Heart of Fire Read online

  LOOK FOR THESE HEART-POUNDING NOVELS OF ROMANTIC SUSPENSE FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR

  LINDA HOWARD

  She’s hunting for a mate—and there’s no more playing it safe.

  OPEN SEASON

  Handsome, rich, sexy, deadly....

  MR. PERFECT

  “Sexy fun.”—People

  ...and don’t miss

  ALL THE QUEEN’S MEN NOW YOU SEE HER SON OF THE MORNING SHADES OF TWILIGHT AFTER THE NIGHT DREAM MAN HEART OF FIRE THE TOUCH OF FIRE

  All available from Pocket Books

  PRAISE FOR THE SENSATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERS OF

  LINDA HOWARD

  OPEN SEASON

  “A perfect mystery for a late summer weekend. It’s part romance with a dollop of suspense.”

  —The Globe & Mail (Toronto)

  “This book is a masterpiece. Howard hooks us with a devastating opening prologue, then paints such visual pictures of her characters that they live.”

  —Rendezvous

  “A modern-day version of the fairy tale about the ugly duckling that grows into a magnificent swan. . . . Linda Howard plays the fairy godmother with deftness and charm, two words not often associated with a thriller.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel (FL)

  MR. PERFECT

  “Sexy fun.... A frolicsome mystery.... Jaine Bright lives up to her name: she’s as bright—and explosive—as a firecracker.”

  —People

  “Mr. Perfect really scores. . . . Part romance novel, part psychological thriller, [it] is both a frightening and funny look at the search for an ideal mate.”

  —New York Post

  “Funny, exciting, gripping, and sensuous . . . one of her all-time best!”

  —Romantic Times

  Books by Linda Howard

  A Lady of the West

  Angel Creek

  The Touch of Fire

  Heart of Fire

  Dream Man

  After the Night

  Shadow of Twilight

  Son of the Morning

  Kill and Tell

  Now You See Her

  All the Queen’s Men

  Mr. Perfect

  Open Season

  Published by POCKET BOOKS

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1993 by Linda Howington

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN 13:978-0-671-01974-7

  ISBN 10: 0-671-01974-0

  eISBN-13: 9-781-45166-4-430

  First Pocket Books printing July 1993

  22 21 20 19

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Cover design by Carlos Beltran

  Printed in the U.S.A

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Who’s that, Daddy?” Jillian’s small finger poked insistently at a picture in the book her father held. She was ensconced on his lap, as she often was, for even though she was only five years old she was fascinated by his tales of long-ago people and faraway places, and had been since she was a toddler.

  “That’s an Amazon.”

  “What’s her name?” Jillian knew the figure was female because of the way it was shaped. When she was real little she had sometimes been confused by the length of the hair, until she realized that almost everyone in Daddy’s picture books had long hair, boys as well as girls. In search of a better means of gender identification, she had soon discovered a much more dependable clue: chests. Men and women had different chests.

  “I don’t know her name. No one knows if she ever truly lived.”

  “So she may be a pretend person?”

  “Maybe.” Cyrus Sherwood gently stroked his daughter’s small round head, lifting her thick, shiny hair and letting the dark strands drift down to fall once more into place. He delighted in this child. He knew he was biased, but her understanding and her grasp of the abstract were far beyond what was normal for her age. She was fascinated by his books on archaeology; one of his favorite memories was of her, at the age of three, tugging on a book that weighed almost as much as she did, wrestling it to the floor, and then spending an entire afternoon lying on her stomach, slowly turning the pages as she pored over the pictures, utterly oblivious to everything else around her. She combined childhood innocence with a startling logic; no one would ever accuse his Jilly of being muddleheaded. And if her primary personality trait was pragmatism, her second was stubbornness. He fondly suspected that his beloved daughter would turn out to be more than a handful for some unsuspecting man in her future.

  Jillian leaned closer to study the picture in greater detail. Finally she asked, “If she’s a pretend person, why is she in here?”

  “The Amazons are classified as mythical figures.”

  “Oh. Those people that writers make up stories about.”

  “Yes, because sometimes myths can be based on fact.” He usually tried to simplify his vocabulary when he was talking to Jillian, but he never talked down to her. If she didn’t understand something, his fierce little darling would demand explanations from him until she did understand.

  Her little nose wrinkled. “Tell me about these Amazings.” She settled back in his lap, making herself comfortable.

  He chuckled at her accidental but on-target pun, then launched into an account of the warrior women and their queen, Penthesilea. A door slammed somewhere in the house, but neither of them paid attention, caught up in the old world that was their favorite playground.

