Prey Read Free Page B

straightened her spine, and held her ground. “What do you want?” she asked curtly, and, by God, even if nothing else about her was steady, her voice was.
    “I want to know what the hell’s the matter with you,” he growled, his voice so rough she had to fight to keep from flinching, as if it had actually scratched her. The words were even more guttural than she remembered. Before she could help herself she glanced at his throat, at the pale scar that slashed at a slight diagonal across the muscled column. Was his voice deteriorating, or did he sound as if he’d eaten ground glass simply because he was so pissed about something? She hoped he was pissed, hoped she’d inadvertently done something to make him so angry he could barely speak; if she could find out what it was she’d done, she’d go out of her way to do it again.
    “Nothing’s the matter with me,” she said, her teeth clenched so tightly her jaw ached. Now that she’d looked at the scar on his throat, she found herself staring at the other scars on his face: the gouge high on his right cheekbone, another beside his mouththat actually looked like a dimple if you didn’t know the scars were from shrapnel, and another sort of arrow-shaped scar on the bridge of his nose. None of the scars was disfiguring; they didn’t seem to bother him and they shouldn’t bother her, except seeing them made her chest hurt from something that felt inexplicably like sorrow.
    She pushed that thought away; she couldn’t afford to feel personal sympathy for him. So he’d been hit by shrapnel in Iraq; he was alive, he wasn’t disfigured or disabled, and she could feel sympathy for him in the abstract, as a service member, without letting him elicit any other emotion from her.
    She wished his breath stank, instead of smelling pleasantly like coffee … wished there was something, anything, about him that was physically distasteful. What kind of idiot was she that in some weak moments she’d find herself wistfully thinking about what might have happened if she’d actually gone out with him when he’d first returned to the area and asked her out, if anything would have come of it? Then doubts would set in, and she’d wonder if maybe he’d set out to deliberately destroy her business because she’d turned him down; if so, that made him a major jerk, and no good could have come from dating him. What gave her emotional whiplash was that she simply didn’t know, which meant she kept worrying at the different scenarios without any way of knowing which one was true. All she knew for sure was that she wasn’t good with men, and that Dare Callahan had ruined her business. She was rock solid on those two things.
    With him standing so close and the truck right behind her she felt hemmed in, trapped. Damn it, enough was enough; she couldn’t stand it, not for another second. She edged sideways, farther from the truck, though her damn stubborn pride wouldn’t let her actually step back from him.
    He adjusted his position, too, turning with her so they remained face-to-face.
    “Then what makes you act as if you have a stick shoved up your ass every time I’m around?” he snapped. “Just now you turned and ran as soon as you saw me. I’m tired of it, damn it. If you have a beef with me, then tell me to my face what it is.”
    “I didn’t
run
,” she snapped right back. Instinctively she slid another few inches to the side. “Maybe I thought of somewhere else I need to go.” She didn’t bother even trying to put any sincerity into her tone. Instead, her good sense seemed to have taken a hike, because she sounded as if she was taunting him. She didn’t want to wave a red flag at the bull, she didn’t want to escalate things into an all-out argument, she just wanted to get into her truck and leave. That was what she wanted, but instead she kept standing there, and things she hadn’t meant to say kept coming out of her mouth. “Maybe seeing you or speaking to you