Dark Fire. Robyn Donald

Aura said lightly, ‘and if you think I’ve been brought up the old-fashioned way, wait till you meet Natalie. She’s straight out of the ark.’ She primmed her mouth. ‘She had a very sheltered upbringing. Her father believed that women were constitutionally incapable of understanding matters more complicated than the set of a sleeve, so he didn’t bother to have her taught anything beyond womanly accomplishments like playing the piano and running a dinner party with flair and poise. Consequently she’s as sweetly unconcerned about practicalities as a babe in arms.’

      ‘It sounds a considerable responsibility,’ Flint agreed in his slightly grating voice. ‘Will she be living with you after you—after the wedding?’

      At the look of sheer horror that spread over Paul’s face, Aura bubbled into laughter. ‘No,’ she said demurely.

      Recovering his equanimity, Paul told him, ‘She’ll be living quite close to us, so we’ll be able to keep an eye on her.’

      ‘I see.’ Flint sounded remote and more than a little bored.

      Aura asked, ‘What are you doing in Indonesia, Mr Jansen?’

      ‘Flint,’ he said, smiling with an assured, disturbing magnetism that made every other man in the big, luxurious room fade into the wallpaper. ‘I was tidying up a mess.’

      ‘Oh?’

      ‘Don’t ask,’ Paul advised kindly, directing a purely masculine look at the man opposite. ‘He won’t tell you anyway. Flint’s work is highly confidential.’

      Thoroughly irritated by the unspoken male conspiracy, Aura fluttered her lashes and cooed, ‘How fascinating. Is it dangerous, too?’

      ‘Sometimes,’ Flint said, the intriguing, gravelly texture in his voice intensifying. ‘Does danger excite you, Aura?’

      From beneath half-closed eyelids he was watching the way the light shimmered across her hair. Uneasily she shook her head; an unknown sensation stirred in the pit of her stomach. Perhaps, instead of letting her hair float around her shoudlers in a gleaming burgundy cloud, she should have confined it into a formal pleat.

      ‘No, far from it,’ she said, trying to make her tone easy and inconsequential. ‘I’m a complete coward.’

      ‘Aura,’ Paul said, touching her hand for a second, ‘is not into risk.’

      As she turned her head to give him a quick, tender smile, she caught in the corner of her eye the ironic movement of Flint’s lips.

      ‘Yet you’re getting married,’ he said speculatively. ‘I’ve always thought that to be the greatest risk in the world, giving another person such power in your life. Unless, of course, the other person is too besotted to be any threat.’

      ‘Ah, you’ve guessed my secret,’ Paul retorted, his blue eyes warmly caressing as they rested on Aura’s face.

      Without reason, Aura was hit by a wave of profound disquiet. Her gaze clung a moment to Paul’s, then slid sideways as the wine waiter appeared.

      When the small business of handing the drinks out was over, Paul began talking of a political scandal that had erupted a couple of weeks before. Hiding an absurd relief, Aura listened to the deep male voices, sipping her wine a little faster than usual because something was keeping her on edge.

      No, not something; someone, and he was sitting next to her. If she lowered her eyes she could see Flint’s long fingers on the round tabletop, his bronze skin a shocking contrast to the white, starched damask cloth. He had a beautiful hand, lean and masculine and strong.

      He had to spend a lot of time in hot sunlight to acquire a tan like that, she thought vaguely. Of course, he had just returned from the tropics, but, even so, he was far darker skinned than either her or Paul. It was one of the reasons those glittering golden eyes were so spectacular, set as they were in black lashes beneath straight black brows.

      The hum of conversation receded, became overlaid by the sudden throbbing of her heart in her eardrums. From beneath her lashes Aura’s gaze followed his hand as he lifted his wine glass and sipped some of the pale straw-coloured liquid. When he’d greeted her the rough hardness of calluses against her softer palm had made her catch her breath, and set up a strange, hot melting at the base of her spine. It had receded somewhat, but now it was starting all over again.

      She didn’t know what was happening to her, although instinct warned her it was dangerous. With a determined attempt to ignore it, she joined in the conversation.

      To share a meal with someone who disapproved profoundly of her was nothing new; hatred she could deal with.

      But Flint Jansen despised her. He had taken one look at her, and for a frightening second contempt had flickered like cold flames in the depths of his eyes. The moment her eyes had focused on that harshly commanding face, an intuition as old as her first female ancestor had warned her that he was no friend of hers, that he never would be. For some reason they were fated to be enemies.

      And Paul hadn’t noticed.

      She looked up at him, half listening as he expounded some interesting point of law to the other man. Apart from her cousin Alick, Paul was the most intelligent man she had ever known, yet he thought they were getting along well.

      Flint’s textured voice dragged her glance sideways. He was smiling, and even as she tried to jerk her eyes free his gaze snared hers.

      For the length of a heartbeat green eyes and gold clashed. His mouth curved in the smiling snarl of a tiger playing with something small and not worthy of it.

      A question from Paul shattered the tension, his beloved tones both an intrusion and a shield. As Flint answered, Aura breathed deeply.

      Stop it, her brain screamed. But she had no idea what it was. Her reaction was totally new to her; it seemed that a new person had moved in to inhabit her body, a bewildering renegade, a woman she didn’t know.

      She had to calm down, reimpose some sort of control over her wayward responses.

      Something Paul said brought a smile to Flint’s face, revealing strong white teeth that did more uncomfortable things to the pit of Aura’s stomach. Snatching at her slipping self-possession, she concentrated fiercely on the words, not the man; on the occasion, not her reactions.

      He had excellent manners. He was entertaining in a dry, wittily cynical fashion. When Aura spoke he listened attentively with nothing more obvious than lazy appreciation in his hooded eyes, yet she felt the track of his eyes like little whips across the clear ivory of her skin. And she sensed his contempt.

      Oh, he was clever, he hid it well; he was a man whose feelings were caged by a ferocious will. But Aura had spent too many years noting hidden, subliminal signals to be fooled. This was not the casual disdain of a man faced by a woman out to feather her nest. Flint Jansen’s anger burned with a white-hot intensity that made him more than dangerous. And all that savage emotion was directed at her.

      It bewildered her and upset her, but the most astonishing thing was that in some obscure way it was exciting. She looked across the table to the shadowed, clever face slashed by the scar, a countenance almost primitive in its force and power, and a feral shudder ran down her spine, set off warning signals all through her, flashpoints of heat and light leaping from cell to cell.

      Shaken, at the mercy of forbidden and equivocal sensations, she managed to disguise her response with a sparkling glow of laughter and bright conversation, while Paul watched her with pride and the tiniest hint of possessive smugness. Amazingly, the secret, seething undercurrent of ambiguous emotions appeared to swirl around him without touching him.

      She didn’t begrudge him his pride; all men, she knew, wanted to stand well in the eyes of their fellows. It was at once one of their strengths, and rather endearingly childish.

      ‘Paul tells me we’re having a party tomorrow night,’ Flint said coolly while they waited for dessert.

      Natalie had insisted that as mother of the bride she owed friends and relatives