evil to take delight in torturing him? Probably. But she couldn’t stop herself. As he’d told one of the masked gunmen, Tit for tat, dicksmack. If she was going to be miserable because he had some ridiculous standing rule about relationships, if she was going to be denied the joy of what could be between them if only he weren’t such a confounding idiot, he needed to suffer a little too. Fair is fair.
“Don’t say sausage either,” he grumbled.
“Okay,” she agreed. “I’m willin’ to allow for kielbasa, but anything bigger than that and you’re just foolin’ yourself.”
“Maddy,” he groaned, adjusting his stance. When her eyes pinged down to the front of his shorts, she realized all this naming of his nether region had caused the area to perk up. And maybe kielbasa was the best comparison.
Oh! How she longed to find out for herself.
But he didn’t do relationships. And she didn’t do casual sex. So they’d reached an impasse. Or at least she thought they had. Then an idea began to gestate. A scary, crazy, sort of…intriguing idea. With its birth, the emptiness inside her shrank.
“Fine,” she told Bran, her mind racing over possibilities. “No more talk of your man meat or the fact that I was lookin’ forward to—”
He lifted a hand. “Stop right there.”
“You’re no fun,” she declared.
“And you’re relentlessly wicked,” he countered.
“I’ll get you, my pretty,” she cackled, mimicking the Wicked Witch of the West. “And your little dog too!” Only, in her mind, she decided that dog was a euphemism for his pickle. His sausage. His kielbasa.
He grinned at her, having no idea of the devilish thoughts spinning through her brain. Then his expression turned serious. “How are you, Maddy? Really. How are you holding up? ’Cause I know you were just starting to get over the hijacking on your father’s yacht. Is this gonna set you back?”
Okay, so apparently fun time was over. She could have dodged the question and kept up the lark, but they’d never been anything but forthright with each other.
“Who knows?” She sighed. “I didn’t expect to experience such an aftershock three months ago. I thought I was okay and then bam! The nightmares and the cold sweats started. So…” She shrugged. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“But for right now?”
“I’m okay.” When he lifted an eyebrow, she tossed her hands in the air. “What can I say? I feel like I woke up this mornin’, stepped in quicksand, then fought my way free only to have a two-ton anvil land on my head. I’m tired. The kind that can’t be fixed with sleep. The kind that’s bone deep. The kind that comes when you realize so many people are willin’ to do bad things for power or money or…or…whatever.”
He let his head fall back against the lighthouse. It made a soft bong-ing sound when it hit the metal. “It’s a cruel world.”
She glanced at his perfect profile. “Meanin’ a cruel world begets cruel men?”
“And cruel women.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Are you tryin’ to tell me somethin’?”
He snorted. “Babe, there isn’t a cruel bone in your whole body. Now, sarcastic bones? Ball-busting bones? You’re lousy with those.”
“I don’t know about that,” she admitted, turning to stare out at the dark waves. The moon kissed their peaks, making them shimmer in the light. Somewhere out there were the last two men who had tried to do wrong here tonight. “After the hijacking three months ago, I feel like a poisonous seed was planted inside me and now it’s grown into a bloodthirsty tree.” When he turned to her, she went on. “I wasn’t sorry to see those men killed tonight. And I was sorry when those last two got away. Surely that speaks of cruelty.”
“Nah. You’re just human. There’s a difference.”
“I’m not sure I see it.”
He pursed his lips as if trying to arrange his thoughts. Finally, he said, “A cruel person is violent to achieve some self-serving end or to satisfy some sadistic need to inflict pain on another. Resorting to violence to defend yourself or those who are depending on you to defend them, wishing to put a period on a man’s life to make sure he doesn’t put a period on yours, is simply human.”
The way he said it, with such conviction, suddenly reminded her of how he’d behaved toward the masked men during the second standoff. Baiting them almost as if he wanted them to give him a reason to pull his trigger.
“And which one