Hotter Than Wildfire

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Harry froze. “What did you do?”

  “I ran,” she said simply.

  Ellen could clearly remember the bright, blinding panic flaring in her head when she saw the men spilling out of that van.

  Pure instinct took over. She didn’t even stop to think about what she was doing. She didn’t pack a suitcase, didn’t do anything but grab her car keys and the thousand dollars she always kept in cash in an ancient copy of Pride and Prejudice and run down the back stairs to the laundry room, which led to an underground corridor exiting onto the back parking lot, where she kept her car.

  She drove to the most eastern ATM she could think of, withdrew as much money as the system would allow, then turned west and began the long, long trek to the farthest point she could think of: Seattle.

  “You ran,” Harry Bolt repeated thoughtfully. His deep voice was quiet and calm.

  She nodded. “I knew I had to keep off the grid, because my boss—my former boss—is good at finding things out. That’s one of the things he does. And I knew he wasn’t ever going to just forget about it. I think…” Ellen lifted her eyes to Harry Bolt’s and searched his face, looking for something elusive. Some sense that he would understand completely and totally what she was saying. She found it. She drew a deep breath. “I think he’s the kind of man who will keep looking for me until I’m dead. Can you believe that?”

  “Absolutely,” was the quiet answer.

  Okay. Okay. Maybe this was going to work.

  “I drove at night and slept in motels during the day. Sometimes I stopped for a week or two and waitressed in places where they don’t ask for documents. Finally I made it to…a city in the north. I rented a room in a rough part of town. I paid cash, no questions asked. The landlady wasn’t about to report my rent to the IRS. After a couple of days, I found a job as a waitress in this dive. I gave the boss a false name and I didn’t show him any papers. The owner was—was good to me. I think—I think he understood.”

  Mario Russo, one of life’s good guys. Big and rough looking, with only inches of visible skin not covered by tribal tattoos. He ran a funky bar frequented by an astonishing variety of humanity, but he didn’t water his drinks, he didn’t ask questions and if you behaved, you could stay forever in his place on one beer. Particularly on cold days.

  Though he didn’t have to, Mario paid her a little over minimum wage, which with tips was enough to pay for her room and her keep. He never asked questions, paid every Friday night, and was always somehow there if a customer got a little rowdy with her.

  “About a week after I ran, I found out that—” Her throat constricted and she swallowed heavily. As always when she thought about it, her stomach seemed to slide greasily up her windpipe.

  Ellen watched Harry Bolt watching her. Again, he showed no signs of impatience as he waited for her to continue her story. Not a muscle in his body moved. She suddenly had a flash of insight—he’d wait for her to tell her story in her own way, no matter how much time it took.

  Up until now Ellen’s focus had simply been, Is this man my enemy? Am I going to get myself killed coming out in the open with him?

  But now she relaxed just a little and noticed other things about the man. He was so very tall, for one thing. Even sitting down, he towered above his desk. He was well built, too—dense, lean, tightly packed muscle with no fat anywhere. Amazingly broad shoulders, maybe the widest she’d ever seen.

  Astonishing as his physique was, though, it wasn’t the first thing you noticed about him. No, what drew your attention like iron filings to a supermagnet were his eyes. That brown so light it could almost be called golden. Intense, intelligent eyes that seemed to see more than most.

  “You found something out a week after you ran,” he prodded gently.

  She drew in a deep breath. “Yes. I paid no attention to the news at first. I just fell into bed exhausted every evening. But finally one evening I decided to check up on what was going on back home.” Her fingers tightened on the canvas of her backpack as she tried to keep her hands from trembling. “My boss reported to his friend the chief of police that I’d embezzled almost a million dollars from the company.”

  She watched his face, as she sat tense and miserable, reliving the shock of the accusation. She hadn’t slept for two days afterward.

  He blinked those narrow golden eyes. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, and she let out her breath in a long, relieved sigh.

