Ignis

By KJ

Felicity Davis, principal of Rawson Girls Grammar School, is a passionate educator, an inspirational leader, some say even an ice queen, although she's not sure about that last one. But one thing Felicity knows is that she is perfectly happy with her life. That is until the trauma, the darkness of her past, comes crashing into her present, revealing a deeply buried secret, and placing Felicity and those she loves in incredible danger. Inspector Tal Diamandis takes on the case, attempting to extinguish the flames of Felicity's past before they consume her. Matters become complicated as Felicity and Tal realise their mutual spark of attraction but when they finally connect the shocking links, the explosive conclusion will leave everyone reeling.

Can Felicity play with fire or will the fire become an inferno?

A dark, romantic thriller from the author of Coming Home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: KJ
• Release date: May 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224552184

Book preview

For Roanne

Because when you have a mutual spark, why not light that fire?

Acknowledgments

ONE OF THE MOST ASTONISHING things about this novel is that it just fell out of my head. I’m serious. Suddenly I had thousands and thousands of words in a very short amount of time. It was mind-blowing. Oh! But before I had words, I had an actual plan for the story. I never have plans. I tend to make it up as I go, then the characters take over and tell me what to write. But this one? Plans, timelines, squares on paper, paper even.

Here’s why. The story of Felicity was essential to get right. I had to tie it into Coming Home and Art of Magic, because she appears in those books, you see. There were people—readers—who I wanted to respect because they valued and expected continuity. I wanted to respect the closure of the Coming Home universe. But the other reason for getting it right was that Felicity and Tal needed their own story—a stand-alone—that could be read without having to read the other books. I also wanted Felicity to star in my first attempt at a thriller. She seemed like the sort of strong character who could hold the tension of a thriller. Probably with a raised eyebrow. This is not exactly a romance. Oh yes, there’s romance in it, but that’s not the main plot. The main plot?

It’s about walking through fire to come out the other side, like a phoenix rising from the trauma of the past to fly free into the future. It’s intense and graphic and mysterious and will keep you on the edge of your seat. Well, near the edge hopefully, sort of creeping towards the front, maybe your spine is more upright, perhaps there are goosebumps...anyway, it’s not what I normally write.

I HOPE YOU LIKE IT.

To my beta team, who are amazing. Soph, M, Sel, Connie, Sarah, Maggie, and Amanda kept me on track and made sure Felicity stayed in my head. They found errors and plot holes and completely illogical ramblings that made me, upon re-reading, wrinkle my eyebrows and ask myself what on earth I’d been thinking when writing that. They found those. They also waved pom poms as they cheered me on when I had many moments of imposter syndrome. I get those a lot so I highly recommend a cheerleading team. They are invaluable.

Georgie, your advice and information about escorts and sex workers helped me write Isabelle and Hannah. I hope I did the profession justice. Any errors are mine.

Em. You are astonishing. I love working with you, and your creativity is out of this world. This cover is divine.

Thank you Angela for making my words and sentences and paragraphs make sense. Commas are like glitter, aren’t they?

Also by K J

COMING HOME

Goldie Awards finalist, LesFic Bard Awards finalist

LEARNING TO SWIM

KICK BACK

Goldie Awards finalist

ART OF MAGIC

Goldie Awards finalist (cover design), LesFic Bard Awards finalist (cover design), Lesfic Bard awards winner (romance), eLit silver medalist

AN UNEXPECTED GIFT: Christmas In Australia: Five Short Stories

CHANGE OF PLANS

About the Author

Best-selling author KJ lives in Bendigo, Australia with her wife, their son, three cats and a dog.

TWITTER AT @PROPERTYOFKJ

Instagram at kjlesfic

Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/kj.lesfic.7/

I SINCERELY HOPE YOU enjoy reading Ignis. If you do, I would greatly appreciate a review on your favourite book website. Maybe a tweet. Or even a recommendation in your favourite Facebook lesbian fiction group. Reviews and recommendations are crucial for any author, and even just a line or two can make a huge difference. Thanks!

Synopsis

FELICITY DAVIS, PRINCIPAL of Rawson Girls Grammar School, is a passionate educator, an inspirational leader, some say even an ice queen, although she’s not sure about that last one. But one thing Felicity knows is that she is perfectly happy with her life. That is until the trauma, the darkness of her past, comes crashing into her present, revealing a deeply buried secret, and placing Felicity and those she loves in incredible danger. Inspector Tal Diamandis takes on the case, attempting to extinguish the flames of Felicity’s past before they consume her. Matters become complicated as Felicity and Tal realise their mutual spark of attraction but when they finally connect the shocking links, the explosive conclusion will leave everyone reeling.

