Playing With Fire

Copyright

Mischief

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.mischiefbooks.com

Copyright © Kat Black 2015

Kat Black asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780008128241

Version: 2015–01–15

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Epilogue: Teach na Tulaí, Co. Cork, Ireland

Acknowledgements

More from Mischief

About the Publisher

Dedication

This one is for my readers. Your support made this book possible. Thank you so much.

Chapter One

It was happening again.

Please, no. Not again.

A bubble of fear inflated in Annabel’s chest, trapping the air in her lungs as it rose to clog her throat. She fought to release it, to cry out, but the dark shape looming over her shifted closer; a crushing vice tightened around her neck, squeezing off her voice, cutting off her very breath.

She didn’t understand. How? How could this be happening?

Panic flared as she tried to get her bearings, to work out where she was. But dimness rendered her surroundings murky, indistinct. In the shadows, even the threat bearing down on her with such suffocating weight remained faceless. Terrifying.

No … no. Horror-spiked memories of pain and helplessness flooded her mind, jolting her into action. She couldn’t do this. Not again.

Never again.

Lashing out, she rained a storm of wild swings and strikes upon her attacker. But not once did she connect with solid form. Her fists seemed to pass through the nebulous shape as though her enemy was no more substantial than mist. She renewed her efforts, tried to pinpoint her aim, but black spots began to bloom around the edge of her vision and the watery blur of tears made it impossible to focus on what it was that she needed to fight.

Move, every atom of her being screamed. It was her only chance. She had to move, to get away. Scrabbling and heaving, she fought frantically to escape. But the weight held her pinned. So heavy. Far too heavy to allow her to struggle free.

Second by desperate second, her flailing efforts weakened as the strength leached from her body. Try as she might, she could find no energy in reserve. With her lungs ready to explode, the blackness tainting her vision thickened, threatening to extinguish the last of the light from her world …

‘No!’

The force of her own defiant cry snapped her awake. In an instant, the fog of darkness was dispelled, the malevolent shades of her nightmare extinguished by the soft golden glow of the bedside lamp that revealed familiar surroundings to her darting, fear-widened eyes.

Muscles locked stiff with shock, she lay temporarily frozen in her bed, the sound of her gasping breaths amplified in the blanketing stillness of the night. Displaced, the bed covers tangled low around her calves, leaving the winter air to chill the sweat that filmed every inch of her skin and stuck her nightshirt to her damp chest.

It took only a moment to register each of these details, to process them and ground herself in reality. Just a dream. A bad dream. Not real.

The sudden wave of relief that broke over her brought a rush of weakness that turned every locked joint and tightly knotted muscle to quivery jelly. She was OK, she assured herself as she exhaled a shaky breath’. Of course she was. Shaken, but safe. Because, despite her sleep being haunted by memories of the awful attack she’d suffered at the hands of her mother’s ex-lover, in reality the man himself was no longer a waking threat.

Instinctively, protectively, her hand went to her right forearm, the sensitivity of the skin there a reminder that the limb had been cut free of its cast only earlier that day. She traced with her fingers the line of the newly knit bone. No, Tony Maplin couldn’t hurt her any more. The drunken violence he’d unleashed upon both herself and her mother, coupled with a long list of outstanding court summonses and unpaid dues, had put him where he belonged – behind the bars of a prison cell.

Releasing another slow, unsteady breath, Annabel blinked at her alarm clock. Not even midnight. With a groan, she raised trembling hands and scrubbed them over her clammy face. It was going to be a long time until dawn.

Keen to rinse away the thick aftertaste of fear, she pushed herself to a sitting position, careful of her weakened arm. Reaching for the glass of water on the bedside table, she stalled as the sight of the photograph standing at the edge of the pool of lamplight brought a further rush of memories and powerful emotion.

While the frame itself was new – an elegant, unfamiliar replacement for the original, which had been broken at the same time as her arm – the image it held was one she was thoroughly acquainted with. A perfect picture of her five-year-old self, held aloft in her father’s arms, the two of them laughing in the summer sunshine in front of the inn that had been her childhood home. It was the most important record she had of that distant time. A frozen snapshot of love and laughter that she’d been forced to use as a weapon in the fight for her life. A glimpse of forgotten happiness that had smashed and splintered, leaving her believing it damaged and lost for ever.

Until today.

Until Aidan had walked back into her life and returned the precious gift of the past as well as offering the unnerving promise of a future.

Her barely slowed heartbeat threatened to skyrocket again as the name conjured a breathtaking image of dark masculine beauty, and raised a whole different set of fears that left her mouth suddenly dry.

