Dark Fire

Sure that Flint was too astute to be taken in by her mother’s calculated seductiveness, she watched with astonishment when he gave her mother a slow, tantalising smile and sat down.

Natalie, who adored flirtations and knew just how to conduct one, eyed his hard, unhandsome face with an interest that had something of avidity in it, and proceeded to show how skilled she was in such sport.

Flint responded to her sophisticated coquettishness with a lazy, dangerous charm that had Natalie eating out of his hand in no time. Fuming, Aura had to make coffee and listen to her mother being questioned by an expert. Within five minutes Natalie had artlessly divulged that dear, kind, thoughtful Paul had not only bought a flat for his mother-in-law to be, but had also offered a car.

‘Only to have Aura throw it back in his face,’ Natalie sighed. ‘So middle class and boring and prissy of her! It would make life infinitely less stressful, especially now. As it is, unless friends are generous enough to put themselves out for us, we have to use public transport.’

Her voice registered the kind of horror most people reserved for crawling over oyster shells. Flint’s brows shot up.

Much encouraged by this, Natalie went on, ‘And what difference is there between moving before the wedding and moving after it? I’m not complaining, but it would have made life so much easier for us all if we’d had the new flat, which is four times the size of this dreary little place, to entertain. But no, Aura had some idea that it wasn’t the done thing. As though I’m no judge! Not that it really matters, it just means that I’ll be stuck here until they come home from their honeymoon. I’ve been ill, so I can’t cope with moving by myself.’

Whenever it seemed she might run down, Flint asked another seemingly innocuous question, and away she went again, spilling out things Aura would much rather he didn’t know. Cosseted and adored all her life, Natalie had been valued only for her looks, for her pleasing ways. She naturally gravitated towards men who looked as though they could protect her. Flint filled the bill perfectly.

If you liked that sort of overt, brash male forcefulness. Aura’s fingers trembled as she set the tray. She knew she was being unfair; Flint’s air of competence, of authority, that inbuilt assurance that here was a man who was master of himself and his world, was not assumed. It was as natural a part of him as his smile and the complex hints of danger that crackled around him.

Aura knew better than to display her anger and resentment, but when she appeared with the tray she very firmly took command of the conversation, steering it away from personal things to focus on the man who sat opposite, his lean, clever, formidable face hiding every thought but those he wanted them to see.

Fortunately, Natalie knew that men adored talking about themselves. She demanded the details of his life, so they learned that he was some kind of troubleshooter for his firm, that he travelled a lot overseas, that he had been born in the Wairarapa and still went back as often as he could, and that he was thirty-one, a year younger than Paul.

Which, Aura thought as she sipped her coffee, probably explained Paul’s protective attitude to him at school. He certainly didn’t need protecting now. A more confident, invulnerable man than Flint Jansen it would be hard to imagine. She could see him troubleshooting right across the globe, keen intelligence fortified by disciplined energy and confident control, the hard-edged masculine charisma warning all who came up against him that here was a man who had to be taken very seriously indeed.

He could tell a good story, too. In a very short time he had them both laughing, yet although he seemed perfectly open Aura realised that he was revealing very little of either his work or himself. What they were being treated to was a skilfully edited version of his life, one he’d clearly used before.

A quick, unremarked glance at her watch informed her that he had only been there thirty minutes. It seemed hours. Restlessly, she thought she’d never be able to look around the small, slightly squalid room, rendered even smaller by the furniture that her mother had managed to salvage from the wreck of her life, without remembering Flint in it. Somehow he had managed to stamp the dark fire of his personality on it as Paul never had.

At least he hadn’t paid much attention to her; his whole concentration had been almost entirely on her mother.

Which worried Aura. She knew skilful pumping when she heard it, and thanks to Natalie he now knew that they had no money beyond her pathetic little annuity. Natalie even told him all about Alick’s generosity over the years, thereby reinforcing, Aura thought savagely, his estimation of both Forsythe women as greedy and out for what they could get.

Still, it didn’t really matter. Paul knew she wasn’t like that, and Paul’s opinion was the only one she cared about.

