Page 46 of Hotter than Wildfire

Now was the time for sex, and he had to get the violence out of his system before he even thought of touching Eve. Ellen.

Killing and fucking were related. He didn’t particularly like the thought, but there it was. Soldiers needed sex after a fight—hard, fast, rough sex. Preferably not with a wife or a girlfriend, because what they were getting out of their systems was not nice and not gentle.

Harry rarely trusted himself with a woman after extreme violence because the thought of hurting a woman, even a little, even if she wanted rough sex, even if she asked for it—man, no. Just couldn’t do it. He steered clear of the ladies when the adrenalin of violence was still sloshing around his system. He either drank or ran or used his fist.

Unlike Sam and Mike, who were lions hitting the bars where women congregated like gazelles at the watering trough. Well, not Sam, not any more. Harry didn’t think Sam even saw other women now that he was married to Nicole.

Mike…well, Mike was a slut. He’d fuck anything female that held still long enough.

Harry had to eject every ounce of violence from his system right now. He wanted to take Ellen to his bed with a ferocity that scared him. He wanted her bad and he wanted her now.

He had to tie her to him with sex. Make her his.

Sweat trickled down his back, and it wasn’t the sweat of sexual excitement. No, it was the greasy sweat of imagining this amazing woman with her fingernails pulled out one by one and then her fingers cut off with shears, knuckle by knuckle. Imagining her waterboarded, gang raped…the horror was coming off him in waves.

That wasn’t going to happen. If he had to handcuff her to him, so be it. No one was going to touch her, ever again, unless it was him.

But to be absolutely certain that he could keep her safe, that nothing bad would happen to her, he had to bind her to him. Make sure she obeyed him instantly. No more bolting because he’d slanted a glance at Sam.

So she had to obey him, stay put where he put her, and not take matters into her own hands. A year ago, she’d stepped off Earth and had landed on a vicious planet where all the inhabitants were predators. The usual rules didn’t apply. The usual rules got you killed and you died badly. Harry knew that planet intimately. It was where he had been born—his native land.

The best way to keep her safe, tie her to him, to make her do exactly as he said, when he said it, was sex. Hot, intense sex. And lots of it. So much she couldn’t even begin to imagine being separate from him. So much so that in danger, she’d do what he said instantly, instinctively.

Because back at that hotel, it had been so close. If she’d zigged instead of zagged, if she’d arrived one minute earlier or he’d arrived one minute later, she’d be dead right now instead of messing with his head.

The elevator pinged, the doors opened onto his floor and like a switch being thrown, the sweat of fear turned into the sweat of lust.

Approaching Sea-Tac Airport

“The pilot’s started his descent,” Montez said and Piet grunted.

Montez had slept, eaten two gourmet sandwiches downed with an excellent half-bottle of Shiraz, and watched a movie.

Piet had neither eaten nor drunk anything. He hadn’t even used the crapper. He’d spent the entire three and a half hours tapping away at a computer, staring ferociously into the monitor. Out of curiosity, Montez had stopped to look on his way to the bathroom but all he’d seen had been a grid and some numbers flickering on the screen.

He was sick of the silence, sick of Piet acting as if he didn’t even exist, but he didn’t dare complain. He just hoped Piet hadn’t lost his touch. He had no idea what he’d been doing for the past eight years. Crocheting for all he knew. Maybe Piet couldn’t track any more, maybe⁠—

“Got it,” he said softly.

Montez shot up. “What? Got what?”

Piet slid the monitor around and Montez stared blankly at the screen. It looked like one of those kid games – connect the dots. There were about ten dots in a cluster and four outlying dots. All the dots were different sizes.

It made no sense to him. He lifted his eyebrows.

“She’s a woman on the run,” Piet said. “She’d keep a basic level of preparedness and I imagine that would include keeping her hands free. So if she had a cellphone I imagined she’d have Bluetooth technology. A hands-free headset and mike.”

Montez shrugged. So?

“Bluetooth emits a radio signal which can be tracked over time. It’s called snarfing. What you’re seeing is tracks of the Bluetooth signal, over time. So these are the places she’s been over the past three months, which presumably is when she acquired the prepaid. The size of the dot indicates the number of times she was at a specific site and the time spent there. The larger the dot, the closer the connection to her.”

Christ. Montez bent forward to look at the dots. Now if only⁠—

As if in response to his silent request, Piet punched a button and the dots were overlaid over a map. A street map, Montez saw. Of Seattle!

All of a sudden he saw it. He was looking at a map of all the places Ellen had been over the past months. She had kept her life simple, in a tight spiral around Larsen Square.

Piet tapped the dots, starting with the largest one. “That’s where she rented a room. That’s a bar that plays jazz two nights a week, called the Blue Moon. She’s there almost every night until recently. Probably working, until she started selling so big. That’s a food market, that’s a bookshop, that’s an internet cafè.” He tapped a large dot. “And that’s a boarding house with three rooms. Two men and one woman. One of the men is a travelling salesman who rents the room because it’s cheap by the month but he’s only there six or seven nights a month. The other man is a sixty year old librarian. And the woman?” He pulled up a photo from the DMV. She was young, pretty, blonde. “Name’s Kerry Robinson, but the ID doesn’t really hold up that well, so I think we can assume it’s a fake. And she works at the Blue Moon. I think she’s Ellen’s friend.”