A Wanted Man by Susan Kay Law Page B

to automatically withholding any information, all information, in case it might expose a vulnerability that his opponent could exploit. But what could it hurt to tell her? He was bordering on rude, and he knew it. His mother would have been ashamed of him. “Near Columbus.”
    “There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” She bent her head, her mouth puckering up in concentration. She wore that expression often, and it never failed to make him want to press his mouth against hers.
    “No.” And maybe, he thought, the conversation would distract him from things he shouldn’t be dwelling on. Like the way the sunlight brought out the faintest glimmer of copper in her plain brown hair. “You?”
    “I was born in New York. But I’ve lived most of my life in Newport.”
    “I’ve heard it’s beautiful there.”
    Her eyes went soft and hazy as she glanced up from the page and looked over the broad, even sweep of the land, the spear of red rock thrusting abruptly up from the flats.
    He could bring that softness, that wonder, into her eyes. It would be a lucky man who had the right to do so.
    “Yes. It is. But so is this.” She turned back to him. “Do you still have family there?”
    “No.” The word clogged in his throat, and he had to swallow hard to continue. Odd, because the hurt didn’t usually rise that quickly; he didn’t let it. But there was something about her, and the sympathy that welled into those soft blue eyes like springwater, that made it surge afresh. “Not anymore.”
    Oh, what Laura wouldn’t give to follow up on that one. But pain flashed through the midnight of his eyes. He wouldn’t want to share that with her. Not yet, she thought, then amended, probably not ever. And it would be wrong of her to push it merely to satisfy her rampant curiosity. For it was not as if there could ever be anything more between them than this.
    “So…how many men have you killed?”
    It had the desired effect. His head snapped back, the pain transplanted by surprise.
    “What?”
    “You’re a hired gun, right? Mr. Hoxie says you’re quite fearsome.”
    “I’ve lost count,” he said flatly. It was not unusual for Sam to meet women who were titillated by his reputation, attracted to the supposed danger he represented. He just hadn’t suspected she was one of them.
    “I see.” Her stomach dropped. She hadn’t really expected him to answer and had asked only as a distraction.
    He’d killed men . She supposed she’d known it from the first but had never really felt the impact of it. As far as she knew, none of her small circle of family and friends had ever taken the life of another human being. To think that they had would have appalled her. Did appall her. And it only served to point out how wide and unbridgeable the distance was between them, the difference in their lives so large they might have inhabited separate worlds.
    “You look so shocked.” He chucked her beneath the chin like one might a child, friendly, ostensibly asexual. And yet that instant of contact lodged in her mind. He touched me again, bare skin to bare skin.
    Very few men unrelated to her had ever touched her, and those, circumspect and correct, with properly gloved hands at a party her mother arranged and supervised.
    Dear heavens, but it was long past time.
    “I was in the war,” he said. “It’s hard to keep count when there are bodies all around, and you’re terrified as hell one of ’em is going to be your own. Tallying ’em up is the last of your worries.”
    “The war?”
    She was finally beginning to read him, she realized. The moments he showed the least emotion, when his lids were pulled low over those near-black eyes and his mouth was tight, harshly inexpressive, was when things roiled beneath the surface, threatening to quickly break through.
    He nodded. “Though I must admit I wasn’t in battle that much.”
    “You must be a lot older than you look,” she said without thinking, and could have clapped her hands