Raven’s Prey(2)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

He watched her silently for a moment and she could almost feel him assessing and cataloging the sum of her features. Good God, how detailed a description had he been given? Could she bluff her way through this? After all, there was nothing all that remarkable about her looks, was there?

She was twenty-nine, but age could be deceptive in a woman hovering between her twenties and her thirties, especially to a man. Her hair was a dark amber brown, but he would probably have been told she was simply a brunette. There were a lot of brunettes in the world, especially in Mexico. And hazel eyes were surely almost as common? Dressed as she was in jeans and a white shirt, her slender figure with its small br**sts and gently flaring hips must have appeared similar to the body shapes of countless other women in the world.

“Honor Knight,” the man said again and then reached into his shirt pocket and drew out a color photograph. Deliberately he placed it on the table between them, and then he waited. Honor went even colder.

In helpless fascination she stared down at the picture of herself. There, caught by the camera’s eye, were all the elements that were so hard to describe verbally, the elements that went together to make each human being distinctive and unique. In her case that meant not just hazel eyes, but wide, intelligent eyes of a complex shade somewhere between green and gold. It meant not just brunette hair but a heavy, amber mane which, although she had recently cut it to shoulder length, still had a characteristic wave even when worn in a clip at the nape of her neck as it was that evening. It meant a mouth that was soft and, in the photo, smiling with feminine warmth. It meant a faintly tip-tilted nose, a proud lift to the chin. It meant no real beauty in the accepted sense but rather an impression of sensitivity, intelligence and a hint of vulnerability.

It meant, Honor realized, disaster. The man could be in no doubt whatsoever that he had found the right woman. Slowly she lifted her eyes from the damning photograph.

“There is also a scar,” the stranger went on coolly, “on the left wrist.” He reached across the table and caught her hand before she could hide [_it _]in her lap. “A mark left over from a botched suicide attempt, I’m told.”

She flinched as he captured her hand and exposed the delicate skin on the inside of her wrist. The angry red scar was clearly visible, even in the smoky light.

“A rather badly handled effort,” the man observed, his touch remote and dispassionate. “You either didn’t want to do a good job or else you must have used a pretty dull knife.” He released her hand and Honor shoved her fingers into her lap to hide the trembling in them. “My guess is you probably didn’t set out to really take your own life. You probably just used the attempt as a means of getting the kind of attention you seem to need.”

“Who are you?” Honor whispered.

“I’m the man who’s been sent to bring you home,” he said quietly, lifting his tequila glass again. The dark, unfathomable eyes went over her stark expression with a total lack of sympathy or any other emotion. “My name is Judd Raven.”

Raven. The name fit him, Honor thought bitterly. A bird of prey. A bird of menace. That explained the eyes, the lack of emotion. The connotations of danger and ill fate that surrounded the word “raven” were not lost on her. In her lap her nails began to eat into the palm of her hand, but her chin stayed proudly lifted.

“Home?” she questioned grimly. There was some cause for hope, she told herself. If he had been sent to fetch her rather than to kill her she still had some chance.

“Your father and brother are damned worried about you,” Raven said musingly. “But, then, I suppose you know that, don’t you? That’s why you’re here in the first place.”

Her father and brother? “How did they know where I was?”

“They don’t. Not precisely. They only knew the general region of Mexico into which you disappeared. They don’t speak Spanish themselves so they realized they didn’t have much chance of tracing you. That’s why they hired me. I’ve been tracking you for almost a week. You’re a foreigner in this country and people remembered the nice [_gringa _]with the big hazel eyes and the lousy Spanish. It took some legwork but here I am.”

“My father and brother,” Honor said carefully, “sent you to bring me home?”

He raised his glass in mocking acknowledgment of her apparent slow-wittedness. “Are you disappointed? Would you rather one of them had come with me to look for you? Afraid you won’t get as much comfort and attention from me as you would from them?”

“No!”

“What’s the matter, Honor? You’ve achieved almost everything you wanted, haven’t you? A lot of time and worry has been spent on you and that’s the main thing you were after, wasn’t it? This little adventure worked even better than the suicide attempt.”

She ignored that, leaning forward to stare at him with wide, searching eyes. “Just tell me the truth. Have you really been sent to bring me home or have you come to kill me?”

He considered the question. “What do you think?”

She blinked and then sat back in her chair, taking in a deep, steadying breath. “I think that if you’d come to kill me I’d probably be dead by now.” Which was the truth, she realized. This man wouldn’t sit around chatting with his target. He’d get the job over with the efficient cruelty of a hunting bird.

Raven watched the play of emotion across her tightly drawn features. There was a long silence and then he said quietly, “They told me you had a hell of an imagination. That you were borderline paranoid, according to your doctor.”

Honor’s vulnerable mouth twisted. “I can just imagine what they told you.” She stared down at her nearly empty bottle of beer. She had to think had to find some logical way of dealing with this situation. But it had been almost impossible lately to think logically at all. There had been too much fear and her imagination had been so damn active.

That wonderful, vividly romantic imagination that had always set her apart from her practical, restrained, disapproving family had proven to have a dark side, one which was capable of painting her dreams with nightmarish colors and her daytime thoughts with fear.

Well, there was no point dwelling on that now. At the moment she had to force herself to think very pragmatically indeed. Judd Raven, apparently, was only a hired hand. Or was he merely allowing her to think that so she wouldn’t complicate matters by running screaming through the village? “Do you always believe everything you’re told, Mr. Raven?”