Free Broken by Shiloh Walker Page B

blank expressions, were nothing but a mask. Something had shattered that mask today and when she looked into his gray eyes, she saw a deep, screaming hell.
    Pain. A pain so deep and cold, it left her heart aching. With that mask shattered, when Sara looked into his eyes, she saw a million wounds, the slow-bleeding kind that led to festering and death.
    Something hot touched her cheek and she reached up, startled to realize she was crying. Taking a deep breath, she wiped the tears away and then looked at her wrist. It was already bruising. He hadn’t been trying to hurt her—she knew that as well as she knew that if he had been trying to hurt her, she wouldn’t have been able to stop him.
    There had been too much strength, too much speed, too much power in him. She’d touched his shoulder and in the blink of an eye, he had her pinned against the wall. It left her shaken how quickly he’d moved, how quickly he had trapped her.
    She’d worked too damn hard to let somebody take her off guard like that. To let somebody get in close enough to hurt her, and she hadn’t so much as tried to strike back. Of course, she suspected fighting back would have been an exercise in futility.
    Once more, she found herself wondering what in the hell it was he did. He didn’t set her cop radar off, but he sure as hell wasn’t the handyman type that Theresa had made him out to be.
    You just need to stay the hell away from him. Stay away . . . and probably move. No. Not probably. Definitely.
    Good advice. Shoving off the door, she started forward. Her bare foot brushed up against something and she glanced down, saw the large white envelope with the big UPS symbol emblazoned across it.
    Scowling, she stooped and picked it up. That envelope was why she’d followed Quinn down to his apartment when he hadn’t heard Theresa calling him. She’d offered to run it down to him. With a sigh, she trudged back up the stairs.
    She’d let Theresa handle the surly bastard.
    But even as she thought it, she kicked herself.
    He wasn’t a surly bastard.
    He was . . .
    It doesn’t matter if he’s a bastard or not. Stay away from him.
    Good advice.

    ONCE upon a time, Sara had been very good at giving advice. She didn’t do it much now. The life she now led wasn’t the sort of life that put her in contact with many who would listen, even if quite a few of them could use it.
    Still, she knew good advice when she heard it. Too damn bad she wasn’t very good at following good advice.
    She’d told herself to avoid Quinn Rafferty. She’d told herself she just needed to move. But she hadn’t moved, she didn’t plan on doing so just yet, and now she was sitting in the backyard, watching one Quinn Rafferty and wondering about him. She was doing the exact opposite of avoiding him.
    Brooding, she sat in the shadows on the deck, watching the man as he paced the backyard. She’d been sitting out there, just enjoying the cool night, staring up at the sky while the full moon played peekaboo behind a bank of clouds.
    Then he was there. She hadn’t heard him leave his apartment, hadn’t heard the door shut. He moved too damn quietly. She pegged his height at a little over six feet, and that body of his was hard, solid muscle—he shouldn’t be able to move quiet as a cat, but he did. Restless as a cat, too, it seemed. He had been pacing and prowling the backyard for a good ten minutes.
    She sighed and pushed up off the lounge chair. As she moved to the railing, he stopped his pacing and stared at her. She’d been wondering if he knew she was out there, but as their eyes met, she knew the answer without even asking.
    He’d known she was there. Known she was there and had been ignoring her. Somehow, she had a feeling this guy was aware of just about everything that happened around or near him.
    It was a thought that bothered her.
    A lot. Sara had gotten by thus far because most people only looked at the surface, but that wasn’t Quinn. He looked below the