Hotter Than Wildfire (14 page)

Her hands fell from the keyboard and she opened her eyes and looked at her little audience, expecting polite smiles, maybe a little light applause.

Instead, Sam and Mike were looking stunned. Harry was looking hard, grim. Nicole wiped a tear from her face.

Ellen was alarmed, particularly at what she saw in the men’s expressions. “What?” She looked at Nicole. “It was that bad?”

“God. No, not at all.” Nicole gave a watery smile. It was a good thing Ellen liked her so much, otherwise she’d hate her for looking so great even when she was crying. “It was—it was just so moving, so beautiful. Your voice—I can’t describe it. And that last song. I never really thought of it that way before. It made me think of my father. You’re so talented, Ellen. No wonder Harry listened to you for hours on end.”

Ellen looked at Harry, startled as he suddenly stood up and crossed to her. “Time to go home,” he said, putting his huge hand under her elbow and lifting. She rose, because it was either that or leave her elbow behind.

Before she knew it, they were at the front door. Harry didn’t appear to move fast, but she scrambled to keep up.

“Thanks for dinner!” Ellen managed to call out over her shoulder at three utterly surprised faces. She and Harry stepped over the threshold, the door whooshed shut behind them and they were alone in the hallway.

 
San Diego

  Harry stood in the elevator with Ellen, going down to his apartment, concentrating on the word
down
because his boner was about ready to punch a hole through his pants.

He stared straight ahead, willing Ellen to stare straight ahead, too, because if she looked down, she’d understand exactly what that abrupt exit from Sam’s house really meant.

Harry was sorry for the way he acted. Or he’d be sorry tomorrow, just as soon as some blood returned to his head. Or he fucked her.

Whichever came first.

He didn’t even recognize himself. He knew he could be as rude as he wanted to his two brothers; rudeness bounced right off their broad backs. But he’d behaved abominably to Nicole, who’d arranged a nice relaxing evening for them, never expecting that it would be cut short by a maniac. Nicole deserved better.

And man, Ellen deserved better, too.

He thought his heart would explode listening to her, listening to
Eve
, in the flesh. Singing live, for him, something he’d never even thought of asking from whoever was up there, because it was too absurd to even contemplate.

And yet, there she’d been, in Nicole and Sam’s beautiful library, weaving her spell. Listening to her music in the dark—that had saved his life. Listening to her playing live, not five feet from him—well, that had been magic.

And it turned out that this magical voice was attached to a gorgeous face and a stunning little body that had awakened his long-dormant libido.

Nicole was a beautiful woman, almost outrageously so. She had a head-turning, traffic-stopping kind of beauty. Ellen’s beauty was quieter, more delicate. She didn’t turn heads, or at least not right away. And yet, Harry had barely been able to look at Nicole when Ellen was in the room.

Everything about her fascinated him—her delicate manners, that soft, compelling voice with a smile in it, the clear, porcelain skin and uptilted green eyes. She was a little too thin, making her look incredibly fragile. But that was probably because she’d spent the past year in hiding with murderous thugs after her.

Harry’s fists tightened and he saw Ellen look up at him, startled. That was another thing about her, besides looks and talent. She seemed to have an extra sense, another gear to her.

That was great, because it had probably saved her life, but it had also made her run from Sam and him. And now she was picking up on the violent emotions coursing through him at the thought of Gerald Montez after her.

He was emoting aggression and violence and she picked up on that. It wasn’t directed against
her
. God, no. He’d rather shoot himself in the chest than hurt her in any way. But how could she know that?

Harry forced himself to relax, muscle by muscle. Wrenched the hatred of Gerald Montez out of his head, like ripping out a strong weed with deep roots. There would be a time to savor killing the sick fuck, but that time was not now.

Now was the time for sex, and he had to get the violence out of his system before he even thought of touching Eve. Ellen.

Killing and fucking were related. He didn’t particularly like the thought, but there it was. Soldiers needed sex after a fight—hard, fast, rough sex. Preferably not with a wife or a girlfriend, because what they were getting out of their systems was not nice and not gentle.

Harry rarely trusted himself with a woman after extreme violence because the thought of hurting a woman, even a little, even if she
wanted
rough sex, even if she asked for it—man, no. Just couldn’t do it. He steered clear of the ladies when the adrenaline of violence was still sloshing around his system. He either drank or ran or used his fist.

