Wildfire

by Anne Stuart

  “I noticed.” He moved behind her, reached down, and unlocked the wheels. “That doesn’t mean you have to stay in one place.” He turned her, quite deftly, and in the next moment he was wheeling her away from the house. She arched her neck to look back at him, but his expression was entirely unreadable. She needed to get used to that—he wasn’t giving anything away.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Out of range of the house.”

  So he knew there were cameras and microphones? Of course he did. Archer didn’t bring innocents to the island, and there was nothing naïve about Mal’s clear green eyes. “Turn left,” she said abruptly as he reached the corner of the terrace.

  “I’d planned to turn right.”

  She shook her head. “Turn left,” she repeated. “There’s a fairly level path down to a small hidden cove, and you shouldn’t have any trouble pushing me. It’s very peaceful.” There was also a long stretch with no surveillance at all. If for some indiscernible reason Mal had come to the island to kill her, then she’d just played into his hands, and she couldn’t rule that out. Then again, the only person who’d want her dead would be Archer, and he’d want to watch.

  Maybe the Committee was tying up loose ends and had decided to punish her for ignoring her mission and running off with Archer, which had to be the stupidest thing she’d ever done in her life. It didn’t matter that she’d been thrown into the mission before she was ready—there was still no excuse.

  But Malcolm wasn’t a member of the Committee—she knew that without any shadow of a doubt. The Committee members she’d known had essentially been soldiers, and Malcolm was too elegant, too self-contained to be an efficient soldier. He was someone who would work alone.

  No, he was a far cry from the Committee, and besides, they’d written her off years ago. She’d made her bed and now she had to fester in it. They weren’t going to rescue her, but they wouldn’t waste manpower getting rid of her. Malcolm Gunnison was no threat to her, even if it felt like he was the most dangerous man in the world.

  He turned left, pushing her over the closely cropped grass, and in moments they were on the narrow path that led down to the beach. She didn’t like having him behind her, pushing the chair, but she didn’t have much choice in the matter. It had been so long since she’d been down to the small cove that she was willing to do anything to get there, even allow the enemy to transport her.

  Of course, it remained to be seen whether or not he was the enemy. He might be the only person on the island to have no agenda of hurting her. His late-night foray into her room could have been simple reconnaissance by a wary criminal. It seemed that he was either there to kill her, in which case she’d already be dead, or he was just one of her husband’s cronies. Corrupt, evil, and soulless, as all of them were, but no more threat to her than Elena, the cook, although Sophie wasn’t even certain about her. Archer had ways of getting people to do what he wanted, including bribery, threats, and extortion.

  Mal didn’t seem like someone who’d be coerced into doing anything. Indeed, whoever sent him here would have had to believe he could stand up to Archer. Which meant he was probably no threat to her.

  So why did she feel hyperalert around him, restless and churned up? It was either the stomach flu or lust, she told herself with latent amusement. Not that he wasn’t lustworthy, with that long, lean body, but she’d much prefer stomach flu. She allowed herself a furtive glance over her shoulder, but he had the same enigmatic expression on his face that he’d had before, giving nothing away, and she told herself that after the past few years, the last thing she was interested in was sex.

  The thick foliage began to disperse, and suddenly they reached the small crescent of sand leading down to the deep blue-green water, her own particular place to think, to dream. She’d considered asking Archer to put a pathway to the spot so her wheelchair could reach it, but in the end she’d changed her mind. Archer had never known about it, and this place was hers and hers alone. She had no intention of sharing it.

  So why was she sharing it now, with this enigmatic stranger? She’d have to figure that out later.

  It didn’t look as if anyone else had been there in her absence. The wooden bench where she used to lie, reading her novels, was now overgrown with weeds, the paint peeling off from the constant exposure to sun and rain. The formerly clear water was full of seaweed as it lapped against the shore, but she didn’t care. Without realizing it, she let out a sigh of contentment.

