While the Fire Rages

by Joan Hohl

  Halting at the side of the desk, Brett leaned toward her. For a fleeting half instant he hesitated, fighting the impulse to slide his hand under her chin, tilt her head up, and taste her pursing lips with his own. The effort required to bypass her head and pluck the folder from her hands was evidenced by the barely discernable tremor in his fingers.

  Jo had the good sense to remain quiet while he studied the folder’s contents. Gradually, the tension eased out of Brett as his eyes skimmed the printed lines on each successive sheet of paper contained within the folder’s cream-colored covers.

  Yes. Yes. A tiny smile played over Brett’s lips in appreciation of the thorough investigative job Wolf had done on the proposed project. Before he came to the final sheet, Brett fully agreed with his brother’s conclusions. The location was good. Wolf’s figures, if accurate—and Brett knew they would be—were well within reason for a complex of this size. The time for action was now if the groundwork was to be completed and excavation begun by late spring.

  Behind the printed sheets were several handwritten pages. Brett’s smile grew on recognition of Wolf’s slashing, straight-line penmanship. In a bold hand, Wolf had outlined a comprehensive, detailed directive on exactly how the official prospectus should be blocked out.

  Impressive bit of work, old son, Brett silently congratulated his elder sibling, then he mentally telegraphed a promise: You very obviously wanted this. I’m going to get it for you. It may not be much in exchange for your oh-so-exquisite plaything here, but thems the breaks, bro.

  Raising his head, Brett focused his attention on the hazel-eyed plaything sitting very quietly, very patiently at Wolf’s desk. Gazing into the amber-flecked depths, Brett reiterated what he’d known for a very long time. One could never fault Wolf’s taste in women. It seemed his taste in assistants was faultless as well, for Jo Lawrence was every bit as efficient at her work as his own paragon, Richard Colby. And that was a compliment Brett had bestowed on no other.

  “You’re staring, Brett.”

  Jo’s tone conveyed enlightenment, not censure. Smiling wryly, Brett brought the cream covers together with a businesslike snap before handing the folder to her.

  “Slide this into your briefcase,” he ordered as he started to turn away from the desk.

  “We’re going to pursue it?”

  “We’re going to pursue it,” he repeated, tilting his head back to her. “Can we wrap it up here soon?” he went on, deliberately stifling any attempt she might have made at questioning him further. “I’d like to be on the road by lunchtime, and I want to stop by the house on our way out.”

  “This apparently not-to-be-discussed report was the last of it.” Jo held up the folder. “Are you positive you feel safe leaving it in my care?” Her tone betrayed her slightly out-of-joint, but adorable, nose.

  “Simmer down, Ms. Assistant.” Brett sighed. “We will discuss the thing, probably to your screaming point, after we’re back in the city.” Stepping back, he indicated she was free to leave the desk without fear of having to get too close to him. “Are you packed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Brett ran a quick glance over her and took another step back, advising himself not to tempt fate or his own swiftly dissolving control. “So am I. Let’s get this place in order and get out of here.”

  Working together, the apartment was quickly restored to the neat condition they had found it to be in on their arrival two days previously. It was when Brett strode into the hall toward the bedroom to collect his suitcase that he felt the now-familiar tightening in his stomach muscles. The juices inside that particular organ began to roll, much like the gray-green waves pounding against the shoreline.

  Brett didn’t see the waves, or the shoreline; he didn’t even see the long wide window that took up most of one of the bedroom’s walls. A grimace twisting his lips reflected his inner image. His eyes, a moody dark gray, were fastened on the oversized bed. The figures his actively churning imagination projected onto that bed were the cause of sudden nausea.

  Within the luxury of that rich man’s couch, Wolf had consummated his marriage to Micki. Brett knew that. What he didn’t know and what had tormented him throughout most of last night was whether Wolf had also consummated his liaison with Jo Lawrence there as well.

  God damn!

  Standing perfectly still, his long body rigid with tension, Brett was not even aware of the fingers of his right hand curling into his palm; was not conscious of the urge that sent that hand hurtling out to make painful contact with the solid wood that framed the doorway. Consciousness came with the tongue of fire that shot from his knuckles to the base of his skull.

