A Nice Guy's Guide to Starting Fires

By Vivi Andrews

He’s on fire for her...literally.

Superhero research scientist Dr. Eric Eisenmann always wanted to be super himself, until he was abducted, experimented on, and woke up pyrokinetic – the least stable of all the super abilities. Suddenly he’s lighting everything he touches on fire whenever his emotions get the better of him. Desperate to turn his powers off, Eisenmann’s only hope for a cure lies with a woman who wants nothing to do with him – and fires up the very emotions he needs to keep in check.

As the only non-super daughter in a superhero dynasty, Tandy Nightwing has been poked and prodded for years in an attempt to find the cause behind her powerlessness. Now that she’s finally happy with her normalcy, the last thing she wants is to subject herself to another scientist’s tests – but she can no more resist Eisenmann’s plea for help than she can resist the good doctor himself.

Deep in his underground lab, Eisenmann must maintain rigid control of his feelings, but his attraction to Tandy constantly tests his restraint. Powerless or not, she might be the one woman brave enough to stand close to his fire – provided they both survive when their experiments unleash a passion that burns hotter than ever.

**PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED AS SUPER HOT**

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vivi Andrews
• Release date: Jul 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311244857

Vivi Andrews

Vivi Andrews is an award-winning paranormal romance author who calls Alaska home. For more about Vivi and her books, visit www.viviandrews.com.

Book preview

Chapter One

Eisenmann’s Inferno

The dream always started the same way. He was powerless, fighting futilely for the right to control his own body, his own voice. The dark compulsion in his head was sickeningly familiar, that awful, suffocating helplessness. His every molecule screamed for release.

Then there was a jab, a stinging pain, and the fire woke up.

It always woke up ravenous, an animal with a thousand mouths, each one hungrier than the last. It seemed to know its life would be short, lasting only as long as it could greedily consume everything in its path. It wanted to devour everything it touched as badly as a human being wanted to breathe another breath. And it was very good at getting what it wanted.

The fireball erupted, the sound of the flames deafening—roaring, crackling, thunder and lightning in one. The pressure was immense, but there was no heat. Inside the fire’s soul, he was immune to burns. Safe. It would protect him, defend him, this wild, hungry beast. Not his pet or his friend, but a ferociously dangerous ally—quick to anger, quick to strike, and devastating in its destruction. His sociopathic protector, fueled by his fear.

The rough timber beams above his head blackened and fell, but the smell was wrong. Not wood smoke. More astringent. Chemical. Metallic—

Eric Eisenmann flailed awake, choking and gagging on the chemical foam covering him and every inch of his office as still more sprayed from spigots on the ceiling, dousing the lingering flames. He cursed and wiped the white goop from his eyes and mouth, sucking in a breath of air tainted by the lingering smells of charred metal and fire-suppressant foam.

Calm down, Eisenmann. Get it together. He forced himself to breathe, forced the dream back, the fear back, and felt the fire retreat into its den in the back of his brain.

Control temporarily regained, he surveyed the wreckage.

He’d fallen asleep in his office again. Another computer ruined. Another desk destroyed—this one melted down to a lump of molten metal.

Perfect. Just perfect.

The dreams were coming every night now, along with the fire they conjured. He’d cleared his bedroom of all flammable materials—including his bed, reduced to sleeping on a slab made of the same heat-resistant material used to protect space shuttles from burning up on impact. Of course, none of those precautionary measures did any good when he fell asleep at his computer.

The foam sputtered to a stop, leaving his office looking like it was covered in rapidly melting snow. It dripped off him, his skin still hot to the touch in an after-effect of the dream.

No, not dream. The memory. Because as much as he might wish it was just a fabrication of his subconscious, the powerlessness, the pain, and the flames were all far too real. The mindbender Demon Wroth had abducted him, used psychic compulsion to control him, and then injected him with a designer poison which had mutated Eric’s normal human DNA into a super genome.

Just his rotten luck that his untapped super ability happened to be the most volatile and dangerous one on record.

Pyrokinetics. The supers voted most likely to accidentally kill themselves within a year of awakening their ability.

For now, the fire couldn’t touch him, but he could still die of smoke inhalation, and then there was the risk of flaming out—reaching a burning point where even he could not withstand the heat of the fire and nothing was left but ash.

Eric shoved off from his chair, which was remarkably unsinged, considering the recent conflagration. Apart from his glasses and his clothing, everything else within a five yard radius looked like it had just had an unfortunate run-in with a blow torch. Smoke clogged his throat, the air stiflingly thick and getting thicker with each breath he took.

Automatic security protocols shut off oxygen to this wing at the first hint of flame to keep from feeding the fire. The threat of suffocating in his sleep had been a necessary sacrifice to prevent the very real alternative of taking out a full city block should he have a bad dream.

He crossed to the far wall, grateful the foam had deployed to dampen the flames before they could reach this far. The security panel was still intact and he typed in a quick series of codes to activate the all clear. With a barely audible whoosh, clean air began to fill the room, the filtration system sucking out the smoke.

Just another day at the office.