  “You like this spot better than the wide beach I came in on?” Malcolm said, and Sophie jerked in surprise. For a brief, dangerous moment she’d forgotten all about him, awash in the joy of returning to her favorite place.

  He parked her wheelchair at the edge of the sand, locked the wheels, and moved around her to stand by the water. He was wearing sunglasses, though she couldn’t remember when he’d put them on, and it almost seemed as if he’d dismissed her from his mind.

  She knew better than that. “This is my own secret place,” she said finally. “I used to come down here and stay for hours, and no one would ever bother me.”

  He didn’t look back at her. “Used to?”

  “You know better than anyone how difficult it is to push a wheelchair down that path,” she said sharply.

  He turned then, his sunglasses in place, shielding his eyes and his expression. “You appear to have a household ready to wait on you,” he said lightly. “Why didn’t you simply ask for someone to bring you down?”

  “Appearances can be deceiving,” she said. It wasn’t a smart thing to do. Malcolm Gunnison needed to think she was deeply in love with her husband, content as a pampered cat.

  But why? If Malcolm had come to hurt Archer, then she could help him in return for an escape from this golden prison. But if he’d come to hurt her, to do Archer’s bidding and report back to him, then she was better keeping her thoughts and her feelings to herself, as she’d done so well for the past few years. She’d let her instincts betray her once, when she’d fallen for Archer, and she was still paying the price. It would be a cold day in hell before she trusted this man.

  She gave a small, self-deprecating laugh. “Don’t pay any attention to me, Mr. Gunnison. Every now and then I feel a little bit sorry for myself. Of course you’re right—Archer would do anything for me. All I have to do is ask. I just feel that my demands are so many and I give so little back that I don’t want to be any more trouble than I have to be. Besides, I kind of like keeping this place a secret, just for me.” She knew she was selling it, with a wistful smile and the faintest fluttering of her hand that disguised the muscle and made her seem frail and weak.

  She just wished she could see his eyes to make sure. He stared at her for a long, thoughtful minute, saying nothing, and then he moved closer. “Then why did you bring me here?”

  The simple question shouldn’t have shocked her. Why in God’s name had she brought him here, to the one place that felt safe? Now it would feel contaminated, ruined.

  Oddly enough, though, it didn’t. She floundered for an answer and came up with a logical one. “It was the only way I could get here,” she said. “And you’ll be gone soon enough and no one else will know about it.”

  He said nothing, and she couldn’t tell whether he bought it or not. In fact, she’d been an idiot to direct him down here. The fewer people who knew about this place, the better.

  “Do you want to get out of that damned chair?” he said after a moment, his voice casual.

  She looked up at him in alarm. “And do what?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Sit in the sand, put your toes in the water, make sand castles.”

  “Sand castles are a waste of time. The moment you build them, the tide rolls in and washes them away.” Shit, why did she say that? He seemed to have the ability to draw the most revealing things from her. She laughed again. “You see, I warned you I was feeling sorry for myself today.”

  He dropped down on the wooden bench, ignorin
g the peeling paint as he watched her. “You know what you do then, Mrs. MacDonald?” he said softly.

  She hated that name with a fierce passion, so fierce that she couldn’t let it pass. “Call me Sophie,” she said abruptly. “And don’t tell me you come back and build another sand castle the next day, only to have it wash away again. I’m not that naïve.”

  He pushed his dark glasses up onto his forehead, and she could see that sharp green gaze of his, uncomfortably intimate. “I don’t think you’re naïve at all, Sophie.” His voice caressed her name, and for a moment she wondered whether “Mrs. MacDonald” might have been preferable after all. He was a cool, distant, dangerous man, and yet somehow he was getting too close. “And I think you’re far too practical to keep building castles in the sand, or in the clouds, for that matter. I think you know as well as I do that you find a good, solid surface and build your defenses there.”

  For some reason the thought of her huge bathroom, the one place where she could move and train her body back into obedience, came into her mind. “Who said anything about defenses? I thought we were talking about castles.”

  “All good castles need defenses, Sophie. You should know that.”

