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He all but dumped her onto the mattress as he rasped, “How do you like your coffee?”
She thought about snapping that she’d fix her own coffee, but reined in her temper. If she let herself get pulled into a red-hot back-and-forth with him, God only knew what she’d end up saying, and they’d end up doing. Her goal was to keep everything under control. “One sugar. Thank you.” She sounded so prim she wanted to slap herself.
He prepared their cups of coffee, putting one packet of sugar into hers and a whole lot more than that into his. She started to comment, but deemed silence more prudent. She wouldn’t even ask him if the coffee tasted good to him, because that would be like prodding an ill-tempered tiger. Taking the cup when he held it out to her, she scooted back against the wall, stretched her legs out, and sipped.
Despite everything, the hot coffee felt and tasted like heaven. She took another couple of sips, then leaned her head back against the wall, closed her eyes, and felt her headache begin to disappear as if it were going down a drain. Maybe it wasn’t really going away that fast, but her head definitely felt better.
She felt him settle into place beside her, heard him sip. Grudgingly he muttered, “It’s good.”
“Thank you.”
My, weren’t they polite?
Okay, the best way to go on was to just … go on. Something occurred to her and she asked, “By the way, you’ve never said … why were you here? Were you doing some scouting for a late hunting party you have coming in?”
“No, I came up to do some fishing, and to get away from paperwork. You were a few hours ahead of me.”
She opened her eyes and turned her head, still resting against the wall, to look at him. “Lucky coincidence, for me. If you hadn’t been, who knows if I’d still be alive right now. What were you doing out in the storm, anyway, at that hour?”
“Looking for your camp.” Wrapping his hands around the warm cup, he drank some more, then adjusted his shoulders to a more comfortable position. “The storm woke me up, and then I heard the shots. I knew they were pistol shots, and I couldn’t think of any good reason why you or anyone else would be shooting a pistol at that time of night. If a bear or cougar had come into your camp and was attacking, you’d have used your rifle. The pistol shots meant people trouble,” he said flatly.
“Yeah,” she agreed, and sighed. “They did.”
“So I saddled up that crab-hopping young son of a bitch and set out in the worst storm I’ve seen up here since I was a kid. I’d lost the trail and was doubling back when I heard you. You know the rest.”
“But how did you know where my camp was? I mean, you might be able to tell the general direction the shots came from, but—”
“Harlan told me which camp.”
“Harlan?”
?
?He was worried.”
Angie digested that in silence. Harlan’s concern was probably because she was a woman and her two clients were men, something she couldn’t completely discount because she was always careful, herself, in that regard.
“So he knew you were coming up here and—” She stopped, confused. And, what? Keep an eye on her? This cabin was several miles from her campsite, so if it hadn’t been for those shots in the middle of the night, there was no way Dare could have known that anything was going wrong at her camp. If Chad had waited until the next day, and shot Davis and her with the rifle, there was nothing that would have alarmed Dare because rifle shots were to be expected during a hunt.
He drank some more coffee, his eyelids lowered as if he were thinking. Then he said, “No, not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“I wasn’t coming up here. Harlan was worried and asked me to keep an eye on you, just in case. I decided to do some fishing while I was here.”
She almost dropped her cup, she was so flabbergasted. She stared at him, trying to sort through all the implications that were rushing through her brain. “So you … I …”
“Yeah. It wasn’t coincidence I was up here.”
He’d come up here, taken what could have been an entire week out of his time, to do a favor for Harlan? She could see him doing Harlan any number of favors, but considering the hostility in her own relationship with Dare, she couldn’t think of why he’d do that particular one.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’re here,” she said, “but for the life of me I can’t imagine why you agreed to do that.”
“I’ve told you,” he returned, eyeing her over the rim of the cup. “I’ve been watching your ass for two years now. By the way, this really is some damn fine coffee.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Alarm bells once again began ringing in the back of her head. Her reaction was instantaneous. “Oh, no,” she warned. “I told you, I’m not going there.”
