Read Online Into The Fire by Manda Scott - Free Book Online Page A

out of memory.
    More recently, they had collaborators in the Vichy government and the Milice even while others slipped into the forest to join the Maquis, or hid English agents for the Resistance. In ’44, they sent younger members to infiltrate the Communists when it seemed as if they might conquer the whole of France after the war, and they had others already working hand-in-glove with the Americans to make sure such a catastrophe couldn’t happen.
    But until now, they have been contained in the south. If you were to draw a line from Lyon to Bordeaux and look down, everything below it is theirs and has been for ever. This is where the money resides, where the sea laps at Marseilles, Monaco, Montpellier. Stretch a little east and you can touch the contacts in Turin, the banks in Zurich, the big families of Barcelona. Now, though, they have a new goal. In two years, the Family plans to sweep Luc along a route that took the current president nearly a decade. Lack of ambition has never been one of their failings.
    This, then, is what they were planning, the detail of it, as Picaut passed the door.
    ‘And what about your wife?’ Uncle Landis asked. All the weight in that one word.
    ‘Inès will be at my side.’ Luc spoke with the precision of one who has drunk to the point of absolute honesty. ‘She may be difficult in some things, but in this she knows her place.’
    Picaut was gone by the morning. Since then, she has communicated with her husband only through her lawyer and has made sure she is never alone in his presence.
    She owns this apartment; Landis was true to his word. If the divorce gives her nothing else, this is her pension, and a good one. Luc left within a week, but it still doesn’t feel secure and her own lawyer has told her not to change the combination on the number pad that locks the door, not to do anything that might give Landis ammunition to suggest her a less-than-perfect wife. She has not been back often in the past eight weeks.
    She reaches the wet-room at the far end of the hallway and stands on the heated marble floor, discarding her ash-strewn clothes.
    This, oddly, is her favourite place. In here she is safe. She can lock the door if she needs to, and because she can, she doesn’t. The window faces east, to the rising sun, the shutters are open, the glass opaque. She stands in front of it naked, feeling the grit of the night rough against the soft skin under her arms, in the fold beneath her breasts, in her ears, her hair, her eyes, her nose.
    She turns on the shower. The steam builds to the high ceiling. She steps underneath and hot water seeks out the places where falling cinders burned her.
    She burns again, and there is a part of her that revels in the pain and draws it inside, as if by this she might come to know what burning is, might reduce it, might make it manageable. The sight of a man’s incinerated corpse will not leave her, nor the manner of his death. She could be sneezing out charred parts of the body, washing him out of her hair …
    She turns round and lets the power wash her shoulders, the curve of her back. She leans into the pressure, is held by it, could sleep in it … Is sleeping in it—
    ‘Inès? Is that you?’
    She rockets forward into dryness and cold. Her eyes snap open.
    ‘
Luc?
’
    He is standing in the doorway to the shower room, his eyes wide, his hair awry. He is a dark god, a sculpture of pure beauty, and the shock of his presence punches through her belly, a raw, ripe thing, snatching at animal instincts that have lain dormant these past four months. She draws a halting breath.
    ‘Inès …’ With one hand, he reaches for her. Lust lights his eyes, carves new lines around his mouth.
    She hasn’t seen him since January, and he is here, and he wants her, and every plane of his face, of his being, is stronger than memory, more glorious. She remembers his touch, his breath on her cheek, his hands on her breasts, on the flat of her abdomen, the downward