Hotter Than Wildfire

by Lisa Marie Rice

  It had to be asked. “What…what happened to me?”

  Bolt’s mouth tightened into a grim line. “You were shot, but thank God it was only a ricochet. Gave me a hell of a scare there, for a moment. You lost some blood, but it wasn’t life threatening. If it had been, I’d have had to take you to a hospital, and you can be sure Montez is monitoring all of them. And anyway, by law, hospitals have to report gunshot wounds. I’ve had extensive medic training and I had everything I need here. You won’t have the most beautiful scar in the world, but you’re going to be fine. Maybe later, you can have plastic surgery on the scar.”

  Ellen shook her head, her hair rasping on the pillow. That wasn’t important.

  “How—” She coughed, to loosen up her throat. “How long ago? How long have I been…out?”

  Harry’s mouth grew, if possible, even grimmer, long grooves appearing in his cheeks. “Three days,” he said, the two words falling like stones out of his mouth.

  He looked…something. There was some strong emotion there. Anger? At her? Had she been keeping him from something important? Was he mad because she might have put him in danger? She couldn’t tell at all what he might be feeling, only that whatever it was, it was strong.

  Nicole looked at Bolt then back at her. “He hasn’t left your side for three days and two nights,” she said softly. “He patched you up and stayed with you. We all offered to help but he refused.”

  “All?”

  “Me, my husband, Sam—you met Sam at the office—our housekeeper, Manuela, and the third RBK partner, Mike. You haven’t met him yet.”

  Nicole’s voice was as calm and smooth as if they were at a tea party and she were describing the guest list.

  “We all said we’d be willing to stay with you. You developed a high fever the first night. Very high. Luckily, antibiotics took care of that. You drifted in and out of consciousness. Harry stayed right here. Except for going to the bathroom”—Nicole pointed to a door in the corner—“he hasn’t budged from that chair in three days.”

  There was no answer to that. Ellen was mulling that piece of information over in her dull, sluggish mind when Nicole’s face changed.

  It was remarkable. Where before she’d just been this beautiful woman—okay, the most beautiful woman Ellen had ever seen up close and not on a screen—all of a sudden she smiled brightly and became even more gorgeous. She simply glowed.

  Ellen had a limited field of vision. But the reason for Nicole’s blinding smile walked up to her, put a big arm around her waist and bent to kiss her.

  For the first time, Ellen noticed something about the way Nicole moved, a heaviness around the belly. She was expecting. And by the way her husband kissed her, it was a happy occasion.

  Ellen’s mom had had a couple of pregnancy scares while Ellen was growing up and it had been anything but an occasion for rejoicing. Usually because the man in question was already across the state line, and Ellen’s mom didn’t know how to take care of herself and Ellen, let alone another kid.

  But this guy looked like he was going to stay, and was really happy about the pregnancy.

  Sam Reston. The man Kerry had trusted to get her away safely. The man who’d saved Kerry’s life. The man she said Ellen could trust.

  A tiny lingering tension left Ellen’s body.

  There was still a question mark against Harry Bolt, but Nicole and her husband Sam felt safe.

  Reston’s head lifted and his eyes met his wife’s. He smiled, a secret smile just for the two of them. For an instant, they were encased in a cocoon of love, the outside world completely forgotten.

  Oh, man. A pang of…what? Jealousy? Longing? Whatever the emotion, it hit Ellen squarely in the chest. She was really weak; that’s why tears pricked her eyes.

  But still. She’d never loved anyone like that and no one had ever loved her like that. She’d never even seen that kind of relationship. Her mom had specialized in deadbeat boyfriends who were mainly out for a temporary bedmate and often just a bed.

  Must be nice to be loved like that, she thought.

  Reston turned to her and smiled. It transformed his rough face and made it almost…handsome. She wondered if a smile would do that to Harry Bolt’s face, even though he looked as if he’d never smiled. Not once in his life. As if his face would crack if he smiled.