Swinging to sit on the edge of her bed, she reached for the glass and took a mouthful of water. Chilled as she already was, the cold liquid caused a shudder to shoot from scalp to toe. She got to her feet and made for her wardrobe, aware that the turn of her thoughts towards a certain Irishman had done nothing to improve the weakness in her knees.

Aidan Flynn. Impossible, infuriating … and apparently irresistible. The man who’d turned her nice orderly life on its head from the moment fate had put him behind the bar of Cluny’s – the London restaurant she managed – until long after circumstances had caused him to leave. A rule-breaker, a force of nature and a law unto himself, he’d blasted his way past the barriers of accepted professional codes of conduct and personal etiquette and got closer to Annabel than anyone had before … until, ironically, the prospect of losing him had made her push him away.

Like the photo, she’d been convinced she’d lost Aidan from her life for ever. But after six weeks of silence he’d suddenly surfaced, showing up at her door, looking for answers.

‘I want to know why you acted the way you did. Why you ran out without a word, without a reason,’ he’d demanded with an uncharacteristic cool detachment, the lovely lilt of his accent clipped short, the look in his beautiful grey eyes – usually so expressive – shuttered and remote.

Shivering as she discarded her damp nightshirt and pulled on a replacement, Annabel pondered how, in the past, she would have welcomed such remoteness, would have encouraged exactly such emotional distance between herself and another human being.

But this time had been different, and even as she’d felt a rush of hope at his unexpected appearance, one look at his stern demeanour had crushed it, leaving her convinced he’d come for nothing more than to officially end things between them, face to face, after she’d been too cowardly to.

Feeling certain that she had nothing left to lose had somehow made it easier to open up, to reveal more vulnerability than she could ever remember doing with anyone else. ‘I was scared,’ she’d admitted, because when she’d so abruptly run out on his generosity and kindness, she had done so out of fear. Since she had so little experience of close friendships, let alone relationships, the shocking strength of the feelings this intensely passionate man had awoken in her had her literally running scared.

And now, as she pulled on her robe, she was scared all over again. Scared because, rather than gloating over or disdaining her for admitting her cowardice, Aidan had done something far more devastating and dangerous to her emotional state. He’d shown compassion and understanding by restoring her most precious possession to her.

Annabel grabbed the faux-fur throw from the end of the bed and returned to the bedside table to gather up the photograph before making her way to the sitting room. Clutching the frame to her chest, she recalled how that ultimate act of kindness had caused that very spot to ache with a pain so overwhelming that she had turned away from him to hide the tears that threatened to overflow.

‘Thank you,’ she’d barely managed to rasp out. ‘I don’t deserve this.’

He’d touched her then, for the first time since his arrival. Fingers on her chin, he’d forced her to face him, to meet that crystalline gaze that left her tears and her pain nowhere to hide. ‘If you had the chance to do that day differently, would you?’

Too choked at the thought of everything she’d thrown away, she’d simply nodded, unable to find her voice. But instead of the final goodbye she’d been anticipating, she’d found herself wrapped in a strong pair of arms and given a second chance. The deal sealed with a kiss.

And what a kiss. Potent, ardent, yet tempered with such heart-rending tenderness that even the memory had Annabel’s lips tingling.

She entered the sitting room and returned the frame to its usual place on her bookshelf before switching on a lamp and the television. Settling on the sofa, she draped the throw over herself and snuggled down to try to get comfortable.

Almost immediately, the lack of give in the cushions reminded her that, however bad her nights might currently seem, it was nothing compared to what was in store for her once the small, style-over-substance piece of furniture became her bed again when her mother was finally released from hospital. For six weeks Ellen had been in traction for the fractured neck she’d sustained during Tony Maplin’s attack. Although it had never been mentioned, Annabel couldn’t help but wonder if her mother’s sleep was as terrorised by nightmare replays of that day as her own.

Feeling the heavy pull of exhaustion, she used the television remote to channel-hop, searching for some late-night show mindless enough to send her back into a doze before she had to get up for a busy day at Cluny’s. But, unsurprisingly, neither the shopping channel nor sitcom reruns were up to the task of distracting her from the force that was Aidan Flynn. Or the velvet-wrapped promises of a future together he’d made to her mere hours before.

Despite his unwavering positivity, she was doubtful that they’d be able to merge their individual paths to make any long term commitment between them work. How could it, when she’d discovered that ultimately his intention was to move back to Ireland, while she had her own career path mapped out in England?