Perhaps he had noticed that surreptitious glance at her watch, for almost immediately he rose. Aura overrode her mother’s protests by telling her crisply that Flint had been flying most of the day and must be exhausted.

‘You don’t look tired,’ Natalie murmured. ‘You look—very vigorous.’

Aura stirred uneasily. She was accustomed to her mother’s innuendoes, but her coyness grated unbearably.

Flint’s smile hid a taunt as he responded, ‘Aura’s right, I need some sleep.’

‘Ah, well, we’ll see you tomorrow,’ Natalie said sweetly, looking up at him from beneath her lashes. She held out her hand. It was engulfed by his, but instead of shaking it he kissed her pampered fingers with an air.

Natalie laughed and bridled and, amazingly, blushed.

Austerely, Aura said, ‘Goodnight.’ She did not hold out her hand.

His smile was measured, more than a little cold-blooded. ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ he said, and somehow the words, spoken softly in that sensuously roughened voice, sent shivers down her spine.

When at last he was gone, and Aura was able to breathe again, she said drily, ‘Well, there’s no need for him to ask any more questions. You’ve told him all he ever needs to know about us.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Aura, try not to be too drearily bourgeois.’ Into the weary flatness of her mother’s tone there crept a note that could have been spite as she added, ‘You’re not the tiniest bit jealous because he wasn’t interested in you, are you?’

For some obscure reason that hurt. Aura’s lips parted on a swift retort, then closed firmly before the hot words had a chance to burst out. Over the years she had learned how to deal with her mother, and an angry response was the worst way. The nasty incident on One Tree Hill must have shaken her usual restraint.

Smiling wryly she said, ‘No, not in the least. You can have the dishy Flint; your friends might laugh at the difference in ages, but they’ll probably envy you. However, I wouldn’t bore him with any more details of our personal affairs, or you’ll see him rush off to more exciting conversation.’

From her mother’s expression she saw that her shaft had struck home. If Flint Jansen pumped her mother again he’d probably get what he wanted easily enough—he was that sort of man—but with any luck, from now on Natalie wouldn’t spill out unasked-for details.

It had been a strange day. As Aura curled up in her cramped room and closed her eyes against the glare of the streetlight that managed to find her face every night through the gap between the blind and the window-frame, she tried to woo sleep with an incantation that never failed.

In two weeks’ time she would be married to Paul, darling, gentle, kind, understanding Paul, and she would be able to relax and live the serene, happy life she had always longed for.

Of course there would be troubles, but they’d be able to overcome them together. Her mother, for one. Natalie would always demand the constant attention she considered her due. But when they were married, Aura’s first loyalty would be to Paul. Dearest Paul. She intended to make him so happy, as happy as he would make her.

Two weeks. A fortnight. Only fourteen more days.

Firmly banishing Flint Jansen’s fiercely chiselled face from her mind, she turned her head and drifted off to sleep.

She woke the next morning slightly headachey and as edgy as a cat whose fur had been stroked the wrong way. The clear sky of the night before had been transmuted into a dank, overhanging pall of heavy cloud; rain hushed persistently against the window panes.

Listening to the early traffic swish by on the road outside, she wondered why she felt as though she had spent all night in a smoky room. It couldn’t be the weather. It had rained for most of the autumn, so she was quite reconciled to a wet wedding day.

And everything was under control. Mentally she went through the list. The caterer knew to ignore any instructions her mother gave; her wedding-dress was made in the simple, flowing lines that suited both her figure and the informal occasion, not the elaborate and unsuitable costume Natalie had suggested. And the florist had no illusions about the sort of flowers she wanted.

A wedding, even one as small as theirs, was like a juggernaut, caught up in its own momentum, rolling serenely on towards an inevitable conclusion. The simile made her smile, and stretch languidly. This wedding was going to be perfect, from the hymns to the best man—

Flint Jansen.

Like the outburst of a nova the memory of the previous evening lit up her mind, and with a shame that sickened her she recalled the dream that had woken her halfway through the night. Explicit, sensual, only too vivid, they had lain tangled together in a bed swathed with white netting. Through the wide windows came the soft sounds of the sea. Scents that hinted at the tropics floated on the heated, drowsy air.

