Consumed by Fire Read Free

looked at Corsini, and he wondered if she could see anything. She didn’t look perturbed, just continued down the aisle toward him, and for a crazy moment he thought of a bride walking to meet her groom. Some bride, he thought, the trace of a smile tugging at his mouth. She looked as if she’d been rolling in dust, she had scrapes on her long legs, and her hair beneath the bandanna was a mess.
    She finally reached him, and if there was a slight hesitation in her step only he would have noticed. She looked him in the eye, plastered a totally fake smile on her face, the same one she’d given them before, and greeted him as she had before, in American-accented Italian, though this time with a hint of a question in her greeting.
    He answered in the same language, with a better accent. “Good afternoon, signorina. It’s a very fine church, isn’t it?”
    She was definitely nervous, looking up at him uneasily despite her friendly smile, but that could be simply because she was alone in a deserted place with an unknown man. For Claudia that would be enough to blow her head off. He wasn’t as trigger-happy. “Very fine,” she agreed. “I’ve been studying it.”
    “You are a student?” He was stringing out this inconsequential conversation while he covertly watched her. She was looking at him as if he were a murderer, he thought resignedly. He was going to have to kill her after all.
    “Sort of,” she answered, and he wondered why she was prevaricating. It raised his suspicions. “If you’ll excuse me, signor, I have to get back to town . . .”
    “You’re American, aren’t you?” he said suddenly in English. Maybe he could get a better sense of her in her own language.
    She looked startled. “Y . . . yes. And you?”
    “From Connecticut,” he lied, but an East Coast polish went better with his current incarnation. He was actually from the endless winters of Wyoming, from miles and miles of emptiness and spiky mountains and bone-deep cold. “What is your area of interest?”
    She clearly wasn’t in the mood for idle conversation. She seemed anxious to get away from him, and that might have sealed her fate. “Medieval clerical architecture,” she admitted finally. “With an emphasis on walled towns. And now I really need . . .”
    “You picked a good town for it then,” he said, cutting off her excuse to leave. “I haven’t been back home for a number of years, but unless things have changed drastically I wouldn’t think there’d be a whole lot of jobs in that area.”
    “I teach college. I already have my degree, I’m just working on a project.” She seemed to struggle with the words, and he wondered what she really wanted to say. What was she covering up?
    “You’re an academic?” he said, and she winced.
    “I suppose so,” she said reluctantly. “Excuse me, but I really need to go.” She was already edging away, and he kept himself from reaching for her. If she ran he could catch her. That, or bury a bullet in the back of her brain with the same amount of care it took him to tie his shoes.
    “Do you have a car?” he asked, stalling her as she turned to leave.
    She blinked those gorgeous green eyes of hers. They were startling—a clear emerald color that had to be from contacts, just as his own eye color was.
    She was looking at him warily, filled with distrust. Shit.
    “I don’t need a car.”
    “Look, I’m driving down into Cabrisi. You must be staying there—it’s the only town in the area, and you’re on foot. Let me give you a ride. Trust me, I’m perfectly harmless.” He held up both hands in a surrendering gesture.
    “I don’t think . . .”
    “Look, I saw you here, and I don’t like to leave a single woman alone up in these hills with no protection. Not when it’s getting dark.” He gave her his patented engaging grin. “For all I know you’re some kind of super-spy, with epic martial arts skills and lethal weapons all over you. But in case you’re