  “Hi.” Reston bent over the bed so she could see him more clearly. “Welcome back. We were a little worried, even though Harry here is a really good medic. He took good care of you.”

  Her eyes slid over to Harry Bolt. Maybe. Was she expected to say thank you?

  “So…we’re okay here?” Ellen desperately tried to read Sam Reston’s eyes. They were dark and featureless, except when he looked at his wife. Then they burned. “Nobody can find me here?”

  “Yeah, you’re safe,” he said.

  “She needs a little more reassurance than that.” Nicole jabbed an elbow into her husband’s side. He looked as thickly muscular as Harry Bolt. He probably could barely feel the jab. “My husband here tends to be…protective of me. I don’t think he’d let me be here if he felt there was any danger.”

  “Damn straight,” Reston growled. “There isn’t anything that can lead Gerald Montez here and it’s going to stay that way.”

  For how long? Was she just expected to stay here—wherever here was—forever?

  It was too much. Her body didn’t have any energy left, not for speculation, not for hope, not even for fear. There was simply nothing left.

  She closed her eyes, murmured, “S’all right,” and heard a rushing noise as the world went black.

  Chapter 6

  She was just so fucking beautiful.

  Harry knew Nicole and Sam and Mike thought he was being heroic or something, not leaving her side, but it wasn’t that. Bolt cutters and a crane couldn’t make him move.

  All he wanted to do was watch her, and rejoice that she wasn’t dead.

  Another minute—hell, probably another second—and she would have been dead meat. Harry had seen so many dead bodies. You’d think he’d have become inured, but he hadn’t.

  And a dead woman’s body…man. That just fucked with his head.

  And a dead Eve. He didn’t know if he could have recovered from that one.

  A second later, and poof! He wouldn’t be sitting here, holding her slender hand. He’d be burying her in the cold, stony ground, not even knowing her real name.

  Harry knew that once he was dead, it was over. He’d done some good; he’d tried to, anyway. If he died before Sam and Mike and Nicole did, they’d remember him. And Nicole and Sam’s little girl would too, because he intended to stick close and be a good uncle. But basically when he died, that would be it.

  Not Eve.

  She was magic. If civilization survived, a thousand years from now people would be listening to her voice, to her songs. Some poor fuck who was hurting in the dead of night would listen to her and get enough out of that magic voice to face another day. A little light of beauty shining in the cold, dark world.

  Who knew how much more music she had in her? She’d basically saved his sanity if not his life, and she’d only recorded two CDs. If he could keep her alive there was lots more where that came from.

  He really respected her talent and her courage.

  So…why the three-day woodie?

  Because, well, that was part of it too. He was ashamed of himself, but there it was. He’d sat for three days and three nights looking at her face, memorizing the shape of it, the swooping line of her eyebrows, the thick lashes a shade darker than her hair, still and lush along her cheeks, the delicate line of her jaw, curving around to that pointed little chin with a tiny little dent in it. The little hollow at the base of her neck where the collarbones met. The soft, shiny hair pooling around her head, forming a russet frame.

  Actually, keeping that hair had not been a good idea. It was a magnet for the eye. She should have chopped it off and dyed it a dull brown.

  It wouldn’t
have made her less beautiful—she’d need to burrow in a gunny sack for that—but at least she wouldn’t have a beacon around her head.

  Every single line of her was gorgeous—and fragile. So fragile. The long, narrow hands with the long, slender fingers, which he just knew had coaxed that gorgeous music from some keyboard. Even just lying there, one mottled from the IV line, they were prettier than any hands he’d ever seen before.

  In every way, this was a woman any healthy male would instinctively protect. Want to protect.

  How could there be sick fucks in the world who wanted to hurt her, kill her? How could there be sick fucks who’d hurt any woman, any child?

  It still baffled him. He was thirty-four years old and he’d been around the world more times than he could count and he still couldn’t wrap his head around it. How could any man do that?