She tried to convince herself that the other man in that wide bed had been Paul, but it was Flint’s bronzed, harsh-featured face that had been above hers, Flint’s hard mouth that had kissed her with such passion and such bold eroticism, Flint who had touched her in ways Paul never had.

‘Oh, God,’ she whispered, burying her face into her hot pillow.

Somehow Flint Jansen had slid right through her defences and taken over that most unmanageable part of her mind, the hidden area that manufactured dreams and symbols, the secret source of the imagination. Such a betrayal had never happened to her before.

Perhaps that vengeful little daydream on the way home from One Tree Hill had given her inner self permission to fantasise? Had the strength of her anger carried over into her unconscious and been transmuted for some reason into the passion she hadn’t yet known?

In the end, after mulling over the whole wretched business for far too long, she was forced to accept that for some reason she was physically attracted to Flint.

Of course it had nothing to do with love, it was a mere matter of chemicals. Aura might be relatively unsophisticated, but she knew that such an explosion of the senses usually died as quickly as it flamed into being. She had seen what happened to those of her friends who believed it to be love. They had found that within a horrifyingly short time, when desire was sated, they were left with nothing but the dross of a failed affair.

Jessica Stratton, her best friend and bridesmaid, had tripped into such a pit only a year ago. Recalling the subsequent disillusionment, Aura sat up, shivering in the cold dampness of her room, and reached for her dressing-gown.

‘I don’t even like him,’ Jessica had wailed. ‘I thought it was the greatest romance since Romeo and Juliet, I thought he was wonderful, and then I woke up beside him one morning and saw a boorish, sports-mad yob with hairy toes and a bad case of egotism. He wasn’t even a good lover; he did it by numbers! What on earth did I see in him?’

‘Chemistry,’ Aura had told her pertly, secretly rather proud that she had never fallen prey to it.

Clearly pride went before a fall. Because when she looked at Flint Jansen funny things happened to her legs and her spine, and her insides melted into a strangeness that was shot through with exhilaration and eagerness.

Paul’s touch was warmth, and love, and happiness. What she felt when Flint looked at her was a heated sexual excitement, the basic lust of a woman for the most potent man around.

Her soft, full mouth firmed in distaste as she shrugged into her robe and tied it. Appetite, that was all it was, a primeval pull at the senses, a straight biological urge that had nothing to do with love or trust. She-animals felt its force, and mated with the strongest male because of it.

In spite of his striking, unhandsome face and unyielding expression, Flint was a very sexy man, edged with an aura of danger that some women found smoulderingly sensual. However, she was immune to what he offered.

Uncomfortable and disturbing although her reaction to Flint was, she could deal with it. All she had to do was remember that it would pass. She would not exchange the pure gold of her feeling for Paul, the affection and companionship, the fact that she respected and admired and loved him, for all the enticing tinsel and gloss of sexual desire, however it blazed in the moonlight.

Braced by common sense, Aura showered and cleaned her teeth in the tiny, dingy bathroom, then made coffee and took her mother the glass of mineral water and slice of lemon that was her first meal of the day. When that was done she sat down to her toast in the dining end of the sitting-room.

Almost immediately the telephone rang. ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ Paul said. ‘Everything all right for tonight?’

‘So far, so good.’ Aura smiled at the gloomy day outside. ‘I’ve no doubt there’ll be more crises today, but at the moment I’m on top of everything.’

She could hear his smile. ‘Good. How did you get on with Flint last night?’

So unnerved was Aura by her dreams that she immediately wondered whether somehow he knew…

No, of course he couldn’t!

‘Fine,’ she said automatically. ‘It was rather touching, really. He took me to the top of One Tree Hill and tried to satisfy himself that I have your best interests at heart.’

There was a moment of silence before Paul said in an amused voice, ‘Did he, indeed? And do you think you convinced him? Or did you tell him to mind his own business?’

Aura laughed softly. ‘You know me too well. To be honest, I don’t really care what he thinks. If I convince you, that’s all I worry about. And I’ve got a long time to do that; at least sixty years.’

With immense tenderness he said, ‘Darling, I love you.’

‘I love you, too.’

