Free Uncommon Passion by Anne Calhoun Page A

she offered, trying to make it better.
    A long moment passed, then without looking at her he slammed shut the tailgate. Metal clanged against
    metal, shocking the silent night air and startling her nearly out of her skin.
    “Sorry.”
    “It’s fine,” she said. The breeze tossed her hair into her face; without thinking she quickly tamed it into
    a loose French braid she bound off halfway down her back. Arms braced on the tailgate, he watched her,
    but this time there was no pleasure in his eyes. Now they were the color of the sky during an icy cold snap.
    Blue frost.
    “Ready?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    She opened the passenger door and climbed inside. He stepped up into the driver’s seat. They drove
    back to Silent Circle, music from an alternative rock station filling the silence between them. She directed
    him to the next driveway down, the direct road to the apprentices’ bunkhouse, and gripped the door as they
    jounced through the potholes.
    “You’re angry,” she said. It was a guess, more than anything else. Elysian Fields didn’t just restrict
    choices in hair or dress or sexual activity. Everyone spoke with soft voices, said only kind words. Harsh
    feelings were reason for prayer, and certainly weren’t vocalized. Not that Ben was actually speaking. But
    whether he realized it or not, emotion carved the line of his jaw, the thin set of his mouth, the rigidity of his
    shoulders. And while he’d looked much the same thirty minutes earlier, just before she brought him to
    orgasm, this was different. Very different.
    “Nothing to say.”
    “All right.” She opened the passenger door. Hot air rushed from the truck’s undercarriage up her calves
    as she slid out of the truck.
    He stopped her before she could close the door. “Rachel.”
    She turned to look at him over her shoulder. The interior light cast his square jaw and forehead in
    planes and shadows. “You’re going to confuse it with love. It’s not. It’s sex.”
    “Actually, I don’t think I will,” she said. “I know what love feels like. That wasn’t love.”
    He looked out the windshield, then gave a little laugh, the flashing, daring smile’s dark and jaded
    cousin.
    “Why did you do this?”
    “Because I could,” he said with a shrug.
    Her eyes narrowed slightly and her lips pursed as she considered this.
    “That pisses off most girls, you know. It’s supposed to piss you off.”
    “My train of thought derailed back at the idea of having sex just because you could. I’ll think about that
    for a while,” she said. She slid down to the parking lot’s dirt. “Thank you for a nice evening,” she said, and
    closed the passenger door.
    By the time she opened the bunkhouse’s door, Ben’s truck was raising dust on the dirt road back to the
    highway.
    Chapter Six
    Ben stood outside No Limits watching the bouncers handle the door. A line contained by a red
    velvet rope stretched from the front door along the brick exterior to the corner nearest the parking lot. The
    door staff, both muscle-bound bruisers, maintained an orderly line and for the most part kept things under
    control in the bar. Ben and his partner Steve, another off-duty Galveston cop, were there for when things
    got really out of hand.
    Nothing that happened at No Limits was as dangerous as setting foot on the Bar H for the first time since
    he moved out. He’d taken Rachel out there because it was private and quiet, and to prove to himself that the
    ranch meant nothing to him. As casual as he’d been to her, he’d been facing off with danger down by the
    creek, in more ways than one. She smelled like danger, like thunderstorms and lightning and abandonment,
    a scent he’d learned to be wary of on the Bar H.
    The door opened to let patrons out into the parking lot, and club music thumped into the hot night air.
    Ben glanced up, using eight years of experience to assess the sobriety of five women leaving the club. Four
    of the five teetered on their heels, but