Can Felicity play with fire or will the fire become an inferno?

A dark, romantic thriller from the author of Coming Home.

Before

SHE PICKED AT HER FINGERNAIL, waiting for the others to shuffle silently into place behind their chairs. The long dining table stretched both left and right of her position, twenty-four places set with simple crockery and utilitarian cutlery. Water glasses for the women and children. Tea for the men, which was replaced at lunch and dinner by beer and wine. But always water for the women and children.

At thirteen years of age, she was relatively invisible; the babies, the wives, the men and, of course, the Benevolent Father, were of much higher priority at the table, on the farm, and in life, despite her importance as a gift. She gently angled her foot and scuffed a tiny mark on the wooden floorboard with the sneaker’s edge, shifting the red dust that permeated through every crack and crevice from the harsh land outside. The bright overhead lights, necessary since breakfast was always quite early, caught the movement of the dust as it attempted to land, only to be collected by the breeze of the lazily rotating ceiling fans.

A throat cleared beside her and she quickly lifted her gaze, delivering a rapid one-two head flick to ensure her hair was behind her shoulders. Asking, just last week, why she couldn’t tie it up had been a mistake, because she’d received a stern lecture about the glory of the woman, and that her hair was the covering to protect her purity. She couldn’t remember if it was from Corinthians or Timothy that the lecture had been plucked, but the wife had spoken so fiercely, stabbing at the Bible page, that she’d started nodding before the lecture had finished. The girl knew she was supposed to listen to those talks, but lately she’d started to listen to the very small voice in her mind that whispered and wondered about interesting things. Like whether she’d ever be allowed to wear underwear that wasn’t white.

Let us give thanks. The feminine voice, two places removed from her own, focused everyone’s attention.

The girl surreptitiously angled her gaze, letting it rest on the tall, blonde woman, Maggie, who had clasped her hands together and bowed her head. The deliberate ambiguity as to who her mother was twisted at the girl’s stomach. She thought it might be Maggie who had given birth to her. They had the same light blonde hair, the same light blue eyes. It shouldn’t matter so much, but it really did. Perhaps if she knew that information, it would deepen her love for the sisters and the wives. There was a thought that she couldn’t quite catch, probably because she wasn’t old enough yet and didn’t have the words to articulate it, but it was a thought that she loved in a slightly disconnected manner, as if there was a space between her heart and the object of her affection. The need to erase that divide wasn’t strong, but niggled at her subconscious. She did love her family, because they were her constant; the wives, her sisters, her father. But sometimes she wondered if she was supposed to love them more.

We give thanks for— The girl quickly clasped her hands, dropping her chin to her chest —our Benevolent Father, who, by the Hand of God, provides for our Family and Plants His Seeds so that others will continue to receive and thrive in his Graciousness on this farm we know as Glory.

Maggie intoned an Amen and every gaze shot to the head of the table where the Father was seated, his smile soft as he took in the room, the table of food, his wives, his men and their wives, and his children.

He lifted his large hand, gesturing in an arc. Sit, everyone. Let us enjoy the start of another day, he said benignly, his voice smooth and rich, like the chocolate puddings Kristen, one of the other wives of the Father, made.

Martha, pass the salt shaker, please, asked Paul Grantee, who was sitting opposite her, his plate piled high with bacon, eggs, lamb sausages, fried tomatoes, and toast.

She moved the shaker towards him, and just before she let go, he grabbed her fingers and the shaker in one meaty, sweaty hand and leered.

Thank you, Martha. You’re turning into a stunning young woman, aren’t you?

Paul’s wife, sitting at his left side, gazed vacantly at the exchange. The woman’s name had been erased when she married the farmhand, as the Father insisted that only his wives—the mothers— retain their names.

The girl jerked her hand back, and delivered a quick, placating smile. Thank you, Paul Grantee. You have paid me a nice compliment. The girl stared past his right ear, ignoring the cold blue eyes, clean shaven face, and cruel mouth.

All the men were variations of Paul; lack of facial hair—the Father disallowed it—hard mouths, large calloused hands, white skin under the sunburn, eyes of many colours but always entitlement. The Father’s eyes were the exception. His brown eyes radiated devotion, enthusiasm, and a fervent belief in the grace of God.