  Eyes mirroring disbelief, Brett stared at the abraded skin covering his fingers. Although the door frame had been the recipient of his lashing blow, Wolf’s face had been his mental target.

  Wolf?

  As he stared at his still-balled hand Brett’s expression changed from disbelief to incredulity. Good God! Was he cracking up completely? He had never ever felt anything but near adulation for Wolf. Now, because of a woman ... a shudder rippled through him. With a concentrated effort Brett uncurled his fingers.

  Brett felt the sickness roil again as against his will his gaze drifted back to the opulent bed. Did he want Jo because of who she was, or because of what she was to Wolf?

  Moving with an unusual jerky swiftness, Brett clutched the handles of his supple leather case and swung out of the room. There were connotations here he didn’t want to examine at the moment. Later, when he was back in New York, and alone, he’d pick his mental and emotional feelings to pieces.

  Jo stood patiently waiting for him in the hall, her tall, sleek body an invitation, her cool, aloof expression a denial of same.

  Nodding curtly for her to precede him, he scooped up her travel bag, thankful for the necessity of bending over and thereby concealing the evidence of the need growing even greater within.

  Following her smoothly swaying, ultra-slim hips along the corridor and down the open stairs to the first level, Brett wondered what had happened to his hard-won, tightly reined control. He had not touched his wife, Sondra, once during the last six months of the farce they’d called their marriage. And his celibacy had been by choice, not by Sondra’s rejection.

  His eyes caressing the enticing symmetry of Jo’s tush, Brett’s lip lifted in a sneer in memory of Sondra’s professed willingness to, in her own words, share her wealth.

  “Brett?”

  The voice was not the soft, languid drawl that had captivated him five years ago but the businesslike clip of a motivated woman who had worked her way up from assistant hotel manager to assistant everything. With a mental shake, Brett banished the memory of his former wife—at least temporarily.

  A frown on her more-than-merely-beautiful face, Jo held the heavy glass door for his passage.

  “You have the look of a man who has forgotten something,” Jo murmured as he strode by her. “Have you?”

  I wish to hell I could forget everything, Brett thought savagely. Most particularly you! He let a sharp movement of his head answering in the negative.

  After a last-minute check on Wolf’s house, during which Jo remained in the car—because of an aversion to entering the home Wolf shared with Micki? Brett wondered—he headed the sports car toward New York.

  To Brett the drive seemed exceptionally long and rife with tension. Being confined in such a small area with a woman as purely enticing as Jo was not exactly conducive to tranquil travel. The fact that said woman smelled intoxicating, not of perfume but of pure, sweet female tormented him to the brink of squirming in the bucket seat.

  I’ve got to have her, and it’s got to be soon. The stark realization followed the silent sigh that slipped the barrier of his lips as Brett joined his car in jockeying for position in the melee laughingly referred to as New York traffic.

  Jo’s apartment, located in a fashionable if not exclusive section of the city, was relatively easy to find. Drawing the
car to a halt in front of the high-rise, Brett stepped out of the low car and smiled sardonically at the doorman who moved with alacrity to assist Jo in alighting.

  With a word to the obsequious man to stand by the Porsche, Brett again suffered the discomfort of trailing the delicate figure he lusted after. Confinement in the elevator proved almost as unnerving as confinement in the Porsche. Finally, after a long trek along the hall on the ninth floor, Jo came to a halt before an unmarked door. She had her key in hand. A long, oddly shaped key, the sight of which glued Brett’s teeth together. He recognized that key. Was he not in possession of one exactly like it? Was it not, at that very moment, inside his pocket, nestled among the other keys on Wolf’s gold ring?

  He did.

  It was.

  God damn.

  The emotions that welled to congregate in Brett’s throat burned with a bitter sting. Fury, disappointment, disgust merged into a choking mass. Yet, overall, frustration reigned, prompting him to snatch the key from Jo impatiently when she hesitated at inserting it into the lock.

