Despite everything, the hot coffee felt and tasted like heaven. She took another couple of sips, then leaned her head back against the wall, closed her eyes, and felt her headache begin to disappear as if it were going down a drain. Maybe it wasn’t really going away that fast, but her head definitely felt better.
She felt him settle into place beside her, heard him sip. Grudgingly he muttered, “It’s good.”
“Thank you.”
My, weren’t they polite?
Okay, the best way to go on was to just … go on. Something occurred to her and she asked, “By the way, you’ve never said … why were you here? Were you doing some scouting for a late hunting party you have coming in?”
“No, I came up to do some fishing, and to get away from paperwork. You were a few hours ahead of me.”
She opened her eyes and turned her head, still resting against the wall, to look at him. “Lucky coincidence, for me. If you hadn’t been, who knows if I’d still be alive right now. What were you doing out in the storm, anyway, at that hour?”
“Looking for your camp.” Wrapping his hands around the warm cup, he drank some more, then adjusted his shoulders to a more comfortable position. “The storm woke me up, and then I heard the shots. I knew they were pistol shots, and I couldn’t think of any good reason why you or anyone else would be shooting a pistol at that time of night. If a bear or cougar had come into your camp and was attacking, you’d have used your rifle. The pistol shots meant people trouble,” he said flatly.
“Yeah,” she agreed, and sighed. “They did.”
“So I saddled up that crab-hopping young son of a bitch and set out in the worst storm I’ve seen up here since I was a kid. I’d lost the trail and was doubling back when I heard you. You know the rest.”
“But how did you know where my camp was? I mean, you might be able to tell the general direction the shots came from, but—”
“Harlan told me which camp.”
“Harlan?”
“He was worried.”
Angie digested that in silence. Harlan’s concern was probably because she was a woman and her two clients were men, something she couldn’t completely discount because she was always careful, herself, in that regard.
“So he knew you were coming up here and—” She stopped, confused. And, what? Keep an eye on her? This cabin was several miles from her campsite, so if it hadn’t been for those shots in the middle of the night, there was no way Dare could have known that anything was going wrong at her camp. If Chad had waited until the next day, and shot Davis and her with the rifle, there was nothing that would have alarmed Dare because rifle shots were to be expected during a hunt.
He drank some more coffee, his eyelids lowered as if he were thinking. Then he said, “No, not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“I wasn’t coming up here. Harlan was worried and asked me to keep an eye on you, just in case. I decided to do some fishing while I was here.”
She almost dropped her cup, she was so flabbergasted. She stared at him, trying to sort through all the implications that were rushing through her brain. “So you … I …”
“Yeah. It wasn’t coincidence I was up here.”
He’d come up here, taken what could have been an entire week out of his time, to do a favor for Harlan? She could see him doing Harlan any number of favors, but considering the hostility in her own relationship with Dare, she couldn’t think of why he’d do that particular one.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’re here,” she said, “but for the life of me I can’t imagine why you agreed to do that.”
“I’ve told you,” he returned, eyeing her over the rim of the cup. “I’ve been watching your ass for two years now. By the way, this really is some damn fine coffee.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Alarm bells once again began ringing in the back of her head. Her reaction was instantaneous. “Oh, no,” she warned. “I told you, I’m not going there.”
“Yeah? Why not?”
From his tone of voice he might as well have been asking her why she didn’t want pizza for supper. That definitely punched her buttons, making her feel as if he were looking for nothing more than a sexual tissue, to be used and discarded. She scowled at him. “I have a better question: Why? I’m not into recreational sex, period, and it isn’t as if we’re dating.”
He cocked one knee up and rested his forearm on it, coffee cup in hand, giving her a long, considering look. “We could have been. Damn it, I asked you out twice. So now let me ask you a question: Are you attracted to me, or not? I’ve made it as plain as I can that I’m attracted to you, so now tell me straight out how you feel.”
Angie felt her face getting hot. She could lie—that is, if she hadn’t kissed him back the way she had, hanging on to him and meeting him tongue to tongue. He was asking a loaded question, one to which he already knew the answer. “That isn’t the point,” she muttered, shifting uncomfortably.
“That’s exactly the damn point. The least you can do is be as up-front with me as I’ve been with you.” He didn’t take his gaze from her face, studying every minute change of her expression. Such intense scrutiny made her feel emotionally naked, but then she’d given him that power by telling him all about her wedding, how much she doubted herself because of her own actions. He could figure out now what made her tick, how to get to her, and that was by making himself appear as vulnerable as she felt. The problem with that was she doubted this man had ever felt vulnerable in his entire life, even when shrapnel had sliced his throat. Some people just had that innate self-confidence that spilled over into every facet of their lives. She wasn’t one of them. Her self-confidence seemed to be confined to very specific areas, and didn’t bleed over into the others.