Free The Devil and Ms. Moody by Suzanne Forster

a lot. Grown men with beards who picked on small animals, motorcycles that had aphrodisiac properties and a tropical heat wave—she slapped viciously at her arm—complete with mosquitoes.
    Edwina met Diablo’s glance and answered his warning with one of her own. His eyes hardened to emerald shards, piercingly beautiful and frightening. Her throat gripped, convulsing on its own movement, but she held her ground. Don’t go, she implored silently.
    He flicked his head, tossing black hair. With a quick careless gesture, he dug a red bandanna from his jeans pocket and tied it around his head. He can be cruel, she realized, witnessing the coldness in him. He can kill just as mercilessly as they do, and probably for no better reason than to show off his prowess with a weapon.
    “Set up camp while I’m gone, Ed,” he said brusquely. He strode to his cycle, pulled a sheathed knife from his gear, and strapped it on his leg. Edwina shuddered, from both anger and revulsion. How could he do such a thing?
    It was close to nightfall when he returned. Edwina had spent most of the day at war with her own emotions and the rest of it in a fruitless quest for anything she could discover about Christopher Holt. It seemed that all the men had gone hunting, and because of her scene with Squire, the women weren’t talking. Even Carmen had been unusually reticent when Edwina posed a few “friendly” questions about the Warlords, making Edwina wonder if Carmen had been ordered to give her the cold shoulder.
    Now Edwina had a small fire going and some packaged soup simmering. She’d also found a corn-bread mix that needed only water. Her efforts were more from principle than hunger. The heat and emotional turmoil had robbed her of an appetite, but she wanted it known that she had no intention of eating whatever the Great White Hunter brought back.
    He surprised her by striding into the campsite in an uncharacteristically upbeat mood and dropping a gunnysack at her feet. “It’s a jungle out there,” he said, a slow grin breaking as she glared at him.
    Edwina glanced at the sack, grimacing as she imagined the contents. “I was hoping the wildlife would get you .”
    “Is that how you talk to the man who’s just brought you dinner?” He crouched next to the sack and stared up at her, an odd glint of amusement in his eyes. “If you’re not going to cook it, I will.”
    “Cook it? Dear Lord!”
    Diablo reached for the sack, but Edwina beat him to it. Spurred by sincere outrage, she whipped it from under his nose. “Nobody’s going to cook anything,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “I’m giving the poor thing a decent burial.”
    “You might want to take a look at it first.”
    A strange odor filled Edwina’s nostrils, pungent and unpleasantly metallic. “What’s in there?” She opened the sack and pulled out a good-size brook trout by its tail. “You let me think this was a raccoon?” she said, incredulous. “How could you do that?”
    A devilish grin broke on his face, and Edwina couldn’t help herself. He was cruel—cruel to make her believe he’d killed an animal, and crueler still to make fun of her distress. She took a backhand swing at him, fish and all. He ducked gracefully, dodging again as she tried a forehand. They both knew it was futile. He was much too fast for her, and that knowledge, with his hoots of laughter, drove Edwina crazy with frustration. She wanted to get the bastard so badly, she could taste it!
    Occasionally the Fates take pity. Whatever the reason on this occasion, they smiled down on Edwina’s plight with a certain poetic elegance. The very gunnysack that Diablo had brought the fish in became the instrument of his downfall. Literally. As Edwina menaced him again, his boot-heel caught in the slippery burlap. His feet flew out from under him, and despite an impressive effort to save himself, he sprawled on the ground.
    Hard-packed clay. A large man. It was a nasty