  It was almost as if he thought there were some reason she should be conversant with castles and defenses. “I never put much thought into it,” she said airily. “And I hardly need any defenses here on Isla Mordita, when I have my husband and so many people looking out for my welfare. In fact, the only unknown potential source of danger is you, Malcolm.” There, she said it, she thought, waiting for his reaction.

  He dropped his glasses back down on his nose. “Whatever gets you through the night.” He leaned back, tilting his face up to the sun, and she said nothing, watching him, the long lines of his body, his dark hair falling away from a face that was almost ascetic. He was wearing jeans today, and for a moment she decided he couldn’t be British. All British men wore socks with their sandals.

  His blue linen shirt was rolled up at the sleeves, and his forearms looked strong, his hands beautiful. Jesus, even his toes were beautiful. Maybe she had overestimated her own abilities. Even with the element of surprise she had some question whether she’d be able to best him or not if he were the enemy.

  She needed a gun. She’d known that all along—a simple firearm for one added bit of protection when she was finally able to make her escape. She’d been an excellent shot, had been even better with a knife, but she preferred hand-to-hand combat. Years ago she could take down a man twice her size in less than a minute.

  She didn’t think Malcolm Gunnison would be quite that simple to vanquish. A handgun could stop anything short of a stampeding elephant, and there were no elephants on Isla Mordita.

  She tilted her own head back to look up into the bright blue sky. The soft breeze across the water made her think of freedom, and if she’d been in any less control of herself, she would have wept. She never cried, not after the first year of her imprisonment. Instead, she let the tension drain from her body as the sun beat down on her, the wind ruffling the trees all around, and she sank back, soaking up the warmth and beauty of the day. There was no guarantee that Malcolm wasn’t here to harm her, but she was relatively certain she wasn’t in danger at that particular moment. No one was watching. No one would expect anything from her. She closed her eyes and breathed in the day.

  Malcolm knew the moment she relaxed, drifted into a light sleep. It surprised him—she’d been sleeping like a rock the night before when he’d gone into her room, and with all the pain meds she was on, she probably got more than her share of rest. It could have been the Vicodin that made her drift off now, but it didn’t seem a drugged sleep to him.

  He opened his eyes to watch her. Her pale face was tilted back toward the sun, her eyes were closed, and he could see a fresh tracing of freckles across her cheekbones.

  She was in her early thirties, seven years younger than he was. He’d heard about her when he was in Africa—not that many women worked for the Committee, and she’d showed enormous promise. They’d been grooming her for great things, but fate had intervened in the form of Archer MacDonald. He’d taken one look at a junior operative who’d simply been there to observe, and apparently the man had fallen in love. It was totally out of character for a sociopath like MacDonald, but if a man was going to fall in love, then Sophie would be the woman to tempt him, he thought lazily. It was a good thing he had no such weakness. Given Archer’s unexpected infatuation, no one in the London office could let such an opportunity pass them by, so they’d let Sophie go into the fray when she was unprepared, and disaster had followed.

  He wondered what he would have thought of her had he met her back then. Probably not much—the woman was as dumb as a rock to have fallen for Archer MacDonald under any circumstances.

  Too bad he found her attractive, with her dark eyebrows beneath the tousle of unshaped, tawny hair. He’d like to pretend it wasn’t so, but he was always honest with himself, and he knew there was something about her that drew him. He had absolutely no idea what it was. He could barely see most of her body beneath those long flowing things she wore, and to put it crudely, only half of it worked. He was broad-minded, but that was an unlikely turn-on. Whenever she was around Archer, her intellect seemed to drop, and the rest of the time she seemed faintly crabby, particularly with Mal. That in itself was also interesting—while he hadn’t bothered to hit her with his well-practiced charm, she had no reason for her hostility. Unless she suspected he might be a danger to her darling Archer, but that option seemed unlikely, given her lack of mental acuity.