  And this woman, with the once-in-a-lifetime voice…he couldn’t even begin to imagine hurting her.

  Fucking her…well, that was something else.

  If he had to be painfully honest with himself, that was part of the reason he wouldn’t leave her side.

  He couldn’t.

  It was as if, even unconscious, she’d thrown out invisible tentacles and lashed his dick to her bedside. His very, very hard dick.

  Oh man.

  He’d spent the past three days with a perpetual hard-on and nothing would make it go down. He willed it down by sheer grit when Nicole or Sam or Mike came in to check on her. Wouldn’t that be something? For them to come in and find him with a woodie for a wounded woman? Harry disgusted even himself.

  But when they were gone, when there was no one but the silence and Eve and himself, whoa.

  He’d tried everything. Tried not looking at her, but that was a no-go from the start. He was here to keep an eye on her, to make sure she didn’t crash, to respond to any need instantly—or that was what he told himself. The truth was, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Telling himself every single second that he was an asshole didn’t help at all. He just accepted the idea and sat in his chair as if glued there.

  Harry wasn’t used to hard-ons he didn’t do anything about. True, he’d only just started having them again after a year in Afghanistan—a no-sex zone if ever there was one—and then another year-long hiatus after he’d died and then been pumped back to life again on a medevac helicopter on its way to Ramstein via Bagram. Four surgeries and intense physical therapy just to be able to stand upright had taken the wood right out of his pecker, it did.

  He’d spent many months in a wasteland of pain, acutely aware of the siren pull of death, because not even with all that he knew of hell on earth did he believe there was a hell after death. There was nothing after death, and for a long, long time, the thought of that blissful nothingness was so tempting, he knew his brothers kept a close watch on him so he wouldn’t fall into its siren embrace.

  Because death sounded an awful lot like peace. At some deep level, he’d been angry at his brothers for keeping him from that peace.

  And then—and then this woman and her voice came along and he’d found something outside himself that gave him the strength to go on. She hadn’t given him peace, but she’d reminded him that the world held glories still, beautiful things, even if he wasn’t seeing them. Her voice had brought him back from the dead.

  The hard-on was a real, real surprise, because though her voice was soft and sensual, her music wasn’t sexual to him.

  The woman herself was, though. And how. Man, from the second he saw her he’d been stunned senseless. It was only the realization that she was in mortal danger that punched him back to reality.

  When he wanted sex and there wasn’t a woman around, well, his hand knew its way around his body. He could take care of himself.

  Not this time, though. Nope. After a couple of hours of wood, disgusted with himself, he’d gone into the bathroom to take care of the problem, and that’s when his little head blindsided his big head.

  His fist wouldn’t do it. Just wouldn’t cut it. Little head didn’t want the fist. Little head wanted her.

  Another woman wouldn’t do it, either. That was the real shocker. There wasn’t one woman Harry could think of that he desired a billionth as much as he desired the wounded woman on the hospital cot in his study.

  No fist.

  No other women.

  He was shit out of options.

  So he kept the woodie while watching over her. It hurt, but it would have hurt him more to leave her side. To think that she might need something and he wouldn’t be there to get it for her, man, no way.

  Eve moaned and he straightened, watching her face. Her head shook from side to side, eyes beating behind her lids, tracking back and forth like windshield wipers. Whatever she was seeing in her sleep was wildly troubling, scaring her. Fierce cries were throttled in her throat as if even in her sleep she was trying to be quiet. Her breathing speeded up, became ragged. Her legs thrashed.

  A choked whimper rose up out of her throat, the cry an animal might make in the woods at the sight of a terrible predator. A minute before dying. Her heels scrabbled against the sheets as in her dream she tried to scramble away.

  Tears leaked from the corners of her tightly shut eyes and the whimper became a keening sound that made the hairs on his forearms and his neck rise.

  Nightmare city.

  Harry knew all about that. Knew all about the terrors of the night, particularly when they echoed the terrors of the day.

