should be finalized in the next couple of days. She’s not contesting anything. Mostly because she doesn’t want to end up in prison. I have impressed upon her how unpleasant that experience was. She has no desire to see for herself.”
“Oh, of course you’re still married to her. Because everybody thought—”
“That she was dead. You don’t have to divorce a dead person.”
“Let me ask you something,” she said, doing her best to meet his gaze, ignoring the quivering sensation she felt in her belly. “Do I have reason to be afraid of you?”
The grin that spread over his face was slow, calculated. “Well, I would say that depends.”
He shouldn’t toy with her. It wasn’t nice. But then, he wasn’t nice. He hadn’t been, not even before his stint in prison. But the time there had taken anything soft inside of him and hardened it. Until his insides were a minefield of sharpened obsidian. Black, stone-cold, honed into a razor.
The man he’d been before might not have done anything to provoke the pretty little woman in front of him. But he could barely remember that man. That man had been an idiot. That man had married Alicia, had convinced himself he could have a happy life, when he had never seen any kind of happiness come from marriage, not all through his childhood. So why had he thought he could have more? Could have something else?
“Depends on what?” she asked, looking up at him, those wide brown eyes striking him square in the chest...and lower, when they made contact with his.
She was so very pretty.
So very young, too.
Her pale, heart-shaped face, those soft-looking pink lips and her riot of brown curls—it all appealed to him in an instant, visceral way.
No real mystery, he supposed. He hadn’t touched a woman in more than five years.
This one was contraband. She had a use, but it wouldn’t be that one.
Hell, no.
He was a hard bastard, no mistake. But he wasn’t a criminal.
He didn’t belong with the rapists and murderers he’d been locked away with for all those years, and sometimes the only thing that had kept him going in those subhuman conditions—where he’d been called every name in the book, subjected to threats that would make most men weep with fear in their beds—was the knowledge that he didn’t belong there.
That he wasn’t one of them.
Hell, that was about the only thing that had kept him from hunting down Alicia when he’d been released.
He wasn’t a murderer. He wasn’t a monster.
He wouldn’t let Alicia make him one.
“Depends on what scares you,” he said.
She firmed those full lips into a thin, ungenerous line, and perhaps that reaction should have turned his thoughts in a different direction.
Instead he thought about what it might take to coax those lips back to softness. To fullness. And just how much riper they might become if he was to kiss them. To take the lower one between his teeth and bite.
He really wasn’t fit for company. At least not delicate, female company.
Sadly, it was delicate female company that seemed appealing.
He needed to go to a bar and find a woman more like him. Harder. Closer to his age.
Someone who could stand five years of pent-up sexual energy pounded into her body.
The sweet little architect he had hired was not that woman.
If her brothers had any idea she was meeting with him they would get out their pitchforks. If they had any idea what he was thinking now, they would get out their shotguns.
And he couldn’t blame them.
“Spiders. Do you have spiders up your sleeves?”
“No spiders,” he said.
“The dark?”
“Well, honey, I can tell you for a fact that I have a little bit of that I carry around with me.”
“I guess as long as we stay in the light it should be okay.”
He was tempted to toy with her. He didn’t know if she was being intentionally flirtatious. But there was something so open, so innocent, about her expression that he doubted it.
“I’m going to go sketch,” she said. “Now that I’ve seen the place, and you’ve sent over all the meaningful information, I should be able to come up with an initial draft. And then I can send it over to you.”
“Sounds good,” he said. “Then what?”
“Then we’ll arrange another meeting.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he said, extending his hand.
He shouldn’t touch her again. When her soft fingers had closed around his he had felt that around his cock.
But he wanted to touch her again.
Pink colored her cheeks. A blush.
Dammit all, the woman had blushed.
Women who blushed were not for men like him.
That he had a sense of that at all was a reminder. A reminder that he wasn’t an animal. Wasn’t a monster.
Or at least that he still had enough man in him to control himself.
“I’ll see you then.”
Faith was not hugely conversant in the whole girls’-night-out thing. Mia, her best friend from school, was not big on going out, and never had been, and usually, that had suited Faith just fine.
Faith had been a scholarship student at a boarding school that would have been entirely out of her family’s reach if the school hadn’t been interested in her artistic talents. And she’d been so invested in making the most of those talents, and then making the most of her scholarships in college, that she’d never really made time to go out.
And Mia had always been much the same, so there had been no one to encourage the other one to go out.
After school it had been work. Work and more work, and riding the massive wave Faith had somehow managed to catch that had buoyed her career to nearly absurd levels as soon as she’d graduated.
But since coming to Copper Ridge, things had somehow managed to pick up and slow
