Playing with Fire (4 page)

There was no number three. The second it became clear that her sexual charms came with a nasty third-degree side effect, Patrick no longer had any use for her.

“Stop the spoiled brat act for five minutes,” he said. “How well can you control yourself?”

“If you’re asking if I shoot off random flames when a man has my nipple between his teeth, the answer is no.”

Patrick’s eyebrow rose. For the first time, genuine interest sparkled in his eyes. His gaze flickered to her legs, running the length of them and settling where they met. “Is that so? How do you manage?”

“Easy.” She crossed her legs tighter and scowled. “I don’t let men anywhere near my nipples.”

His laugh was everything she remembered disliking about the man—condescending and confident and cruel.

“You don’t mean to tell me you’ve gone celibate? I’ve never met a girl so ready to drop on all fours at the sound of a zipper falling.”

One. Two. Three. Inhale. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Four. Five. Six. Exhale. No matter how good it would feel to scar his carefully preserved and Botoxed face. She might have power, but she wasn’t stupid.

She waited a full twenty seconds before she was able to speak. “And that should be all the evidence you need. A few years ago, a remark like that would have had us both in trouble. Don’t worry, I’m in control now.”

That kind of control hadn’t been easy. Fiona knew, from taping a candy thermometer to her stomach, that her body temperature shot to about two hundred degrees when she fired. If she suppressed the release for too long, her temperature rose even higher. She never had so much as a single singed hair afterwards, though she had to be careful of metal fasteners, shoes, and non-porous clothes.

When she’d first taken the conversion serum, before she was used to the effects, she’d once gotten way too worked up in a pair of tight gold lamé pants on the middle of a dance floor. The fabric had absorbed the heat in ways that regular cotton didn’t, holding it against her skin and causing quite a bit of pain before she scrambled out of them and ran, buck naked, out the door.

She was much better now. The other day had been proof of that. Ian had placed his hand on her arm at the scene of the tree fire and hadn’t even flinched. If she could control herself around Ian, she could do it with Patrick, too.

“Look at me,” she added with a sneer. “I’m practically an ice queen.”

He didn’t even blink, though a light sheen of sweat covered his forehead. “Is that what you call it? It must be a hundred degrees in here.”

“So open a window. Or better yet, leave.”

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere, Fiona. You’re a danger to the people. I think the good town of Ashland deserves to know what it’s dealing with.”

“The only person I’m a danger to right now is you.” She stood and pulled open the door, waiting for him to take the hint. He rose from the couch and came so close his fingers brushed along her upper arm. She stiffened. Normally she ached for human contact, savored those minor brushes of skin on skin. But Patrick’s touch just pissed her off.

Before she could react, he sucked in a sharp breath and pulled back, shaking himself. Her skin was hot. Maybe her restraint wasn’t as great as she’d thought.

“I don’t know what you want, Patrick, but you won’t find it here.” She refused to lower her gaze from his steely blue eyes. “You wouldn’t dare expose me because you know I can do the same thing to you.”

“You’re so adorable when you’re angry. And when you’re so painfully, blatantly wrong.” He snared a tendril of her hair and wound it around his finger with intense focus. What was with men and their obsession with her hair lately?

Yanking hard, he forced her to lean in. “I’m not asking,” he whispered. “I’m telling. There are two cars parked outside. One belongs to my driver. The other belongs to the Conversion Office. I’ll let you pick which vehicle you get into. You have an hour to decide.”

“Bullshit,” Fiona said, and let loose a big glob of spit right into his face. Patrick calmly pulled a handkerchief from his interior jacket pocket and dabbed at the bridge of his nose, not even blinking as a drop fell into the corner of his eye. As he put the handkerchief away, he grabbed a file tucked inside his jacket and handed it to Fiona with as much ceremony as a marriage proposal.

“These are the papers I filed with the CO this afternoon.” He checked his watch. “You’re a very dangerous woman, you know. They were quite interested in what I had to say.”

Fiona didn’t take the file. “What’s stopping me from getting into my own car and hightailing it out of here?” she said. Her own voice came to her from far away, as though she was speaking from the end of a very long, very dark tunnel.

Patrick laughed, tossing his head back until she could see every last one of his molars. “Read the file, Fiona. And then let me know how far you think you’ll get.”

Without another word, he tossed the manila folder across her threshold. He was always crossing her threshold. Crossing the line. That was what Patrick Veller did.

He took the stairs casually, one at a time, and she couldn’t shoot even a flicker of flame at his receding back. She wanted to, more than anything in the world. But apparently, Patrick had found the one thing that could stop her lustful, fiery sparks before they even began to form.

