Consumed by Fire (The Fire Series)

by Anne Stuart

  “That’s not fair!” she said, outraged.

  He shrugged. “Take it or leave it.”

  The cheating bastard. “I’ll take it,” she said, reaching for his beer bottle without thinking, planning to grab the beer back. Reaching between his legs.

  He moved his hand so quickly, she had no time to pull back, and held her hand against the bottle nestled in his crotch, against his zipper, against a part of him that was indisputably hard.

  She yanked her hand back as if it were burned, moving to unfasten her seat belt, ready to stomp back into the cabin, or as close to stomping as she could manage with her bruised leg, when his words stopped her.

  “You still have three questions. You aren’t going to have this chance again, so you’d better take advantage of it while I’m still in such a cooperative mood.”

  She stayed put. She had little doubt he could drink any number of beers and be unimpaired, but the same couldn’t be said for her. One beer was her limit—pathetic, but there it was—and hers was already half gone, relaxing her when she didn’t want to be relaxed.

  “All right. But I don’t want you answering until I tell you it’s one of my questions. I need to think about this.”

  “Take your time,” he said affably. “We’ve got miles of highway between us and our next destination, and your company is, as always, delightful.”

  She didn’t give in to temptation and call him a nasty name, mainly because she believed, in a strange sort of way, he actually meant it. Or maybe she was just telling herself that, but she didn’t care.

  “I want to know who and what you are.”

  “That’s two . . .”

  “I told you, no answers until I tell you what my actual question is. I want to know who James Bishop is. Who do you work for, and what in God’s name your job is that you’d know how to kill people? Are you CIA, FBI?” She realized her first guesses would immediately make him one of the good guys, and she quickly added, “Or are you a criminal, which seems more than likely. Don’t answer!”

  He took another drink of beer, then draped his strong, beautiful hands comfortably on the steering wheel as they headed into the infinite flatness of the empty countryside. His eyes seemed to be on the road but she knew he was somehow managing to watch her. Maybe he had fabulous peripheral vision or hidden mirrors; somehow he was acutely aware of her every expression. Which meant she had to be more circumspect, or he’d catch her looking at him like a love-starved kitten . . .

  Where the hell had that idea come from? Too much beer—probably because she’d had so little to eat in the last few days. There was no place to set the bottle, but she needed to be careful, not let maudlin emotions interfere.

  “Tell me who you work for,” she said abruptly. “That’s a real question. If you feel like throwing in your real name free of charge that would be nice, but it’s not an official question.”

  He waited so long that for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. She’d almost given up hope when he spoke, reluctantly. “I work for an organization called the Committee. They’re based out of London, but they’re planning on setting up an American office and one in the Far East. And my real name happens to be James Alexander Bishop. I don’t use it very often, but I happened to use it when I met you. And yes, I’ll give you that one for free, since I’ve already told you that one many times. You just chose not to believe me. That’s three.”

  She thought for a long time. She needed to shape the questions in just the right way as to elicit the most information—Bishop would give her as little as he could get away with. Bishop. James Bishop. She believed him—in her own mind no other name fit him.

  “What exactly do you do for this Committee?” The “exactly” ought to force him to tell her enough to get a sense of whether he was a good guy or a bad guy.

  “You don’t want to know,” he said grimly.

  She wasn’t letting him get away with that. “I asked, didn’t I? Question number four. What do you do for the Committee?”

  “Kill people.” His voice was hard, but she was prepared. He wanted to shock her, frighten her, and even if he did, just a little, she wasn’t going to let him see it.

  “That’s not a complete answer,” she said. “If all you did was kill people, then I would have been dead five years ago, and you wouldn’t be wandering around Texas in a Winnebago.”

  “How do you know I’m not headed toward a target?”

  “You may be, but it’s an awfully elaborate cover. What else do you do, and this is still question four.”

  “I keep the world safe for democracy,” he said mockingly.

  “England isn’t a democracy, it’s a constitutional monarchy.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. The monarchy has absolutely no power—it’s a social position and nothing more. It’s a democracy.”

  “Well, tell me what you do to preserve democracy, then. Still question four,” she reminded him, not trusting him for a moment.

  He rolled his eyes, but she wasn’t going to be intimidated. He started this—she’d play it to the end.

  “I do anything they ask of me. I go undercover and pretend to be any number of things. Mostly I watch people, which can get fucking boring after a while. Bad guys aren’t that interesting—you’d think they would be, but they aren’t. Sometimes I kidnap troublesome young women and have sex with them in a Winnebago.”

  He was trying to intimidate her, but he’d given her one very useful piece of information. “Or a hotel in Venice,” she countered smoothly.

  He glanced over at her deliberately, heat in his eyes, darkening them. “I’m not sure which I prefer.”

  To be truthful, neither was she, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. She’d be an idiot not to prefer the suite at the Danieli, but right now her body still remembered the fast, hard passion of the night before, and it still tingled with need.

  But he’d said bad guy. Which meant, whether he would admit it or not, that he considered himself one of the good guys. Whatever this Committee was, they thought they were on the side of the angels.