‘Not as much as you’re going to,’ he said quietly, almost as though he was making a vow. Before she could answer he said, ‘Enough of this! I can’t spend all morning dallying with you, I’ve got work to do. It’s this afternoon you’re going to do the flowers, isn’t it, so you’ll be here when the caterers come at three?’

‘Yes. It shouldn’t take me more than an hour to arrange the flowers, and all I’ve got to do for the caterers is show them where things are in the kitchen. I’ll have plenty of time to come home and get changed before you pick me up.’

‘Good. Although it would take a lot less time if you’d just get off your high horse and accept a car. All right, we’ve been through it all, but you must be the most stubborn, exasperating woman I’ve ever met. I have to go, darling, I can hear Flint surfacing, and if I’m not to be late I have to leave within three minutes.’

Aura hung up, wondering whether Flint would be in the flat that afternoon.

Of course not, she scoffed as she finished her toast and drank a cup of coffee. He had this important, slightly sinister-sounding job; he’d be at work giving the women there a thrill.

After the final fitting of the wedding-dress, she had lunch with an old friend of her grandmother’s before catching the bus to Paul’s apartment, walking the last hundred metres through the downpour that had been threatening all day. Her umbrella saved her head and shoulders, but she grimaced at the cold wetness of the rain on her legs and shoes. Much of this, and she’d have to think of getting a coat.

No, she thought as the last of the autumn leaves fluttered like dank brown parachutes to land in a soggy layer on the footpath, after they were married she’d have a car and life would be more convenient. But she still didn’t regret not having accepted Paul’s offer.

At least Flint couldn’t accuse her of unseemly greed.

Even the perfect, radiant flowers of the camellias were turning brown under the rain’s relentless attack, while pink and white and yellow daisies were being beaten into the dirt. In one garden dahlia plants in a wide bed were still green and leafy at the base; only the stalks that had held the brilliant flowers towards the sun were blackened and stiff.

Aura was overcome by a sudden, stringent melancholy, a weariness of the spirit that gripped her heart. It was the weather, she thought, shaking off her umbrella before she tapped out the code that opened the street door of the apartment complex. June was often fine, but this year it had decided to go straight into winter.

In two weeks’ time she’d be married to the nicest man she had ever met, and they would be flying to a luxurious little island of the coast of Fiji for their honeymoon, where she would have nothing to do but soak up the heat and the soft tropical ambience, and learn how to please Paul.

As though summoned by an evil angel, Flint’s voice echoed mockingly through her mind. ‘It’s about lying in a bed with him, making love, giving yourself to him, accepting his body, his sexuality with complete trust and enthusiasm…’

The door opened to her suddenly unsteady hand. She walked quickly across the foyer, nodding to the porter, her heels tapping coldly on the smooth, shiny marble. In the lift she pressed the button for the third floor.

Oh, she was a fool, letting him get to her like that. Of course she wanted to make love with Paul; she enjoyed his kisses, his caresses, they made her feel warm and loved and secure. That was why she had broken the other two engagements. Although she had liked both men very much, she had been unable to let them touch her beyond the mildest of caresses.

Paul was different. He had understood her wariness, the tentative fear she had never really overcome, and he hadn’t tried to rush her into a sexual relationship before they were married.

Of course Flint didn’t have the faintest idea that she was still a virgin! Forcing her mind away from his relentless tone as he accused her of being no better than a whore, she opened the door into Paul’s apartment.

The flowers had already arrived. Great sheaves of roses and carnations and Peruvian lilies stood in buckets in the kitchen, with sprays of little Singapore orchids and exquisitely bold cymbidiums, all in shades of pink and bronze and creamy-green. After hanging up her coat, Aura tried to banish her odd weariness by walking slowly around the big rooms of the flat, working out where to put vases.

An hour later she was arranging the roses in a huge vase on the hall table when, against the sounds of Kiri Te Kanawa’s magnificent voice singing Gershwin, she heard the front door open. A quick glance over her shoulder revealed the lean form of Flint Jansen strolling in through the door, completely at home, a perfectly detestable smile not softening his arrogant face.