  A quick, vicious turn of the key and the door swung open. Stepping back, Brett frowned a silent order for Jo to enter her apartment, knowing he had to get her inside as quickly as possible and get himself out of there.

  Jo murmured, “Thank you.”

  Brett murmured, “You’re welcome.”

  Then, being very careful not to look at her, he placed her bag next to the door and stepped back into the hall, one hand outstretched to her.

  “I’ll have the Vermont report,” he clipped shortly. Jo’s startled look made him add, more gently, “I want to study it tonight. Come to my office first thing tomorrow morning. We’ll go over it together.” Silently he urged: Come to my bed tonight and we’ll forget it together.

  The longing that swept through him shook Brett to the core. Hurry, damn you, he commanded silently, watching Jo fumble with the clasps on her briefcase. Hurry, because if you don’t I’m going to step back inside, throw you down, and take you right there on that expensive hand-loomed rug my prowling brother paid for. The last thought brought with it a shaft of pain that blanketed Brett’s mind with shocked disbelief.

  Pain!

  Automatically, Brett’s fingers closed on the folder Jo extended to him.

  Pain?

  Automatically, Brett responded to Jo’s baffled-sounding words of farewell. And automatically, Brett retraced his tracks to the elevator.

  Why pain?

  Examining the puzzling emotion, Brett absently slipped a twenty-dollar bill into the doorman’s hand before slipping behind the wheel of the Porsche. The key to the puzzle eluded him as he fought his way through the late-afternoon traffic to Wolf’s apartment, which was located in a posh section of the city.

  Inside the elegantly decorated duplex, Brett abandoned his case inside the door and drew a straight line to Wolf’s well-stocked bar.

  “There should be no pain involved here…except of the physical discomfort type.”

  Measuring two fingers of amber liquid into a short, squat glass, Brett wasn’t even aware of speaking the assertion aloud. After swallowing the aged single malt neat, he was fully aware of being vocal.

  “Damn,” he muttered as the whisky burned a path to his stomach. “The idea was to quench the desire, Renninger. Not burn a hole in your guts.” He added ice cubes and water to the second drink.

  Sipping at the diluted whisky, Brett retrieved his case and climbed the free-standing staircase to the apartment’s second level and the largest of the two guest bedrooms.

  Standing dead center in the room decorated in muted tones of blue, Brett relaxed his fingers and let the case drop carelessly to the carpet. He didn’t even hear the muffled thud as the supple leather made contact with the wool fibers. His spine rigid, Brett fought against the urge tugging at him and lost.

  Following the emotional dictate, Brett, cursing himself softly, spun around and strode from the room and along the short hallway to the master bedroom. Flinging the door open, he took one step inside then halted, his eyes riveted to the enormous bed—in which, Brett was sure, Wolf was undoubtedly the master.

  “Have you had her here, you bastard?”

  The sound of his own voice was startling in its harshness. Still it persisted in erupting from his stiff lips.

  “While that beautiful creature who bore your children went serenely, trustfully about the business of keeping your home for you in that classy pile of bricks beside the ocean, did you wantonly debase her, and yourself, on that damned island you call a bed, with my woman?”

  The echo of his own words slamming back at his mind, Brett remained unmoving for a timeless moment, not seeing, not even breathing. Then, his eyes filling with something akin to horror, he slowly shook his head from side to side.

  “No!” Brett’s whispered denial came in cadence with his head motion. “No. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t do something as stupid as fall in love with her!”

  Closing his eyes to blot out the offensive sight of Wolf’’s sensual playground, Brett’s lips thinned in endurance of the shudder that rent the fabric of his soul. The body tremor caused a crackle in his breast pocket. In the silence of the room, the crackle had the muted ring of mocking laughter.

  Raising his right hand, he slipped the long envelope from his pocket and withdrew the legal document from it. A bitter smile twisting his lips, he opened his eyes and again focused on the huge bed.

  “No, brother mine, soiling your own nest would definitely not be your style. You would ensconce her expensively, but apart.”

  The document Brett unfolded was the deed to the apartment he had so recently retreated from.