She flicked a glance at their Benevolent Father. He was large; not fat, just plain large, from working their sheep farm; handling the stock, loading, unloading, reloading, building fences, riding the horses or motorbikes to muster the animals. His hands were calloused and vast; her hand disappeared inside his when she raced to be the first to walk back with him after their service on Sundays.

The girls hardly ever saw the Father, except at services and meals, and at the latter they were expected to eat briskly, clear the table, and go about their duties in the house or do school work or whatever else occupied their time. Mostly it was school work. All the girls—their ages ranging from six to seventeen years—attended the School of Distance Education, where instruction was delivered via HF radio for two hours each day by a teacher based in the big town north from their farm, and then the wives tutored the girls through the assigned materials in the dining area from lunch until dinner. Each week, one of the men would drive the five hours into the closest little town to deliver their completed workbooks in a large satchel, and the post truck would carry it on from there. The afternoon tutoring was boring, as the wives delivered the religious instruction and insisted on interpreting all the resource materials distributed by Distance Education so that they were in line with the family’s beliefs.

The girl liked the lessons, though. The teacher, Mrs Lantollic, knew such a lot about everything, and at thirteen years of age, the girl was now being asked to read Shakespeare, and study geography, and analyse history, and complete mathematical equations that were complicated and energised her mind. She’d answered one of Mrs Lantollic’s questions last week in the daily fifteen minute individual session that all girls could access, and when her teacher had praised her thought process and the depth of her answer, the girl had beamed, despite Mrs Lantollic not being able to see it. The tutor, Harold’s wife, had smiled as well, then looked around the room, closing down the gesture as quickly as when the sun dropped into the fields at the end of the day.

The girl ducked her head to her own plate.

Martha.

She didn’t feel like a Martha. Her full name was Martha Gift, but both names tasted like the red dust on the floor in her mouth. For a long time, she hadn’t questioned her last name. All the sisters had the last name, but only a few months ago, it had occurred to her that if they all were named Gift, then perhaps that meant they were related. Their Father was the father of all the daughters, and they all had different mothers. It was a puzzle inside her thirteen-year-old head, but she knew, after previously expressing opinions and thoughts about puzzles, that asking questions invited punishment.

The question about her hair was one example. She’d only received a lecture after that question, but there were worse punishments. So the girl had learnt to still her face and create a landscape of bland. She’d seen a couple of the wives do it, and when she thought carefully, it seemed a somewhat protective behaviour. That was odd because she wasn’t in danger. Her life on the farm was settled, and ordinary, and predictable. Yet, the girl’s skin prickled every so often, manifesting as waves of alertness, and that awareness taught her to watch, to pay attention, to analyse behaviour and body language, to listen to words that were said and not said. And to mask all emotions.

The girl couldn’t inhabit the name Martha Gift. Her name seemed as ill-fitting as the shift dresses that she wore day in, day out. She chewed on a piece of bacon. She’d been told that a person’s name can shape who they become, which was frankly devastating because her name had the same consistency as porridge and didn’t seem inclined to create any shape at all. The girl forked more bacon into her mouth. There was something she had to do in her life, she knew it, and wearing the moniker of Martha Gift wasn’t going to achieve it. So she called herself ‘the girl’ until her shape was ready to wear a new name.

Chapter 1

Felicity Davis gazed out over the heads of the sixty or so senior staff members assembled in the large staff common room on the main campus of Rawson Girls Grammar school. The fortnightly early morning staff meeting for the lead teachers, faculty heads, and boarding house supervisors was drawing to an end, thank goodness. No-one had pressing issues; the general nodding and positive murmuring was heartening.

She made eye contact with Rani Mason, her highly efficient PA, and widened her eyes; the gesture hopefully conveying that she’d like to close the meeting and that Harriet Princeton, the head of Art, needed to wind up her plea for staff to attend the Year Ten Art Show, running all next week, as the students would be thrilled to see their teachers from other faculties in attendance. Felicity made a mental note to drop by the studios next Tuesday or Wednesday. She’d need at least thirty minutes to view the pieces properly, as it always annoyed her when the executive staff of schools appeared so briefly at a student-led event that they may as well not have attended at all. Rani would have to wrangle the schedule.

Her PA stood, smiled at Harriet, who blinked then nodded seriously at everyone and returned to her seat.

Felicity, leaning against one of the dining tables at the side, then pushed off the furniture and stepped to the space in the middle of the gathering. She caught Harriet’s eye.