  She was probably nothing more than she seemed on the surface: a fretful, spoiled wife who’d outlived her usefulness and had spent the past few years trapped on an island with nowhere to go.

  Maybe.

  But you didn’t survive long in the life they’d chosen if you went with the obvious, and he was taking nothing at face value. She’d been smart enough to have gotten through the rigorous Committee training. Before that she’d worked for the CIA and the State Department, and she’d graduated from Sarah Lawrence summa cum laude. Her dossier had been thorough—including the death of her diplomat parents in a plane crash when she was thirteen, her upbringing with her rigidly conservative aunt. Little wonder she’d gone into government work; less obvious was why she turned to the Committee. It wasn’t the place for conservatives who followed rules.

  After three years of marriage, two of them bedridden and as a virtual prisoner, wasn’t she likely to have seen through Archer’s amiable exterior? Or had being so dependent made her cling to him? He glanced down at her motionless legs beneath the flowing skirt. Nothing at face value, he reminded himself.

  He heard the sound from a distance, someone moving down the path to the small clearing, the footsteps practically inaudible, the rustle of the shrubbery no more than the sound of the breeze. Archer was trying to sneak up on them, and with anyone else he might have gotten away with it. He underestimated Malcolm, which was fine with him, and Mal didn’t move from his spot on the bench, seemingly oblivious. Archer wanted to surprise them, not kill them, but Mal moved his hand to the front pocket of his jeans, to the outline of the zip knife he kept there. Whether he could throw it faster than Archer could fire was uncertain, but he was counting on Archer’s motives being relatively innocuous, at least for now.

  Archer was almost there when Malcolm saw Sophie’s eyelids flicker for the briefest instant. So even in her sleep she had heard him, he thought. She was stretched in her chair, every muscle relaxed in feigned sleep, but if Archer opened fire he had little doubt her old training would take hold and she’d dive for the sand. Not that it would save her—she would be an easy target if and when Archer was ready to get rid of her. But that wasn’t going to be today.

  “I thought I’d find you here!” Archer announced as he appeared at the end of the pathway. Mal looked up at him from behind his mirrored sunglasses, not even pretending to be surprised. It was Sophie’s behavio
r that interested him. The moment Archer spoke she jumped, as if startled into wakefulness. She didn’t overdo it—just the slightest jerk, and she turned her head back and greeted him with a sleepy smile. This—his first bit of proof that Archer’s wife wasn’t the docile victim she appeared to be.

  “You surprised us,” she said in a slightly husky voice that was entirely fake. She’d known perfectly well he was coming. This was getting interesting.

  Archer towered over her, leaning down to give her a kiss on her pale mouth, and Mal watched her body rise toward his, instinctively moving into the kiss. Or that was what she wanted it to look like. He was beginning to question all his assumptions about the former Committee member.

  When Archer moved back she looked up at her husband adoringly, her rich brown eyes warm with love, but he’d already dismissed her, turning his back on her to look at Malcolm. “You’ve made quite a hit with my wife,” Archer said cheerfully. “As far as I know she’s never let anyone bring her down here to her special place. Even I’ve been off-limits.”

  “I didn’t know you even knew where it was,” Sophie said softly.

  “Of course I did, baby,” Archer said smugly. “I know everything that goes on at Isla Mordita, especially when it concerns my sweet wife.” He glanced up at the gathering clouds. “I think you two picked the wrong time for your walk—we’re about to get one of our usual late-morning rain showers. Malcolm, come back with me and we’ll play a game of pool. I’ll send Joe down to fetch Sophie.”

  Mal didn’t rise from the bench. “I wouldn’t think of leaving her,” he said, managing to sound almost indifferent. “I’ll bring her back up to the house and meet you in the pool room.”

  Archer snorted but didn’t look displeased. “That wheelchair is just about solid gold, but it doesn’t go up the path nearly as well as it goes down, and she’s going to be bumped all to hell if you try it. Joe’s a bull—he won’t have any trouble, and I wouldn’t want my baby to be in any more pain than she’s already in.”