LITMIR.BIZ

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slowed, and the air between them all but blistered.

      His heart boomed. His blood pooled deep down. He’d spent his life keeping not only his passions but visceral reactions like this under impenetrable wraps, but he knew his gaze sharpened in spite of him, intensified, locked on her lips.

      She couldn’t let her mistaken meaning go uncorrected. Her tongue swiped at her lips and she tried to take it back.

      “Kiss whoever—” She swallowed. “I meant…not you.”

      “I know what you meant.” He tried to put a stop to the slippery slope of sexual awareness sucking the air out of them both. “Did you hate him that much, Fiona? Enough to kill him?”

      “Yes. But I didn’t.”

      Stricken and still pale, shaking now, she fixed her gaze on Soldier Boy, avoiding the threat of a kiss between them. Then she turned and gave him a withering look. “When is the last time you had a tetanus shot?”

      “Beats me. How long do those things last?”

      She rolled her eyes. “Come with me. Or forget it. Take your chances. It really doesn’t matter to me.”

      But he had the distinct impression that it would suit her very well if he if walked away and took his chances with a fatal case of lockjaw.

      He followed her instead.

      FIONA TURNED ON HER HEEL and led the way from the barn into a room outfitted with an examining table and stocked with veterinary supplies. Aware that he was following her, she switched on the glaring overhead lights. Her hands were shaking. She set the safety and put aside the rifle, then opened a gleaming white cabinet door and pulled out a vial containing a dose of tetanus booster.

      Dear Lord, what was she doing?

      She began to go through a drawer in search of a small syringe when he boosted himself up onto the small-animal exam table.

      “That’s meant for animals under a hundred pounds.”

      “Must not get a lot of use.” He pulled one arm out of his coat and began rolling up a sleeve.

      “That’s not the point.” He didn’t belong there. Didn’t belong on the Bar Naught at all. In fact he didn’t have any business looking at her the way he was looking at her.

      “It’s fine.”

      “It’s not fine.” He meant that the table would hold up. She meant much, much more. Nothing was fine. Nothing had been fine for her or the Bar Naught in a very long time.

      “Fiona—”

      She looked straight into his dark brown eyes, noting the fringe of thick black lashes. “Don’t bother sweet-talking me, Guiliani.”

      His pupils flared, otherwise she would not have known she’d caught him off guard. He was that good.

      He blinked slowly. “If you know who I am, Fiona, then what was that all about in Soldier’s stall?”

      “I didn’t know at first. Not for a while. Now that you’re under the lights—” Now that you made a fool of me, broke my heart cozying up to Soldier Boy— She cut off the thought and shrugged. “I know. That’s all.”

      “How?”

      “Kyle.”

      “Kyle? What about him?”

      She turned back to her search for supplies, still so shaken by Kyle’s murder and the timing of Matt Guiliani’s appearance on the Bar Naught, and what the fallout would be to her own purposes, that she couldn’t think what lie to tell or how to deliver it.

      She combed unnecessarily through the drawer full of syringes to cover her delay in answering, then plucked out an unused eighteen-gauge syringe.

      He grabbed her other forearm. “Look at me, Fiona. What about Everly?”

      She jerked her hand away, but he held tight and all she accomplished by pulling so hard was to bring his naked wrist into contact with her breast.

      An intensely sexual awareness, keen, fierce and unexpected, hit her, a flash flood of mutual suspicion crashing down through canyons of barren, thwarted desire. Her mouth watered. Her nipples tightened unbearably. Another slip, Fiona? she thought, like the unintended mention of a kiss in Soldier Boy’s stall?

      What was it about him that had her reacting this way?

      She swallowed.

      He released her wrist.

      Their eyes met, and she backed away, one step.

      “I want you off the Bar Naught. Now.” She knew he wasn’t any less affected by her slip than she was. Her breast still tingled. However unwitting, he stroked the part of his wrist that had touched her with the tips of the fingers on his other hand.

      She couldn’t do this, couldn’t be here, be in a situation where a man made any difference to her. Or made her feel. Or made her tingle, wanting more.

      He had to get off the Bar Naught and stay off it. She had made the worst mistake of her life by not betraying his presence to Dex. If she had, Dex would have hauled Matt Guiliani off to jail, and then she could try to decide what to do. What Kyle’s murder meant. How her own future would go now that her excuse for being on the Bar Naught was dead.

      But Guiliani still wanted to know how she knew who he was. “I’m not leaving till you tell me what Everly said.”

      The part of her that flawless composure had been drilled into responded with the necessary lie. “Kyle showed me your photo. It had come up in a conversation about bodyguards.” She joked to neutralize the tension, to defeat the stirring of attraction to this intruder into her life. “Kyle was skeptical, making fun of the possibility, but he told me that you would try to kill him one day.”

      The implication that Kyle might actually need a bodyguard was the first time he came close to revealing what she already knew. He dealt with men who dispensed illegal arms, guns, bombs and rockets to half-baked causes, dangerous men—and profited hugely in doing it.

      Her ears had perked up, her attention snared. He never told her in so many words what his international business dealings were about. He avoided the subject all the time. She’d asked a few questions, trying to make her curiosity seem without any particular motive behind it. Kyle had only stroked her chin between his thumb and forefinger in a way that repulsed her, and he told her not to worry her pretty little head.

      He would always have things under control, and when he needed her to know more, he would tell her.

      Guiliani was the last man alive to whom she would confess what she knew, and why she was really back on the Bar Naught, enduring Everly’s arrogance, fending off his mocking advances all these months. She had made her deal with the devil. She would be the necessary ears and eyes on the Bar Naught, reporting every move Kyle Everly made in exchange for the chance to regain ownership of the ranch.

      He wasn’t moving anymore, but it was still faintly possible that she could prove useful enough.

      Her situation was already tenuous. Matt Guiliani would make it worse if he knew what she was doing here. She’d be off the Bar Naught faster than she could pack her meager belongings—and her chance would be lost forever.

      The Bar Naught was far more to her than a symbol of the pretensions to a privileged, polo-playing country-manor lifestyle of distant royalty, which was what the ranch represented to her idle parents. Much more.

      She loved the work.

      She loved the land, the freedom, the responsibility, the beautiful wild mustangs that she gentled. The love and respect and care of horses made people into better people. She knew that firsthand. Personally.

      The Bar Naught was her safe haven, and she was willing to do whatever unsafe things she had to do to have it back.

      “You didn’t believe him?” Matt asked, interrupting her

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