I’ll come by next week some time. Please don’t make special arrangements, Harriet. I’d like to blend in and just appreciate the art, she said quietly.

Harriet beamed. Absolutely, Felicity. Thank you.

Felicity nodded and turned back to the large group. She raised an eyebrow at the hubbub of talking that had spiked after Harriet finished her contribution, and the single gesture threw the room into attentive, respectful silence.

She knew that the staff considered her aloof, a closed book, some even going so far as to label her an Ice Queen. She’d scoffed at that title. Ice Queen? More like a refrigerated vegetable crisper. Yes, she could be intimidating. At nearly six feet tall in heels, with piercing blue eyes, closely cropped blonde-turning-light-grey hair, and at forty-seven years of age, decades of excellence in educational leadership, there were some who only saw...that. Felicity was careful, that was all. Often there was more to gain by listening than speaking, so yes, she liked holding her cards close. There was little need to gush and fling about exuberant gestures when a simple eyebrow lift conveyed all manner of meaning.

With the meeting done, and the staff zipping off to various points of the campus for their first lessons, Felicity detoured via the school’s cafe, pausing as the automatic glass door hazily reflected her outfit for the day. Dark blue, pinstripe skirt suit with a white collared shirt and her favourite Jimmy Choos: crystal mesh on black suede stiletto heels from the Love 85 collection. She nodded in approval.

Gwen, the cafe manager for the last three years, wished the student, who’d clasped the lemon squash bottle to her chest along with her books, a great day and turned to Felicity as she stepped up to the counter.

Good morning, Gwen. How are you? It was a genuine question, and Gwen seemed to appreciate being asked.

I’m not too bad, Felicity. Thank you. The smile didn’t reach her soft brown eyes.

Felicity, with a single wave of her hand, directed the three people behind her to move to the other counter for their orders. She turned to Gwen. You seem out of sorts, she stated gently.

Sorry, Gwen muttered, her mouth a straight line.

Felicity waited until the older woman made eye contact. "It was an observation stemming from concern, Gwen, not a statement regarding a possible transgression. There is no need to apologise.

Gwen’s lips tightened, possibly to hold back another apology. I don’t want to burden you with my silly issues.

Leaning her hip into the counter, Felicity relaxed her face, allowing the soft light in her eyes to shine. There are many things that burden me. The reason for your anxiety is not one of them.

Gwen huffed, wiped her hands down the half-apron tied at her hips, and adjusted her glasses. Okay, well, my cat is sick and my daughter was going to take him to the vet today but then her car wouldn’t start. So he’s at home right now, and I’m worried that I won’t get there in time to get him to the vet before it closes. And I can’t afford one of those twenty-four hour places because they’re three times the price. Then her cheeks pinked, as if she still regarded her personal problem too trivial for the principal of the school.

Felicity’s mind rotated its cogs all of three seconds, churning out a solution that would benefit Gwen’s dilemma and create an opportunity for others. Excellent. People mattered. As did efficiency.

Bronwyn is here today, isn’t she? The second-in-charge at the cafe, Bronwyn, was a wonderfully capable Pasifika woman, who wore a perpetual smile, and knew everyone’s name on campus.

Yes, we’re both on today.

Excellent. The Junior campus cafe across the road doesn’t open in the afternoons, and the Year Eleven students in Marco Gianno’s Economics class are studying business models at the moment. One group is focusing on small business organisational structure specifically related to catering. Felicity watched in fascination as Gwen’s eyebrows lifted, probably at the randomness of the comments, and the fact that Felicity would know, out of the eight hundred girls on campus, what topic a group of Year Eleven students would be currently researching. Felicity gave her a subtle smile. The girls in that focus group may enjoy the opportunity to spend a double lesson after lunch discussing with Nigel across the road the intricacies of cafe and catering management, if I ask him to stay later, while Stewart— Gwen nodded at Felicity’s querying head tilt; Stewart was the full-time assistant— might enjoy some extra hours over here after lunch.

Gwen snapped her mouth closed.

Felicity gazed steadily at the friendly manager. Go home after the lunch rush, Gwen. I’ll check in with Nigel and Stewart, and inform HR of the reshuffling.

Thank you, Gwen managed.

Felicity reached across to quickly pat her hand. It’s within my purview to fix problems that affect my staff, and I hope this solution works. Pets are family, and family is very important. She withdrew her hand, then nodded. "Now, I’m in need of an apple and one of those packets of highly addictive dried