Free Seduce Me Sweetly (Heron's Landing Book 1) by Iris Morland Page B

at him, forcing her voice to be calm. Measured. Emotions were a woman’s worst enemy in these types of battles.
    “What?”
    “That when anyone tries to get me to do something simply because they’re a jackass, it gives me more of a reason to do it anyway.” Standing, she grabbed her purse and looked down at Adam, who was just staring at her. “Oh, and you know what else? I talked to people in Chicago about helping with the events at River’s Bend. Because that’s what friends do—help each other. But you’re so intent on seeing things as some master plot to screw you over, that you lose anyone who might actually be a friend.”
    He said nothing, but she could see his fist clenching at his side. “What are you saying?” he ground out.
    “I’m saying that I’m going to write whatever the hell I want, and you can eat a dick. Toodles.”
    She stalked out of the café, leaving Adam with the measly coffee bill. She began walking back to her apartment, but the thought of sitting up there sounded so unbearable that she stalked off in the direction of the creek. She also didn’t want to talk to Mike, or anyone else in the general store. She waited to hear Adam come after her, but he didn’t.
    Hurt filled her, and she could feel tears threatening. She swiped at them. She was an angry crier, and God above, she was angry. Angry at herself for thinking Adam was a good guy despite her first impression of him, angry at herself for kissing him! But mostly she was angry that he thought she was such a heartless jerk that she’d screw him over for her own gain. She was a fucking journalist, not some Wall Street big wig stealing money from the poor to line her own pockets. Hell, she barely made anything in the last few weeks because she’d been preoccupied with life and moving.
    If you had any integrity —the words bounced around in her mind until she was close to chucking her purse and stomping on it out of sheer rage. Instead, she kicked a tree, and then swore at the pain radiating up her foot from the attempt. Could her life be more of a mess?
    She finally walked to a log overlooking the creek. She sat down with a plop, huffing out a breath. The tears had mostly disappeared, but she probably looked a sight: flushed and scowling and swearing underneath her breath. She wished she could be a subtle person when angry, but that had never been her style. But once she got it out of her system, she generally moved on.
    Adam Danvers can suck a dick and I hope he falls off a cliff and dies. To occupy herself, she imagined terrible, ridiculous fates for him—getting eaten alive by raccoons, choking on a sandwich, getting the plague—before she calmed down enough to think a little more clearly.
    The wind whistled through the trees, and Joy watched as birds flitted about in the branches. She spotted a bright red cardinal in one of the shrubs. She smiled, watching it hop around. She soon spotted a female cardinal, more brown then red, and realized there was probably a nest in the shrub. She smiled a little sadly.
    A small voice in her head told her she’d gotten herself into this bind by agreeing with Adam but then reneging, but she pushed that voice aside. She wasn’t in the mood to understand him. He had insulted her, and she didn’t have time to be nice to whiny man babies. Jeremy had been the whiniest of man babies at the end, crying about how she’d never loved him.
    Was there anything worse in this world than whiny man babies? Joy didn’t think so.
    She sat on the log for a few hours, just staring off into the distance. She probably should get back, work on a story, pay her bills. Figure out her life, ignore that she’d been falling for Adam and now she hated everything about him. Was that to be her fate with men? Fall for them and then when they showed their true colors, wish instead that they’d get hit by a tractor and be run over multiple times, very slowly?
    “Joy?”
    Turning, Joy saw Grace walking toward her. The