Prey

the tightening she could feel deep inside. No. Oh, no. She wasn’t going there. No matter how he kissed her she wasn’t going to let her own body sabotage her resolve.

She tried to find some anger she could use to bolster herself, but there simply wasn’t any. Instead, she had to admit that sleeping beside him was sweeter and more seductive than anything she’d ever done.

She was in deep, deep trouble.

Chapter Twenty-three

It was still raining. Angie pondered that awful fact for a moment, then pushed it away, because there was nothing she could do about it. She sat up, yawned, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and said to Dare, “If you don’t have coffee, I may have to kill you.”

He opened one vivid blue eye, surveyed her in silence for a moment, then muttered, “Hell, I believe you.”

“So?”

“So I guess I’ll get up and make you some coffee.”

“Good deal.” She’d been pretty sure he would have coffee; he had a percolator, didn’t he? But there had been the chance he’d kept the percolator up here only for his clients, and that he was some kind of unnatural creature who drank only water.

He stretched his long body, his arms banging against the partition wall and the sleeping bag sliding to the side. She had to swallow a sudden rush of moisture in her mouth; he looked both disreputable and delicious, with a beard that was about forty-eight hours past being a five o’clock shadow, and sleep-mussed dark hair. Angie deliberately looked away from the play of muscle, instead focusing on the more mundane, such as the tiresome need to take care of physical matters.

Maybe she could put some weight on her ankle today, which would make the trip outside so much easier. She eased her right foot from under the sleeping bag and surveyed it. Her toes still looked a little swollen, but not much. Very carefully she wiggled them, just to see if she could. That felt okay, so she wiggled them some more. “If my ankle was broken, would wiggling my toes hurt?”

“I don’t know. I’ve broken my arm, three ribs, a collarbone, my nose, and cracked my kneecap, but I’ve never broken an ankle.”

She turned to look at him, frowning. “Are you accident prone?”

“I prefer to think of it as adventurous. I broke my nose when I was eight, trying to jump my bicycle over a ramp.”

“It doesn’t look as if it’s been broken.” And it didn’t. The bridge was perfectly straight.

“Kids heal better than adults. The ribs were broken when a horse kicked me when I was fourteen. The cracked kneecap was a football game. The broken arm and collarbone were a training accident.”

“What happened?”

“It was a climb. The guy above me lost his grip and fell, and took me and another guy with him.”

He could have been killed. If he’d hit his head, or his spine… Angie had to turn her head before he could read the sudden horror in her expression. She felt sick at the possibility, even though it was in the past, much as she felt sick whenever she saw the scar on his throat and realized how easily that piece of shrapnel could have killed him if it had hit his carotid artery. He’d been so close to death so many times, a matter of inches, a split second of time-

She loved him. Or at least could love him. She pressed a hand to her stomach, fighting to control the same nauseating sensation she got on a Ferris wheel, which she didn’t enjoy at all. Her own history had taught her that having feelings for someone didn’t automatically turn everything into wine and roses. There was some sexual attraction going on, Dare had made that plain, but odds were sexual attraction was all that was going on.

“You okay? You look a little green,” he commented as he stuffed his feet into his boots.

“Headache,” she automatically replied, which was true enough because she hadn’t had coffee, or any other caffeine source, in two days. “I need that coffee.” She hoped he wouldn’t mention that she’d been pressing her hand to her stomach, not her head, because she didn’t want to get drawn into a personal conversation. Her instinct was to pull back, to protect herself. Maybe someone more self-confident in relationships would react differently, but she wasn’t that person, never had been. She was confident in her career, in commonsense stuff, but as far as she could see emotions had nothing to do with common sense.

“Yes, ma’am, I’m putting the water on to heat right now,” he drawled, though he was obviously still lacing his boots.

“I can see that.” She decided to make herself useful, so she lit the heater, and checked the water level in the percolator. There were a couple of inches left. “How many cups will you drink?”

“Two or three.”

“Same here. Pass me three bottles of water, and it can be heating while we go downstairs.”

He did better than that; he not only pulled three bottles of water from the case of water sitting on the floor, he rooted around and pulled out a bag of ground coffee. There was even a scoop inside the half-empty bag. She opened the bag and took a deep breath; just breathing in the aroma of the coffee was a pleasure. She was a by- the-numbers kind of coffeemaker, so she began doing math in her head, mumbling to herself as she did so. “Three bottles at sixteen-point-nine ounces… fifty point seven… add six… divide by five… eleven something… divide by two-”

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked incredulously, staring at her with a kind of horrified, I-don’t-believe-it expression.

“Figuring out how many scoops of coffee to use.” Wasn’t it obvious? She frowned at him. She’d specifically mentioned the bottles, so what else would she have been doing?

“Multiplying and dividing?”

“Well, how do you do it?” She crossed her arms, both feeling and sounding defensive.

“I put in the water, and I dump in how much coffee I think I’ll need.”

“How does it taste?”

He blew out a breath. “Sometimes it tastes pretty good,” he said cautiously.

“I get better results than ‘sometimes’ with my method.”

“But you need a fu-a damn calculator to figure it out!”

“Oh, really?” Ostentatiously, she looked around. “I don’t believe I see one, and I was doing just fine.” She couldn’t believe it. He’d just caught himself before he said fucking, and substituted damn. When was the last time he’d bothered to moderate his language? Huh. She was beginning to have a little fun.

“So what’s this magic formula?” he demanded after a few seconds, when she simply sat there looking at him, her head cocked a little as if she were waiting.

“Figure out how many ounces of water you have and divide by five-”

“Why?”

“Because, for reasons unknown to mankind, coffeemakers figure a cup of coffee is five ounces, rather than eight.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, it’s true. Haven’t you ever measured water into a coffeemaker and noticed it doesn’t match?”

“I don’t pay attention to shit like that. But this isn’t a coffeemaker. It’s a percolator.”

“But the scoops seem to be based on how much coffee you need for five ounces, so it doesn’t matter. Then the type of grind makes a difference-”

“I don’t want to hear it. You’re making this way too complicated.”

“I make good coffee.” She was beginning to feel a little indignant on behalf of her coffeemaking skills.

“So you say. I haven’t seen any proof yet. Finish with this mathematical thing.” He was glaring at her as if she’d told him there was no Santa Claus.

“If the grind is coarse, then you need to use a little bit more; if it’s fine, a little less. This looks like a medium grind, but the scoop looks big, so I’m estimating two cups for each scoop of coffee. Therefore, after I divide the