkies.”

  Merlin did a little dance in place, but apart from that he wasn’t doing anything Bishop suggested. “Traitor,” Bishop muttered beneath his breath, and then headed off into the woods, leaving his wife and her bodyguard behind.

  Evangeline didn’t want to wake up. She was curled up in bed, a soft, fluffy duvet wrapped around her, and as long as she stayed there, she didn’t have to deal with him. She didn’t even have to deal with facing her own culpability—she could just hide. It seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do, until she heard Merlin whining at the door, and while she could ignore calls of nature, she couldn’t ignore her dog. Wrapping the duvet around her nude body, she stepped out onto the floor. Directly onto her discarded shorts and underwear.

  Kicking them out of the way, she opened the door, steeling herself to face Bishop. But he wasn’t there; it was only Merlin waiting to get in. She backed up and let him past her, then looked out into the thick forest of pines. There was no sign of Bishop.
With extreme luck he’d left her there, safe in a camper with all the comforts of home. Was he expecting her to drive for help? Or sit there quietly, waiting for his return?

  If so, he was in for a surprise. Bishop wasn’t the only one who could hotwire a car around here. She shoved the bed platform up and out of the way, refusing to think about the state of the sheets, and moved to the driver’s seat. One look told her she was shit out of luck—this wasn’t really a 1970s Winnebago, no matter what it looked like. The dashboard was a computerized nightmare, and while she was relatively good at technology, she was iffy when it came to upscale vehicles, never having been able to afford one herself. Besides, she could hardly drive off stark naked and wrapped in a duvet.

  “Where’s your asshole friend, baby?” she asked Merlin, who cocked his head. “No, you don’t think he’s an asshole, do you? It takes a woman to appreciate his full asshattery.” She headed into the back of the camper to investigate. She hated using toilets in RVs—nothing could keep them from eventually permeating the living space. She hadn’t taken into account the space-age facilities someone, or something, had supplied Bishop, and she took a look at the tiny closet-like room with awed appreciation.