Fear.

Debilitating, ice-cold fear.

Chapter Five

Forget science. Ian was turning out to be a pretty good stalker.

From the bench seat of his ‘69 Chevy pickup, he had a good view of Fiona’s apartment complex. He’d already logged the arrival and departure of several residents, and so far, not one had pounded on his window and told him to get his creepy Peeping Tom eyes out of there.

In his book, that counted as a success.

Though the more he thought about it, the more it seemed this might be the kind of neighborhood that catered to shady-looking young men with binoculars. His chest ached a little, right in the center, as the meaning of that sunk in. Fiona lived right around the corner from a bar that promised “Nakkid Lady Tuesdays.” Piles of garbage decorated the curb. The years might have been kind to her physically, but she was obviously struggling.

It wasn’t fair of him to judge. A few maxed out credit cards and an anonymous research grant donor were the only things keeping him from similar conditions.

A figure approached the front door of the building from inside, and Ian dropped his binoculars as he fumbled to bring them to his eyes. He reached to get them just as a fist crashed into his passenger window.

Okay. Crashed was an exaggeration. But the knock was loud enough to make him jump, his heart slamming harder than normal when he realized the face peering in was the one he’d been waiting for, red lips and all.

He rolled down the window a crack. Surprise made him gruff. “Fiona? What the—”

She signaled for him to unlock the door. Ian reached across to flick up the metal lock stub and lift the handle and watched, helpless, as Fiona slid onto the tan leather seat.

“Go. Now.” She cast a panicked look around.

Ian glanced toward the chain-link fence leading to the back of her apartment. The gate was swinging shut, but he didn’t see anything particularly frightening. No dragons. No men in capes.

“I said go,” Fiona cried. “The longer you sit there, the better his chances of coming after me. Please, Ian. I’m begging you. Get me out of here.”

A fierce protective instinct kicked in, and Ian’s foot hit the pedal before he was able to fully register what he was doing. That realization came a few seconds later when not one but two unmarked, but very obvious, service cars whizzed by in the opposite direction.

He hadn’t seen any flames, but there was no doubt they were headed for the apartment complex—correction, crime scene—he’d just fled with the suspect in his passenger seat. He lifted his lead foot. The whole purpose of the stakeout was to trail her, get a feel for her general activities. See if he could catch her in the act.

Serving as a getaway driver was not in that plan.

“Fiona—you know I have to stop.” He pulled over to the shoulder in front of a Laundromat that looked like it doubled as a prostitution front.

“Ian, do you remember that tree stump the other day?”

Did he remember? It had been the only thing he’d been able to think about for days. Fiona had lit that tree on fire.

Fiona was the Fireball.

She looked at him with that mixture of sharp-eyed interest and something he couldn’t recognize on a cognitive level, but felt stirring in his groin just the same.

Fiona was still the girl he remembered. She was so much more than a random stranger capable of violence, or the unnamed culprit of half a dozen Corrupted crimes. If he was being honest, she was his biggest shame—in more ways than one.

He would forever regret the day he stood by watching, silent, as a fellow student called her by the awful nickname Neil had spread, using it as a reason to slip a hand under her skirt. He would regret even more that he hadn’t said a word when she let the guy push even further, eyes on Ian the whole time, waiting for him to contradict the slur.

But he’d done nothing, too weak and too embarrassed to confess his ineptitude, or to punch that sleazebag in the face like he’d deserved.

Oh, he remembered, all right. He remembered
everything
.

“Yeah,” he said vaguely. “I think I might have some recollection.”

Fiona shifted next to him. “So help me, Ian Jones. If you don’t start driving, I will do the exact same thing to you.”

He gulped. What had he been thinking, letting this girl get into his car?

Correction. This
woman
.

He glanced sideways at her. With her long, bare legs in cutoffs and a zombie apocalypse tank top spread tight across her chest, it was easy to make the mistake. She didn’t look at all like a responsible adult, someone who paid bills and purchased sensible footwear. She looked…

…crap. She looked scared.

Ian took a deep breath, keeping his hands firmly on ten and two. No matter what had happened in the past, he was not falling for this damsel-in-distress routine. He was stronger than that. Smarter.

“Where, exactly, am I supposed to take you?” he asked, pulling the car back onto the road.

“I need a place to hide. Somewhere to lay low for a little while. Somewhere he can’t find me.”

Pain stabbed his gut, feeling an awful lot like fire. “He?”

“I melted the hell out of his tires, but it won’t take him long to recover.” Fiona gnawed on the end of her thumb. “How far away is your lab?”