  Rick Sherwood bounded into the house with unusual enthusiasm, his customary sullenness lost in excitement. The cleats on his baseball shoes made a strange metallic sound against the wooden floors as he ignored the housekeeper’s oft-repeated demand to take the shoes off before coming inside. God, what a game! It was the best game he’d ever played. He wished his dad had been there to see him, but he’d had some student appointments and couldn’t make it.

  Up to bat five times, and he’d had four hits, one of them a home run. That made his batting average for the day a stupendous .800! Math wasn’t his strong point, but he could figure that batting average easily enough.

  He stopped in the kitchen to down a glass of water, gulping it so thirstily that rivulets ran down his chin, then ran another glass. As he brought it to his mouth he heard voices and paused. It sounded like his dad.

  Still impelled by excitement, he clumped rapidly toward the library, where he knew his dad would be. He burst the door open and rushed through. “Hey, Dad! I got four hits today, one of them a home run! I had seven RBIs and made a double p
lay. You shoulda been there!” The last was said on a burst of excitement, not as a complaint.

  Professor Sherwood glanced up from the book and smiled at his son. “I wish I had been. Good boy!”

  Rick ignored his little sister, perched on their father’s lap. “Your student appointments didn’t take as long as you thought, huh?”

  “They were postponed until tomorrow,” the professor said.

  Rick stood there, his excitement fading. “Then why didn’t you come to the game?”

  Jillian had been listening with interest, and now she said, “I like baseball games, Daddy.”

  He smiled down at her. “Do you, Jillian? Perhaps we’ll go to the next one.”

  She was satisfied with that, and her story had been interrupted long enough. She poked at the book to redirect his attention. “Amazings,” she prompted.

  Obediently the professor responded to the demand in that piping voice, something easy to do when the story was so close to his own heart. Thank heaven Jillian preferred myth to fairy tale, or he couldn’t have been nearly so patient.

  Rick’s happiness died, to be replaced by fury as he found himself once again shut out by that brat. Okay, so she was smart; so what? She couldn’t handle a double play. Frustration welled up inside him, and he stalked out before he gave in to the urge to grab her out of their father’s lap. The professor wouldn’t understand; he thought the little darling was wonderful.

  Little darling, my ass, Rick thought viciously. He’d disliked and resented Jillian from the moment she was born, just as he had disliked her mother. Her mother had died a couple of years ago, thank God, but the brat was still here.

  Everybody made a fuss over her because she was smart. They treated him like some dummy just because he’d been left back a grade in school. Okay, so he was seventeen, and would turn eighteen just after starting his junior year in high school; he wasn’t stupid, he just hadn’t tried real hard. Why bother? No matter how good he did, people still gave the brat all of their attention.

  He went upstairs to his room, where he pulled off his baseball shoes and hurled them against the wall. Now she’d even ruined the best game he’d ever had. If Dad’s student appointments had been postponed, he could have come to the ball game after all, but instead he’d come home to tell stories to that little brat. The injustice of it made Rick want to hit something. He wanted to hit the brat. He wanted to make her hurt, the way she made him hurt. She’d stolen his father from him, she and her stupid mother, and he would never, ever forgive her.

  Impulse jerked him to his feet. His socks muffled all sound as he padded out of his room and down the hall to Jillian’s room. He stood in the middle of it, looking around. Like all children, she gathered her treasures around her; the room was littered with her favorite books and dolls and other mementos with meanings obvious only to her. Rick didn’t care about any of that; he just looked for her special doll, the one she loved more than any of the others, a bedraggled plastic playmate she had named Violet. She usually slept with it snuggled against her cheek.

  There it was. Rick grabbed the doll and slipped back to his own room, trying to decide what to do next. He wanted to whack the thing to pieces and leave it on Jillian’s bed, but animal cunning told him he would be blamed for it, because there was no one else who could have done it. Still, just hiding the doll from her wasn’t enough. His jealousy demanded more; he needed to destroy something she loved, even if he was the only one who knew about it.

  Smiling, he got his pocket knife from the top of the dresser and opened it. Sitting down on the bed, he calmly and thoroughly dismembered the doll. Jillian wouldn’t know what he’d done; she would cry because her favorite doll was lost, but no one would accuse him of anything. He would hug the knowledge to himself, and every time he looked at her he would gloat, because he would know and she wouldn’t.

  1

  Jillian Sherwood was tight-lipped with anger as she let herself into her condo. It was less than two years old, and she usually felt a surge of pleasure and achievement on stepping over the threshold, for the condo wasn’t only great looking, it was hers, but today wasn’t a usual day and she didn’t even notice the cool, soothing interior. She slung her canvas bag onto the foyer table and stalked straight through the living room to the balcony. Her anger was so overwhelming that she felt as if she had to be outside so it could expand.

