Consumed by Fire (27 page)

“And you seriously think a beer is going to impair me? I can be dead drunk and still shoot the heart out of an ace of spades at five hundred yards.”

“A regular Robin Hood. Why do you need to shoot cards?”

“So I can shoot people and not miss.”

She felt a chill run over her at his flat words, starting with the icy beer in her hand. “It’s probably against the law to have an open container . . .”

“We’re in Texas. You really think they have a law like that? They’re worse than Colorado. And you really think I’d give a flying fuck if they did? Bring me a beer and join me.”

“When pigs fly.”

“If you do, maybe I’ll answer some of your questions.” She knew he regretted the words as soon as he said them, but she also knew he’d stick to them. She was beginning to realize he had a peculiar sense of honor. He might have killed people—she didn’t want to think how many—but he wouldn’t go back on his word.

Opening the tiny stainless-steel fridge again, she pulled out another Guinness, opened it, and carefully made her way to the front of the camper. She dropped into the passenger seat, then glanced around her. The front of the Winnebego looked its age, though she knew that was deceptive. The vinyl seats were cracked and mended with duct tape, the dashboard was dusty, and some of the dials were cracked or simply not working. There was no such thing as a cup holder.

Without taking his eyes from the road, he reached out and took the Guinness from her, taking a long pull before settling it between his legs. Naturally her eyes followed, and she jerked them away, determinedly staring out the window. She didn’t want to be looking at his crotch, thinking about his crotch.

“I thought you were a dedicated believer in seat belts,” he drawled easily.

Of course she looked back, surprised to see he was wearing his, and she hastily reached for hers. She had no choice but to tuck her bottle between her own thighs, and the icy chill of the glass was an odd stimulation, one she had no intention of letting him see. She leaned back in her seat, took another drink, and glanced over at him. At his face, not where he’d set his bottle of beer.

“You said you’d answer questions.”

“I did, didn’t I?” He sounded faintly disgruntled.

“So let’s start with the most obvious one. Exactly who and what are you?” She made it sound like he was an alien artifact or a lost species of snake, which wasn’t far from the truth.

“I think we’d better get some ground rules established. If you think I’m going to while away the next five hours telling you the story of my life and a whole lot of the kinds of secrets I’d need to kill you for, you’re mistaken. I didn’t go this far to protect you only to have to turn around and cap you myself. I’ll give you . . . let’s say five questions, which I’ll answer to the best of my ability, as long as it won’t put you in more jeopardy.”

She stared at him, his elegant profile so familiar and yet so different without that mop of dark hair. His short blond hair was growing out a bit, and the roots were darker, but not the mahogany shade his hair had been in Italy, and his scruffy beard was brown and flecked with bits of gray, which shocked her.

“Exactly what color is your hair?” she demanded. “Your eyes, for that matter? Sometimes you look like a complete stranger, and other times I know you far too well.”

“My real hair, last time I saw it, was a sandy brown and I’m not wearing contacts right now. What you see is what you get. That’s two.”

“Two what?” Of course he’d end up having gorgeous eyes. The deep ocean blue of them was almost unbelievable, but she’d somehow known they were the real thing.

“Two questions, Angel. You’ve got three more.”

“That’s not fair!” she said, outraged.

He shrugged. “Take it or leave it.”

The cheating bastard. “I’ll take it,” she said, reaching for his beer bottle without thinking, planning to grab the beer back. Reaching between his legs.

He moved his hand so quickly, she had no time to pull back, and held her hand against the bottle nestled in his crotch, against his zipper, against a part of him that was indisputably hard.

She yanked her hand back as if it were burned, moving to unfasten her seat belt, ready to stomp back into the cabin, or as close to stomping as she could manage with her bruised leg, when his words stopped her.

“You still have three questions. You aren’t going to have this chance again, so you’d better take advantage of it while I’m still in such a cooperative mood.”

She stayed put. She had little doubt he could drink any number of beers and be unimpaired, but the same couldn’t be said for her. One beer was her limit—pathetic, but there it was—and hers was already half gone, relaxing her when she didn’t want to be relaxed.

