Diana Palmer - Wyoming Strong

* * *

SHE WAS SITTING in the park, feeding the pigeons. It was a stupid thing to do, the birds were a nuisance. But she had bread left over from a solitary lunch, and the birds were comfortable, cooing around her feet as she scattered crumbs.

She was wearing a green V-necked pullover sweater with jeans and ankle boots. She looked very young with her long hair in a braid down her back and her face clean of makeup except for the lightest touch of lipstick.

Wolf Patterson stared at her with more conflicting emotions than he’d ever felt in his life. She was two different people. One was fiery and temperamental and brilliant. The other was beautiful and damaged and afraid. He wasn’t sure which one was the real Sara.

He’d felt guilty at the way he’d snapped at her at the ballet. He hadn’t meant to. The memories had eaten at him until he felt only half-alive. Just knowing Ysera was out there, still plotting, made him uneasy. With the memory of her came others, sickening ones, that Sara reminded him of.

She felt eyes on her and turned her head, just slightly. There he was, a few feet away, standing with his hands in his pockets, scowling.

It fascinated him to see the way she reacted. Her lithe body froze in position with crumbs half in and half out of the bag she was holding. She just looked at him, her great black eyes wide with apprehension.

He moved closer. “A deer I shot once looked just like that,” he remarked quietly. “Waiting for the bullet.”

She flushed and dropped her eyes.

“I don’t hunt much anymore,” he remarked, standing beside her. “I hunted men. It ruins your taste for blood.”

She bit her lower lip, hard.

“Don’t do that,” he said in the softest voice she’d ever heard him use. “I won’t hurt you.”

She actually trembled. She managed a faint laugh. How many times in her life had she heard that from men who wanted her, hunted her.

He went down on one knee right in front of her and forced her to meet his eyes. “I mean that,” he said quietly. “We’ve had our differences. But physically, you have absolutely nothing to fear from me.”

She swallowed. Hard. Her eyes when they met his were full of remembered fear and pain.

His Arctic-blue eyes narrowed. It had been a shot in the dark, but he watched it hit home. “Someone hurt you. A man.”

She tried and failed to make words come out of her mouth. On the bag, her hands were clenched so tightly that the knuckles went white.

Her very vulnerability hurt him. “I can’t imagine a man brutal enough to try to hurt something so beautiful,” he said very softly.

Her lower lip trembled. A tear she couldn’t help trickled out of the corner of her eye.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” he said roughly.

She caught her breath and swiped at the tear, as if it made her angry. “Should you be giving aid and assistance to the enemy?” she asked in a choked tone.

He smiled. Antagonism was much preferable to those silent tears. They hurt him. “Truce?”

She looked into his pale eyes. “Truce?”

He nodded. “We don’t want to scare away the pigeons. They’re obviously starving. You’re upsetting them.”

She was upsetting him, too, but he didn’t want to admit it. He felt guilty at the things he’d said to her. He hadn’t realized that she was damaged. She had such a strong, brave spirit that he hadn’t expected this vulnerability.

She straightened a little and tossed more crumbs at the birds. They gathered around them, cooing.

“I expect if the police see me, I’ll be arrested. Nobody loves pigeons.”

He got up and dropped lightly onto the bench beside her, just far away enough not to make her nervous. “I do,” he corrected. “If they’re cooked right.”

A tiny little laugh jumped out of her throat, and her black eyes lit up like fires in the night.

“I had them in Morocco, when I was there on a case once,” he remarked.

“I did, too. In this beautiful hotel on a hill in Tangier,” she began.

“El Minzah,” he said without thinking.

Her hand stilled in the bag. “Why, yes,” she stammered.

“They had a driver named Mustapha and a big Mercedes sedan,” he continued, grinning.

She laughed. It changed her whole appearance, made her even more beautiful. “He took me to the caves outside the city, where the Barbary pirates hid their loot.”

“You? Alone?” he probed gently.

“Yes.”

“You’re always alone,” he said thoughtfully.

She hesitated. Then she nodded. She turned back to the pigeons. “I don’t...mix well with people,” she confessed.

“Neither do I,” he said gruffly.

She tossed another handful of crumbs to the birds. “You have that look.”

“Excuse me?”

“My brother has it, too,” she said without glancing at him. “They call it the thousand-yard stare.”

He cocked his head and narrowed his pale eyes as he stared at what he could see of her face. He didn’t say a word.

She lifted her eyes and winced. “Sorry,” she said, flushing. “I always put my foot in my mouth around you.” She shifted restlessly. “You make me nervous.”

He let out a short laugh. “Me and the Russian Army maybe,” he mused.

She turned her face toward him. She didn’t understand.

He searched her black eyes slowly, and for longer than he meant to. “You stand your ground,” he explained. “You fight back. I admire spirit.”

She averted her eyes. “You fight back, too.”

“Long-standing habit.”

She tossed some more crumbs. She was running out. “You don’t really like women, do you?” she blurted out, and then flushed and grimaced. “Sorry! I didn’t mean...”

“No,” he interrupted, and his eyes grew cold. “I don’t like women. Especially brunettes.”

“That was awful of me,” she apologized without looking at him. “I told you I don’t mix well with people. I don’t know how to be diplomatic.”

“I don’t mind blunt speaking,” he said surprisingly. “So it’s my turn now.” He waited until she looked at him to continue. “You were hurt, badly and physically, by a man somewhere in your past.”

The bag went flying. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.

He wanted to draw her close and hold her, comfort her. But he moved toward her, and she shot to her feet, her head lowered.

“God, Sara, what happened to you?” he asked through his teeth.

She swallowed. Swallowed again. “I can’t...talk about it.”

He was going to find out from Gabriel. He had no right to be curious, but she was too beautiful to go through life locked up inside like that. He stood up, too, but he didn’t move closer. “You should be in therapy,” he said softly. “This is no sort of life.”

“I should be in therapy?” she returned with a short laugh. “What about you?”

His face shuttered. “What about me?”

“At the ballet,” she said. “You have no idea how you looked...”

His chin lifted. His pale eyes flashed. “We were talking about you.”

“Something happened to you, too,” she said doggedly. “I thought you hated me because I ran into you with the car. But that wasn’t it at all, was it? You hate me because I look like her, because I remind you of her.”

His face was like stone. Beside him, one big hand clenched.

“You...loved her,” she guessed.

His eyes fragmented, like icy shards cutting into her face. “Damn you,” he whispered in a vicious undertone. He turned and walked away.

Sara, watching him, wasn’t even offended. She began to understand him, just a little. There was something traumatic in his past, too. Something that tied him up in knots, that left him no peace. He’d loved the woman. She saw it in his eyes.