  “Yes. Yes, it is, but he obviously made it sound convincing. There was an interview with him on the local news and he was all, We don’t know what made her do this terrible thing—though she’s been drinking heavily lately.”

  Ellen looked into his eyes and felt that hot stab of indignation all over again. “I don’t know how he could say that without a bolt of lightning striking him dead. I rarely drink and I would never embezzle. But it gets worse.”

  “He accused you of being the dead guy’s lover and insinuated you killed him.” Harry Bolt said it calmly, that deep voice sure and steady, no problem, as if saying the sun rose in the east.

  Ellen’s jaw nearly dropped. “Yes. How did you know?”

  “Guy sounds like an operator. He had various elements to deal with, and stringing them together that way took the heat off him, put it onto you, made sure you stayed in hiding and that no one would believe a word you said. Like killing four birds with one stone.”

  It burned that it had been so easy for Gerald. Part of it was her own fault. She’d led such an isolated life in Prineville. He could spin any story he wanted about her.

  She sighed. “So I knew I had to stay under everyone’s radar, and I did. For a year. It wasn’t much of a life, but at least I stayed alive. Then, three days ago, something happened.”

  “Someone else die?”

  “No. Not that I know of. But it scared the hell out of me. Coming home from work I happened to notice a man loitering in front of a shop window on my street. He was dressed like a homeless person, but by sheer chance, I recognized one of my boss’s new hires from a year ago. If I hadn’t recognized him, I’d probably be dead by now. So far I’ve managed to stay alive by sheer, dumb luck, but I can’t count on it lasting forever. I’d made friends with the woman you know as Dove. I never told her anything, but I think she knew. And I think she was in the same situation. She gave me this and said that if I needed help, to call. And ask for Sam Reston.”

  Ellen opened her backpack and slid a small cardboard visiting card across the table. Her hands were trembling. He saw that. Those fierce eagle eyes saw her shaking hands and she curled them back in her lap.

  Harry Bolt barely glanced at the card, but of course he’d know what it was. Not a normal business card.

  The top of the card had a beautifully rendered bird in flight, the very epitome of freedom in few brush strokes, and a telephone number printed in the center of the card. Nothing else. No words. No name, no address. Just the symbol of freedom and a number.

  The number didn’t correspond to any of the official numbers of RBK Security, either. There was no other information on the card. Just the stylized bird and a toll-free number. Which she’d called. One of the company’s secretaries had given Ellen the city and address when she called.

  It was a special phone line. Obviously the line for desperate women on the run.

  Bolt watched her carefully. “Do you have any idea how these men might have tracked you down?”

  Here it comes, she thought. “Yes, yes I do, unfortunately. You remember I told you I worked in this bar? More of a dive, really?”

  He nodded his head gravely.

  “Well, the place featured live music every Tuesday and Thursday evening. The music was provided by this ancient jazz singer who wasn’t actually…um…very good. His voice was shot to hell by years of smoking and drinking and he had arthritis in his hands, but he’d been playing there for twenty years, the customers were used to him and, knowing the boss, he’d stay for another twenty. One night he didn’t show up. We found ou
t later that his heart simply gave out.” Honorius Lime. He’d been one of the good guys who’d found life simply too hard to face without the help of the bottle. He’d once had talent, but he’d flushed that, and his life, down the toilet.

  Ellen had grown up with people like that. Talented but weak, living life on wishful thinking until there was nothing left but charity and then the grave.

  She’d studied and worked so hard all her life to get out of that hole, and now look at her.

  It was a sign of her exhaustion that she even let these thoughts inside her head, because they were wasted energy and she couldn’t in any way afford that.

  She drew in a deep breath. “So my boss was left without live entertainment. I, um, I offered to step in.”

  For the first time, she saw lightness in his face. It wasn’t a smile, but something amused him. “Do you have any talent?”

