He gave a bark of incredulous laughter. “So that’s the way you feel about it, is it?”
Her spine straightened. “Yeah, it is. You were vulnerable and I . . . I used that to my advantage.”
He shook his head slowly, his blue eyes gleaming in the firelight. “You’ve been my friend for sixteen years now, Katie—Everett’s little sister. And I let you suck me off through a half-closed door.”
The words seemed to hang in the still, warm air, dark, incendiary . . . arousing. Katie inhaled slowly, trying to ease the band of tension that had tightened around her chest.
“I’m still your friend, Rill,” she whispered.
“Friends don’t want to fuck each other blind.”
“You mean . . . you mean you want to?” she asked in a quavering voice.
“What d’ye mean?”
“Fuck me. Blind.”
“That’s not even the half of it, Katie. Not even a fraction,” he rasped. For a few seconds he looked so furious Katie was sure he was going to strangle her. The gravid tension in the room was so thick it felt difficult to draw air.
“Well . . . then why can’t we? We’re both adults.”
A puff of air popped out of his lungs. He shook his head and put his glass on the coffee table.
“Is there someone else?” Katie asked slowly when he placed his forehead in his hand and didn’t respond.
“Someone else?” Rill repeated bemusedly, lifting his head.
“Are you sleeping with someone?” she said through her teeth, irritated by his confusion. This was Rill Pierce, one of the most gorgeous, talented, virile men on the planet, as far as Katie was concerned. Surely he shouldn’t be so dumbfounded when she asked about his sex life. The idea of Rill being celibate was just . . . ridiculous. True, he’d never flaunted his sex life, never brought a parade of females to the Hughes house while he was still a bachelor. Her assumptions had more to do with what Rill was than anything she’d ever witnessed. He epitomized masculinity. He practicality oozed sex from his pores.
He rolled his eyes. “Vulture’s Canyon doesn’t exactly provide a wide variety of choices in that department.”
“You’re not sleeping with Sherona?”
“No. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’m not really up for wooing a woman at this point, Katie,” he snapped.
His frustration must have overcome him because he sprang up from the couch and began to pace on the far side of the coffee table. “I told you from the very beginning you don’t understand how I live. You don’t get what I’ve become.”
“I get what you wish you’d become!” Katie spat, standing and facing him. “You wish you were a robot. You wish you didn’t have any feelings at all, so you convince yourself that you don’t. You drown your grief in alcohol. You avoid people who care about you. You don’t care about your friends; you’ve abandoned your work and the people who rely on you. You pride yourself on your detachment. You claim not to give a damn about the people in this town, even. But you’re not cold and aloof, Rill; you’re just running. You’re scared that if you take a moment and really focus on the loss of Eden, your grief will swallow you up whole. So you’ve come here to the woods to hide, and meanwhile your grief gets the better of you even as you try and escape from it. It binds you like a prisoner. That’s what you are, Rill. You’re a prisoner in these damn woods, and you’re the jailer as well.”
He’d stopped pacing midway through her rant and now stared at her, his face glazed with shock, his mouth hanging open.
The words had flared out of her in one fierce, leaping blaze, but now that she’d said her piece, she felt empty . . . deflated.
“I won’t let you destroy yourself,” she said quietly. “I know Eden meant everything to you—”
“You don’t know what Eden meant to me,” he interrupted darkly. “You don’t know why I’m here in these woods.”
“What?” she asked sarcastically, her fury flickering to life if not blazing like it had a moment ago. “You’re the only one on this planet who knows what it is to love someone? You’re the only one who feels they’re in a living grave because they’ve lost that person?”
“You don’t know the meaning of love,” he shouted. “You don’t love anything but your fast car and purses so expensive they could support a starving village for a year. You’re a child.... You’re a fucking little girl, coming here and telling me how to live my life. You—preaching to me. Someone who quits her job on a whim and hauls ass halfway across the country for no good reason—”
“I’m thirty years old, Rill,” she interrupted, her voice trembling with fury. “I’m not a little girl. And I came here with very good reason.”
“A grown woman wouldn’t suggest something as ridiculous as us fucking each other.” His mouth slanted into a harsh line. “It’d spoil everything. Our friendship is probably already in ruins.”
“Then I guess the only direction we can go is forward.”
For several seconds they faced off in straini