  Retreat appeared to be Brett’s order of the day, for now he backed away from his brother’s sleeping quarters, quietly closing the door as he went.

  If Brett had found it a struggle coming to grips with his unexpected, unwanted physical need for Wolf’s partner in dalliance, that struggle was as nothing compared to facing the reality of a deeper emotional need.

  Never a coward, Brett nevertheless decided that there were times when facing reality was better done with a few stiff belts. Striding out purposely, he went back downstairs to the bar and the comfort of twelve-year-old Scotch.

  It was while sipping on his third glass of barely diluted whisky, his elongated frame perched tiredly on a leather-covered, thickly padded bar stool, that Brett finally conceded defeat to the indefinable emotion commonly called love.

  God, he hated it.

  No doubt about it, chum, he taunted himself wryly. This time your engine has completely jumped its tracks. One might be forgiven for falling hard for the wrong woman once. But twice? Brett shook his head sadly. You, sir, seemed to have developed a penchant for loose-limbed, loose-moraled, shockingly beautiful females. But at least the first one had not been staked out by another man—and that man the silver-eyed Wolf, no less. Brett’s soft, self-mocking laughter skipped the length of the short bar.

  If she finds out, she will rip you apart.

  So how do you go about keeping the very beautiful, very sexy, Jo Lawrence from finding out?

  Propping his elbow on the polished wood bar, Brett held his glass aloft and frowned at the amber contents, a self-derisive smile curving his lips.

  You are not going to find an answer at the bottom of a bottle of Scotch, he advised himself judiciously. Finish your drink and go rustle up some food to soak up the booze.

  The refrigerator, kept well stocked by Wolf’s part-time housekeeper, yielded the makings of a Reuben sandwich, which Brett prepared with the same ease as he had breakfast earlier that morning.

  Deciding coffee would be the prudent drink to have with his meal, Brett brewed a full pot and polished off the sandwich in between deep bracing swallows, all the while resisting the surge of memories of his first disastrous foray into the baffling emotion called love.

  As a rule Brett was successful at keeping all recollection of his time with Sondra at bay, but this evening, taut
with anger, actually aching with physical frustration, and saturated with whisky, the self-imposed mental barrier refused to stay in place.

  Sighing in defeat, his beautiful male lips curling in a sneer of self-mockery, Brett refilled his cup, stretched his long legs out under the table, and let the memories rip.

  * * * *

  Sondra Malone had taken Brett’s breath away from the first moment he saw her, greeting passengers as they entered the jet bound from Chicago to Atlanta. His first thought had been that she was overall gorgeous. Of average height, Sondra had a neat, trim body with delectable curves, a fantastic mane of fiery red hair, and a face that could, and often did, stop men in their tracks. Of course, there was no outward indication betraying the fact that she also possessed the morals of a back-alley feline. Completely bowled over by her, it was a long time later that Brett learned, the hard way, that Sondra would sleep with anything that wore pants—if the pockets in those pants were heavily lined with gold.

  Sipping at the strong black brew, Brett allowed his mind freedom to wander down the pathway to yesterday, allowed his senses to experience the trauma of the time he’d spent with Sondra.

  Now, from a five-year distance, Brett realized he’d been a prime target for any Sondra who happened along. He’d been more than tired. After six weeks of flying from Atlanta to Dallas to Honolulu to San Diego to Chicago, on orders from Madam President to “pull the outer reaches of the company together,” he’d been bone weary. As he’d also been without female companionship the entire length of those six weeks, he’d been horny as hell.

  Enter the gorgeous redhead!

  * * * *

  With a snort of disdain, Brett jackknifed to his feet and began clearing the table. When the kitchen was again restored to its usual neatness, he walked slowly to his temporary bedroom, extinguishing lights as he went. After a quick visit to the connecting bathroom for a brief ablution, the plying of a toothbrush, and the natural draining off of some of the liquid he’d consumed, Brett stripped to the buff and crawled between luxurious expensive sheets, only then allowing his memory free run once more. This time, their time together replayed in his mind in detail.