Prey

can’t be easy for a man, for anyone, to suddenly be left with the sole care of an infant.”

“I’d sure as hell panic,” he observed.

“Bull,” she scoffed. She had no doubt he’d handle it. He wasn’t someone who panicked, he was a man who got the job done, regardless of what the job was. “Anyway. She was a quitter, and I guess you can say it affected me in that I won’t let myself be a quitter. I don’t want to be like her.”

“You aren’t,” he said after a brief pause, his rough voice quiet. “You’re not a quitter.”

For some reason, hearing him say that made her throat feel thick, as if she was about to get teary. Horrified at the thought, she cleared her throat. “That’s enough of that. Do you want to hear about my wedding, or not?” she asked, scowling.

“Yeah, I do. We kind of got sidetracked.”

“You mean you did. I was telling you what happened when you went off on a tangent.”

“I was curious. So shoot me. Back to your makeup and hairdo for the wedding.”

She gave him a warning squint and considered refusing to say anything else, but what the hell, she’d already gotten this far, she might as well finish.

“I hired someone to do my hair and makeup, because I knew I couldn’t manage it. Getting ready took hours. But when she was finished, I looked good. I looked even better than I’d hoped, and I was so happy. I thought he’d be-”

“He, who?” Dare interrupted. “Does the asshole have a name?”

“Todd,” she said, then stopped, struck by the fact that Dare had automatically assumed the man she’d married was an asshole. “Todd Vincent. He wasn’t… I mean, he kind of was, but I completely overreacted.”

“Overreacted to what?”

She sighed and resumed her inspection of the ceiling. “He pushed cake in my face. Not a small piece, either, but a huge chunk that was covered in thick icing. It went up my nose, it was in my eyes… and he laughed when he did it.” Everyone had laughed, but she didn’t feel it was necessary to elaborate on that detail.

“The bastard,” Dare said blandly.

He was going to make light of it, like everyone else had. He was going to tell her that she’d definitely overreacted. The bad part was that she knew she’d been unreasonable, and as a result she’d broken up with and ended her marriage to someone who was essentially a good man, someone she’d loved-all because of her wounded ego. But Dare didn’t say anything else, and after a minute she continued.

“We’d discussed it beforehand. I don’t like the cake-in-the-face thing anyway, I don’t think it’s funny, and I especially didn’t want my hair and makeup to be ruined. I asked one thing of him on our wedding day, which was don’t smack me in the face with wedding cake. He agreed. He promised. Was that too much to ask?” Angie heard her voice rising and didn’t even attempt to rein in her indignation. “Apparently it was, because instead of sticking with the agreement he shoved that piece of cake in my face and ground it in, and I started crying and yelling at him, and then I ran out. He followed and tried to apologize, but I wouldn’t listen. Dad tried to comfort me, but I asked him to just please get me out of there, so he did. The next day I filed for an annulment.

“Todd tried to talk me out of it. He apologized over and over. All of my friends tried to tell me to settle down, that he didn’t mean anything by it, but I wouldn’t listen, and pushed my lawyer to get the annulment done in record time.” She took a deep breath. “And then I realized what a fool I’d made of myself over something so minor. I’d hurt a good man, humiliated him and myself, thrown away my marriage-”

“Bullshit,” said Dare.

Taken aback, Angie stared at him. “What?”

“He broke his word.”

“Yes, but-”

“That isn’t minor. And you didn’t love him.”

“I did,” she said, but surprised herself with the uncertainty in her tone that even she could hear.

Dare snorted. “No you didn’t. If you’d loved him you’d have explained away his bad judgment, wiped the cake off your face, and gone on with the party. If he’d loved you, he wouldn’t have broken the agreement in the first place. All in all you’re better off that it ended then, because from where I sit it seems pretty clear that it would’ve ended eventually no matter how hard you tried to make it work. You deserve better.”

“I could have handled it so much better-”

He gave an impatient shake of his head. “You weren’t wrong. You did what you knew was right, so forget it and move on.”

“Thank you, Dr. Phil,” she said sharply, but without anger, because she was too startled by his assessment. Even more startling was that he didn’t think she’d gone off the deep end when, hell, even she thought she had. And he’d said that Todd had poor judgment. She was so taken aback that she couldn’t even think about it right now; she’d save that for later. Much later.

A wry smile turned up one corner of his mouth. “I do have my talents. So, what else?”

“What else?” Wasn’t that enough? She’d just told him the most embarrassing episode of her life and he wanted more?

“The dream, sweetheart. What else happened in the dream.” He made a rough sound, deep in his throat. “I’ve heard all about your wedding that I care to, and cake wasn’t all you dreamed about. You mentioned mud and the bear.”

Reorienting herself took a minute. She had to mentally pull herself away from her wedding and back to the hellish scene when the storm broke. “Yeah, cake, and mud, and that freakin’ bear.”

“Where was I?”

“Nowhere in my dream,” she retorted. Not this time, anyway.

“Too bad.”

“There’s nothing much to tell. Like I said before, I was drowning in the mud, and then it turned into icing. I was caught in it, couldn’t get free, and the bear was coming… enough said about that.”

He heaved himself up, stretched out a long arm to snag two bottles of water from the floor. Twisting one open, he handed it to her, then opened the other for himself. Angie pushed herself to a sitting position and drank. She hadn’t thought about being thirsty, but the water was unbelievably good. Maybe she’d put too much salt and hot sauce in her bowl of stew.

“What time is it?”

He glanced at his watch. “Close to midnight. We’ve slept about five hours.”

She hoped they weren’t caught up on sleep, because there were some long hours between now and daylight, and she didn’t want to lie awake all that time in the dark with a half-naked Dare right beside her. Sleep was better, less risky.

Tilting her head, she listened to the rain. It didn’t seem to be quite as heavy as before, but it was still steady, and until it stopped and the flash floods had subsided, she and Dare would inevitably be having more of these too- intimate conversations. There was something about being enclosed in this small space, safe and dry, that freed her tongue. On the other hand, she couldn’t really regret any of the personal things she’d told him.

He couldn’t know what it meant to her that he understood what she’d done-and she would never, ever tell him.

She capped the bottle of water and set it aside, then to her surprise was overtaken by a huge, jaw-popping yawn. She covered it with her hand, then blinked at him. “Sorry. You’d think I’d have caught up on my sleep by now.”

“Takes a lot to make up for something like what you went through. I could use another few hours myself.” He capped his own bottle, then reached down to turn off the lantern. Plunged into total darkness, Angie stretched out again and snuggled under the sleeping bag. A warm, muscled arm circled her waist, tugged her back until she nestled snugly against a very hard chest. He nuzzled her hair aside, lightly kissed the back of her neck, and murmured “Sweet dreams” in a voice that already sounded a little drowsy to her.

Her eyes popped open, straining wide against the darkness. After kissing her like that, he expected her to go to sleep? She could still feel the slightly moist heat of his breath, the barely there pressure of his firm mouth, as intensely as if he’d branded her instead of kissing her.

Abruptly her breasts were aching, and she caught herself pressing her thighs together to contain and relieve