Brighid's Flame by Cate Morgan

supposed to be your night, you know. You were going to light the torch. Imagine my surprise to find I hadn’t been invited.”
    Tara stood at ease, hands clasped behind her back. Stephen’s innovation in powering the torch with solar power stored during the day so the “flame” would be illuminated at night had been a work a genius, one she would have been proud to reveal to the world. “Well, considering I didn’t even know about it…”
    Julien chuckled, visibly relaxing as he closed the distance between them. She looked up into his beautiful, chiseled face and felt nothing but contempt. “Vincent and his damnable secrets.” He reached one hand to brush the damp, curling hair from her eyes.
    Tara whipped her hand out from behind her back and shot him square in the chest with her stun gun. At close range.
    Julien flew off his feet and hit the ground several yards away, sliding on the polished floor, ruining the lines of his expensive suit.
    â€œFunny thing about secrets,” Tara said, strolling toward him as he slowly got to his hands and knees. “Turns out everyone has them.” She lashed her foot out like a striking cobra. Her steel toes smashed him in the ribs and sent him flying once more.
    Coughing interspersed with laughter, Julien struggled to his feet. “The cat finally draws her claws. I wondered what it would take.”
    â€œBetrayal will generally do it every time,” Tara returned, maintaining the calm of a still lake—on the surface. Beneath, her mind and blood raced with possibilities and the knife’s edge of preparation versus reaction. The reality of Julien’s superiority in the sparring ring never left her. She couldn’t let her early advantage make her overconfident.
    But something happened to her, as she watched Julien limp toward her with that pleased, arrogant smile. The bubbling of anger in her belly didn’t flood her, as it normally would have by now. It percolated, built on itself and grew steadily, but under her control. Anger became something else entirely. Energy buzzed in her veins, made her muscles fluid and ready.
    â€œYou’re already a gifted dancer technically,” Gwen had said to her once, ages ago—or had it been just a few days, perhaps a week? “You just need to learn to lose yourself in the music. Let go, Tara.”
    Tara exhaled, a strange serenity coming over her as she accepted the outcome of the fight, before it even started. Without knowing what the outcome would be. It was the fight that mattered.
    Julien stood a few feet from her, clenching and unclenching his fists in a sure signal of his preparing to engage. “Did it ever occur to you, all those times in the ring, that I might be holding back?”
    He launched himself at her.
    Tara ducked and whirled away, arm swinging up as she faced him coming from the other direction. “Of course it did.” She ducked and dodged and blocked some more, as Gwen did to work out Tara’s emotions to a point where she could focus. On Julien it served the opposite affect—building his anger to boiling.
    â€œBut I’m damned sure,” she added, “it never once occurred to you.” She grabbed his arm as it flew by and flipped him head over heels until he landed on his back once more, cracking his head on the wood floor. It should have been a difficult evasive maneuver for her. Instead, his momentum and her calm made it the most natural thing in the world.
    Julien’s rage reached a point where he was actually landing hits now. Flashes of pain in ribs and stomach and shoulder, quickly pushed away in the wake of her narrowed focus. Tara employed a few offensive strikes of her own, highly calculated for those few moments he left himself open. On one such occasion, she instinctively followed through, only to find herself spun head over heels in mockery of her earlier maneuver.
    She landed with startling precision