  Harry reached out a hand to shake her gently awake when her eyes suddenly opened, wild and terrified. She gasped, the sound loud in the dark room.

  “It’s okay,” Harry said immediately. God, he wanted to wipe that terrified expression off her face. “It’s just a nightmare. Don’t worry. You’re safe.”

  “Safe,” she repeated in a whisper and shuddered. She said it as if it were an unfamiliar word, an unfamiliar concept.

  Something in his chest tightened. Safe. He was going to keep her safe or die.

  Harry reached out with his thumb to wipe the tear tracks on her cheeks. “Yeah,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Safe.”

  Her eyes roamed around the dark room, though there weren’t that many features for her eyes to fixate on. Harry belonged to the Minimalist School of Home Decoration.

  The room wasn’t giving her any clues, so her gaze roamed right back to his face.

  Harry was used to masking his emotions, had done it all his life. The world was one huge knife just waiting to plunge into soft hearts. He kept a hard carapace around him at all times, surrounded by very strong don’t fuck with me vibes.

  That didn’t work here. She needed reassurance and Harry didn’t know how to do reassurance. So he did the only thing he could. He let down his defenses, for just a moment.

  Everything down, shield, vibes, even his woodie, a little. Because the thought of this magical, beautiful woman wounded and terrified and encased in nightmares was a real downer.

  He looked her straight in her huge, frightened eyes. They glowed green with an almost unearthly light in the gloom of the room, reflecting the lights in the living room. She stared at him, eyes wide, unblinking.

  “You’re safe here, absolutely,” Harry said again. He’d raised his voice a little and it echoed in the room.

  She blinked and breathed out. He realized she’d stopped breathing for a minute. A vein had been pounding in her neck when she opened her eyes, the nightmare so vivid her heart pumped blood to her extremities to face the danger, even though her muscles were too weak to use it. But now the pulses slowed.

  Her right hand unfurled, like a flower blossoming. Gently, Harry sandwiched her hand between his. Her hand was cold, soft, delicate. Her eyes dropped to her hand in his, then back up to his eyes.

  The lashes drooped.

  “Safe,” she murmured and fell back asleep.

  “Is she safe? Really?”

  Nicole stepped out of the bathroom in one of Sam’s favorite nightgowns. Of course, all of the
m were his favorites. He loved them all, though he loved stripping her out of them even better.

  Billows of fragrant steam boiled out from the open bathroom door. Sam closed his eyes and inhaled. The steam wafted the smell of her fancy shampoo and conditioner and moisturizer and hand cream and foot cream and cuticle cream…He’d become an expert on how many creams and lotions a woman needed in the ten months of their marriage. Each smell was fabulous, but swirled together, and with Nicole’s unique fragrance underlying it…Jesus.

  “Hmm?” Sam enjoyed watching his wife walking around their bedroom. His bedroom had changed beyond recognition since their marriage. It was full of girly things now. The bed had flounces around the bottom, the sheets were floral prints, there were watercolors on the wall, scented candles everywhere and crystal bowls full of flower petals. Silk drapes. Feminine overkill.

  But Sam was a tough guy. He could take it.

  Shit, to be married to Nicole he’d walk over red-hot coals barefoot. Putting up with some froufrou nonsense was nothing.

  He walked to her, to his miracle of a wife, put his arms around her, pulled her to him. The baby was just starting to show and he could feel the little bump against his own belly. He loved that bump.

  Up until it started to show, the little girl Nicole was expecting was more an idea than a reality. They knew she was expecting and in the meantime everything was exactly the same.

  And then the baby bump and the morning sickness brought it home to him every day. They could feel her moving around in Nicole’s belly. He could feel his child in her.

  Sam loved his wife, he loved his brothers, he would die for her and for them without question—but they weren’t his blood. This child growing inside Nicole would be the only human being on the face of the earth who was his blood relative.

  It gave him goose bumps every time he thought about it.