“All right. But I don’t want you answering until I tell you it’s one of my questions. I need to think about this.”

“Take your time,” he said affably. “We’ve got miles of highway between us and our next destination, and your company is, as always, delightful.”

She didn’t give in to temptation and call him a nasty name, mainly because she believed, in a strange sort of way, he actually meant it. Or maybe she was just telling herself that, but she didn’t care.

“I want to know who and what you are.”

“That’s two . . .”

“I told you, no answers until I tell you what my actual question is. I want to know who James Bishop is. Who do you work for, and what in God’s name your job is that you’d know how to kill people? Are you CIA, FBI?” She realized her first guesses would immediately make him one of the good guys, and she quickly added, “Or are you a criminal, which seems more than likely. Don’t answer!”

He took another drink of beer, then draped his strong, beautiful hands comfortably on the steering wheel as they headed into the infinite flatness of the empty countryside. His eyes seemed to be on the road but she knew he was somehow managing to watch her. Maybe he had fabulous peripheral vision or hidden mirrors; somehow he was acutely aware of her every expression. Which meant she had to be more circumspect, or he’d catch her looking at him like a love-starved kitten . . .

Where the hell had that idea come from? Too much beer—probably because she’d had so little to eat in the last few days. There was no place to set the bottle, but she needed to be careful, not let maudlin emotions interfere.

“Tell me who you work for,” she said abruptly. “That’s a real question. If you feel like throwing in your real name free of charge that would be nice, but it’s not an official question.”

He waited so long that for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. She’d almost given up hope when he spoke, reluctantly. “I work for an organization called the Committee. They’re based out of London, but they’re planning on setting up an American office and one in the Far East. And my real name happens to be James Alexander Bishop. I don’t use it very often, but I happened to use it when I met you. And yes, I’ll give you that one for free, since I’ve already told you that one many times. You just chose not to believe me. That’s three.”

She thought for a long time. She needed to shape the questions in just the right way as to elicit the most information—Bishop would give her as little as he could get away with. Bishop. James Bishop. She believed him—in her own mind no other name fit him.

“What
exactly
do you do for this Committee?” The “exactly” ought to force him to tell her enough to get a sense of whether he was a good guy or a bad guy.

“You don’t want to know,” he said grimly.

She wasn’t letting him get away with that. “I asked, didn’t I? Question number four. What do you do for the Committee?”

“Kill people.” His voice was hard, but she was prepared. He wanted to shock her, frighten her, and even if he did, just a little, she wasn’t going to let him see it.

“That’s not a complete answer,” she said. “If all you did was kill people, then I would have been dead five years ago, and you wouldn’t be wandering around Texas in a Winnebago.”

“How do you know I’m not headed toward a target?”

“You may be, but it’s an awfully elaborate cover. What else do you do, and this is still question four.”

“I keep the world safe for democracy,” he said mockingly.

“England isn’t a democracy, it’s a constitutional monarchy.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. The monarchy has absolutely no power—it’s a social position and nothing more. It’s a democracy.”

“Well, tell me what you do to preserve democracy, then. Still question four,” she reminded him, not trusting him for a moment.

He rolled his eyes, but she wasn’t going to be intimidated. He started this—she’d play it to the end.

“I do anything they ask of me. I go undercover and pretend to be any number of things. Mostly I watch people, which can get fucking boring after a while. Bad guys aren’t that interesting—you’d think they would be, but they aren’t. Sometimes I kidnap troublesome young women and have sex with them in a Winnebago.”

He was trying to intimidate her, but he’d given her one very useful piece of information. “Or a hotel in Venice,” she countered smoothly.

He glanced over at her deliberately, heat in his eyes, darkening them. “I’m not sure which I prefer.”

To be truthful, neither was she, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. She’d be an idiot not to prefer the suite at the Danieli, but right now her body still remembered the fast, hard passion of the night before, and it still tingled with need.

