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Her lips thin and her nostrils flare, adding a redness to her cheeks. But it’s her eyes that hold my attention.
They’re so lit they’re almost green, like the cool, forbidding depths of the forest.
Beautiful.
I don’t care that they’re spitting fire at me.
It makes me want to rise to her challenge.
If this woman has to drive me insane, I won’t go down without a fight.
“You offered the prize, Foster,” she tells me, her chest heaving. Her hands land on her hips. “Why do you resent me for claiming it?”
I give her a tiny, twisted smile. “That’s a whole other question.”
“You never answered my first.”
“No, and you can add it to the list of reasons why you hate my damned guts.”
She huffs loudly. “Here’s another question...”
“Sure. I guess you’re seeing a pattern,” I say.
There’s no way I’m going to answer her now—out of pure stubbornness if nothing else.
Childish? Maybe.
No, I don’t give a fuck.
“You say I’m a contradiction like it’s personal,” she says. “Why does that bother you?”
Only a thousand reasons.
Annoyed, I stride away from the fire and rake my fingers through my hair, pulling my thoughts together.
“When someone is made of contradictions,” I say, enunciating clearly so she can understand, “at least one of those contradictions must be a lie.”
“I—what?”
I turn to face her. She’s still standing by the fire, painted in shadow.
“So which part of you is the lie, Destiny Lancaster? What’s true?”
Her face looks pale. “Why does anything about me have to be a lie?”
“I know who your family are. The Lancasters? You think I don’t know you come from money just like me?”
Her father is a billionaire. That’s not insignificant.
It also has me wondering why the hell she needs this two-million-dollar prize at all.
“What’s your game? I just want to know,” I say. “Why play at being a typical do-gooder with big ideas and no cash to fund them? Why doesn’t Cole Lancaster help you fund an entire sea otter preserve?”
Color floods back into her cheeks and her fists clench at her sides.
“What, you’ve been cyberstalking me now?”
“Fair game. Let’s not pretend you haven’t done some digging on me. And do you really think I’d pay out anything for a publicity role without conducting a thorough background check?”
