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you’re not…attractive.”
    He snorted.
    “But,” she said pointedly, “I’m not going down that road again. Heck, you’re the one who wanted to get off the road.”
    “Will you forever be throwing that back at me?” he wondered aloud.
    “Why wouldn’t I?” Carrying the folder to her desk, she scooted past him, then took a stand, figuratively and literally. “We were together three months and you ended it two months ago. Time to move on, don’t you think?”
    He looked at her again and the flat, steady stare he sent her way had Laura thinking that he was looking into her heart, her mind.
    “What I think,” he said, “is there’s more going on here than you’ll say.”
    “If there is, it’s my business,” she retorted and dropped the file to her desktop.
    “That’s where you’re wrong.” He planted both hands on her desk and leaned in until they were eye to eye. “If you wanted me gone from your life so neatly, Laura Page, you should’ve returned Beast to me. But you didn’t and that tells me you want me bothered. Troubled. And I have to ask myself why.
    “So we’ll not be finished until I’ve got my answers.”
    Damn it.
    “You can end this today by telling me what it is you’re hiding,” he told her, lifting one hand to push her hair back behind her ear.
    She flinched from his touch, and he frowned. He hadn’t liked that, but Laura couldn’t let him touch her because every time he did, it weakened her resistance to him.
    “Tell me,” he whispered, all hint of a smile gone from his face. “Tell me why I see sadness as well as passion in your eyes when you look at me. Tell me why you took Beast and held him hostage. Tell me—”
    She shook her head and held up one hand in an effort to stop him. “I don’t have to tell you anything, Ronan.”
    “You don’t, but you will.”
    “Because you say so? I don’t think so.”
    “No,” he countered, coming around her desk to stand beside her. “Because it’s eating you up inside to not tell me. It’s on the tip of your tongue at all times, but you keep biting it back. So let it out, Laura. If you truly want me gone from your life, then tell me.”
    Well, that was part of the problem, wasn’t it? If she told him, she’d have the satisfaction of seeing shock jolt into his eyes, but then he’d be gone, wouldn’t he? Really gone, and she didn’t know if she was as ready for that as she claimed to be. But it was more than just that. Sharing her secrets would open herself up to the pain of talking about her loss. And she wasn’t willing to do that.
    The front door opened, the bell jangled a welcome and Georgia stepped inside and stopped dead on the threshold, staring from one to the other of them. “Am I interrupting?”
    “Yes,” Ronan said.
    “No,” Laura disagreed.
    “Okay, then, it’s a draw, and I get to decide,” Georgia told them, walking to her desk. “And, since I just spent an hour and a half with the slowest postal employee on the face of the planet, all before coffee, I choose to interrupt.”
    Ronan’s gaze never left Laura’s and though she heard her sister speaking, the words were lost and muted, as if coming from a distance. She paid no attention when Georgia left the room and went into the mini-kitchen where the coffee was waiting. She was too tied into knots to do much more than nod at Ronan when he murmured, “I’ll be going then.”
    “Goodbye.”
    He eased away, walked to the door and gave a quick nod to Georgia before looking back at Laura. “You’ll miss me.”
    Not a question, but she answered anyway.
    “No, I won’t.”
    He grinned. “Liar.”
    * * *
    Ronan calmed his mind, let his thoughts slide away and paid no attention to the wind rushing in off the desert, stinging his skin with grains of sand. Instead he aimed, setting his sights on the silhouette target a hundred yards away. Slowly, he let out his breath and squeezed the trigger. Then he did it again and again until the clip in his