But he’d said
bad guy
. Which meant, whether he would admit it or not, that he considered himself one of the good guys. Whatever this Committee was, they thought they were on the side of the angels.

But didn’t most villains think they were the heroes? People had a tendency to justify their worst behavior. Everyone was a hero in his own life, the star of his own movie.

So this so-called Committee thought they were good guys; and if they had an ingenuous mission statement like “Making the world safe for democracy,” it meant they were an antiterrorist group, even if they sometimes behaved like them. She only had one question left, and she didn’t want to waste it; while there were so many things she wanted to know, it really boiled down to one thing.

“Why me?”

He drained his beer, then reached over and took the bottle between her legs, the one she’d been ignoring. Maybe it was accidental that it pressed against her sensitive parts for a moment, another stimulation.

Who was she kidding? Nothing he did was accidental—he was the most deliberate man she had ever met.

“You want to clarify that? Considering it’s your last question, you ought to make sure you get what you want.”

Why did that sound sexual? Then again, to her battered mind almost everything he said sounded sexual. She took a deep breath. “Here’s what I know so far. I accidentally witnessed a murder you committed, one I didn’t realize I’d seen. Instead of automatically killing me, you took me back to the hotel and . . .”

“Fucked the shit out of you,” he supplied affably.

“Stop it!” she said before she could stop herself.

“You want me to be more romantic about it? I took you back to the hotel and seduced you, made love to you until you were so infatuated you couldn’t see straight? Is that more accurate?”

She gritted her teeth. “You fucked the shit out of me,” she said. “Why?”

“Obvious answer, babe. You were hot.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. The woman you were with was gorgeous, and there were any number of other, much prettier, women who would have happily fallen at your feet. The reason you took me to bed had something to do with the murder.”

“Claudia isn’t exactly my type,” he said obliquely. “The reason I took you . . . not to bed, but in the shower, in case you’ve forgotten . . . was to find out exactly what you’d seen. I kept you away from newspapers reporting Corsini’s death, I distracted you from the sound of the police sirens, and I fucked you until you were incapable of telling me anything but the truth. If you’d seen anything, suspected anything, you’d have hardly let me go down on you with such enthusiasm.”

She sat there like stone, determined not to react. His deliberately coarse words were like blows, hammering away at something she’d still been fool enough to treasure, like someone taking a sledgehammer to a classic marble statue. She hadn’t realized she still kept even an ounce of emotion about that entire time once he’d betrayed her, and that was another wound. She wasn’t the strong, iron lady she’d envisioned herself to be.

She wasn’t going to let him know. She could keep that much to herself. And she had to keep him talking. He could shut down at any time—he’d answered more than five questions and he was hardly the soul of cooperation.

“All right, so we’ve established we had a night of sex. That was never under debate. You knew I’d seen nothing. Why didn’t you just dump me the next day? Why worry about me?”

“Because Corsini’s death was splashed all over the papers, and you’d seen both of us up there at the hillside chapel and could identify us. I needed to distract you until the big rush of publicity had gone by and Corsini was no longer front-page news. Your Italian wasn’t that good, and you’d have no reason to pick up a local newspaper and try to read it. The Corsini family is a big deal in Italy, but the family is not well-known out of the country. Corsini’s death barely made a paragraph in the English newspapers.”

“Okay, I can understand that. I can even understand the Danieli—anyone who could go to the best hotel in Venice on an expense account shouldn’t hesitate. But why bother with that sham marriage?”

He hesitated, and she was afraid he was going to stop talking. His eyes were straight ahead on the wide, endless highway in front of them, and he didn’t even glance at her. “I had my reasons.”

“And they were . . . ?”

“A question I’m not about to answer.”

She wasn’t ready to give up. “Okay, then tell me this. Why didn’t you just kill me in the first place? It would have been tidier, and I don’t get the sense that your organization is worried about collateral damage.”

“You know shit about my organization. I don’t happen to like ‘collateral damage,’ as you put it so professionally. I didn’t want to kill you. Not if I didn’t have to.”