  Well, that was the problem. “Some. More than poor old Honorius, anyway. So I started singing every Tuesday and Thursday and the place filled up. The boss gave me Wednesday and Friday off. He said I was bringing in so many new customers, he wanted me fresh. And then one evening, about six months ago, after I’d been singing there for a couple of weeks, an agent was in the audience. We talked after the gig and he asked me to record some songs and we did. He knew this great studio and we did it all in one day, in one take. Enough for two CDs. One just voice and keyboard and bass and sax and drums. Covers, mostly. I also had some songs that I’d, um, composed myself. Just for…something to do.”

  The solace of music. How grateful she’d been over this past year of terror and flight that she could find solace in music.

  “I didn’t think too much about it. I thought maybe he’d use the recordings for some private purpose or something. Play them at parties. But he didn’t. He put out two CDs under a pseudonym and…” she shrugged, almost embarrassed, “one went gold and the other went platinum. We never thought—”

  The words died in her throat as Harry Bolt jolted, looking as if he’d been stuck with a cattle prod. His face was tight and harsh. He placed his big hands on the desk and leaned forward on powerful arms.

  “Christ,” he breathed. “You’re Eve.”

  Harry thought he was impervious to surprise. More or less everything that could happen to him already had. At least twice. He’d been a Delta operator and had been trained and trained hard not to show surprise.

  Had there been any capacity for surprise left in him when he signed up, Delta had beaten it right out of him.

  But right now, he felt as if someone had whacked him upside the head with a two-by-four.

  Eve. Fuck him, he had Eve sitting right across from him, with that soft Southern-tinged voice he piped most evenings straight into his head.

  And she wasn’t a seven-chinned hippopotamus, either. She was a real beauty. Run down and scared, sure, but still gorgeous. While listening to her, it had been really hard to pay attention. He was ashamed of himself, but there it was.

  Harry wasn’t Mike, the man-slut. Harry’d been celibate for almost two years now, the whole year in Afghanistan, where to bed a woman meant her death by stoning, and the year after, when he’d come back in pieces and had had to put himself painfully back together.

  It was as if sex had fled his life, and fuck him if it didn’t decide to come roaring back into his life right this instant. He had a scared beauty in front of him and she wasn’t thinking about sex, she was thinking about survival, so he should be ashamed of himself.

  And he was, sort of. Except the hard-on took precedence over the shame.

  Yep. Harry Bolt, Mr. Self Control himself, was getting a hard-on even though he was sweating to keep it down. Everything about this woman turned him on. That pale, porcelain skin that contrasted so delightfully with the rich, shiny, dark-red hair, the fatigue-bruised, beautiful eyes, the delicate lines of her cheekbones and jawline.

  Even exhausted, rumpled, with deep purple smudges under her eyes, so tense she was practically thrumming, she turned him on more powerfully than any other woman he’d ever met.

  And then…and then it turned out she was fucking Eve.

  Harry was still getting over the shock of that when a soft knock sounded at the door separating his office from Sam’s, and Sam stuck his head in.

  “There was someone to see me?” Sam had a few lines in his face he hadn’t had yesterday, so Nicole’s morning sickness must have been bad. But if he was here, that meant she was feeling better and she’d come in to work. He wouldn’t be here otherwise.

  Sam looked at Nora Charles—or whatever the hell her real name was, though Harry could think of her now only as Eve—and at Harry, sensing the electricity in the air, and walked into Harry’s office.

  Sam’s presence rearranged the molecules in the room and gave Harry a little space to get his head out of his ass and try to get his dick to go down a little.

  Nora—Eve—was looking as if she’d been run over by a truck. She hadn’t wanted him to figure out who she was. Even though her story had been carefully edited to keep all details out, Harry could figure them out now. The city in the north was Seattle. The agent was Roddy Fisher, who’d discovered Broken Monkeys and Isabel.

  Sam was looking at him, at Eve, and back at him.

  Eve was sitting at the very edge of the chair, clutching her no-name canvas backpack with white knuckles.

  Terrified.