“My lab?” He slammed on the brakes and turned to face her. Caution had always been his modus operandi, the way other men relied on communication skills or six-pack abs. There was no way he was going anywhere near his lab until he was sure what this woman wanted from him—and what she was capable of.

Forget bodily harm. His lab was the only thing that really mattered.

But in one fluid movement, Fiona slid so close she might have been in his lap. Ian had enough time to register her soft skin pressed against him before she jammed her foot atop his and hit the gas pedal.

“I’m not kidding. If you just give me a second to gain my bearings, I can explain everything. What I can do…all those trees in the forest.” She dug her heel into the bridge of his foot. He winced.

What about the elementary school? What about the bank robbery, the one where a security guard died from third-degree burns and the alarm system melted on impact?

“Or what?” Ian asked, his mouth dry. “You’ll kill me?”

He met her eyes, and caught a flicker of something more than fear.

Anger. “I’ll admit, the temptation is there,” she muttered, then took a deep breath and shook her head. “But I wouldn’t do that. Unlike some people, I actually care about how my actions impact others.”

Touché. He couldn’t argue with logic—especially logic that pointed out all too well the role he’d played in Fiona’s life.

She breathed deep. “As much as it pains me to admit it, Ian, I need your help. There’s a man back there who might be trying to kill me. And pathetic as it sounds, you’re the closest thing to a friend I have right now. Please.”

And there it was. She hit his Achilles heel—transmuted herself into a giant piece of green Kryptonite. A woman needed his help. A fugitive on the run asked him to be her friend.

He’d once made the mistake of inaction where this woman was concerned. Heck, some people might say that inaction was a scientist’s life way of life.

Ian Jones wasn’t
some people
.

So when Fiona pulled her foot away, he didn’t let up. He took a sharp turn at full speed and headed right.

Chapter Six

“There’s something I should tell you before you come in.”

Fiona took in the nice landscaping, the white picket fence, the kids’ toys in the neighbor’s yard. “Are you about to tell me that you still live with your parents?”

Ian dropped his keys. As he bent to retrieve them, Fiona drank in the sight of his ass, a perfect combination of muscle and whatever it was about Irish bloodlines that gave a man’s glutes such delicious perkiness.

This was what she’d been reduced to—a woman fleeing for her life, with no more common sense than to ogle her rescuer. A rescuer who, thank you very much, had once tossed her aside like she meant nothing. He was the last man she should turn to in her time of need.

Yet here she was. Needy.

“It’s my parents’ house, yes.” He stabbed his key into the lock. “But they don’t live here. They’re in Arizona now.”

“Touchy subject?” Fiona asked.

“Look, you’re the one who vowed to shoot me if I didn’t bring you here.” He held the door open and ushered her in. The blinds were drawn, and particles of dust clouded the air. Chintz floral furniture and childhood pictures filled the space. It was like a museum of his childhood, untouched except by time.

“I love what you’ve done with the place,” she murmured, trailing her fingers along the dusty photo of a scowling, sixteen-year-old Ian looking down from the entryway. “Very authentic retro.”

“I don’t really do much up here.” His curt voice prevented further discussion. “My lab is in the basement.”

“And you’ll let me see it?” Despite everything, she was oddly excited to gain access to his lair. It was like catching a glimpse of the real Ian Jones, the soft underbelly of the scientist. The man.

But he paused.

There was mistrust in his eyes, a murky darkness that got her temperature going all over again. His respect for her was so infinitesimal, he actually believed her capable of all those acts of villainy. And still she’d begged.

Being forced to ask him for help had knotted her stomach, but there was no other way around it. As promised, Patrick’s car had been waiting below, flanked by a pair of burly men who were probably hired to protect his life and livelihood as General Eagle, public safety extremist. She’d watched them through the melted slats of her blinds for a full thirty minutes before finally catching sight of Ian’s rusty old truck pulling in at the end of the block.

He’d been watching her apartment. With binoculars pressed to his eyes.

She’d had no idea what his intentions were, but in that moment, he was the least of three evils. Going with Patrick wasn’t an option. And if everything in the manila folder was true, neither were the authorities.

So she’d fired from the open window above her kitchen sink. Aim was something she’d perfected over the years, and the hiss from the first two tires went unnoticed. By the time she was on the third, the guards were on the alert, and she’d seen the flash as the largest of them pulled a gun.

Idiots. Metal got pretty hot pretty damned fast, and the guy would probably have nasty burn marks on his hands for the rest of his life. The other one dodged behind the car, giving her enough time to run down the back stairs of the building and slip, unnoticed, into Ian’s truck.