Unlike Sam and Mike, who were lions hitting the bars where women congregated like gazelles at the watering trough. Well, not Sam, not anymore. Harry didn’t think Sam was even aware of other women now that he was married to Nicole.

Mike…well, Mike was a slut. He’d fuck anything female that held still long enough.

Harry had to eject every ounce of violence from his system right now. He wanted to take Ellen to his bed with a ferocity that scared him. He wanted her bad and he wanted her
now
.

He had to tie her to him with sex. Make her
his
.

Sweat trickled down his back, and it wasn’t the sweat of sexual excitement. No, it was the greasy sweat of imagining this amazing woman with her fingernails pulled out one by one and then her fingers cut off with shears, knuckle by knuckle. Imagining her waterboarded, gang raped…the horror was coming off him in waves.

That wasn’t going to happen. If he had to handcuff her to him, so be it. No one was going to touch her, ever again, unless it was him.

But to be absolutely certain that he could keep her safe, that nothing bad would happen to her, he had to bind her to him. Make sure she obeyed him instantly. No more bolting because he’d slanted a glance at Sam.

So she had to obey him, stay put where he put her, and not take matters into her own hands. A year ago, she’d stepped off earth and had landed on a vicious planet where all the inhabitants were predators. The usual rules didn’t apply. The usual rules got you killed, and you died badly. Harry knew that planet intimately. It was where he had been born—his native land.

The best way to keep her safe, tie her to him, to make her do exactly as he said, when he said it, was sex. Hot, intense sex. And lots of it. So much she couldn’t even begin to imagine being separate from him. So much so that in danger, she’d do what he said instantly, instinctively.

Because back at that hotel, it had been so close. If she’d zigged instead of zagged, if she’d arrived one minute earlier or he’d arrived one minute later, she’d be dead right now instead of messing with his head.

The elevator pinged, the doors opened onto his floor and like a switch being thrown, the sweat of fear turned into the sweat of lust.

Approaching Sea-Tac Airport

  “The pilot’s started his descent,” Montez said, and Piet grunted.

Montez had slept, eaten two gourmet sandwiches chased with an excellent half-bottle of Shiraz, and watched a movie.

Piet had neither eaten nor drunk anything. He hadn’t even used the crapper. He’d spent the entire three and a half hours tapping away at a computer, staring ferociously into the monitor. Out of curiosity, Montez had stopped to look on his way to the bathroom, but all he’d seen had been a grid and some numbers flickering on the screen.

He was sick of the silence, sick of Piet acting as if he didn’t even exist, but he didn’t dare complain. He just hoped Piet hadn’t lost his touch. He had no idea what he’d been doing for the past eight years. Crocheting, for all he knew. Maybe Piet couldn’t track any more, maybe—

“Got it,” he said softly.

Montez shot up. “What? Got what?”

Piet slid the monitor around and Montez stared blankly at the screen. It looked like one of those kid games—connect the dots. There were about ten dots in a cluster and four outlying dots. All the dots were different sizes.

It made no sense to him. He lifted his eyebrows.

“She’s a woman on the run,” Piet said. “She’d keep a basic level of preparedness, and I imagine that would include keeping her hands free. So if she had a cell phone, I imagined she’d have Bluetooth technology. A hands-free headset and mike.”

Montez shrugged. So?

“Bluetooth emits a radio signal, which can be tracked over time. It’s called snarfing. What you’re seeing is tracks of the Bluetooth signal, over time. So these are the places she’s been over the past three months, which presumably is when she acquired the prepaid. The size of the dot indicates the number of times she was at a specific site and the time spent there. The larger the dot, the closer the connection to her.”

Christ. Montez bent forward to look at the dots. Now if only—

As if in response to his silent request, Piet punched a button and the dots were overlaid over a map. A street map, Montez saw. Of Seattle!

All of a sudden he saw it. He was looking at a map of all the places Ellen had been over the past months. She had kept her life simple, in a tight spiral around Larsen Square.

Piet tapped the dots, starting with the largest one. “That’s where she rented a room. That’s a bar that plays jazz two nights a week, called the Blue Moon. She was there almost every night until recently. Probably working, until she started selling so big. That’s a food market, that’s a bookshop, that’s an Internet café.” He tapped a large dot. “And that’s a boardinghouse with three rooms. Two men and one woman. One of the men is a traveling salesman who rents the room because it’s cheap by the month, but he’s only there six or seven nights a month. The other man is a sixty-year-old librarian. And the woman?” He pulled up a photo from the DMV. She was young, pretty, blond. “Name’s Kerry Robinson, but the ID doesn’t really hold up that well, so I think we can assume it’s a fake. And she works at the Blue Moon. I think she’s Ellen’s friend.”

