Hunter's Choice

Talk about taking one for the team, Wyatt thought with disgust as Sara backpedaled away. Her pale green eyes were wide with shock, her pretty face had gone pale with fear and he could hear the rapid beat of her heart from five feet away.

Five feet and growing. Her hand slid to her waist and then fell back to her side as though she just realized he’d taken her gun away from her. A seriously mean looking gun. Wyatt had little use for such weapons, but he knew his way around them and the weapons he’d taken from Sara weren’t the kind used for recreational purposes.

They were a soldier’s weapons. A fighter’s. A killer’s.

It hurt his heart to see what grief and rage had done to her. Wyatt’s memories of that one week were crystalline–he could recall it in such acute, exquisite detail. The way her lashes fluttered right before her eyes went wide as she came, a feline smile curling her lips as she cuddled into him afterwards.

The way those pretty green eyes had misted over with tears that she tried to hold back. The reluctant way she told him that her twin brother had been murdered, along with her best friend.

Even then she’d had secrets in her eyes, some hidden knowledge she hadn’t given voice to. Thinking back, Wyatt knew he shouldn’t have let her slip away as she had. And not just because he could have happily spent the next fifty years in bed with the woman.

When she’d slipped away from him, he had almost gone after her.

Almost. But he’d been sent to make sure she would be all right–not fuck her brains out. He’d ended up doing both, and the guilt he carried was lightened only a little by the knowledge that she’d needed him. And he did prefer to think it was him she’d needed, and not just anonymous comfort sex. A man was allowed a few delusions, after all.

The guilt was back though. He’d been thinking with the wrong brain and now they were both caught in a mess.

“You’re one of them,” she whispered. There was a stricken look in her eyes that was going to linger in his mind for a long, long time.

“Sara, I’m not going to hurt you.”

She laughed. It was an ugly, brittle sound that echoed through the night for just a moment. Then it was gone and she stared at him with a mixture of disbelief, hurt, anger and fear. “Don’t give me that line, Wyatt. I know what your kind do. Hurting people is all you know.”

“If I’d wanted to hurt you, I could have done so last year.”
Sara flinched, almost like he slapped her across the face. Wyatt held still when all he wanted to do was reach for her, pull her to him.

“If you don’t want to hurt me, then what in the hell do you want?” she demanded.

Her voice all but dripped with sarcasm and he knew she didn’t believe him any farther than she could throw him. It hurt. But he’d come into this knowing he’d get bloodied over–figuratively speaking.