Blackwolf's Redemption

He let go of her, sat back, clasped the steering wheel and stared out the windshield.

“Okay. You’re broke. You have nowhere to go. Nobody you can turn to for help.” He looked at her, his voice cold. “Have I left anything out?”

Sienna lifted her shoulders, then dropped them in what he assumed was meant as a what-else-is-new gesture. It made him want to tug her into his arms again and kiss her not as he just had, with anger at himself, at her, at fate, but with tenderness.

He wouldn’t, of course.

Why should he feel tender toward a woman who’d dropped into his life without invitation?

Still, no way could he simply abandon her. Pretending otherwise had been foolish. His mother had always teased him about bringing home strays. Dogs, cats, one time an orphaned raccoon, another a baby possum. Linda hadn’t teased him about it so much as she’d chastised him for it. She had enough to do, dealing with him, she’d say; the last thing she needed was a stray underfoot.

But Linda had nothing to do with this. This was about Sienna. She was a problem, and until he figured out what to do about it, he’d handle it.

He took the bills he’d tried to give her earlier from his shirt pocket, sat forward, took his wallet from his jeans, thumbed out all the bills and held all the money toward her. She looked at his hand, then at him. The expression on her face would have frozen an entire ocean.

“I already told you. No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“I mean, no. En-Oh. No. I don’t want anything from you except a lift back to the bus station.”

He stared at her for a long minute. Then he shook his head, stuffed the bills and the wallet into his pocket.

“You,” he said grimly, “are impossible.”

Sienna thought that he might be right. But she didn’t want his money, didn’t want him thinking he could buy her off, didn’t want anything except what he had not offered, and, God, she wasn’t just impossible, she was crazy.

She was furious with him, and he hadn’t done anything but show her another act of kindness even if he’d done it with all the charm of a grizzly.

Even if it wasn’t the one thing she really wanted.

When he’d come through the door at the bus station, calling her name; when he’d located her and come toward her…Her heart, her foolish, foolish heart, had bounced straight into her throat.

He’d come for her, she’d thought. This time, he really had come for her. He didn’t want to let her leave him. He was going to tell her that, to say it didn’t matter how or when or where they’d stumbled across each other, all that counted was that they had.

But he hadn’t done or said anything remotely like that. Instead, he’d grabbed her as if she were a—a sack of laundry, hauled her to his truck, driven her out here in grim silence and then asked her questions she couldn’t answer.

The worst of it was, she couldn’t blame him.

They were nothing to each other. She’d romanticized everything. The storm, the kisses, the sexual heat they’d generated, and now she was taking out her anger on him.

“Okay,” he said, and slapped his palms against the steering wheel. “Okay. You won’t accept a handout. How about a job, instead?”

A job. Yes. That sounded reasonable. She could accumulate a little money, take the time to determine what to do next.

She turned toward him.

“Do you know someone with a job to fill?”

He shrugged those broad shoulders. “Maybe.”

Maybe. The man was a wellspring of information.

“Doing what?”

He glanced at her. “Does it matter?”

No, it didn’t. She’d take whatever she could get.

“Yes,” she said, lying through her teeth. “A person likes to know what she’s applying for before she applies.”

Brilliant. He raised his eyebrows. She fought against raising hers.

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “what can you do? There must be something besides anthropology.”

He made the profession sound like a disease. Sienna sat a little straighter.

“I studied business for two years before switching majors.”

He nodded, obviously not impressed. “So, you can type?”

That did it. She swung toward him again, this time breathing fire.

“If you mean, can I do word processing…”

“I mean, can you type? Whatever ‘word processing’ is, it doesn’t interest me.”

No. It wouldn’t. She was thirty-five-plus years ahead of him in technology and light-years ahead in gender equality, but the old saying was accurate. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, and if ever there’d been a beggar, it was she.