Montez looked at Piet with new eyes. Fuck, the man was good.

“So I guess we’re going straight to the woman.”

“No.” Piet shook his head. “First we resuscitate the agent, make sure he’s found. Then we pay a visit to Kerry Robinson. First her agent, then her friend. We’re going to rattle Ellen Palmer’s cage and smoke her out.”

San Diego

  Ellen stepped into Harry’s apartment warily. There was a completely different vibe here, now. Something had changed up at Sam and Nicole’s place. The air had become somehow supercharged.

Harry placed a huge, warm hand to the small of her back and urged her gently forward, as if she were reluctant to enter. Well, maybe she was.

She was so tense it was a miracle her muscles weren’t twanging. Her heart was pounding, but she couldn’t tell why. Her limbs felt heavy; the air was thick and hot.

Harry moved slightly away from her into the room and she nearly fell forward, as if he had a huge force field around him that generated its own gravity. He was at a sideboard. “Do you want some whiskey?”

Did she? She wanted…something, that was for sure.

“Um, yeah.” Her throat was tight. Her voice was scratchy. She cleared it. “Thanks.”

The gurgle of whiskey was loud in the silence. Harry walked over holding two glasses and pressed one into her hand.

She looked up at him. How could he get more handsome by the hour? How was that possible? In the penumbra he was just magnificent, a golden god looking at her with heat in his golden eyes.

She brought her glass to her mouth and he his, then she hesitated when it was at her lips. They both hesitated. Finally, Harry put his glass down without tasting the whiskey.

“That’s not what I want,” he whispered.

Ellen set hers down too, blindly. “Me either.”

They stepped forward, both of them, and in a second she was in his arms, which was easier for Harry than it was for her.

She wanted—oh so badly—to embrace him, but he was so tall and his shoulders so broad, it was impossible. And then it didn’t matter that she couldn’t fit her arms around him because he was kissing her and she blew up in flames.

He didn’t have any problems, though. One arm was around her waist, one big hand cradling the back of her head, covering it. It was a good thing that hand was there, because her neck muscles went lax.

His mouth was eating her up, tongue stroking hers, and every time their tongues met, heat flashed through her and all the muscles in her lower belly clenched, hard.

Harry lifted his head, slanted his mouth, and it was like another kiss altogether, longer, hotter.

He tasted of the wine they’d had for dinner and the chocolate mousse for dessert and sex.

He slanted his head again, lightly bit her bottom lip, and she moaned.

It was as if she’d flipped a switch. Harry stiffened and tightened his arm around her and she could feel everything, his hard chest muscles, lean belly and huge, erect penis. Heat flashed everywhere in Ellen’s body. She just lit up from the inside, this small nuclear detonation that melted her insides, made her legs weak. It was entirely possible that Harry’s arm around her waist was the only thing holding her up.

So much power and heat, she instinctively wanted more of it, stepping even closer to him, feet between his, the heat becoming a furnace where their loins touched. Her tongue touched his in a silky stroke and she could feel his penis lengthen.

This time it was Harry who moaned. “Bed,” he groaned, when he lifted his mouth from hers for a second and she nodded enthusiastically and pulled his head back down to her.

There was some rusty sound coming from his chest and it took her a second to identify it. Laughter. Grim Harry Bolt was laughing.

She smiled beneath his mouth.

Still kissing her and kissing her and kissing her, Harry bent at the knees and lifted her up in his arms—the stuff movie scenes are made of. But Ellen didn’t know of many men who could do it like Harry. He simply lifted her in his arms as if she were weightless and carried her away with no sense of strain at all. Not even his breathing changed.

No, wait. While moving in the darkness through the seemingly endless rooms, Ellen lifted herself up a little by tightening her arms around his neck and bit his mouth lightly, running her tongue over his lips, and oh, yeah, his breathing changed.

Lifting a full-grown woman in his arms didn’t do it but bumping the sexuality up a level sure did.

It was a good thing his house was mainly empty because Harry wasn’t looking where he was going, he was kissing her with his eyes closed as if to savor every aspect of her mouth.

They reached the bedroom and he gently put her on her feet, holding her shoulders in his big hands.

Ellen slowly opened her eyes, hands curled around his sides. Under her palms, she could feel the hard, lean planes of muscle moving as he breathed.