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He grabbed her again, pulled her close. "Don't get glib with me, damn it. What else do you know about me?"
"Everything."
Slowly he let her go, surprised to find that his fingers were shaking. He stepped back and tried to get a handle on his emotions. It had been so long since someone had mentioned his past. With suddenly cold fingers, he rolled a cigarette and lit up. A hazy film of smoke obscured her for a second, veiled that wrenching sadness in her eyes. He turned and walked across the cabin, putting as much distance between them as he could. Then-he sat down. The whining creak of old wood exploded in the too quiet room.
He let out an even breath and forced himself to calm down. She couldn't know everything about him. If she did, she wouldn't ask him for help. No woman who knew about his past would make that mistake. "So what do you know about me?"
Lainie flinched at the question. It felt as if a grenade had just landed in her lap, without the pin. She dragged her tongue along her cracked, dry lower lip and looked at him, suddenly afraid. The seconds crawled by, ticked, ticked.
"Now!" he barked.
She flinched and sank back on her heels beside the bed. The hard wood of the floor bit into her knees, but she barely noticed. He sat across the room from her,
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smoking, leaning forward on the chair. There was an intensity in his eyes that scared her, a coiled power in his body that reminded her of a hunting cat. She cleared her throat and met his angry gaze. "You are John Mac-Arthur Killian, born 1866 in Scotland. You arrived in America in 1880 with ten bucks in your pocket. You became a Texas Ranger, and were a good one, until ..."
He stilled, seemed almost to stop breathing. The smoke drifted across his eyes. "Go on."
Lainie had to force the words up her dry throat. "Until ... Emily . . . died."
"How did she die?" he asked quietly.
"There was an outlaw?I don't think I named him?"
"Rem Clide," he answered steadily.
She frowned. "Really? I don't think I named him___"
"Go on."
"Anyway, the outlaw and his gang, they ..." She winced, remembering the violence of the scene. She dropped her head, unable to look at him. It had been therapy for her, something she'd known that someday she'd have to write, but still it had sickened her. "They raped and killed her...."
The chair creaked. He let out his breath in a long sigh, and she heard the pain in the sound, felt it as if it were her own. Slowly she brought her gaze up from her own hands and looked at him.
Sorrow and regret deepened the harsh lines in his face, made him look older, harder. "You're close," he said at last, and this time his voice sounded raw and forced.
"Close? I'm exactly right."
He looked at her then, and in his eyes she saw a bleak despair that was all too familiar. She'd felt it a million times in her life. "No."
She frowned. How could she be wrong about any-
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thing? It wasn't possible. She'd created him. That shifting, suffocating sense of weirdness descended on her again, left her feeling unsure and off balance. "Where am I wrong?"
He shrugged, as if the discrepancies didn't matter. "I was born in 1853."
She shook her head, calculating his age. That birthdate would make him forty-three. He looked forty-three; hell, he looked older than that. But still, it wasn't possible. She'd created him, devised all the vital statistics of his life. He was twenty-eight years old. "No . . ."
"Yeah, and Emily ..." He looked away. When he finally spoke, his rich voice was strained. "Emily wasn't murdered."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"But ... but I wrote that scene. It wasn't just part of your character biography, not just background information. I wrote the scene, word for word. I know what happened."