  She stood rigidly still in the late spring heat of Los Angeles, her hands braced on the rim of the waist-high concrete wall. She had a good view of the city, and normally she loved it, both the pastels of daytime and the glowing neons of night, but she was too angry right then to even see it.

  Damn those narrow-minded bastards!

  She had paid her dues, earned the right to work on the Ouosalla dig in east Africa; it was the biggest new archaeological find in decades, and her mouth literally watered at the thought of being involved. She had never wanted anything as much as she wanted to help excavate the buried ancient village that had only recently been discovered on the African coast of the Red Sea. The dig was being funded by the Frost Archaeological Foundation, the very foundation she worked for, and she had been almost giddy with excitement when she submitted her name for consideration for the team being chosen to work on the Ouosalla site.

  Why shouldn’t she have expected to be chosen? Her work was excellent, and so were her reports; her papers had been printed in several reputable publications. She had a doctorate in archaeology and had already been on several minor digs in Africa; her experience would be of considerable value to a dig as important as the one at Ouosalla. Only the best would be chosen, but she knew that she was one of the best. She was experienced, dedicated and hardworking, and possessed the kind of nimble, commonsense mind that allowed archaeologists to piece together ancient lives from the fragments left behind. There was no reason why she wouldn’t be chosen.

  But she hadn’t been, because to the pinheads who ran the foundation, there was one very good reason not to include her: her name was Sherwood.

  The head of archaeology at the university had put it to her point-blank: The daughter of Cyrus “Crackpot” Sherwood wouldn’t be a prestigious addition to any archaeological team. Her own work and reliability were overshadowed by her father’s reputation for propounding wild theories.

  She was beating her head against a wall and it infuriated her. Her father had always said that she had enough determination for three people, but in this instance she was frustrated by a lack of options. She didn’t want to leave the field of archaeology; she loved it too much. But the upper levels of her chosen career were closed to her, because of who she was. Archaeological digs cost a lot of money, and there weren’t many sponsors around; the competition for the available funds was murderous. Therefore no reputable team could afford to send her on a major dig, as her very presence would call into question the validity of the findings, and the team would then lose the funding.

  Even changing her name wouldn’t do any good; the world of archaeology was a small one and too many people knew her. If only it weren’t all so political! The funding went to the big names that got the publicity, and no one would take the chance of getting bad press by including her. She had been on plenty of minor digs, but all of the important finds had been closed to her.

  Not that she would have changed her name, even if it would have done any good. Her father had been a wonderful man and a brilliant archaeologist. She had dearly loved him, and still missed him even though he had been dead for half of her twenty-eight years. It infuriated her that his many contributions to archaeology had been virtually ignored because of his wilder schemes and theories, none of which he had been able to prove. He had died in an accident in the Amazon jungle while on a trek that he’d hoped would provide incontrovertible proof of one of his more outrageous theories. He had been called a charlatan and a fool, but after his death the more sympathetic had decided that he had merely been “misguided.”

  Cyrus Sherwood’s reputation had followed J
illian throughout her college days and her career, so she had often felt as if she had to work harder than anyone else, to be more accurate, more conscientious, to never show any of the flights of fancy that her father had reveled in. She had devoted herself to archaeology, never even taking a vacation, using every possible moment to pursue her goals.

  All for nothing.

  “Crackpot” Sherwood’s daughter wasn’t welcome on any major digs.

  She banged her hands down on the wall. He hadn’t been a crackpot, she thought fiercely. He had been a little vague, a little off-key, but a marvelous father, when he was home, and a damn good archaeologist.

  Thinking of him made Jillian remember the boxes of his papers that she had never gone through. After his death, Professor Sherwood’s papers had been packed up and the house sold, and her half brother, Rick, had taken the boxes to his dingy apartment and simply stacked them in a corner. He had no interest in them, and as far as she knew, they had never been touched. When Jillian finished college and moved into her own place she had offered to take them, to get them out of his way, but Rick had refused—more, she thought, because he liked the idea of having something that she wanted than because he himself wanted their father’s things.

  In that, as in most things, Rick’s reasoning had been faulty. Though she would never have destroyed her father’s papers, she hadn’t been panting to get at them. Quite the contrary. By then, Jillian had been forced to full, painful acknowledgment of her father’s reputation as a crackpot, a joke in the profession, and she hadn’t wanted to read anything that might make her believe it, too. Better to keep her memories of him as they were.

  But now she felt a surge of curiosity and a need to bring his memory closer. He had not been a crackpot! Some of his theories were unconventional, but five hundred years ago the theory that the earth was round was also considered a crackpot idea. Her father had spent countless hours poring over maps, charts, and journals, tracking down clues, to help formulate theories. And in the field he had been superb, able to tell so much about the past by the few shards of evidence that had survived to the present day.