Eric snorted, surveying the damage. The remains of his latest laptop were fused to the metal blob that had once been his desk. No doubt all his papers had been reduced to ash beneath the foam which was starting to ooze off the desk and puddle on the black-charred tile.

Thankfully he’d learned never to allow uncopied originals into his office and all of his laptops were programmed to automatically back up to the Trident servers, so there was nothing lost that couldn’t be easily replaced. All things considered, it could have been much worse.

Nobody was dead. He could handle a few lost files.

He rinsed off in the chemical shower in his lab, peeled off his dripping clothes and changed into workout pants and a Cal-Tech T-shirt, leaving his feet bare as he grabbed towels and mops to clean up his office. The melted blob of desk and laptop refused to budge, fused to the floor, but he cleaned off the oozing foam and the rest of the debris until what was left looked like a weird modern art installation in the middle of the black-singed circle at the center of the room. So much for his hope that a metal desk wouldn’t go up in flames as quickly as the wooden ones had—the metal just made clean-up that much more of a bitch.

Eric collected another—wooden—desk and a fresh laptop from storage and set them up beside the modern art blob. The physical labor and familiarity of the actions seemed to pacify the fire somewhat, so his erratic gift felt reasonably under control when he sat down to sync the new laptop to the Trident server.

He didn’t often get to feel like himself these days, like a scientist rather than a powder-keg looking for a spark. These rare moments when his mind was clear and the fire silent could not be wasted.

His email lit up, but he ignored it, logging on instead to the online forum he’d tripped across two weeks ago in his newest line of research, the line he privately called how not to die a horrible flaming death though the public title to the paper he was supposedly writing was Voluntary Suppression of Volatile Superhero Traits. Luckily his extensive work with super rehabilitation prevented anyone from wondering why Dr. Eric Eisenmann was suddenly so interested in power suppression. His past experiments had destroyed far more than desks, so for now he was able to keep his dirty little secret.

Something dark and hungry stirred in the back of his mind and he closed his eyes, taking a deep breath and pushing away the memory of how violently opposed to power suppression he’d once been, how envious he’d been of those with powers, how badly he’d wanted to spend just one day super, just one…

Be careful what you wish for.

There wasn’t much new on the boards. Eric scanned the latest articles posted, looking for comments from DocDavid, the scientist whose research had struck him as the closest to practical application and with whom he’d been occasionally collaborating lately, but there was nothing new. He cursed, feeling the fire shifting restlessly again in concert with his frustration.

He was running out of time. Even pyros who learned how to control their power inevitably lost it and went up in flames—literally—often taking dozens if not hundreds of others with them. Theories abounded that pyrokinesis belonged to a family of powers too closely tied to the instinctual and animal part of the brain to be effectively consciously controlled, unlike flight and strength and telepathy and a hundred other abilities. For once Eric didn’t care about the why. He just wanted his power gone. It was the only way he and the people around him would ever be safe.

With a ping, a chat window popped open on his screen.

A9-2172: Hey, Doc. Any news?

Eisenmann flinched. The situation felt hopeless enough without being reminded that he wasn’t the only one depending on him to find a cure. A9-2172, AKA Area Nine Prisoner #2172, AKA Diana Potter, age fourteen, who’d come into her own pyrokinesis at puberty and set fire to her neighborhood, causing over a dozen fatalities, including her parents and both of her younger brothers. Her committal to the legendary supervillain prison, Area Nine, had been voluntary, which was one of the reasons she was periodically allowed computer time. He’d met her in an online support group for supers with unwanted powers, more than half of whom were inmates at Area Nine. She was the only other living pyro he knew of.

TridentDoc: Sorry, kid. Nothing to report.

A long pause met his reply.

A9-2172: Set fire to my pajamas last night. Never done that before.

Eisenmann closed his eyes and cursed softly. There was only anecdotal evidence that pyros burned hotter right before they burned out for good, the bubble around them that typically kept their clothing from incinerating growing smaller and smaller as they got closer to the end. Nothing was certain with a power so dangerous to study, but setting fire to her own clothing was universally regarded as a Very Bad Sign. How much longer did she have? A week? Two?

TridentDoc: Hang in there, kid. We’ll find a cure.

He typed the words, though lately he was having a hard time believing them. The fire that always lurked at the back of his brain seemed to be burning away his ability to think clearly, his ability to pierce through to the solution.

A9-2172: That null comes today, right? The one with the magic DNA?

His eyes leaped to the date on the corner of his monitor. How could he have forgotten? He really was losing it. Tandy Nightwing, the only known non-superhero child of two superhero parents, was scheduled to meet him at four-thirty today in the hopes that her DNA would lead to a cure.

He’d been stunned to hear that the famous Nightwings had a child who’d never developed powers. It had been previously believed impossible for two powered parents not to pass on the mutation. This null’s DNA might hold the secret to turning powers off at the genetic level. Eisenmann himself was proof positive that they could be turned on. So it had to be possible to turn them off. He just had to find the switch. And Tandy Nightwing was his best shot at that.

He didn’t remember telling Diana she was coming. He shouldn’t have.