If she’d wondered before what Patrick was doing generating the whole public fear thing, she certainly didn’t question it now. Even his guards—paid to strut around like giant penises and baseball bats—had reason to be scared of her. Everyone did. She was an unstable freak who forced bona fide thugs to hide. She might as well have
Life of Crime
printed on her forehead.

But that wasn’t her—not now, and not ever. She’d fire at trees when the energy built up, and she’d dreamt of doing the same to Patrick’s face and possibly Ian’s backside. But the manila folder tucked inside her backpack, its contents a story she wished with all her heart had remained untold, would never be her. She would always be saddled with the guilt of ruining that poor man’s arm, but she didn’t set schools on fire, and she definitely didn’t kill innocent security guards.

But it would be damned hard convincing the authorities of that. Patrick had a plan. Before he’d even arrived in Ashland, puffed up and hawking General Eagle’s tales, he’d been gathering false evidence against her, playing his cards.

He knew her too well. And now Ian knew how awful she was, too.

Why did that second part hurt so much more than the first?

“I promise I won’t touch anything.” She held up three fingers. “Scouts honor.”

Ian eyed her, not blinking. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. I mean—it is that, of course. You aren’t getting anywhere near my work until you tell me what’s going on.”

“That’s fair,” Fiona said quickly.
Just don’t make me leave
.

“I feel like I should warn you, though.”

“Warn me? About what?”

Just then, the door next to Ian swung open, and a blur hurtled through. At first, Fiona thought it must have been some sort of mutant human pet, like the one from the Island of Dr. Moreau, but as the limbs unfolded and the creature righted itself, Fiona realized it was someone much less pleasant.

“Holy fucknuggets,” Neil Grantham said, letting out a low whistle. There was nothing at all subtle about the way he looked at her, his eyes traveling from tits to toes and back again, refusing to focus anywhere else. “You weren’t kidding. It really is Fingerbang.”

No one had called her that in years. Almost a decade, actually. That didn’t make the sting of it any less painful. She breathed in through her nostrils, her temperature rising to dangerous heights.

Fiona’s eyes widened when Neil staggered backward, coming to a stop only when he smacked into a dining room chair. He fell into a crouch, clutching his nose and howling as bright blood chugged through his fingers.

Ian shook his hand and scowled. And for once, the scowl wasn’t trained on her.

“I told you not to say that again,” he said, his words tight and controlled. “Apologize.”

“What?” Fiona cried. Neil echoed the sentiment.

“You heard me.” Ian nudged Neil with his foot. “You will treat Fiona with the respect she deserves, or you will get out of this house.” He turned to her, and the scowl softened into what might actually have been a smile. It was just a little quirk of the lips, a chip in that cool exterior, but it was enough.

“I’m really sorry about that,” he said. “Neil’s an idiot.”

“I’m aware of that,” she replied, suppressing a smile of her own. “It’s okay.” She felt suddenly magnanimous, as if she could pardon an entire block of death row inmates.

“Well, Squealy Nealy,” she said, resorting to a favorite high school nickname of her own. “It looks like you haven’t grown a single inch.”

Neil shot her a look of pure hatred, but Ian crossed his arms and got between them, preventing any further backlash. Neil hung his head, still dripping blood all over the linoleum floor. “I’m sorry, Fiona,” he mumbled.

“What’s that?” she asked, cupping a hand to her ear. Okay, so it was beneath her to torment the little weasel, but he deserved it. And she wanted to prolong this moment for as long as possible. “Did you say something?”

“I said I’m sorry, okay? I shouldn’t have called you that.”

Now, or ever?
she wanted to ask. But she couldn’t do it. After all, Ian had been just as responsible—if not more so—for perpetrating that awful nickname. The message had been loud and clear, even then. Not only had he rejected her, but he’d run out and told Neil about her obviously unwelcome overtures. And worse, he’d done nothing to stop the rumors from spreading. If he was at all sorry for what had happened in the past, he had yet to breathe a word about it.

How bad was it that, almost twelve years later, she still wanted that word? That breath?

Awful. It was awful.

Fiona Nelson. Fingerbang. As desperate for male attention as always. Nothing had changed.

She could feel the heat rising, that familiar crackle of self-destruction spiraling out of control. She closed her eyes and cursed inwardly. Not here. Not now.

Without any other recourse, she turned and fled, taking the front steps two at a time, desperate for air untainted by memories—that house, those boys. Hunched over, her hands on her knees, she pulled in huge breaths while searching for a good place to fire. It was lawn mowers and picnic tables as far as the eye could see. Nowhere to shoot safely—and she needed to shoot. Now.

Left with no other choice, she placed her hands palm-to-palm, allowing her energy to flow toward her hands. She’d gotten just far enough for the first spark to ignite when a hand grasped her shoulder and whirled her around.