  And Harry was a dickhead. Hard-headed, tough-as-nails Harry had morphed right into a fanboy and had scared this woman who, it turned out, was not just gorgeous, but who had a once-in-a-generation musical talent and was terrified.

  If she was here, her life was on the line, and he had to get a grip on himself.

  Harry turned to Sam, keeping his movements slow and unthreatening. “Come on in, Sam. Meet Eve.”

  Sam was pretty unsurpriseable, too. So maybe it was sleep deprivation, or the stress of watching his wife throw up her stomach lining, that had him opening his eyes in shock.

  “The Eve? The singer?”

  “That’s highly confidential information,” Ellen said sharply. Information that could get her killed.

  So this was Sam Reston.

  Ellen looked at him carefully. Though he didn’t look like Harry Bolt at all—Reston was dark-haired with rough features; Bolt was dark blond with fine, angular features—they shared a look. Tall, impossibly strong, self-possessed.

  And they both looked really dangerous. Not for the first time, she wondered whether she’d made a mistake in coming here. If she was wrong, if Kerry had somehow steered her to the wrong place, she could have sacrificed her life for nothing.

  These men spirited away endangered women. You’d think that there would be softness and kindness in their gaze. That they’d be sort of like social workers, only taller.

  These two men looked worlds away from being social workers. If she were told they were crime lords or killers, she’d believe every word.

  No softness, no kindness, no discernible mercy.

  What had she done?

  There was silence in the room for a minute, two. Ellen’s throat was too tight and dry for her to even think of speaking.

  “Well?” Harry Bolt fixed her with an unblinking stare, light-brown eyes fixed as in an eagle’s gaze, and just as impersonal. “You are Eve, aren’t you?”

  Yes. And I have just given you enough personal information to track me down. If you’re not going to help me, I’m done for.

  No. Of course not. What a ridiculous notion. And excuse me, I need to be somewhere else right now.

  Yes. No. Yes. No.

  “Yes,” she blurted out, as if some seal across her lips had just been shattered. Except for her agent, no one else knew. Well, maybe her boss, Mario, because beneath his laid-back tattooed exterior he was really smart. Still, he’d never asked and she’d never told. “Yes. And I’m afraid that might be the way my former boss found me, though everyone on the production side signed a confidentiality agreement.”

&nbs
p; She’d made Roddy swear to secrecy and they’d drawn up the confidentiality clause together. She knew enough legal lingo to make it airtight and to make anyone think twice about selling out to the tabloids. The musicians had played in a separate room, with a separate entrance and had never even seen her, only heard her. She’d insisted on that.

  Roddy hadn’t really taken her seriously, but he had seen the marketing potential. At a time in which anyone in the media ran a website, blogged, friended on Facebook, Twittered, had RSS feeds and was linked in, a mystery identity was a sure-fire publicity gimmick.

  Harry Bolt addressed Sam Reston without taking his eyes off her. “So, Sam, this is Nora Charles, aka Eve. She got our number from Dove. Eve, this is Sam Reston, the man who helped your friend.”

  She was vibrating with nerves, sweat trickling down her back and between her breasts. She knew her pale skin would be ice white with stress.

  Sam Reston didn’t even try to shake hands with her; he must have seen that she was on the knife’s edge. He simply nodded soberly, said, “Ma’am” in a low voice and sat down next to his partner.

  He addressed his partner without taking his eyes off her. “Harry? Sitrep.”

  Now both of them were looking at her intently. Most stares come off as aggressive, but theirs didn’t. Just…intense. Like they were listening carefully to what she said, but other information was coming their way from her eyes, her hands, her feet. Maybe even her gut.

  “Ms. Charles is an accountant. She worked for a company…in the South?” He raised his eyebrows slightly.

  Ellen nodded shakily. She’d spent a lifetime getting rid of her cracker accent but there was still a Southern tilt to her voice, particularly under stress.

  Harry Bolt continued. “At a party, a company employee told her that the owner of the company stole a big sum of money from the U.S. government in Iraq. Twenty million dollars.”