  But didn’t most villains think they were the heroes? People had a tendency to justify their worst behavior. Everyone was a hero in his own life, the star of his own movie.

  So this so-called Committee thought they were good guys; and if they had an ingenuous mission statement like “Making the world safe for democracy,” it meant they were an antiterrorist group, even if they sometimes behaved like them. She only had one question left, and she didn’t want to waste it; while there were so many things she wanted to know, it really boiled down to one thing.

  “Why me?”

  He drained his beer, then reached over and took the bottle between her legs, the one she’d been ignoring. Maybe it was accidental that it pressed against her sensitive parts for a moment, another stimulation.

  Who was she kidding? Nothing he did was accidental—he was the most deliberate man she had ever met.

  “You want to clarify that? Considering it’s your last question, you ought to make sure you get what you want.”

  Why did that sound sexual? Then again, to her battered mind almost everything he said sounded sexual. She took a deep breath. “Here’s what I know so far. I accidentally witnessed a murder you committed, one I didn’t realize I’d seen. Instead of automatically killing me, you took me back to the hotel and . . .”

  “Fucked the shit out of you,” he supplied affably.

  “Stop it!” she said before she could stop herself.

  “You want me to be more romantic about it? I took you back to the hotel and seduced you, made love to you until you were so infatuated you couldn’t see straight? Is that more accurate?”

  She gritted her teeth. “You fucked the shit out of me,” she said. “Why?”

  “Obvious answer, babe. You were hot.”

  “Don’
t be ridiculous. The woman you were with was gorgeous, and there were any number of other, much prettier, women who would have happily fallen at your feet. The reason you took me to bed had something to do with the murder.”

  “Claudia isn’t exactly my type,” he said obliquely. “The reason I took you . . . not to bed, but in the shower, in case you’ve forgotten . . . was to find out exactly what you’d seen. I kept you away from newspapers reporting Corsini’s death, I distracted you from the sound of the police sirens, and I fucked you until you were incapable of telling me anything but the truth. If you’d seen anything, suspected anything, you’d have hardly let me go down on you with such enthusiasm.”

  She sat there like stone, determined not to react. His deliberately coarse words were like blows, hammering away at something she’d still been fool enough to treasure, like someone taking a sledgehammer to a classic marble statue. She hadn’t realized she still kept even an ounce of emotion about that entire time once he’d betrayed her, and that was another wound. She wasn’t the strong, iron lady she’d envisioned herself to be.

  She wasn’t going to let him know. She could keep that much to herself. And she had to keep him talking. He could shut down at any time—he’d answered more than five questions and he was hardly the soul of cooperation.

  “All right, so we’ve established we had a night of sex. That was never under debate. You knew I’d seen nothing. Why didn’t you just dump me the next day? Why worry about me?”

  “Because Corsini’s death was splashed all over the papers, and you’d seen both of us up there at the hillside chapel and could identify us. I needed to distract you until the big rush of publicity had gone by and Corsini was no longer front-page news. Your Italian wasn’t that good, and you’d have no reason to pick up a local newspaper and try to read it. The Corsini family is a big deal in Italy, but the family is not well-known out of the country. Corsini’s death barely made a paragraph in the English newspapers.”

  “Okay, I can understand that. I can even understand the Danieli—anyone who could go to the best hotel in Venice on an expense account shouldn’t hesitate. But why bother with that sham marriage?”

  He hesitated, and she was afraid he was going to stop talking. His eyes were straight ahead on the wide, endless highway in front of them, and he didn’t even glance at her. “I had my reasons.”

  “And they were . . . ?”

  “A question I’m not about to answer.”

  She wasn’t ready to give up. “Okay, then tell me this. Why didn’t you just kill me in the first place? It would have been tidier, and I don’t get the sense that your organization is worried about collateral damage.”

  “You know shit about my organization. I don’t happen to like ‘collateral damage,’ as you put it so professionally. I didn’t want to kill you. Not if I didn’t have to.”

  As a declaration of love, it left a lot to be desired, but it still thawed some of the cold that had filled her as he deliberately broke down their relationship in the crudest possible terms.

  “Why not?” Her voice was softer than she wanted.

  He shot her a glance, and then that slow, lazy grin resurfaced, telling her that honesty was over. “I’m afraid that’s all you’re going to get out of me right now, Angel. Unless you want me to remind you of everything we did in the shower, and then in your bed, in exact detail. Or what we did in the Danieli, or in that bathtub, or even . . .”

  “Why do you remember?”

  That wiped the smile off his face, she thought smugly, so she pushed it. “Why would you remember a few days from five years ago in such painstaking detail? You obviously were very experienced, knowing just how to turn me from an intelligent woman into a lovesick idiot, so it couldn’t have been that unusual a way to spend a few days. You must have had tons of mindless sex before and since then. Why do you remember the time with me? Why the fuck am I here? How did I happen to get mixed up with you all over again when you should have been out of my life for good?”

  She hadn’t noticed they were nearing an exit, but all of a sudden he jerked the wheel and they headed off the highway with a squealing of tires. “That’s a discussion for another time,” he said amiably as he pulled up at a truck stop, one that didn’t look all that different from the first one. “Time to feed you.”