“Fiona, please listen—”

The spark flared, but she managed to keep it from building into a ball of fire before Ian saw anything. But she saw. She saw a look of anguish cross his face, drawing his brow tight and tense. His hand was probably burning.

She wrenched herself from out of his grip and forced herself to focus.

“I don’t know what I can say,” he said. “I tried to warn you.”

She laughed, short and bitter. “What? That stepping into your house would be a painful trip down Memory Lane? No need to apologize for
that
, Ian. At least you cared enough to do something about it this time.”

Ian looked as though she’d punched him. That, or released her ball of heat right into his stomach. “I always cared, Fiona.” He reached toward her, moving almost in slow motion. “It was never that.”

She pulled away before he could make contact, an action so unthinking and ingrained that she forgot sometimes how it made other people react. Ian’s eyes shuttered, and the hard look smacked back into place. “Please come back in. I said I’d help you and I will.”

“Is Neil going to help, too?” she asked, blinking back tears. She’d be damned if she was going to waste them here.

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I’m afraid so. Neil is my partner in all this. I can’t do it alone. We have the evidence of what you’re capable of, Fiona. We need to know about what happened with the security guard at the bank.”

Her stomach tightened into that same familiar knot. Slowly, she asked, “How do you know I’m not going to do the same to you?”

“I don’t. But I think if you were going to hurt me, you’d have done it already. And Neil. I guess if you could stand there listening to him insult you and not burn every last bit of skin off his face, you must be trustworthy.”

She relaxed a little, even managed a small smile.

“So will you please come back and tell us who was trying to kill you and why?”

“First, I think I should show you.”

Ian’s brow knit. “Show me what?”

Fiona took a deep breath and did her best to ignore Neil’s greasy nose pressed against the big front window in the living room.

“I want to show you what I am.”

…

She’d asked him to take her somewhere secluded.

Ian would have liked to have her demonstrate her powers in his lab, where he could make the necessary recordings and perform a few tests, but she’d refused to go back in the house.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t trust myself not to murder your best friend—or accidentally burn down your house.”

Fair enough. He was close to murdering Neil himself. For a minute there, Ian had thought maybe they’d made a breakthrough, he and Fiona. He could never make up for his reticence in the past, but he could show her that he’d changed.

Unfortunately, things weren’t that simple—and he couldn’t just apologize and start things over. Fiona was dangerous. She might even be a killer.

They got into his truck, and he drove a little bit south of his neighborhood, where empty fields stretched in every direction and dry brush bracketed a sky mottled by clouds. The location seemed their best bet for seclusion, and it provided the optimal environment for duplicating the conditions of the original incident.

He got out of the cab and moved quickly to open her door. “Will this area do?”

She stepped from the truck, and her breath hitched. “This looks an awful lot like a place to kidnap young women and sew their skins into a suit.” She paused, looking around. “What exactly were you doing outside my apartment with binoculars, anyway?”

He ignored her question and pointed at a small rise in the land, which sloped up to a huge stone slab covered from top to bottom in graffiti. Most of it penises. “Shoot that.”

He couldn’t let himself be diverted. Couldn’t let himself be sucked into her easy charm. He needed answers first, no matter how much he wanted to fix what he’d broken. “Can you do it from this far?”

“Don’t insult me,” she replied. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

No. Not at all.

He wanted nothing more than to kneel before her and beg for forgiveness—forgiveness for his weaknesses, for exposing her to Neil’s ridicule, for not cherishing her when he’d had the chance, however remote that might have once been. If he watched Fiona become little more than an inhuman weapon capable of huge levels of destruction, she’d be rendered down to a science project. A test subject. An independent variable that must be controlled.

He could do this. The scientist in him needed the proof, much more than the man in him needed her approval.

“I’m ready,” he said.

“Fine. But you can’t freak out. You have to promise me you won’t freak out.”

“No freaking out. I’ve been waiting forever for this.”

When the research was first being done on the asteroid, Ian had been in school, a first-year chemistry major who spent way too much time in study hall for a kid his age. But it had paid off—at least at first. One of the professors at his college had been asked to participate in the preliminary studies, and he’d brought Ian and a few other promising students along to grind samples and clean beakers.

Ian couldn’t remember exactly why he’d been the one to try the stolen sample, injecting the tiny bit of opaque fluid into his veins. But he and the others had sat around, breathless, waiting to see what would happen. They’d heard the rumors, and everyone had a guess. Maybe he’d get super-intellect. Or telepathy. He’d secretly hoped for out-and-out brute strength, Hulk-style.