Hotter Than Wildfire by Lisa Marie Rice Page A

operator and had been trained and trained hard not to show surprise.
    Had there been any capacity for surprise left in him when he signed up, Delta had beaten it right out of him.
    But right now, he felt as if someone had whacked him upside the head with a two-by-four.
    Eve. Fuck him, he had Eve sitting right across from him, with that soft Southern-tinged voice he piped most evenings straight into his head.
    And she wasn’t a seven-chinned hippopotamus, either. She was a real beauty. Run down and scared, sure, but still gorgeous. While listening to her, it had been really hard to pay attention. He was ashamed of himself, but there it was.
    Harry wasn’t Mike, the man-slut. Harry’d been celibate for almost two years now, the whole year in Afghanistan, where to bed a woman meant her death by stoning, and the year after, when he’d come back in pieces and had had to put himself painfully back together.
    It was as if sex had fled his life, and fuck him if it didn’t decide to come roaring back into his life right this instant. He had a scared beauty in front of him and she wasn’t thinking about sex, she was thinking about survival, so he should be ashamed of himself.
    And he was, sort of. Except the hard-on took precedence over the shame.
    Yep. Harry Bolt, Mr. Self Control himself, was getting a hard-on even though he was sweating to keep it down. Everything about this woman turned him on. That pale, porcelain skin that contrasted so delightfully with the rich, shiny, dark-red hair, the fatigue-bruised, beautiful eyes, the delicate lines of her cheekbones and jawline.
    Even exhausted, rumpled, with deep purple smudges under her eyes, so tense she was practically thrumming, she turned him on more powerfully than any other woman he’d ever met.
    And then…and then it turned out she was fucking Eve .
    Harry was still getting over the shock of that when a soft knock sounded at the door separating his office from Sam’s, and Sam stuck his head in.
    “There was someone to see me?” Sam had a few lines in his face he hadn’t had yesterday, so Nicole’s morning sickness must have been bad. But if he was here, that meant she was feeling better and she’d come in to work. He wouldn’t be here otherwise.
    Sam looked at Nora Charles—or whatever the hell her real name was, though Harry could think of her now only as Eve—and at Harry, sensing the electricity in the air, and walked into Harry’s office.
    Sam’s presence rearranged the molecules in the room and gave Harry a little space to get his head out of his ass and try to get his dick to go down a little.
    Nora— Eve —was looking as if she’d been run over by a truck. She hadn’t wanted him to figure out who she was. Even though her story had been carefully edited to keep all details out, Harry could figure them out now. The city in the north was Seattle. The agent was Roddy Fisher, who’d discovered Broken Monkeys and Isabel.
    Sam was looking at him, at Eve, and back at him.
    Eve was sitting at the very edge of the chair, clutching her no-name canvas backpack with white knuckles.
    Terrified.
    And Harry was a dickhead. Hard-headed, tough-as-nails Harry had morphed right into a fanboy and had scared this woman who, it turned out, was not just gorgeous, but who had a once-in-a-generation musical talent and was terrified.
    If she was here, her life was on the line, and he had to get a grip on himself.
    Harry turned to Sam, keeping his movements slow and unthreatening. “Come on in, Sam. Meet Eve.”
    Sam was pretty unsurpriseable, too. So maybe it was sleep deprivation, or the stress of watching his wife throw up her stomach lining, that had him opening his eyes in shock.
    “ The Eve? The singer?”
     
     
      “That’s highly confidential information,” Ellen said sharply. Information that could get her killed.
    So this was Sam Reston.
    Ellen looked at him carefully. Though he didn’t look like Harry Bolt at all—Reston was dark-haired with rough