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confessed to loving Benton, he wouldn’t want to go back to his old self, not until he was sure she would never love Byron. Byron was the best chance of them having a perfect life.
    Benton had too many enemies and too much history. Benton had scars and injuries that would hobble him and bend him sooner than pure aging. Being Benton’s woman meant she would be pitied rather than envied.
    No, he was going to remain Byron and give her the fairy tale.
    So why torture himself with hearing how she felt over Benton?
    “I don’t know. Benton is private. He doesn’t always tell me his every move. But he’s often hired as a hunter or a tracker, both of animals and criminals. His skills are such that he’s in demand even by those outside the village.”
    “Is he why you don’t spend time with me?”
    Her mouth parted in shock at his words and her hands clutched her book closer to her chest. “Excuse me?”
    He took a small step toward her, entering the edges of her personal space. “You don’t tend to stay when I’m around. You leave as soon as good manners allow it.”
    The tree was at her back and stopped what otherwise would have been her escape. “I don’t do that.”
    “Yes, you do, and please don’t lie to me.” Another small step forward. As Benton he towered over her, but Byron was only an inch taller than she was. They were eye-to-eye, gazes locked, hers nervous but tinged with something he couldn’t quite place, perhaps a growing awareness that she was with a man who had an interest in her beyond the first level of courtesy.
    “Really, that’s not the case—”
    “Good to hear. Then would you like to spend time with me? Get to know me? Without your friends or enemies hanging onto our every word.”
    She shook her head, but the movement conveyed confusion and not negativity. “I’m not sure what you’re asking. You can’t be asking… me and you?”
    “Why not me and you?” He was as close to her as he dared, inches away where only a slight tilt and a small lean would have his lips meeting hers. “You’re the only one who runs away from me. Any other woman would want to be where you are now. Why are you fighting me the way you have been these last weeks?”
    A heartbeat, two, and a shadow chased across her eyes, leaving in its wake storm clouds and icy frost. She squared her shoulders, her chin angling up. “Does every woman have to fall at your feet before you’ll be happy? Isn’t Tara and her band of groupies enough? What is so broken in you that you have to make a fool of me to be satisfied?”
    This was a tone he had never heard before. A sharpness and the caustic edge, but also a hint of jealousy – faint, hardly overwhelming, but there – and even more of a shock, a thread of loneliness he could discern only because it was her, only because he knew every nuance of tone she had ever uttered.
    He never wanted to hear this pain from her again. He would dig deep and unearth the cause, uproot it from her spirit. “What’s hurt you so badly that you would say such a thing?”
    Her body caved in on itself for a moment, dragged inward by the weight of whatever she carried before her strong spirit reasserted itself. “Excuse me?”
    “I asked what’s hurting you. I don’t like seeing it.”
    “What’s hurting me? I think this… game , this whatever you’re trying to prove or to plan, that’s what’s hurting me. So why don’t you tell me what your deal is so I don’t have to keep looking over my shoulder to see what you are up to.”
    What had happened that she would take an offer of a man to a woman and twist it into this ugliness? He had done nothing to deserve the vitriol that cast its shadow now over her wonderfully familiar features.
    There was no one in this world with lovelier eyes than Nissa, the violet darkened to the deep purple of twilight with her anger. This close to her, those eyes dark like they would be in passion, her sweet, fresh fragrance filling the air around