  Refusing to go with him until he gave her answers would be a total waste of time, and she was starving. The cooking facilities in the Winnebago were limited, and she had a craving for pancakes, comfort food at its finest, slathered in butter and nothing else. No fake sweet syrups to ruin the taste—if she couldn’t have Vermont maple syrup, then butter was an admirable substitute. And she’d eat meats full of nitrates and not give a damn. She’d work on him once she was finished.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dealing with Evangeline was really quite simple, Bishop thought as he headed down the highway, a mammoth cup of strong, bitter coffee between his legs. All he had to do was feed her—preferably carbs—and fuck her, and she wore herself out. She’d slept for hours in the back of the camper after threatening him that she wanted more answers or else, and he had watched her in one of the rearview mirrors, curled up on the smaller bunk, sleeping like a baby. He would have given ten years off his life to park this sleekly reconfigured bucket of bolts and climb into bed with her, but the landscape was so spare and unforgiving that he hadn’t seen much more than a short bush in a hundred miles. There was no way they would get any privacy, and besides, he was going to keep it in his pants, wasn’t he?

  Having sex with her last night had ended up being a very smart thing to do, even if his brain hadn’t been working at the time. It had unsettled and confused her, left part of her both aroused and compliant, even though she was fighting that effect, and she’d go out of her way not to let him get close enough to pull her into bed again. As long as she kept her distance, he’d be able to concentrate on business, and they just might make it through the next few days safely. By late tomorrow they’d be in New Orleans, she’d be safe in someone else’s hands, and he and Ryder could do what they had to do without any distractions.

  He was going to need to answer some of her questions. She had to understand why she was in danger, or she wouldn’t be able to keep herself safe. Even with the divorce and approaching execution of His Eminence, her safety wasn’t guaranteed—he had too damned many enemies. It had never bothered him one way or another, but when it came to endangering Evangeline, it was another matter entirely. It would be better if he stopped keeping tabs on her—better for her, a hell of a lot better for him. He would have had no trouble forgetting all about her if he hadn’t felt it necessary to keep an eye on her.

  He let out a low, mirthless laugh. Yeah, sure. If only it were that simple. For some ridiculous reason Evangeline Morrissey had gotten under his skin, in his blood like some fucking plague, and he couldn’t get rid of her. Even when he went months without checking on her, he couldn’t keep from thinking about her.

  There must be some kind of unfinished business between them, but he didn’t know what it was. Not that he’d been thinking last night, but he’d kind of hoped that taking her to bed again would get her out of his system. That hadn’t happened. And if he didn’t get his shit together, they were all going to be in trouble.

  He glanced back at her again. Her hair had come loose, that familiar cloud of coppery brown, and he wanted to bury his face in it. She smelled so damned good, so familiar. She smelled like coming home.

  He needed to remember he had no home, and never would. It had been his choice, a logical one. Most of his family were long dead, he had no siblings, and because his father had been in the military, they’d moved so much that there was no place on earth he had any ties to. He was the perfect Committee operative—a lone wolf with no connections, nothing to hold him back or make him think twice. He was a weapon, albeit a very advanced, skilled weapon, and setting up the New Orleans office
would be a piece of cake. Just as long as he got Evangeline safely stowed and out of his life forever. That was all he asked of a fate that had never treated him too kindly. He needed her gone.

  He kept driving down the flat, endless roads, and it was almost a relief when he started having to deal with traffic. It meant he was nearing the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and the abandoned farmhouse that the Committee had used a few years ago. No one knew about it except the few operatives under Peter Madsen, and most of them would have forgotten it. It would be a place to unwind, to hide out, and there were half a dozen bedrooms in the place, which meant he could keep his distance from Evangeline.

  All he had to do was piss her off enough that she wouldn’t let him anywhere near him; then he could spend the night doing what he had to do—checking in with Ryder and Madsen, making sure his journey to the old house in the Garden District was still an option. He could hardly do that if he was rolling in the sheets with . . .

  Shit. He had to stop thinking like that. She hadn’t slept long, and during the last few hours he’d been intensely aware of her every move, the sound of her footsteps, followed by the soft click of Merlin’s paws. She needed to make sure his nails were cut—short enough not to make noise, long enough to give him some purchase. With an attack dog it was a fine line, though he wasn’t sure if Merlin could be called an attack dog any longer. She’d turned a canine weapon into a lapdog, and if he didn’t have faith that Merlin would defend her with his life, he’d be annoyed.

  Hell, he was annoyed. He’d put a lot of time and effort into training Merlin, and now that was shot to hell. But then, he’d trained the dog for her, and it only made sense that Merlin would adapt. They’d been comrades together, he and Merlin, but now Merlin wasn’t a soldier; he was a civilian with a highly honed sense of protection.

  And he was going to have to let go of him.

  Evangeline was up and about, rustling through the cabinets, looking for something to eat. “You don’t have to worry about dinner,” he said, probably the first time he’d spoken since their desultory and entirely phony lunchtime conversation. “There’ll be food waiting for us when we stop.”