Gift of Fire

finally stopped speaking. He took the crystal out of Maggie’s hand. “Open your eyes, Maggie.”
    She blinked at him suspiciously. “Hmmm.” Experimentally she turned her head first to one side and then the other. “Better,” she announced. “I declare. That’s a lot better, all right. Maybe you’re onto something with that crystal thing.”
    “Or maybe the aspirin finally kicked in,” Oliver Crump said wryly. “We’ll never know for sure.”
    “Well, either way, I appreciate it,” Maggie said as she rose to her feet. “Just hope the cure lasts.” She nodded at Oliver and Verity and left the room.
    There was a short silence. Oliver was staring at Verity thoughtfully. She wanted to ask him more about crystals, but something made her glance toward the doorway.
    Jonas stood there watching them. His eyes were unreadable. The lazy masculine satisfaction that had shone warmly in that golden gaze all during lunch was gone. “I came back to see if you knew what happened to my notebook, Verity. I can’t find it.”
    “I think you left it in the salon. I noticed you writing something down in it just before lunch.” She smiled at him and wondered why he was lying. He knew perfectly well where he’d left the notebook. She would have bet her life on it.
    Without a word Jonas vanished from the doorway.
    “That,” Oliver Crump observed thoughtfully, “is a man who could be driven to kill if he thought he was going to lose you.”
    Verity was shocked to the core. “He would kill me?” she whispered.
    “No,” Crump said, shaking his head with grim finality. “Never you. But any man who tried to take you away from Quarrel would soon discover that his life wasn’t worth much. I think Jonas has seen more violence that most men see in a lifetime. Perhaps he caused some of it himself. Whatever the reason, it is a part of his nature, and you must be prepared to accept that.”
    Verity spread her fingers on the tablecloth and looked down at them. Jonas had experienced violence from several lifetimes, she knew. He had a psychic affinity for it. She wondered if that sort of thing was an inherited trait. She took one hand off the table and touched her abdomen.
     
    Oliver Crump sat alone at the table for a long while after Verity left. He had been right. Verity Ames had answers to questions he had been asking for a long time. She could teach him things he longed to know about working with crystals. Already he had learned more than he had ever expected.
    To think he nearly hadn’t allowed Elyssa to talk him into spending the week here at the villa. In the end, Crump had come out of sheer curiosity. He’d heard the rumors about Jonas Quarrel, and he’d wanted to learn the truth.
    But it was Verity who had captured Cramp’s immediate attention.
    It was odd that she seemed totally unaware of her power. Perhaps it was because she was linked so strongly to Quarrel. It wouldn’t occur to her to allow herself to form a mental bond with anyone else. On some fundamental level, Verity Ames was very innocent and very virtuous.
    Crimp didn’t understand the nature of her link with Quarrel, but he sensed the strength of it and it awed him. He knew that he had better learn what he could from Verity while she was here, because Quarrel would never allow her to get too close to any other man, not even one who sought only a psychic connection with her.
    Crump smiled wryly. Quarrel would very definitely not let her get close to any male who offered that kind of connection. In Quarrel’s eyes, such a bond would be more threatening than a physical seduction.
    Jonas Quarrel was an intelligent man. He was also a very possessive one.
    But Crump had just discovered that he, himself, was a greedy man in some ways. He would take as much as he could get from Verity, and hope he didn’t step so far out of line that Quarrel felt obliged to beat him to a pulp.
     
    Verity saw Preston Yarwood stride furiously back into the villa an hour later. She was alone in the salon at the time, curled up in an overstuffed chair, a book on her lap. But she wasn’t reading. She was thinking about babies’ names.
    The subject of names, she had just discovered, tended to have a sobering effect. In a strange way, it brought home the reality of her situation as nothing else had. It put a label on something that until now had not been totally real.
    She was pregnant, and the baby’s father wanted to marry her. Given that she loved the baby’s father