Beautiful Sacrifice

you?”
    “Nine. I had to prove myself every summer I spent with him. The tests got harder every year.”
    “Sounds harsh,” Hunter said.
    She shrugged. “It was useful. I stitched and bandaged more than one deep machete cut. It was years before I understood that Philip upped the difficulty every summer because he wanted me to fail. When I figured it out, I confronted him.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He didn’t answer. He usually doesn’t.”
    Hunter’s mouth tightened but he kept it shut. She wasn’t the first child to have a dickhead for a father and she wouldn’t be the last.
    Even at this time of night, Gulf Boulevard’s party houses were flashing like beacons. With the ocean just across the boulevard, it was always vacation time for high-school and college kids, and the older men who preyed on them. The fact that it was the holiday season just put a more colorful gloss on the hunting grounds.
    Hunter took it all in without really seeing it. He was looking for the unusual, not the routine.
    He turned the Jeep off the boulevard and entered a long, sandy, cracked asphalt driveway leading away from the ocean. The beach house he headed toward was small, one-story, on stilts, and old enough to have lived through too many of the Dirty Coast’s hair-raising hurricanes. A latticework fence shielded the space between the floor of the house and the ground.
    When Hunter turned off the Jeep, Lina heard the muted breathing of the surf beyond the boulevard, flat waves lapping against the sand. The salt air was sticky on her skin, cooler than Houston had been, but still warm enough to make the thought of walking on the beach alluring.
    “You need help getting out?” Hunter asked as he came around the Jeep.
    “I’m not a baby.”
    “No argument there,” he said, standing next to her, close, breathing in her presence. “But I’m betting you’re stiff from playing on concrete and then taking a long drive.”
    Lina took off her seat belt, grabbed the purse she had hung on to through all the chaos, and started to slide out. It was a good thing she used the roll bar to steady herself, because Hunter was right. Her knees were crying. He braced her until she worked some of the stiffness out.
    “Bad?” he asked.
    “Not enough to matter.”
    But she didn’t pull away from the arm encircling her waist. She liked it there. She liked having Hunter close. He smelled of cheap restroom soap with an underlay of darkness, salt, and man.
    Breathe, she reminded herself.
    She did, and felt his scent race into her lungs, her blood. The sudden uptick in her heartbeat owed nothing to fear and everything to being a woman close to a man she wanted.
    This is crazy, she told herself.
    No. Crazy is what I’ll be if he doesn’t step away.
    Nothing that had happened during the day had made Hunter less appealing to her. Everything he’d done had simply increased what had already been a compelling sensual lure. She tried not to lean on his strength, but he was there and her legs were stiff, he was warm and she was cold.
    She hoped he didn’t know how much she needed him close, then closer. This afternoon she had learned the difference between almost-blackmailers and murderers. In her new world, Hunter was an angel. A dark one, yes, but they were the most intriguing kind.
    “Doesn’t look like much, but it has what we need,” Hunter said.
    Still holding her, he leaned back into the Jeep. One-handed, he snagged his computer from under the passenger seat. When he straightened, his breath was against her ear, his arm around her waist comforting…and more, much more.
    She forced herself to look away from him, to tear through the sensual web weaving around them, binding them closer.
    The coastal scrub was kept away from the house by the concrete walkway that was covered with a fine coat of sand and a fringe of dirt that was blue in the moonlight. Toad calls and insect noises ebbed and flowed with the sound of the waves. The front steps were weathered gray wood.
    “Looks real good to me,” she said.
    “I haven’t been out here to clean up for a while,” Hunter admitted. “I’ve been too busy with work to come to Uncle Danny’s summer place.”
    “You’re sure he won’t mind us using it?”
    “I talked to him on the phone while you were asleep. He told me the usual.”
    “Which is?”
    “To leave it better than I found it. He probably wants me to fix the gutters or something.” Hunter sounded more amused than