It was a sign of just how far he’d snuck through her defences when, seated beside him on this very sofa, she’d chosen to risk having him short-term rather than not at all. ‘Let’s try it and see.’

‘Oh, we’ll try, Annabel. Don’t you worry about that.’ He’d flashed his wicked, slightly crooked trademark smile at her – the one that never failed to make her belly somersault. ‘We’ll try anything and everything to make this work.’ Then he’d kissed her until she’d been left breathless, dizzy, so electrified by the prospect of what ‘everything’ might include that she’d been left stammering. ‘L-like what?’

‘All sorts,’ he’d promised. ‘To start with, we’ll date.’

That had thrown her. ‘Date?’ She’d never really been a dater … and surely they’d moved a bit beyond that stage already?

Her confusion must have been stamped on her features because he’d laughed and smoothed a thumb between her brows as though to rub away a frown. ‘Yes, you know – dinner, dancing, shows.’

‘Oh, but –’

‘Starting tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow?’ she’d parroted, still not really getting it. ‘I’m working.’

‘Tomorrow,’ he’d insisted, the light of laughter in his eyes sharpened to a determined glint. ‘I’ll pick you up from Cluny’s. Just for a quick nightcap.’

And then, apparently still being able to read the invisible undercurrents running through her as easily as he’d been able to do from the very start, he’d cupped her face, his expression softening again. ‘I know this is all going to be a first for you, and I want to do it right. We’ll feel our way through it together,’ he’d vowed, and lowered his head to brush his lips against hers again, that time a bare whisper of a touch, gone almost before it had begun, a warm, soft tease that had left her instinctively leaning in for more as he’d pulled back to add, ‘We’ll take it slow.’

Eyes still closed, she’d nodded, even as her body had screamed at her to jump him for the instant earth-shattering satisfaction it craved, remembering all too well the torture of Aidan Flynn’s idea of slow. But slow also meant she could keep control of the crazy emotions bubbling up from deeply hidden places inside her – the ones already threatening to drown her common sense. So when she’d finally opened her eyes and looked into his, it had been to agree.

‘Slow is good.’

Chapter Two

‘Hurry!’ Annabel gasped.

The only response Aidan was capable of giving was an urgent, animalistic growl of frustration deep in his throat as he buried his face in the crook of her neck. The smell, the feel, the taste of her had his blood fired and his senses reeling. If only she’d keep still, he could do as she asked. Hurry, as he so badly wanted to do.

But it appeared she was as far gone as he, caught in the grip of a frantic physical need that had them groping at each other like horny teenagers. Bodies rubbing and hands everywhere – sliding over smooth planes, moulding curves, fumbling in their haste to get past the barriers of clothing and revisit the pleasures of naked flesh their separation had denied them.

So much for taking things slow, Flynn. Despite wanting to do the noble thing, his good intentions were no match for the force of the attraction he felt for Annabel Frost. One second they’d been offering each other a tentative goodnight as she’d stepped over the threshold of her flat. The next he’d been inside too, his hands grasping the sides of her head as he’d pinned her tight between his body and the entrance-hall wall, lips fused, tongues sparring. All before her door had even had the chance to swing shut.

But it still wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. Anticipation had been building all through their nightcap as he’d expected it would. How could it not, when coffee had been their drink of choice and they’d found themselves in Chinos, the café where she’d first touched him, albeit by accident, all those months ago? During the six long weeks he’d had without her, that encounter, and every increasingly intimate one after, had replayed in his mind over and over and over, filling him with the constant dull ache of need and longing. And as if that hadn’t been temptation aplenty, Annabel had ordered a slice of chocolate cake, reminding him of how much of a sweet tooth she had; every pleasure-driven flicker of her eyelids, every lick of her red lips and the icing-smeared spoon had shot straight to his groin.

‘Hurry!’ she urged again, the word a breathy spur right into his ear, robbing him of any last hope of reining things in. Raising his head, he smashed his lips over hers, plunging his tongue into her mouth to taste that chocolate sweetness as he wrestled with the buttons of her coat.

If he’d wanted to keep things slow, he shouldn’t have let himself come to the door. With the sexual tension that had been thrumming through him since their reunion yesterday, he should have stuck to his original plan of staying in the taxi out in the street while she let herself through the security doors of the modern, multi-storey residential block, before continuing the journey across town to his own place.

