Free Hot Pursuit by Lynn Raye Harris Page B

just got a
thrill-seeking personality.”
    Evie found that she couldn’t look away from
him. Even with dirt streaking his face, he looked like he belonged
in the pages of a celebrity magazine. When he used words like thrill-seeking , something inside her turned to putty.
    She swallowed. “It’s because of your mother,
isn’t it?”
    His hands tightened on the wheel. “What makes
you say that? She’s been gone a long time, Evie. And I don’t think
she would approve of what I do any more than you do.”
    “I didn’t say I don’t approve.” It wasn’t
that she didn’t think it was an important job. She just thought it
was odd that Matt had chosen it when he could have been anything he
wanted to be. “But when she died… well, I remember what you said to
me in the tree that day.”
    Her throat was tight and her eyes stung. Matt
glanced over at her, his jaw as hard as a block of granite. “I was
twelve, Evie. Twelve-year-olds don’t know what they want out of
life.”
    “You said you’d have given anything to save
her. You said you wanted to save people when you grew up—I thought
you were going to be a doctor.” She laughed, but it didn’t contain
much humor. “God, even when you got appointed to West Point, I
thought you were going to be a military lawyer or something.”
    He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I
would have given anything to save her.” His voice was quiet in the
darkness. “We needed her. Christina needed her. The old man…” He
swallowed. “He’s not bad, Evie. He’s just self-absorbed. It’s
always been about his feelings, his grief, his needs. He never really had time for us, and I’d have given anything
to bring her back again.”
    “I don’t understand how doing what you do now
makes up for any of that.”
    He made a sound in his throat like a growl.
“If I’d known you were going to try to analyze me, I’d have stayed
home tonight.”
    “Maybe you should have.”
    He glanced over at her. “It doesn’t make up
for a damn thing. But I do something important and, yeah, people
live because I’ve done my job. Running an oil company would seem
pretty meaningless in comparison. And I wasn’t about to be a
doctor. No patience for the kind of time that takes.”
    “You’d rather jump out of airplanes and get
shot at.”
    “Something like that.” His tone was clipped.
“So now that we’ve had fun with me, what about you? I notice you
aren’t precisely cooking for a living at the moment. And Christina
told me you’d gone to culinary school, so that can’t be the
problem.”
    Evie rubbed two fingers along her temple.
“I’m surprised you haven’t heard all about it yet. I had a
restaurant in Florida, but I also had a partner who stole from me.
I lost it all.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    She sighed. “Yeah, well, lesson learned and
all that. Now I wash hair in Mama’s salon and send out résumés
every week. Something will happen eventually.”
    “I’ve noticed life has a way of piling on the
shit sometimes.”
    “I’d like to think I’ve had all the shit I’m
going to get for a while, but with my luck, God only knows.”
    He laughed. “ Chère , I so hear
you.”
    Evie turned toward him. The lights from the
dash illuminated his features, caressed the bridge of that
aristocratic nose, those full lips and firm jaw. He was gorgeous,
but that had never been the sole source of her attraction. It
didn’t hurt, of course, but there was more to it than that.
    He’d always made her laugh, and he’d been her
friend, and he’d let her see the parts of him that weren’t strong.
She’d never forget hugging him while he cried in the hollow of that
tree. She hadn’t quite reached the stage of having a crush on him
then, but she figured that was the moment when she’d fallen in
love, before she even knew what it meant.
    “Folks in town seem to think you’re in some
kind of trouble. Were you really captured?”
    He stared straight ahead. “Yeah, we