Aura’s eyes evaded his and flew to the cheek she had slapped. Little sign of the blow remained, except for a slight reddening of the skin about the thin scar. Remorse and self-disgust roiled unpleasantly inside her.

‘Hello,’ she said, nervously banishing the fragmented images of last night’s dream that threatened to surge up from wherever she had marooned them.

The smile widened as he conducted a leisurely survey. Aura had slid her wet shoes off and was standing barefoot in a narrow tan skirt topped by a jersey the exact gold at the heart of the big cream chrysanthemums; her bronze and dark brown scarf was twisted a little sideways. Beneath Flint’s narrowed scrutiny she felt like an urchin.

‘The spirit of autumm,’ he said blandly, closing the door behind him and advancing into the hall. ‘Don’t let me interrupt you.’

‘I won’t.’ It was a short answer and far too revealing, but she felt as though someone had tilted the stable world on which she stood. An odd breathlessness made it difficult for her to speak. Turning back to the flowers, she pushed a splendid bronze-pink candelabrum of cymbidiums home.

‘I’m sorry I slapped you last night,’ she said abruptly.

Silence stretched tautly between them. She kept her eyes on the flowers in the vase.

‘Are you? I didn’t leave you with much option.’ There was no measurable emotion in his tone, nothing to tell her what he was thinking.

Her shoulders moved. ‘Nevertheless,’ she said gruffly, thrusting another large sprig of black matipo into the back of the arrangement, ‘I don’t normally go around hitting people.’

‘Your apology is accepted.’ Clearly he didn’t care a bit.

From the corner of her eye she watched him pick up one of the long-stemmed rosebuds. Hastily Aura averted her gaze, strangely affected by the sight of the fragile flower held so carefully in his lean strong hand as he raised it to his face.

‘It has no scent,’ he said on a detached note.

‘No. Most flowers cultivated for the markets have lost their scent. Even the carnations have very little.’ She was babbling, so she drew in a deep breath. Much more of his presence, she thought with slight hysteria, and she’d end up hyperventilating.

‘A pity. I’d rather have scent and fewer inches in the stem.’

‘Not all roses have scent.’

‘I prefer the ones that do.’

She nodded. ‘So do I.’

He held out the stem. Carefully avoiding his fingers, she took it.

‘Will they open?’ he asked.

She shrugged, and put the rose into the vase. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes they do, sometimes they die like that.’

‘Poor things. No scent, no blossoming, no seeding. Hardly flowers at all. I wonder what gave anyone the idea that these were preferable to the real thing.’ He walked into the sitting-room, saying off-handedly, ‘I’ll get you a drink.’

‘No, thanks, I don’t need one.’

But when he reappeared it was with a wine glass in one hand, and a glass of whisky well qualified with water in the other.

‘You might not,’ he said, ‘but I do, and as I never drink alone, you can accompany me. You look as though you could do with something. It’s only white wine, dry, with a hint of floral bouquet and a disconcerting note of passion. Heavy day?’

‘Not really,’ she said, reluctantly accepting the glass. He had made the description of the wine too intimate, too personal, his abrasive voice lingering over the words as though he was applying them to her, not the wine.

‘What shall we drink to?’ he asked, not trying to hide the note of mockery in his voice.

Eyes the colour and clarity of a topaz searched her face; he seemed to be trying to probe through the skin to the thoughts in her brain, the emotions in her heart.

Determined not to let him see how uncomfortable she was, she said lightly, ‘The future is always a good toast. It covers a lot of ground.’

‘So it does. Well, Aura Forsythe, here’s to the future. May it be all that you need.’

Made gauche by the unexpected wording, she said, ‘And yours, too,’ and swallowed some of the wine before setting the glass down.

‘Do you intend leaving yours to fate?’ he asked with apparent disinterest, tilting his glass so that the light refracted in the liquid like a thousand glinting cyrstals, exactly the same shade as his eyes.

‘What else can I do?’ Picking up a marbled swordleaf of flax, she positioned it carefully, as carefully as she kept her face turned away.

He laughed softly. ‘Oh, I believe in making my own future. Somehow I thought you would too.’

‘I don’t believe one can,’ she said, stung by the inference that she was a manipulator.