But after they’d shared a semi-chaste kiss on the back seat his honourable resolve had been overridden by an altogether more primal surge of protectiveness. Watching her walk away brought flashbacks of the last time he’d dropped her off – high and happy from the weekend they’d spent in Vienna – when she’d refused to let him see her to her door. The price she’d nearly paid for that … He’d never forget the moment he’d caught a glimpse of Tony Maplin’s face at her window as the taxi had pulled away, never forget the split-second timing of his intervention that had saved her from even worse injuries than she’d already sustained. The remembered horror of that day had gripped him as effectively as a choke-hold around the throat, making it impossible for him to stay sitting there while she went up alone.

Shit! He tore his mouth away from the kiss. ‘The taxi.’ He’d told the driver he’d be back in a few minutes.

‘Send it away. Now,’ Annabel ordered, even as her questing hands ran down his back to grasp his arse cheeks and pull him impossibly closer. It seemed whatever the circumstances that had led to his current loss of control, she wasn’t complaining. ‘Hurry,’ she demanded again, this time grinding herself against the rock-hard ridge of his erection.

‘Fuck,’ he gasped harshly, head snapping back as hot needles of pleasure lanced through him. One look at Annabel’s half-closed green eyes and half-open smudged red lips had him crushing their mouths together again as his hands tunnelled beneath her overcoat. Under it, she was dressed in her usual severe work attire – a black skirt suit so sharply tailored he was surprised not to feel his fingers sliced to bits. Her hair was pulled back in its trademark perfect twist, leaving her looking as impeccably, formidably stunning as the first time he’d seen her in Cluny’s dining room. She hadn’t been at all happy that day, returning to work from a week’s leave to find he’d been taken on as head barman without her consent. Yet even as he’d endured the full blast of her icy disdain, he’d known he’d do almost anything to muss up that perfection she wore as armour.

And that thought was all it took to have the caveman part of his brain stomping its big hairy feet to know why the hell she wasn’t mussed right now. He retracted his hands from the recesses of her coat and raised them again to her head to hunt out and remove the clips that held her hair tightly tamed. Spearing his fingers into the long, heavy mass, he fanned them through to the ends.

Pulling back to watch the soft locks cascade over her shoulders, he realised he had a correction to make. Annabel wasn’t as stunning as she’d been the first time he’d seen her. She was more so. The colour of her hair then had been a dyed ruby red, but she’d allowed it to return to its natural flaming riot of spun gold and copper and cinnamon – a sight that made him very happy indeed. He’d always had a thing for redheads, but most especially for this one.

Before he could lean in to claim her mouth again, Annabel used the small distance he’d put between them to push a hand against his chest. ‘Taxi,’ she panted. ‘Now.’

He’d already forgotten. ‘Wait right there.’ He tore himself away, heaved the door open and raced for the stairs before his synapses could relay the urgent message to stop and turn around.

He was back in less than five minutes. And she was waiting for him. Watching through her little spyhole. Flinging the door open before he had to knock.

Then he was inside again, noticing she’d ditched the coat as, without a word, he pushed her back up against the wall and kissed her hard until neither of them had any breath left.

She pulled away first, sucking in air through lips his rough kiss had left red and swollen. Her hands were busy with the remaining buttons of his coat while his skimmed down over the tailored curves of her waist and hips.

‘Off!’ She wrenched the lapels back over his shoulders. He took his hands from her only long enough to help shake the coat from his arms and then he put them right back where they’d been.

‘Your turn,’ he ordered, bending to kiss her jawline while his fingers began gathering the fabric of her skirt, rucking it up. ‘Lose the jacket.’

Annabel moaned and let her head drop back against the wall, surrendering to his mouth as it closed over the pulse banging below her ear.

Hands working urgently in the tight space between their torsos, she managed to wrestle her jacket off while he got her skirt bunched up around her hips. As he felt her palms clasp his shoulders, his own slid downwards over her newly exposed thighs. What his touch discovered there had him smiling against the tender skin of her neck.

Straightening, he looked down into her upturned face. ‘Tights, Ms Frost?’ he questioned with a whiff of disapproval, as he’d done once before – on the day he’d decided that the only way he’d ever get past his manager’s frosty defences was to risk something daring. ‘Really?’

Her eyelids snapped open at the words and, when she would have lifted her head, he wrapped a hand around her throat, setting the pad of his thumb against her chin to hold her where she was.

‘Remember what happened the last time I found you in tights?’ he asked, because he sure as hell did. He recalled every heart-pounding second of the scene that had started as a tease and had spun way out of control down in the wine cellar of Cluny’s, leaving Annabel standing in a ruined pair of tights and him wondering if he’d lost his job as well as his sanity.