Raven’s Prey(8)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

“I thought it might be wise to search this place before going to look for you. And I was right, wasn’t I? Where did you get that piece of garbage you call a gun? Tijuana? Talk about a cheap ‘Saturday night special’!”

“It must have been enough to scare you or you wouldn’t have bothered disarming me!”

“It made me a little nervous, all right. Any kind of weapon in the hands of an unpredictable female like yourself is grounds for making a man nervous.” He released her with a short, disgusted oath, sitting up beside her. “But it turns out you’ve got some bidden weapons, doesn’t it?”

“I was desperate. I [_am _]desperate.” She edged away from him warily, sitting up and curling her legs under herself as she watched him. “I’d do anything I can to make you listen to me.”

“That’s obvious. Including getting yourself raped. You think that would really have done any good? Did you think I’d be so weakened afterward that you’d be able to make your escape?” he scoffed, annoyed because it was possible she was right. Taking this hellion would probably exhaust any man. To be on the safe side one would have to be certain that she knew who was in charge first. She would use any scrap of power she thought she had.

“I wasn’t trying to get myself raped!” she bit out. “It’s just that everything seemed so hopeless after I realized the gun was empty….” Her voice trailed off despairingly and she looked away from him.

In the moonlight he examined her profile and remembered how she had looked a few minutes earlier holding the gun on him. “The gun wouldn’t have worked, Honor,” he finally said with a gentleness that surprised him. “Even if it had been loaded.”

Her head swung around. “What do you mean?”

He moved one hand in a small gesture of dismissal. “When you tried a shot to see whether or not I was telling the truth about the bullets, you didn’t even aim the gun at me. If there had been a bullet, it would have gone through the door about three feet over my head. You should have aimed it at me. It might have been the only chance you got Never threaten a man with a gun unless you’re prepared to use it.”

“I was prepared to use it!”

He shook his head. “No, you’d nerved yourself up to threaten me with it but not to use it on me. Even if I hadn’t gotten the bullets out of it earlier, I could have taken the gun away from you a few minutes ago.”

She glared at him. “You’re wrong, you know. I’m quite desperate. Why can’t I make you see that?”

“I realize you’re desperate,” he soothed, “but there’s no need to be and you know it. I’m only going to take you home, Honor. What’s so horrible about that?”

“The people you’re taking me back to will probably kill me,” she declared flatly. “They might kill you, too, come to think of it. They’ll be wondering how much I’ve told you during the time we’re together.”

“Honor,” he began carefully, thinking of the worried, deeply concerned father waiting back in Arizona, “listen to me—”

“No,” she interrupted, “you listen to me. You*re nothing but a damned mercenary. You’re doing this for the money, aren’t you?”

Why did the accusation offend him? Judd wondered. His mouth tightened. “It’s a job.”

“All right, it’s a job and it pays a couple of thousand plus expenses, right? I’ll double that if you’ll just—”

“I’ve told you, I’m going to do the job I was hired to do!” he snapped. Didn’t the woman ever give up?

“I’m not asking you to renege on your lousy contract! I’m offering to buy a couple of days of your time! How about it, Judd. Two thousand dollars for two days.”

Anger flashed in him. “Now what are you trying to do?”

She leaned forward intently, putting a hand on his arm. He felt the contact of her fingers and something in him reacted to it. Grimly he refused to give any indication of that reaction, forcing himself to sit like stone beneath her touch.

“Two days, Judd. I want to buy two lousy days. Is that so much to ask? The people who sent you after me will never know, will they? They can’t have any way of knowing you’ve even found me yet. How long did you tell them it might take?”

 His eyes narrowed. “I told them to give me a couple of weeks, maybe a month.’* Now why the devil had he told her that much?

“You can double your take on this job by simply staying here in this village with me for a couple of days,” she explained. “I’ll give you the money up front. Tonight. All I want is your word that during the next two days you’ 11 give me a chance to tell you my side of this story. Think of it. Two thousand dollars for two days of humoring me. Surely you can’t afford to ignore that kind of offer?”

“What is it with you, lady? You’ve tried just about everything tonight. Bribery, a gun and sex. Just to buy a couple of days’ worth of time here in this flea-bitten shack?”

“I didn’t try sex!” Honor didn’t know why she felt obliged to clarify that point. The desperate wish to provoke some sort of identifiable male reaction in him hadn’t been a thought-out plan. It had been an instinctive, intuitive action which had nearly backfired. “And you needn’t worry that I’ll try that tactic during the next two days, either. I only want a chance to tell my side of this mess.”

He looked down at the hand on his arm and Honor immediately withdrew it, folding it tensely into a small fist which she rested against her thigh. When Judd’s eyes met hers again in the shadowy light she could see a trace of the savage gutter she’d elicited a few minutes earlier when she’d taunted him.

“You did try sex,” Judd growled softly. “And your efforts nearly got you raped. That’s all you would have achieved, Honor, believe me. Taking you physically would not have made me more vulnerable to your arguments and schemes. I want that very clear between us. I want you to understand that seducing me isn’t going to buy you a damn thing except a night in bed with me. It’s certainly not going to convince me not to take you back to Arizona.”

She flinched under the harsh impact of his words even as she registered the fact that his tone was at last carrying some nuance of emotion. He was still angry at her for causing him to nearly lose his self-control, she realized vaguely. There wasn’t time now to sort out what that might mean, but she stored it away for future reference.